_Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama_, the common attribution of
these two plays to Heywood is impeached on the aesthetic score that
"they are far better than his other early work." I have carefully
endeavored to do what justice might be done to their modest allowance of
moderate merit; but whether they be Heywood's or--as Mr. Fleay, on
apparent grounds of documentary evidence, would suggest--the work of
Chettle and Day, I am certainly rather inclined to agree with the
general verdict of previous criticism, which would hardly admit their
equality and would decidedly question their claim to anything more than
equality of merit with the least admirable or memorable of Heywood's
other plays. Even the rough-hewn chronicle, "If you know not me you know
nobody," by which "the troubles of Queen Elizabeth" before her accession
are as nakedly and simply set forth in the first part as in the second
are "the building of the Royal Exchange" and "the famous victory" over
the Invincible Armada, has on the whole more life and spirit, more
interest and movement, in action as in style. The class of play to which
it belongs is historically the most curious if poetically the least
precious of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood in earnest or by
Shakespeare in jest as popular or ambitious of popularity on the stage
for which they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or caricature, more
or less ineffectually trammelled by the chance or the likelihood of
prosecution and repression, is common under various forms to various
ages and countries; but the serious introduction and presentation of
contemporary figures and events give to such plays as these as mixed and
peculiar a quality as though the playwright's aim or ambition had been
to unite in his humble and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or
patriotic historian and a political or social caricaturist; a poet and a
pamphleteer on the same page, a chronicler and a jester in the same
breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more
literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and
registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from
William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else
omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious
and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next
to none. In Thomas Drue's play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and
plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part of the same ground is gone over
in much the same fashion and to much the same effect; but the subject, a
single interlude of the Marian persecution, has more unity of interest
than can be attained by any play running on the same line as Heywood's,
from the opening to the close of the most hideous episode in our
history. That the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should have
been "staged to the show" for the edification and confirmation of her
half-sister's subjects in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity
toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than that the same hopelessly
improper topic for historical drama should in later days have been
selected for dramatic treatment by English writers and on one occasion
by a great English poet. As there are within the range of any country's
history, authentic or traditional, periods and characters in themselves
so naturally fit and proper for transfiguration by poetry that the
dramatist who should attempt to improve on the truth--the actual or
imaginary truth accepted as fact with regard to them--would probably if
not certainly derogate from it, so are there others which cannot be
transfigured without transformation. Such a character is the last and
wretchedest victim of a religious reaction which blasted her kingdom
with the hell-fire of reviving devil-worship, and her name with the
ineffaceable brand of an inseparable and damning epithet. If even the
genius of Tennyson could not make the aspirations and the agonies of
Mary as acceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic point of
view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could make the sufferings of such poor
wretches as their Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be
expected that the humbler if more dramatic genius of Heywood should have
triumphed over the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily
repulsive: but it is curious that both should have attempted to tackle
the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle
history" of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare's self attempted it, could
scarcely have been other--if we may judge by our human and fallible
lights of the divine possibilities open to a superhuman and infallible
intelligence--than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or
poetic point of view. The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have
been to invent, to devise, to create; not to modify, to adapt, to
adjust. Bloody Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and poetic
malefactress: but only by the most audacious and magnificent defiance of
history and possibility. Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia (to use the
proper ceremonial style adopted for the exquisitely tender and graceful
dedication of the "Asolani") died peaceably in the odor of incense
offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin verse of such accomplished
poets and acolytes as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi. Nothing more
tragic or dramatic could have been made of her peaceful and honorable
end than of the reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history. The greatest
poet and dramatist of the nineteenth century has chosen to immortalize
them by violence--to give them a life, or to give a life to their names,
which history could not give. Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept
faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the creation of a living and
eternal truth. One thing may be registered to the credit, not indeed of
the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the man and the Englishman:
the generous fair play shown to Philip II. in the scene which records
his impartial justice done upon the Spanish assassin of an English
victim. There is a characteristic manliness about Heywood's patriotism
which gives a certain adventitious interest to his thinnest or homeliest
work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a
quality. In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it
informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not
with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and
comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play: which is
indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced
and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or
even an irregular historical drama. Again the trusty cockney poet has
made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman: and has made
of him at once a really noble and a heartily amusing figure. His
better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman
d'Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a
little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and
venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap;
though in the earlier passages of Parisian trickery and buffoonery there
is a note of broad humor which may remind us of Molière--not of course
the Molière of Tartuffe, but the Molière of M. de Pourceaugnac. The
curious alterations made in later versions of the closing scene are
sometimes though not generally for the better.
Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared
that "posterity is bound to take care" (an obligation, I fear, of a kind
which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) "that a writer
loses nothing by such a noble modesty" as that which induced Heywood to
set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in
the rascally interest of those "harlotry players" who thought it,
forsooth, "against their peculiar profit to have them come in print."
