poetry in an age when Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything so
singular in its composition and so mysterious in its motive as 'Troilus
and Cressida,' the most eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or
perhaps of any time, is probably 'The Rape of Lucrece.'" This may
naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the
party-colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed and checkered
with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce.
But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must
recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than
classical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or
essentially to the third rather than to the second of the four sections
into which Heywood's existing plays may be exhaustively divided, which
stands on the verge between them with something of the quaintest and
most graceful attributes of either. The fine instinct and the simple
skill with which the poet has tempered the villany of his villains
without toning down their atrocities by the alloy of any incongruous
quality must be acknowledged as worthily characteristic of a writer who
at his ethical best might be defined as something of a plebeian Sidney.
There are touches of criminal heroism and redeeming humanity even in the
parts of Sextus and Tullia: the fearless desperation of the doomed
ravisher, the conjugal devotion of the hunted parricide, give to the
last defiant agony of the abominable mother and son a momentary tone of
almost chivalrous dignity. The blank verse is excellent, though still
considerably alloyed with rhyme: a fusion or alternation of metrical
effects in which the young Heywood was no less skilful and successful,
inartistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success may seem to
modern criticism, than the young Shakespeare.
The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of
Heywood's work which with all their great and real merit have least in
them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of
his genius: those qualities of which when we think of him we think
first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most
naturally associate with his name. As a historical or mythological
playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from
English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the
sweet-tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of
Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something
of his humor: but if this were all we had of him we should know
comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find
most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is
more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories
or his legendary complications and variations on the antique. The famous
and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be
forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading "The Four
Prentices of London." Externally the most extravagant and grotesque of
dramatic poems, this eccentric tragicomedy of chivalrous adventure is
full of poetic as well as fantastic interest. There is really something
of discrimination in the roughly and readily sketched characters of the
four crusading brothers: the youngest especially is a life-like model of
restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when incarnate in a
hot-headed English boy; unlike even in its likeness to the same type as
embodied in a French youngster such as the immortal d'Artagnan. Justice
has been done by Lamb, and consequently as well as subsequently by later
criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which breaks out by flashes
in this quixotic romance of the City, with its serio-comic ideal of
crusading counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowledge been
observed that in the scene "where they toss their pikes so," which
aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own
prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood,
the future object of Dryden's ignorant and pointless insult, anticipated
with absolute exactitude the style of Dryden's own tragic blusterers
when most busily bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual
challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean epigram.[1]
[Footnote 1: Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue
in "Tyrannic Love" or "The Conquest of Granada":
"Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play?
Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey."
"Rapier and pike this combat shall decide:
Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride."
"I'll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be,
And feign to do my cunning after me."
This will remind the reader not so much of the "Rehearsal" as of
Butler's infinitely superior parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and
Puss.]
It is a pity that Heywood's civic or professional devotion to the
service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in
the transfiguration of the idealized prentice: it is a greater pity that
we cannot exchange all Heywood's extant masques for any one of the two
hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he "had either
an entire hand, or at least a main finger." The literary department of a
Lord Mayor's show can hardly be considered as belonging to literature,
even when a poet's time and trouble were misemployed in compiling the
descriptive prose and the declamatory verse contributed to the ceremony.
Not indeed that it was a poet who devoted so much toil and good-will to
celebration or elucidation of the laborious projects and objects both by
water and land which then distinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs,
pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas Brothers and their most
ingenious parent were employed in a more honorable capacity than the
subordinate function of versifier or showman--an office combining the
parts and the duties of the immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr.
Shum. Lexicographers might pick out of the text some rare if not unique
Latinisms or barbarisms such as "prestigion" and "strage": but except
for the purpose of such "harmless drudges" and perhaps of an occasional
hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the
attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as
barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of
study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or
American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such
constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or
Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood's or
Shakespeare's time there is something comparatively not contemptible;
the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a
simple historic purity and dignity of its own; the dulness is not so
dreary as the dulness of mediaeval prosers, the commonplace is not so
vulgar as the commonplace of more modern scribes.
"The Trial of Chivalry" is a less extravagant example of homely romantic
drama than "The Four Prentices of London." We owe to Mr. Bullen the
rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and
verification of its authorship. In style and in spirit it is perfect
Heywood: simple and noble in emotion and conception, primitive and
straightforward in construction and expression; inartistic but not
ineffectual; humble and facile, but not futile or prosaic. It is a
rather more rational and natural piece of work than might have been
expected from its author when equipped after the heroic fashion of
Mallory or Froissart: its date is more or less indistinctly indicated by
occasional rhymes and peculiar conventionalities of diction: and if
Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may now and then suggest to
his reader the figure of Sancho Panza in his master's armor, his
pedestrian romance is so genuine, his modest ambition so high-spirited
and high-minded, that it would be juster and more critical to compare
him with Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements of his esquire.
