works, and one of his most delightful plays. Inartistic as this sort of
dramatic poem may seem to the lovers of theatrical composition and
sensational arrangement, of emotional calculations and premeditated
shocks, it has a place of its own, and a place of honor, among the
incomparably various forms of noble and serious drama which English
poets of the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and left as models
impossible to reproduce or to rival in any generation of poets or
readers, actors or spectators, after the decadent forces of English
genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and
creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into
everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism. Before
that blight had fallen upon the country of Shakespeare, the variety and
fertility of dramatic form and dramatic energy which distinguished the
typical imagination or invention of his countrymen can only be
appreciated or conceived by students of what yet is left us of the
treasure bequeathed by the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare.
Every other man who could speak or write at all was a lyric poet, a
singer of beautiful songs, in the generation before Shakespeare's: every
other such man in Shakespeare's was a dramatic poet above or beyond all
comparison with any later claimant of the title among Shakespeare's
countrymen. One peculiarly and characteristically English type of drama
which then flourished here and there among more ambitious if not more
interesting forms or varieties, and faded forever with the close of the
age of Shakespeare, was the curious and delightful kind of play dealing
with records or fictions of contemporary adventure. The veriest failures
in this line have surely something of national and historical interest;
telling us as they do of the achievements or in any case of the
aspirations and the ideals, the familiar traditions and ambitions and
admirations, of our simplest and noblest forefathers. Even such a play
as that in which the adventures of the Shirleys were hurried and huddled
into inadequate and incoherent presentation as "The Travels of Three
English Brothers," however justly it may offend or dissatisfy the
literary critic, can hardly be without attraction for the lover of his
country: curiosity may be disappointed of its hope, yet patriotism may
find matter for its sympathy. And if so much may be said on behalf of a
poetic and dramatic failure, this and far more than this may be claimed
on behalf of such plays as "The Fair Maid of the West" and "Fortune by
Land and Sea." Of these the first is certainly the better play: I should
myself be inclined to rank it among Heywood's very best. He never wrote
anything brighter, sprightlier, livelier or fuller of life and energy:
more amusing in episodical incident or by-play, more interesting and
attractive in the structure or the progress of the main story. No modern
heroine with so strong a dash of the Amazon--so decided a cross of the
male in her--was ever so noble, credible and lovable as Bess Bridges:
and Plymouth ought really to do itself the honor of erecting a memorial
to her poet. An amusing instance of Heywood's incomparable good-nature
and sweetness of temper in dealing with the creatures of his
genius--incomparable I call it, because in Shakespeare the same
beautiful quality is more duly tempered and toned down to more rational
compliance with the demands of reason and probability, whether natural
or dramatic--is here to be recognized in the redemption of a cowardly
bully, and his conversion from a lying ruffian into a loyal and worthy
sort of fellow. The same gallant spirit of sympathy with all noble
homeliness of character, whether displayed in joyful search of adventure
or in manful endurance of suffering and wrong, informs the less
excellently harmonious and well-built play which bears the truly and
happily English title of "Fortune by Land and Sea." It has less romantic
interest than the later adventures of the valiant Bess and her Spencer
with the amorous King of Fez and his equally erratic consort; not to
mention the no less susceptible Italians among whom their lot is
subsequently cast: but it is a model of natural and noble simplicity, of
homely and lively variety. There is perhaps more of the roughness and
crudity of style and treatment which might be expected from Rowley than
of the humaner and easier touch of Heywood in the conduct of the action:
the curious vehemence and primitive brutality of social or domestic
tyranny may recall the use of the same dramatic motives by George
Wilkins in "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage": but the mixture or
fusion of tender and sustained emotion with the national passion for
enterprise and adventure is pleasantly and peculiarly characteristic of
Heywood.
