extracts--not even by such extracts as these. His friend and colleague
Dekker shows to better advantage by the process of selection: hardly one
of his plays leaves so strong and sweet an impression of its general and
complete excellence as of separate scenes or passages of tender and
delicate imagination or emotion beyond the reach of Middleton: but the
tragic unity and completeness of conception which distinguish this
masterpiece will be sought in vain among the less firm and solid figures
of his less serious and profound invention. Had "The Changeling" not
been preserved, we should not have known Middleton: as it is, we are
more than justified in asserting that a critic who denies him a high
place among the poets of England must be not merely ignorant of the
qualities which involve a right or confer a claim to this position, but
incapable of curing his ignorance by any process of study. The rough and
rapid work which absorbed too much of this poet's time and toil seems
almost incongruous with the impression made by the noble and thoughtful
face, so full of gentle dignity and earnest composure, in which we
recognize the graver and loftier genius of a man worthy to hold his own
beside all but the greatest of his age. And that age was the age of
Shakespeare.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
Of all the poets and humorists who lit up the London stage for half a
century of unequalled glory, William Rowley was the most thoroughly
loyal Londoner: the most evidently and proudly mindful that he was a
citizen of no mean city. I have always thought that this must have been
the conscious or unconscious source of the strong and profound interest
which his very remarkable and original genius had the good-fortune to
evoke from the sympathies of Charles Lamb. That divine cockney, if the
word may be used--and "why in the name of glory," to borrow the phrase
of another immortal fellow-townsman, should it not be?--as a term of no
less honor than Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman,
has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic
praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far
lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or
prose.
If Lamb had known and read the first work published by Rowley, it is
impossible to imagine that it would not have been honored by the tribute
of some passing and priceless word. Why it has never been reissued
(except in a private reprint for the Percy Society) among the many less
deserving and less interesting revivals from the apparently and not
really ephemeral literature of its day would be to me an insoluble
problem, if I were so ignorant as never to have realized the too obvious
fact that chance, pure and simple chance, guides or misguides the
intelligence, and suggests or fails to suggest, the duty of scholars and
of students who have given time and thought to such far from unimportant
or insignificant matters. "A Search for Money; or, a Quest for the
Wandering Knight Monsieur L'Argent," is not comparable with the best
pamphlets of Nash or of Dekker: a competent reader of those admirable
improvisations will at the first opening feel inclined to regard it as a
feeble and servile imitation of their quaint and obsolescent manner; but
he will soon find an original and a vigorous vein of native humor in
their comrade or their disciple. The seekers after the wandering knight,
baffled in their search on shore, are compelled to recognize the sad
fact that "the sea is lunatic, and mad folks keep no money, he would
sink if he were there." The description of an usurer is memorable by
its reference to the first great poet of England, among whose followers
Rowley is far from the least worthy of honor. "His visage (or vizard),
like the artificial Jew of Malta's nose," brings before the reader in
vivid realism the likeness of Alleyn or Burbage as he represented in
grotesque and tragic disguise the magnificent figure of Marlowe's
creative invention or discovery by dint of genius. (I do not remember
the curious verb "to rand" except in this little book: "he randed out
these sentences": I presume it to be the first form of "rant.") The
account of St. Paul's in 1609 is very curious and scandalous: "the very
Temple itself (in bare humility) stood without his cap, and so had stood
many years, many good folks had spoke for him because he could not speak
for himself, and somewhat had been gathered in his behalf, but not half
enough to supply his necessity."
When we pass from "the Temple" to Westminster Hall we come upon a sample
of humor which would be famous if it were the gift of a less
ungratefully forgotten hand.
"Here were two brothers at buffets with angels in their fists about the
thatch that blew off his house into the other's garden and so spoiled a
Hartichoke."
It should not have been left to a later hand--it should surely have
been the privilege of Lamb's or Hazlitt's, and perhaps rather Hazlitt's
than even Lamb's--to unearth and to transcribe the quaint and spirited
description of Thames watermen "howling, hollowing, and calling for
passengers, as if all the hags in hell had been imprisoned, and begging
at the gate, fiends and furies that (God be thanked) could vex the soul
but not torment it, yet indeed their most power was over the body, for
here an audacious mouthing-randing-impudent-scullery-wastecoat-and-bodied
rascal would have hail'd a penny from us for his scullerships."
Could Rabelais himself have described them better, or with vigor of
humorous expression more heartily and enjoyably characteristic of his
own all but incomparable genius?
The good old times, as remote in Shakespeare's day as in our own, were
never more delightfully described than by Rowley in this noble and
simple phrase: "Then was England's whole year but a St. George's day."