But I am not sure that it was altogether a noble or at all a rational
modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt: "It never was any
great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read." For, eight
years after this well-known passage was in print, when publishing a
"Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable passages of
this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King
Charles," he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, "an
apologie of the Author" for slurring or skipping the record of her life
and times in a curious passage which curiously omits as unworthy of
mention his dramatic work on the subject, while complacently enumerating
his certainly less valuable and memorable other tributes to the great
queen's fame as follows: "To write largely of her troubles, being a
princesse, or of her rare and remarkable Reigne after she was Queen, I
should but feast you with dyet twice drest: Having my selfe published a
discourse of the first: from her cradle to her crowne; and in another
bearing Title of the nine worthy Women: she being the last of the rest
in time and place; though equall to any of the former both in religious
vertue, and all masculine magnanimity." This surely looks but too much
as though the dramatist and poet thought more of the chronicler and
compiler than of the truer Heywood whose name is embalmed in the
affection and admiration of his readers even to this day; as though the
author of "A Challenge for Beauty," "The Fair Maid of the West," and
"A Woman Killed with Kindness," must have hoped and expected to be
remembered rather as the author of "Troja Britannica," "Gynaikeion,"
"The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels," and even this "Life of Merlin,
sirnamed Ambrosius. His Prophesies, and Predictions Interpreted; and
their truth made good by our English Annalls": undoubtedly, we may
believe, "a Subject never published in this kind before, and deserves"
(_sic_) "to be knowne and observed by all men." Here follows the motto:
"Quotque aderant Vates, rebar adesse Deos." The biographer and
chronographer would apparently have been less flattered than surprised
to hear that he would be remembered rather as the creator of Frankford,
Mountferrers, and Geraldine, than as the chronicler of King Brute, Queen
Elizabeth, and King James.
The singular series of plays which covers much the same ground as
Caxton's immortal and delightful chronicle of the "Histories" of Troy
may of course have been partially inspired by that most enchanting
"recuyell": but Heywood, as will appear on collation or confrontation
of the dramatist with the historian, must have found elsewhere the
suggestion of some of his most effective episodes. The excellent
simplicity and vivacity of style, the archaic abruptness of action and
presentation, are equally noticeable throughout all the twenty-five acts
which lead us from the opening of the Golden to the close of the Iron
Age; but there is a no less perceptible advance or increase of dramatic
and poetic invention in the ten acts devoted to the tale of Troy and its
sequel. Not that there is anywhere any want of good simple spirited
work, homely and lively and appropriate to the ambitious humility of the
design; a design which aims at making popular and familiar to the
citizens of Elizabethan London the whole cycle of heroic legend from the
reign of Saturn to the death of Helen. Jupiter, the young hero of the
first two plays and ages, is a really brilliant and amusing mixture of
Amadis, Sigurd, and Don Juan: the pretty scene in which his infant life
is spared and saved must be familiar, and pleasantly familiar, to all
worthy lovers of Charles Lamb. The verse underlined and immortalized by
his admiration--"For heaven's sake, when you kill him, hurt him
not"--should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer.
I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the
most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the
moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of
Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward
as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals,
could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even
Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism. There is spirit
of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of war and adventure that
follow: Heywood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn and the Titans
very human and simple figures, whose doings and sufferings are presented
with child-like straightforwardness in smooth and fluent verse and in
dialogue which wants neither strength nor ease nor propriety. The
subsequent episode of Danaë is treated with such frank and charming
fusion of realism and romance as could only have been achieved in the
age of Shakespeare. To modern readers it may seem unfortunate for
Heywood that a poet who never (to the deep and universal regret of all
competent readers) followed up the dramatic promise of his youth, as
displayed in the nobly vivid and pathetic little tragedy of "Sir Peter
Harpdon's End," should in our day have handled the story of Danaë and
the story of Bellerophon so effectively as to make it impossible for the
elder poet either to escape or to sustain comparison with the author of
"The Earthly Paradise"; but the most appreciative admirers of Morris
will not be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to the
admirable qualities displayed in Heywood's dramatic treatment of these
legends. The naturally sweet and spontaneous delicacy of the later poet
must not be looked for in the homely and audacious realism of Heywood;
in whose work the style of the Knight's Tale and the style of the
Miller's Tale run side by side and hand in hand.
From the Golden Age to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood's
dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with
the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the
legendary gradation or degradation of the classical four ages. "The
Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest
and most primary stage; in "The Silver Age" the process of evolution is
already visible at work. Bellerophon and Aurea cannot certainly be
compared with the Joseph and Phraxanor of Charles Wells: but the curt
and abrupt scene in which they are hastily thrust on the stage and as
hastily swept off it is excellently composed and written. The highest
possible tribute to the simple and splendid genius of Plautus is paid by
the evidence of the fact that all his imitators have been obliged to
follow so closely on the lines of his supernatural, poetical, and
farcical comedy of Amphitryon. Heywood, Rotrou, Molière, and Dryden have
sat at his feet and copied from his dictation like school-boys. The
French pupils, it must be admitted, have profited better and shown
themselves apter and happier disciples than the English. I cannot think
that even Molière has improved on the text of Rotrou as much, or nearly
as much, as he has placed himself under unacknowledged obligation to his
elder countryman: but in Dryden's version there is a taint of greasy
vulgarity, a reek of obtrusive ruffianism, from which Heywood's version
is as clean as Shakespeare's could have been, had he bestowed on the
"Amphitruo" the honor he conferred on the "Menaechmi." The power of
condensation into a few compact scenes of material sufficient for five
full acts is a remarkable and admirable gift of Heywood's.