In "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon" the dramatic ability of Heywood, as
distinct from his more poetic and pathetic faculty, shows itself at its
best and brightest. There are not many much better examples of the sort
of play usually defined as a comedy of intrigue, but more properly
definable as a comedy of action. The special risk to which a purveyor of
this kind of ware must naturally be exposed is the tempting danger of
sacrificing propriety and consistency of character to effective and
impressive suggestions or developments of situation or event; the
inclination to think more of what is to happen than of the persons it
must happen to--the characters to be actively or passively affected by
the concurrence or the evolution of circumstances. Only to the very
greatest of narrative or dramatic artists in creation and composition
can this perilous possibility be all but utterly unknown. Poets of the
city no less than poets of the court, the homely Heywood as well as the
fashionable Fletcher, tripped and fell now and then over this awkward
stone of stumbling--a very rock of offence to readers of a more exacting
temper or a more fastidious generation than the respective audiences of
patrician and plebeian London in the age of Shakespeare. The leading
young man of this comedy now under notice is represented as "a
wild-headed gentleman," and revealed as an abject ruffian of unredeemed
and irredeemable rascality. As much and even more may be said of the
execrable wretch who fills a similar part in an admirably written play
published thirty-six years earlier and verified for the first time as
Heywood's by the keen research and indefatigable intuition of Mr. Fleay.
The parallel passages cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots
are more than suggestive, even if they be not proof positive, of
identity in authorship: but the identity in atrocity of the two hideous
figures who play the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as
more serious evidence. The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables
by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and
school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as
even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have
pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his
humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced
than Master Shakespeare's. As for the other member of Webster's famous
triad, I fear that the most indulgent sentence passed on Master Dekker,
if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence,
could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic. But he was
apparently if not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of
presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable
transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife
he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly
outrages, to despatch by poison. The excuse for Heywood is simply that
in his day as in Chaucer's the orthodox ideal of a married heroine was
still none other than Patient Grizel: Shakespeare alone had got beyond
it.
The earlier of these two plays, "a pleasant" if somewhat sensational
"comedy entitled 'How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,'" is written for
the most part in Heywood's most graceful and poetical vein of verse,
with beautiful simplicity, purity, and fluency of natural and musical
style. In none of his plays is the mixture or rather the fusion of
realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious: the rescue of the
injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet,
she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed
poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any
but the very greatest among Heywood's fellow-poets. There is no merit of
this kind in the later play: but from the dramatic if not even from the
ethical point of view it is, on the whole, a riper and more rational
sort of work. The culmination of accumulating evidence by which the
rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed and put to shame, driven from lie
to lie and reduced from retractation to retractation as witness after
witness starts up against him from every successive corner of the
witch's dwelling, is as masterly in management of stage effect as any
contrivance of the kind in any later and more famous comedy: nor can I
remember a more spirited and vivid opening to any play than the
quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one breaks out at
once into life-like action, full of present interest and promise of more
to come. The second scene, in which the fair sempstress appears at work
in her father's shop, recalls and indeed repeats the introduction of the
heroine in an earlier play: but here again the author's touch is firmer
and his simplicity more masculine than before. This coincidence is at
least as significant as that between the two samples of flogging-block
doggrel collated for comparison by Mr. Fleay: it is indeed a suggestive
though superfluous confirmation of Heywood's strangely questioned but
surely unquestionable claim to the authorship of "The Fair Maid of the
Exchange." A curious allusion to a more famous play of the author's is
the characteristic remark of the young ruffian Chartley: "Well, I see
you choleric hasty men are the kindest when all is done. Here's such
wetting of handkerchers! he weeps to think of his wife, she weeps to see
her father cry! Peace, fool, we shall else have thee claim kindred of
the woman killed with kindness." And in the fourth and last scene of the
fourth act the same scoundrel is permitted to talk Shakespeare: "I'll
go, although the devil and mischance look big."