Webster wished that what he wrote might be read by the light of
Shakespeare: an admirer of Rowley might hope and must wish that he
should be read by the light of Lamb. His comedies have real as well as
realistic merit: not equal to that of Dekker's or Middleton's at their
best, but usually not far inferior to Heywood's or to theirs. The first
of them, "A New Wonder: A Woman Never Vext," has received such immortal
honor from the loving hand of Lamb that perhaps the one right thing to
say of it would be an adaptation of a Catholic formula: "Agnus locutus
est: causa finita est." The realism is so thorough as to make the
interest something more than historical: and historically it is so
valuable as well as amusing that a reasonable student may overlook the
offensive "mingle-mangle" of prose and verse which cannot but painfully
affect the nerves of all not congenitally insensitive readers, as it
surely must have ground and grated on the ears of an audience accustomed
to enjoy the prose as well as the verse of Shakespeare and his kind. No
graver offence can be committed or conceived by a writer with any claim
to any but contemptuous remembrance than this debasement of the currency
of verse.
The character of Robert Foster is so noble and attractive in its
selfless and manful simplicity that it gives us and leaves with us a
more cordial sense of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator
than we could feel if this gallant and homely figure were withdrawn from
the stage of his invention. The female Polycrates who suffers under the
curse of inevitable and intolerable good-fortune is an admirable
creature of broad comedy that never subsides or overflows or degenerates
into farce.
"A Match at Midnight" is as notable for vivid impression of reality, but
not so likely to leave a good taste--as Charlotte Brontë might haye
said--in the reader's mouth. Ancient Young, the hero, is a fine fellow;
but Messrs. Earlack and Carvegut are hardly amusing enough to reconcile
us to toleration of such bad company. It is cleverly composed, and the
crosses and chances of the night are ingeniously and effectively
invented and arranged: there is real and good broad humor in the parts
of the usurer and his sons and the attractive but unwidowed Widow Wag.
And I am not only free to admit but desirous to remark that a juster and
more valuable judgment on such plays as these than any that I could
undertake to deliver may very possibly be expected from readers whom
they may more thoroughly arride--to use a favorite phrase of the all,
but impeccable critic, the all but infallible judge, whose praise has
set the name of Rowley so high in the rank of realistic painters and
historic naturalists forever.
The copies of two dramatic nondescripts now happily preserved and duly
treasured in the library of the British Museum bear inscribed in the
same old hand, at the head of the first page and again on the last page
under the last line, the same contemptuous three words--"silly old
story." And I fear it can hardly be maintained that either Chapman, when
writing "The Blind Beggar of Alexandria," or Rowley, when writing "A
Shoemaker, a Gentleman," was engaged in any very rational or felicitous
employment of his wayward and unregulated powers. "The Printer" of the
play last named assures "the Reader" of 1638, whom he assumes to be a
member of the gentle craft, that "as plays were then, some twenty years
agone, it was in the fashion." A singular fashion, the rare modern
reader will probably reflect: especially when he remembers how far finer
and how thoroughly charming a tribute of dramatic and poetic celebration
had been paid full eighteen years earlier to the same favored craft by
the sweeter and rarer genius of Dekker. This quaintly apologetic
assurance of by-gone popularity in subject and in style will remind all
probable readers of Heywood's prologue to "The Royal King and Loyal
Subject," and his dedicatory address prefixed to "The Four Prentices of
London." It happily was not, however, in the printer's power to aver
that such impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once breaks ground
with was ever in fashion with any of his famous fellows. Nothing can be
worse than the headlong and slipshod stumble of Dekker's at its worst;
but his were the faults of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped
work: Rowley's, if I mistake not, is the far graver error of a
preposterous theory that broken verse, rough and untunable as the shock
of short chopping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural speech
of men and women than the rolling and flowing verse of Marlowe and of
Shakespeare: which is as much liker life as it is nobler and more
satisfying in workmanship. In reading bad verse the reader is constantly
reminded that he is not reading good prose; and this is not the effect
produced by true realism--the impression left by actual intercourse or
faithful presentation of it.
The hagiology of this eccentric play is more like Shirley's in "St.
Patrick for Ireland" than Dekker's and Massinger's in "The Virgin
Martyr." Assuredly there is here nothing like the one incomparably
lovely dialogue of Dorothea with her attendant angel. But there is the
charm of a curious simplicity and sincerity in Rowley's straightforward
and homely dramatic handling of the supernatural element: in the miracle
of St. Winifred's well, and the conversion of Albon into St. Alban by
"that seminary knight," as the tyrant Maximinus rather comically calls
him, Amphiabel Prince of Wales. The courtship of the princely Offa,
while disguised as the shoemaker's apprentice Crispinus, by the Roman
Princess Laodice, daughter of Maximinus, is very lively and dramatic:
the sprightliest scene, I should say, ever played out on the stage of
Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St.
Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror
and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable
grossness.
This play is a perfect repertory of slang and quaint phrases: as when
the master shoemaker, who has for apprentices two persecuted princes in
disguise, and is a very inferior imitation of Dekker's admirable Simon
Eyre, calls his wife Lady d'Oliva--whatever that may mean, and when she
inquires of one of the youngsters, "What's the matter, boy? Why are so
many chancery bills drawn in thy face?" _Habent sua fala libelli_: it is
inexplicable that this most curious play should never have been
republished, when the volumes of Dodsley's _Old Plays_, in their very
latest reissue, are encumbered with heaps of such leaden dulness and
such bestial filth as no decent scavenger and no rational nightman would
have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and smell of any possible
reader.
But it is or it should be inconceivable and incredible that the
masterpiece of Rowley's strong and singular genius, a play remarkable
for its peculiar power or fusion of strange powers even in the sovereign
age of Shakespeare, should have waited upward of three hundred years and
should still be waiting for the appearance of a second edition. The
tragedy of "All's Lost by Lust," published in the same year with
Shakespeare's great posthumous torso of romantic tragedy, was evidently
a favorite child of its author's: the terse and elaborate argument
subjoined to the careful and exhaustive list of characters may suffice
to prove it. Among these characters we may note that one, "a simple
clownish Gentleman," was "personated by the poet": and having noted it,
we cannot but long, with a fruitless longing, for such confidences as to
the impersonation of the leading characters in other memorable plays of
the period. There is some really good rough humor in the part of this
honest clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative reader will doubt
that the author's heart was in the work devoted to the tragic and poetic
scenes of a play which shows that the natural bent of his powers was
toward tragedy rather than comedy. Alike as poet and as dramatist, he
rises far higher and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his flight
is toward the effects of imaginative terror and pity than when it is
confined to the effects of humorous or pathetic realism. In the very
first scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and imminent evil
provoked by coalition rather than collision of the will of man with the
doom of destiny; and the king's defiance of prophecy and tradition is so
admirably rendered or suggested as a sign of brutal and egotistic rather
than chivalrous or manful daring as to prepare the way with great
dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent scenes of attempted
seduction and ultimate violation. With these the underplot, interesting
and original in itself, well conceived and well carried through, is
happily and naturally interwoven. The noble soliloquy of the invading
and defeated Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to all true
lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of England. Nothing can be livelier
and more natural than the scenes in which a recent bridegroom's heart is
won from his loving and low-born wife by the offered hand and the
sprightly seductions of a light-hearted and high-born rival. But the
crowning scene of the play and the crowning grace of the poem is the
interview of father and daughter after the consummation of the crime
which gave Spain into the hand of the Moor. The vivid dramatic life in
every word is even more admirable than the great style, the high poetic
spirit of the scene. I have always ventured to wonder that Lamb, whose
admiration has made it twice immortal, did not select as a companion or
a counterpart to it that other great camp scene from Webster's "Appius
and Virginia" in which another outraged warrior and father stirs up his
friends and fellow-soldiers to vindication of his honor and revenge for
his wrong. It is surely even finer and more impressive than that
selected in preference to it, which closes with the immolation of
Virginia.
The scenes in which the tragic underplot of Rowley's tragedy is deftly
and effectively wound up are full of living action and passion; that
especially in which the revenge of a deserted wife is wreaked
mistakingly on the villanous minion to whose instigation she owes the
infidelity of the husband for whom she mistakes him. The gross physical
horrors which deform the close of a noble poem are relieved if not
beautified by the great style of its age--an age unparalleled in wealth
and variety of genius, a style unmatchable for its union of inspired and
imaginative dignity with actual and vivid reality of impassioned and
lofty life.
No comparison is possible, nor if possible could it be profitable,
between the somewhat rough-hewn English oak of Rowley's play and the
flawless Roman steel of Landor's great Miltonic tragedy on the same
subject. The fervent praise of Southey was not too generous to be just
in its estimate of that austere masterpiece; it is lamentable to
remember the injustice of its illustrious author to the men of
Shakespeare's day. I fear he would certainly not have excepted the noble
work of his precursor from his general condemnation or impreachment of
"their bloody bawdries"--a misjudgment gross enough for Hallam--or
Voltaire when declining to the level of a Hallam. Landor was as headlong
as these were hidebound, as fitful as they were futile; but not even the
dispraise or the disrelish of a finer if not of a greater dramatic poet
could affect the credit or impair the station of one on whose merits the
final sentence of appreciation has been irrevocably pronounced by the
verdict of Charles Lamb.