Dick Bowyer, whose life and death are mendaciously announced on the
catch-penny title-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol")
"does _not_ die," is a rather rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff
British soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to better advantage
in other plays of Heywood and his fellows. That this must be classed
among the earlier if not the earliest of his works we may infer from the
primitive simplicity of a stage direction which recalls another in a
play printed five years before. In the second scene of the third act of
"The Trial of Chivalry" we read as follows: "Enter Forester, missing the
other taken away, speaks anything, and exit." In the penultimate scene
of the second part of "King Edward IV." we find this even quainter
direction, which has been quoted before now as an instance of the stage
conditions or habits of the time: "Jockie is led to whipping over the
stage, speaking some words, but of no importance."
A further and deeper debt of thanks is due to Mr. Bullen for the
recovery of "The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered," after the lapse of
nearly three centuries. The singularly prophetic sub-title of this
classic and romantic tragicomedy has been justified at so late a date by
the beneficence of chance, in favorable conjunction with the happy
devotion and fortunate research of a thorough and a thoroughly able
student, as to awaken in all fellow-lovers of dramatic poetry a sense of
hopeful wonder with regard to the almost illimitable possibilities of
yet further and yet greater treasure to be discovered and recovered from
the keeping of "dust and damned oblivion." Meantime we may be heartily
thankful for the recovery of an excellent piece of work, written
throughout with the easy mastery of serious or humorous verse, the
graceful pliancy of style and the skilful simplicity of composition,
which might have been expected from a mature work of Heywood's, though
the execution of it would now and then have suggested an earlier date.
The clown, it may be noticed, is the same who always reappears to do
the necessary comicalities in Heywood's plays; if hardly "a fellow of
infinite jest," yet an amusing one in his homely way; though one would
have thought that on the homeliest London stage of 1624 the taste for
antiphonal improvisation of doggrel must have passed into the limbo of
obsolete simplicities. The main plot is very well managed, as with
Plautus once more for a model might properly have been expected; the
rather ferociously farcical underplot must surely have been borrowed
from some _fabliau_. The story has been done into doggrel by George
Colman the younger: but that cleanly and pure minded censor of the press
would hardly have licensed for the stage a play which would have
required, if the stage-carpenter had been then in existence, the
production of a scene which would have anticipated what Gautier so
plausibly plumed himself upon as a novelty in stage effect--imagined for
the closing scene of his imaginary tragedy of "Heliogabalus."
There are touches of pathetic interest and romantic invention in "A
Maidenhead Well Lost": two or three of the leading characters are
prettily sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is a graceful
compromise between unambitious poetry and mildly spirited prose: but it
is hardly to be classed among Heywood's best work of the kind: it has
no scenes of such fervid and noble interest, such vivid and keen emotion
as distinguish "A Challenge for Beauty": and for all its simple grace of
writing and ingenuous ingenuity of plot it may not improbably be best
remembered by the average modern reader as remarkable for the most
amusing and astonishing example on record of anything but "inexplicable"
dumb show--to be paralleled only and hardly by a similar interlude of no
less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole
dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche--"La Reine d'Espagne."
Little favor has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors
to "The Royal King and the Loyal Subject": and the author himself, in
committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and
frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition
and versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce
was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need
not shrink from comparison with Fletcher's more elaborate, rhetorical,
elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of "The Loyal Subject"; that the
somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood's hero is not more slavish or
foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher's; and that even if
we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive
straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the
elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential
servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the
Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood. The
humor is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest
in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality
and versatility is as genuine and honest as the serious exposition of
character is straightforward and sincere.
The best of Heywood's romantic plays is the most graceful and beautiful,
in detached scenes and passages, of all his extant works. The
combination of the two plots--they can hardly be described as plot and
underplot--is so dexterously happy that it would do the highest credit
to a more famous and ambitious artist: the rival heroes are so really
noble and attractive that we are agreeably compelled to condone whatever
seems extravagant or preposterous in their relations or their conduct:
there is a breath of quixotism in the air which justifies and ennobles
it. The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit: it is the
more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less
of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for
striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in
ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from
Heywood. But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing
may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found
with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood's genius at its
happiest and brightest as "A Challenge for Beauty."
The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as
difficult to determine in the work of Heywood as in the character of his
time: the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of
Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of
the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which
the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly
beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have
been classed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which
their author's fame must principally and finally depend than among those
which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his
work. There is much the same fusion of interests, as there is much the
same mixture of styles, in the conduct of a play for which we have once
more to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at once of Heywood
and of his admirers. That Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward
a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author of a play which a few
years ago had never seen the light is as evident as that his estimate of
the fine English quality which induced this recognition was justified by
all rules of moral evidence. There can be less than little doubt that
"Dick of Devonshire" is one of the two hundred and twenty in which
Heywood had "a main finger"--though not, I should say, by any means "an
entire hand." The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark:
though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for
smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect. Dick Pike is a
better study of the bluff and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in
"The Trial of Chivalry": and the same chivalrous sympathy with the
chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which
delights us in "A Challenge for Beauty" pervades and vivifies this
long-lost and long-forgotten play. The partial sacrifice of ethical
propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences
of the stage is rather more startling than usual: a fratricidal ravisher
and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance
the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being
happy though married. The hand of Heywood is more recognizable in the
presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his
others, and in the noble answer of the criminal's brother to their
father's very natural question: "Why dost thou take his part so?"