Poetical justice may cry out against the dramatic lenity which could
tolerate or prescribe for the sake of a comfortable close to this comedy
the triumphant escape of a villanous old impostor and baby-farmer from
the condign punishment due to her misdeeds; but the severest of criminal
judges if not of professional witch-finders might be satisfied with the
justice or injustice done upon "the late Lancashire Witches" in the
bright and vigorous tragicomedy which, as we learn from Mr. Fleay, so
unwarrantably and uncharitably (despite a disclaimer in the epilogue)
anticipated the verdict of their judges against the defenceless victims
of terrified prepossession and murderous perjury. But at this time of
day the mere poetical reader or dramatic student need not concern
himself, while reading a brilliant and delightful play, with the
soundness or unsoundness of its moral and historical foundations. There
may have been a boy so really and so utterly possessed by the devil who
seems now and then to enter into young creatures of human form and
be-monster them as to amuse himself by denouncing helpless and harmless
women to the most horrible of deaths on the most horrible of charges:
that hideous passing fact does not affect or impair the charming and
lasting truth of Heywood's unsurpassable study, the very model of a
gallant and life-like English lad, all compact of fearlessness and fun,
audacity and loyalty, so perfectly realized and rendered in this quaint
and fascinating play. The admixture of what a modern boy would call
cheek and chaff with the equally steadfast and venturesome resolution of
the indomitable young scapegrace is so natural as to make the
supernatural escapades in which it involves him quite plausible for the
time to a reader of the right sort: even as (to compare this small
masterpiece with a great one) such a reader, while studying the
marvellous text of Meinhold, is no more sceptical than is their
chronicler as to the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork. And however
condemnable or blameworthy the authors of "The Witches of Lancashire"
may appear to a modern reader or a modern magistrate or jurist for their
dramatic assumption or presumption in begging the question against the
unconvicted defendants whom they describe in the prologue as "those
witches the fat jailor brought to town," they can hardly have been
either wishful or able to influence the course of justice toward
criminals of whose evident guilt they were evidently convinced.
Shadwell's later play of the same name, though not wanting in such rough
realistic humor and coarse-grained homespun interest as we expect in the
comic produce of his hard and heavy hand, makes happily no attempt to
emulate the really noble touches of poetry and pathos with which Heywood
has thrown out into relief the more serious aspect of the supposed crime
of witchcraft in its influence or refraction upon the honor and
happiness of innocent persons. Og was naturally more in his place and
more in his element as the second "fat jailor" of Lancashire witches
than as the second English dramatic poet of Psyche: he has come closer
than his precursors, closer indeed than could have been thought
possible, to actual presentation of the most bestial and abominable
details of demonolatry recorded by the chroniclers of witchcraft: and in
such scenes as are rather transcribed than adapted from such narratives
he has imitated his professed master and model, Ben Jonson, by appending
to his text, with the most minute and meticulous care, all requisite or
more than requisite references to his original authorities. The allied
poets who had preceded him were content to handle the matter more easily
and lightly, with a quaint apology for having nothing of more interest
to offer than "an argument so thin, persons so low," that they could
only hope their play might "pass pardoned, though not praised." Brome's
original vein of broad humor and farcical fancy is recognizable enough
in the presentation of the bewitched household where the children rule
their parents and are ruled by their servants; a situation which may
have suggested the still more amusing development of the same fantastic
motive in his admirable comedy of "The Antipodes." There is a noticeable
reference to "Macbeth" in the objurgations lavished by the daughter upon
the mother under the influence of a revolutionary spell: "Is this a fit
habit for a handsome young gentlewoman's mother? as I hope to be a lady,
you look like one o' the Scottish wayward sisters." The still more
broadly comic interlude of the bewitched rustic bridegroom and his
loudly reclamatory bride is no less humorously sustained and carried
through. Altogether, for an avowedly hasty and occasional piece of work,
this tragicomedy is very creditably characteristic of both its
associated authors.
How small a fraction of Heywood's actual work is comprised in these
twenty-six plays we cannot even conjecturally compute; we only know that
they amount to less than an eighth part of the plays written wholly or
mainly by his indefatigable hand, and that they are altogether
outweighed in volume, though decidedly not in value, by the existing
mass of his undramatic work. We know also, if we have eyes to see, that
the very hastiest and slightest of them does credit to the author, and
that the best of them are to be counted among the genuine and
imperishable treasures of English literature. Such amazing fecundity and
such astonishing industry would be memorable even in a far inferior
writer; but, though I certainly cannot pretend to anything like an
exhaustive or even an adequate acquaintance with all or any of his
folios, I can at least affirm that they contain enough delightfully
readable matter to establish a more than creditable reputation. His
prose, if never to be called masterly, may generally be called good and
pure: its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the
century than faults of the author; and he can tell a story, especially a
short story, as well as if not better than many a better-known writer.