THOMAS HEYWOOD
If it is difficult to write at all on any subject once ennobled by the
notice of Charles Lamb without some apprehensive sense of intrusion and
presumption, least of all may we venture without fear of trespass upon
ground so consecrated by his peculiar devotion as the spacious if homely
province or demesne of the dramatist whose highest honor it is to have
earned from the finest of all critics the crowning tribute of a sympathy
which would have induced him to advise an intending editor or publisher
of the dramatists of the Shakespearean age to begin by a reissue of the
works of Heywood. The depth and width of his knowledge, the subtlety and
the sureness of his intuition, place him so far ahead of any other
critic or scholar who has ever done any stroke of work in any part of
the same field that it may seem overbold for any such subordinate to
express or to suggest a suspicion that this counsel would have been
rather the expression of a personal and a partly accidental sympathy
than the result of a critical and a purely rational consideration. And
yet I can hardly think it questionable that it must have been less the
poetic or essential merit than the casual or incidental associations of
Heywood's work which excited so exceptional an enthusiasm in so
excellent a judge. For as a matter of fact it must be admitted that in
one instance at least the objections of the carper Hazlitt are better
justified than the commendations of the finer and more appreciative
critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of
sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France
found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the
upper classes of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of
Heywood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords,
Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and noble characters are the
finest and surest witnesses to the noble and beautiful nature of their
designer's, observes that "Heywood's characters, his country gentlemen,
etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in
life." But such country gentlemen as his Actons and Mountfords are
surely of a worse than the worst kind; more cruel or more irrational,
more base or more perverse, than we need fear to see in life unless our
experience should be exceptionally unfortunate. Lamb indeed is rather
an advocate than a judge in the case of his fellow-Londoners Thomas
Heywood and William Rowley; but his pleading is better worth our
attention than the summing up of a less cordial or less competent
critic.
From critics or students who regard with an academic smile of cultivated
contempt the love for their country or the faith in its greatness which
distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and
Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the
ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet whose devotion to his
homestead was not merely that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner,
no less fond and proud of his city than of his country. The quaint,
homely, single-hearted municipal loyalty of an old-world burgess,
conscious of his station as "a citizen of no mean city," and proud even
of the insults which provincials might fling at him as a cockney or
aristocrats as a tradesman, is so admirably and so simply expressed in
the person of Heywood's first hero--the first in date, at all events,
with whom a modern reader can hope to make acquaintance--that the nobly
plebeian pride of the city poet is as unmistakably personal as the
tenderness of the dramatic artist who has made the last night of the
little princes in the Tower as terribly and pathetically real for
the reader as Millais has made it for the spectator of the imminent
tragedy. Why Shakespeare shrank from the presentation of it, and left
to a humbler hand the tragic weight of a subject so charged with
tenderness and terror, it might seem impertinent or impossible to
conjecture--except to those who can perceive and appreciate the intense
and sensitive love of children which may haply have made the task
distasteful if not intolerable: but it is certain that even he could
hardly have made the last words of the little fellows more touchingly
and sweetly lifelike.
Were there nothing further to commend in the two parts of the historical
play or chronicle history of "King Edward IV.," this would suffice to
show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was not unjustified of its
early and perilous venture: but the hero of these two plays is no royal
or noble personage, he is plain Matthew Shore the goldsmith. We find
ourselves at once in what Coleridge would have called the anachronic
atmosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a champion cockney, whose
interest is really much less in the rise and fall of princes than in the
homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy gallantry of their
apprentices. The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening
scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: the
homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date
and of the class to which these plays must be referred. The parts of the
rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part
of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers of
Heywood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were still in abeyance or
in embryo. Pathos there is of a true and manly kind in the leading part
of Shore; but it has little or nothing of the poignant and intense
tenderness with which Heywood was afterward to invest the similar part
of Frankford. Humor there is of a genuine plain-spun kind in the scenes
which introduce the King as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his
surroundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are presented with a comic and
cordial fidelity which the painter of Falstaff's "villeggiatura," the
creator of Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and conceivably have
approved. It is rather in the more serious or ambitious parts that we
find now and then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of manner. The
recurrent burden of a jingling couplet in the cajoleries of the
procuress Mrs. Blague is a survival from the most primitive and
conventional form of dramatic writing not yet thoroughly superseded and
suppressed by the successive influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and
of Jonson; while the treatment of character in such scenes as that
between Clarence, Richard, and Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for
a rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and simple part of Ayre, a
character worthy to have been glorified by the mention and commendation
of Heywood's most devoted and most illustrious admirer, is typical of
the qualities which Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the
representative characters of his favorite playwright.