Because no drop of honor falls from him
But I bleed with it.
This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as traceable in the earlier
as in the later of Heywood's extant works: he is English of the English
in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, when suppression is no
longer either possible or proper, of all noble and gentle and natural
emotion. His passion and his pathos, his loyalty and his chivalry, are
always so unobtrusive that their modesty may sometimes run the risk of
eclipse before the glory of more splendid poets and more conspicuous
patriots: but they are true and trustworthy as Shakespeare's or Milton's
or Wordsworth's or Tennyson's or Browning's.
It was many a year before Dick Pike had earned the honor of
commemoration by his hand or by any other poet's that Heywood had won
his spurs as the champion presenter--if I may be allowed to revive the
word--of his humbler and homelier countrymen under the light of a no
less noble than simple realism. "The Fair Maid of the Exchange" is a
notable example of what I believe is professionally or theatrically
called a one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously unjust and
inept remark on Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII."--the play in which,
according to the principles or tenets of the new criticism which walks
or staggers by the new light of a new scholarship, "the new Shakspere"
may or must have been assisted by Flitcher (why not also by Meddletun,
Messenger, and a few other _novi homines?_), we may say, and it may be
said this time with some show of reason, that the genius of the author
limps in and limps out with the Cripple. Most of the other characters
and various episodical incidents of the incomposite story are alike, if
I may revive a good and expressive phrase of the period, hastily and
unskilfully slubbered up: Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate
example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from
him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived.
On the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two first-rate scenes and
passages to which Lamb has done perhaps no more than justice by the
characteristic and eloquent cordiality of his commendations. Its date
may be probably determined as early among the earliest of its author's
by the occurrence in mid-dialogue of a sestet in the popular metre of
"Venus and Adonis," with archaic inequality in the lengths of the second
and fourth rhyming words: a notable note of metrical or immetrical
antiquity in style. The self-willed if high-minded Phyllis Flower has
something in her of Heywood's later heroines, Bess Bridges of Plymouth
and Luce the goldsmith's daughter, but is hardly as interesting or
attractive as either.
Much less than this can be said for the heroines, if heroines they can
in any sense be called, of the two plays by which Heywood is best known
as a tragic and a comic painter of contemporary life among his
countrymen. It is certainly not owing to any exceptional power of
painting or happiness in handling feminine character that the first
place among his surviving works has been generally and rationally
assigned to "A Woman Killed with Kindness." The fame of this famous
realistic tragedy is due to the perfect fitness of the main subject for
treatment in the manner of which Heywood was in his day and remains to
the present day beyond all comparison the greatest and the most
admirable master. It is not that the interest is either naturally
greater, or greater by force and felicity of genius in the dramatist,
than that of other and far inferior plays. It is not that the action is
more artistically managed: it is not that curiosity or sympathy is
aroused or sustained with any particular skill. Such a play as "Fatal
Curiosity" is as truthfully lifelike and more tragically exciting: it is
in mere moral power and charm, with just a touch of truer and purer
poetry pervading and coloring and flavoring and quickening the whole,
that the work of a Heywood approves itself as beyond the reach or the
ambition of a Lillo. One figure among many remains impressed on his
reader's memory once for all: the play is full of incident, perhaps
over-full of actors, excellently well written and passably well
composed; but it lives, it survives and overtops its fellows, by grace
of the character of its hero. The underplot, whether aesthetically or
historically considered, is not more singular and sensational than
extravagant and unpleasant to natural taste as well as to social
instinct: the other agents in the main plot are little more than
sketches--sometimes deplorably out of drawing: Anne is never really
alive till on her death-bed, and her paramour is never alive--in his
temptation, his transgression, or his impenitence--at all. The whole
play, as far as we remember or care to remember it, is Frankford: he
suffices to make it a noble poem and a memorable play.
The hero of "The English Traveller," however worthy to stand beside him
as a typical sample of English manhood at its noblest and gentlest,
cannot be said to occupy so predominant a place in the conduct of
the action or the memory of the reader. The comic Plautine
underplot--Plautus always brought good luck to Heywood--is so
incomparably preferable to the ugly and unnatural though striking and
original underplot of "A Woman Killed with Kindness" as wellnigh to
counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, plausibility, and
propriety in the main action. The seduction of Mrs. Frankford is so
roughly slurred over that it is hard to see how, if she could not resist
a first whisper of temptation, she can ever have been the loyal wife and
mother whose fall we are expected to deplore: but the seduction of Mrs.
Wincott, or rather her transformation from the likeness of a loyal and
high-minded lady to the likeness of an impudent and hypocritical harlot,
is neither explained nor explicable in the case of a woman who dies of a
sudden shock of shame and penitence. Her paramour is only not quite so
shapeless and shadowy a scoundrel as the betrayer of Frankford: but
Heywood is no great hand at a villain: his nobly simple conception and
grasp and development of character will here be recognized only in the
quiet and perfect portraiture of the two grand old gentlemen and the
gallant unselfish youth whom no more subtle or elaborate draughtsman
could have set before us in clearer or fuller outline, with more
attractive and actual charm of feature and expression.