force of living interest to a figure of passive endurance that perhaps
the only instance of perfect triumph over this difficulty is to be found
in the character of Desdemona. Shakespeare alone could have made her as
interesting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these have so much to do and
dare, and she after her first appearance has simply to suffer: even
Webster could not give such individual vigor of characteristic life to
the figure of his martyr as to the figure of his criminal heroine. Her
courage and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her patience and her
passion, are painted with equal power and tenderness of touch: yet she
hardly stands before us as distinct from others of her half-angelic
sisterhood as does the White Devil from the fellowship of her comrades
in perdition. But if, as we may assuredly assume, it was on the
twenty-third "nouell" of William Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_ that
Webster's crowning masterpiece was founded, the poet's moral and
spiritual power of transfiguration is here even more admirable than in
the previous case of his other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem.
The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine's affection
for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which
the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious
and murderous brothers. Here again, and finally and supremely here, the
purifying and exalting power of Webster's noble and magnanimous
imagination is gloriously unmistakable by all and any who have eyes to
read and hearts to recognize.
For it is only with Shakespeare that Webster can ever be compared in any
way to his disadvantage as a tragic poet: above all others of his
country he stands indisputably supreme. The place of Marlowe indeed is
higher among our poets by right of his primacy as a founder and a
pioneer: but of course his work has not--as of course it could not
have--that plenitude and perfection of dramatic power in construction
and dramatic subtlety in detail which the tragedies of Webster share in
so large a measure with the tragedies of Shakespeare. Marston, the poet
with whom he has most in common, might almost be said to stand in the
same relation to Webster as Webster to Shakespeare. In single lines and:
phrases, in a few detached passages and a very few distinguishable
scenes, he is worthy to be compared with the greater poet; he suddenly
rises and dilates to the stature and the strength of a model whom
usually he can but follow afar off. Marston, as a tragic poet, is not
quite what Webster would be if his fame depended simply on such scenes
as those in which the noble mother of Vittoria breaks off her daughter's
first interview with Brachiano--spares, and commends to God's
forgiveness, the son who has murdered his brother before her eyes--and
lastly appears "in several forms of distraction," "grown a very old
woman in two hours," and singing that most pathetic and imaginative of
all funereal invocations which the finest critic of all time so justly
and so delicately compared to the watery dirge of Ariel. There is less
refinement, less exaltation and perfection of feeling, less tenderness
of emotion and less nobility of passion, but hardly less force and
fervor, less weighty and sonorous ardor of expression, in the very best
and loftiest passages of Marston: but his genius is more uncertain, more
fitful and intermittent, less harmonious, coherent, and trustworthy than
Webster's. And Webster, notwithstanding an occasional outbreak into
Aristophanic license of momentary sarcasm through the sardonic lips of
such a cynical ruffian as Ferdinand or Plamineo, is without exception
the cleanliest, as Marston is beyond comparison the coarsest writer of
his time. In this as in other matters of possible comparison that
"vessel of deathless wrath," the implacable and inconsolable poet of
sympathy half maddened into rage and aspiration goaded backward to
despair--it should be needless to add the name of Cyril Tourneur--stands
midway between these two more conspicuous figures of their age. But
neither the father and master of poetic pessimists, the splendid and
sombre creator of Vindice and his victims, nor any other third whom our
admiration may discern among all the greatest of their fellows, can be
compared with Webster on terms more nearly equal than those on which
Webster stands in relation to the sovereign of them all.
THOMAS DEKKER
Of all English poets, if not of all poets on, record, Dekker is perhaps
the most difficult to classify. The grace and delicacy, the sweetness
and spontaneity of his genius are not more obvious and undeniable than
the many defects which impair and the crowning deficiency which degrades
it. As long, but so long only, as a man retains some due degree of
self-respect and respect for the art he serves or the business he
follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his
prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of
respect for any other obligation in the world. François Villon, compared
with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem
patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as
conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson:
he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most
perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first class of
writers for all time. If not in that class, yet high in the class
immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol
the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to
genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among
the masters of creative literature. For he was by nature at once a
singer and a maker: he had the gift of native music and the birthright
of inborn invention. His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy
sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as
that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets. For gentle grace of
inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best
by Shakespeare's self alone. No such combination or alternation of such
admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or
sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he
comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any
other quality of kindred genius.
And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of
later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a
pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly
though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur,
in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the
casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art,
the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and
yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not
so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as
Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for anything"; at all events, for
anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest
degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and
cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and
an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the one great gift of
seriousness, of noble ambition, of self-confidence rooted in
self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable
place among the immortal writers of his age. But this gift had been so
absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by
circumstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy
of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and
now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his
writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his
later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's
infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or
impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before
his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately
developed. His "pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first printed
three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest
and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if
rather thin-spun and slight of structure: but the more serious and
romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light
comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main
original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in
ostentation and repetition of jocose catch-words after the fashion of
mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to
repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond
all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no
signs of the author's higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and
sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not
required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker's which bears
the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and
emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his
ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous passage in which
Webster couples together the names of "Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and
Mr. Heywood," seems explicable when we compare the style of "Old
Fortunatus" with the style of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Dekker had as
much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of
Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely and noble
realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride
of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic
loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he
was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels
in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the
world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these
occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to
such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos
which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of
Shakespeare's, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in
comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names
of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or
most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common
with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of
Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just
when he said of the "frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he talks
pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they." The word
"almost" should be supplanted by the word "fully"; and the criticism
would then be no less adequate than apt. Sidney himself might have
applauded the verses which clothe with living music a passion as fervent
and as fiery a fancy as his own. Not even in the rapturous melodies of
that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable
names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a passage
more enchanting than this:
Thou art a traitor to that white and red
Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne)
Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead,
This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none.
Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be
In love with nothing but deformity.
O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes
Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never
Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax,
Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1]
Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity;
Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's,
For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface,
But thine's eternal: O Deformity,
Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne's,
For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have,
But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.
[Footnote 1: As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical
word "destiny" to stand at the end of this line in place of the
obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later editors
of this passage should hitherto have done so.]
Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of passionate
fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more
perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity,
his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way
of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to
impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he
had set himself--and yet which he had hardly set himself--to run. And if
these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what
would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this
golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or
fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution
into his fancies. But even from such headlong recklessness as he had
already displayed no reader could have anticipated so singular a
defiance of all form and order, all coherence and proportion, as is
exhibited in his "Satiromastix." The controversial part of the play is
so utterly alien from the romantic part that it is impossible to regard
them as component factors of the same original plot. It seems to me
unquestionable that Dekker must have conceived the design, and probable
that he must have begun the composition, of a serious play on the
subject of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of
Ben Jonson's "Poetaster" impelled or instigated him to some immediate
attempt at rejoinder; and that being in a feverish hurry to retort the
blow inflicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he devised--perhaps
between jest and earnest--the preposterously incoherent plan of piecing
out his farcical and satirical design by patching and stitching it into
his unfinished scheme of tragedy. It may be assumed, and it is much to
be hoped, that there never existed another poet capable of
imagining--much less of perpetrating--an incongruity so monstrous and so
perverse. The explanation so happily suggested by a modern critic that
William Rufus is meant for Shakespeare, and that "Lyly is Sir Vaughan ap
Rees," wants only a little further development, on the principle of
analogy, to commend itself to every scholar. It is equally obvious that
the low-bred and foul-mouthed ruffian Captain Tucca must be meant for
Sir Philip Sidney; the vulgar idiot Asinius Bubo for Lord Bacon; the
half-witted underling Peter Flash for Sir Walter Raleigh; and the
immaculate Celestina, who escapes by stratagem and force of virtue from
the villanous designs of Shakespeare, for the lady long since indicated
by the perspicacity of a Chalmers as the object of that lawless and
desperate passion which found utterance in the sonnets of her
unprincipled admirer--Queen Elizabeth. As a previous suggestion of my
own, to the effect that George Peele was probably the real author of
"Romeo and Juliet," has had the singular good-fortune to be not merely
adopted but appropriated--in serious earnest--by a contemporary student,
without--- as far as I am aware--a syllable of acknowledgment, I cannot
but anticipate a similar acceptance in similar quarters for the modest
effort at interpretation now submitted to the judgment of the ingenuous
reader.
Gifford is not too severe on the palpable incongruities of Dekker's
preposterous medley: but his impeachment of Dekker as a more virulent
and intemperate controversialist than Jonson is not less preposterous
than the structure of this play. The nobly gentle and manly verses in
which the less fortunate and distinguished poet disclaims and refutes
the imputation of envy or malevolence excited by the favor enjoyed by
his rival in high quarters should have sufficed, in common justice, to
protect him from such a charge. There is not a word in Jonson's satire
expressive of anything but savage and unqualified scorn for his humbler
antagonist: and the tribute paid by that antagonist to his genius, the
appeal to his better nature which concludes the torrent of
recrimination, would have won some word of honorable recognition from
any but the most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans. That Dekker
was unable to hold his own against Jonson when it came to sheer hard
hitting--that on the ground or platform of personal satire he was as a
light-weight pitted against a heavy-weight--is of course too plain, from
the very first round, to require any further demonstration. But it is
not less plain that in delicacy and simplicity and sweetness of
inspiration the poet who could write the scene in which the bride takes
poison (as she believes) from the hand of her father, in presence of her
bridegroom, as a refuge from the passion of the king, was as far above
Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster qualities of intellect or
genius. This most lovely scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for
passion distilled in melody, is comparable only with higher work, of
rarer composition and poetry more pure, than Jonson's: it is a very
treasure-house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and sweet as
flowers. When Dekker writes like this, then truly we seem to see his
right hand in the left hand of Shakespeare.
To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker amicably associated in
the composition of a joint poem or pageant within the space of a year
from the publication of so violent a retort by the latter to so vehement
an attack by the former must amuse if it does not astonish the reader
least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness to quarrel and the
boyish readiness to shake hands which would seem to be implied in so
startling a change of relations. In all the huge, costly, wearisome,
barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial which welcomed into London the Solomon
of Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to follow the ponderous
elaboration of report drawn up by these reconciled enemies will remark
the solid and sedate merit of Jonson's best couplets with less pleasure
than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker's lyric notes.
Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson's songs for their finish of style
and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or
should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to
place him in the first class--much less, in the front rank--of lyric
poets. He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron;
but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as
Blake or Shelley. Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and
delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the
well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor
which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this
same year of the accession of James--"Patient Grissel"; a romantic
tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and
touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of
the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone before them
with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of
gesture. His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to
reproduce: but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and
simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy
to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off.[1] Chettle
and Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of
them something of their colleague's finer qualities; but the best scenes
in the play remind me rather of Dekker's best early work than of
"Robert, Earl of Huntington" or of "Englishmen for My Money." So much
has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English
character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such
confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent
penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at
least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a
frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant
self-excuse. "Italy," says an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying
and impudent gull, "Italy infects you not, but your own diseased
spirits. Italy? Out, you froth, you scum! because your soul is mud, and
that you have breathed in Italy, you'll say Italy has denied you: away,
you boar: thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest country in the
world."
[Footnote 1: I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the
spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens. The original
reads:
So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn,
Shew the care-pinèd hearts that sue to them.
The word _Shew_ is an obvious misprint--but more probably, I venture to
think, for the word _Shun_ than for the word _Fly_, which is substituted
by Mr. Collier and accepted by Dr. Grosart.]