After the really dramatic episode in which he had the advantage of
guidance by the laughing light of a greater comic genius than his own,
Heywood contentedly resumes the simple task of arranging for the stage a
mythological chronicle of miscellaneous adventure. The jealousy of Juno
is naturally the mainspring of the action and the motive which affords
some show of connection or coherence to the three remaining acts of "The
Silver Age": the rape of Proserpine, the mourning and wandering and
wrath of Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of
touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some
reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as
custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly
connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled
with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition,
the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that
distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. The second of
the five plays composing it closes with the rescue of Proserpine by
Hercules, and the judgment of Jupiter on "the Arraignment of the Moon."
In "The Brazen Age" there is somewhat more of dramatic unity or
coherence than in the two bright easy-going desultory plays which
preceded it: it closes at least with a more effective catastrophe than
either of them in the death of Hercules. However far inferior to the
haughty and daring protest or appeal in which Sophocles, speaking
through the lips of the virtuous Hyllus, impeaches and denounces the
iniquity of heaven with a steadfast and earnest vehemence unsurpassed in
its outspoken rebellion by any modern questioner or blasphemer of divine
providence, the simple and humble sincerity of the English playwright
has given a not unimpressive or inharmonious conclusion to the same
superhuman tragedy. In the previous presentation of the story of
Meleager, Heywood has improved upon the brilliant and passionate
rhetoric of Ovid by the introduction of an original and happy touch of
dramatic effect: his Althaea, after firing the brand with which her
son's life is destined to burn out, relents and plucks it back for a
minute from the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite from
torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength and spirit, before she
rekindles it. The pathos of his farewell has not been overpraised by
Lamb: who might have added a word in recognition of the very spirited
and effective suicide of Althaea, not unworthily heralded or announced
in such verses as these:
This was my son,
Born with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast,
Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love;
His youth my pride; his honor all my wishes;
So dear, that little less he was than life.
The subsequent adventures of Hercules and the Argonauts are presented
with the same quiet straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious that
the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the
multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the
record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic
episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly
as it is humorously and dramatically presented. The rivalry of Omphale
and Deianeira for their hero's erratic affection affords a lively and
happy mainspring--not suggested by Caxton--for the tragic action and
passion of the closing scenes.
At the opening of "The Iron Age," nineteen years later in date of
publication, we find ourselves at last arrived in a province of dramatic
poetry where something of consecutive and coherent action is apparently
the aim if not always the achievement of the writer. These ten acts do
really constitute something like a play, and a play of serious, various,
progressive, and sustained interest, beginning with the elopement and
closing with the suicide of Helen. There is little in it to suggest the
influence of either Homer or Shakespeare: whose "Troilus and Cressida"
had appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered admiration of an
eternally mystified world, just twenty-three years before. The only
figure equally prominent in either play is that of Thersites: but
Heywood, happily and wisely, has made no manner of attempt to rival or
to reproduce the frightful figure of the intelligent Yahoo in which the
sane and benignant genius of Shakespeare has for once anticipated and
eclipsed the mad and malignant genius of Swift. It should be needless to
add that his Ulysses has as little of Shakespeare's as of Homer's: and
that the brutalization or degradation of the god-like figures of Ajax
and Achilles is only less offensive in the lesser than in the greater
poet's work. In the friendly duel between Hector and Ajax the very text
of Shakespeare is followed with exceptional and almost servile fidelity:
but the subsequent exchange of gifts is, of course, introduced in
imitation of earlier and classic models. The contest of Ajax and Ulysses
is neatly and spiritedly cast into dramatic form: Ovid, of course,
remains unequalled, as he who runs may read in Dryden's grand
translation, but Heywood has done better--to my mind at least--than
Shirley was to do in the next generation; though it is to be noted that
Shirley has retained more of the magnificent original than did his
immediate precursor: but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a burlesque to
pass muster even as a blasphemous travestie of the sacred text of
Sophocles. In the fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope with
no such matchless models or precursors; and it is perhaps the brightest
and most interesting of the five. Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing
understudy of Thersites: his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely
diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of
the typical traitress; and though time and space are wanting for the
development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic
character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its
simple fashion: the complicated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime
and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward
lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.
In "Love's Mistress; or, The Queen's Masque," the stage chronicler or
historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet:
his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity
and spirit, simplicity and vivacity. The framework or setting of these
five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is
sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue: the
story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more
graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Molière and Corneille;
though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite
love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and
replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless
Théophile's. The fortunes of Psyche in English poetry have been as
curious and various as her adventures on earth and elsewhere. Besides
and since this pretty little play of Heywood's, she has inspired a long
narrative poem by Marmion, one of the most brilliant and independent of
the younger comic writers who sat at the feet or gathered round the
shrine of Ben Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutchman's poet
laureate, than which nothing more portentous in platitude ever crawled
into print, and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wooden verse
evoked from Shadwell's great predecessor in the office of court
rhymester an immortalizing reference to "Prince Nicander's vein"; a
magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty example of metrical romance
by Morris.