I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality of his undramatic
verse which can ever be said to make it worth reading: it is, as far as
I know, of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the very
humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would be pretty safe to wager, must
be looked for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for
depth or height of imagination or of passion, it will be found memorable
for unsurpassed excellence of unpretentious elevation in treatment of
character. The unity (or, to borrow from Coleridge a barbaric word, the
triunity) of noble and gentle and simple in the finest quality of the
English character at its best--of the English character as revealed in
our Sidneys and Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins--is almost as
apparent in the best scenes of his best plays as in the lives of our
chosen and best-beloved heroes: and this, I venture to believe, would
have been rightly regarded by Thomas Heywood as a more desirable and
valuable success than the achievement of a noisier triumph or the
attainment of a more conspicuous place among the poets of his country.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
George Chapman, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was
born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood,
"he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university"
of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem: "The Shadow of
Night." Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed
concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled
in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned "among the best of our tragic
writers for the stage"; but his only play published at that age was a
crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted
three years before it passed from the stage to the press; and his first
tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the
suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he
had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of
the "Iliad," in a form afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he
crowned the lofty structure of his labor by the issue of an English
version of the "Hymns" and other minor Homeric poems. The former he
dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the hapless favorite of
Elizabeth; the latter to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous
minion of James. Six years earlier he had inscribed to Bacon, then Lord
Chancellor, a translation of Hesiod's "Works and Days." His only other
versions of classic poems are from the fifth satire of Juvenal and the
"Hero and Leander" which goes under the name of Musaeus, the latter
dedicated to Inigo Jones. His revised and completed version of the
"Iliad" had been inscribed in a noble and memorable poem of dedication
to Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and his "Odyssey" fell
under the patronage of Carr. Of the manner of his death at seventy-five
we know nothing more than may be gathered from the note appended to a
manuscript fragment, which intimates that the remainder of the poem, a
lame and awkward piece of satire on his old friend Jonson, had been
"lost in his sickness." Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let
us know, "was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate,
qualities rarely meeting in a poet"; he had also certain other merits
at least as necessary to the exercise of that profession. He had a
singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious
devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of
the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor,
opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of
spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a
robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and
kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style
is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time--a
quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous
with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader
through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled
obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a
witch's gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation.
As his language in the higher forms of comedy is always pure and clear,
and sometimes exquisite in the simplicity of its sincere and natural
grace, the stiffness and density of his more ambitious style may perhaps
be attributed to some pernicious theory or conceit of the dignity proper
to a moral and philosophic poet. Nevertheless, many of the gnomic
passages in his tragedies and allegoric poems are of singular weight
and beauty; the best of these, indeed, would not discredit the fame of
the very greatest poets for sublimity of equal thought and expression:
witness the lines chosen by Shelley as the motto for a poem, and fit to
have been chosen as the motto for his life.
The romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur of Chapman's Homer remains
attested by the praise of Keats, of Coleridge, and of Lamb; it is
written at a pitch of strenuous and laborious exaltation, which never
flags or breaks down, but never flies with the ease and smoothness of an
eagle native to Homeric air. From his occasional poems an expert and
careful hand might easily gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly
gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. The most notable
examples of his tragic work are comprised in the series of plays taken,
and adapted sometimes with singular license, from the records of such
part of French history as lies between the reign of Francis I. and the
reign of Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the trial and death
of Admiral Chabot to the treason and execution of Marshal Biron. The
two plays bearing as epigraph the name of that famous soldier and
conspirator are a storehouse of lofty thought and splendid verse, with
scarcely a flash or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of
Chapman's whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is
"Bussy d'Ambois" (d'Amboise)--a tragedy not lacking in violence of
action or emotion, and abounding even more in sublime or beautiful
interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of
thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the
tragedy of "Caesar and Pompey," whence the finest of them were first
extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles
Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and laboring spirit of Chapman
may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to
pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even
better by help of excerpts and selections. But the excellence of his
best comedies can only be appreciated by a student who reads them fairly
and fearlessly through, and, having made some small deductions on the
score of occasional pedantry and occasional crudity, finds in "All
Fools," "Monsieur d'Olive," "The Gentleman Usher," and "The Widow's
Tears" a wealth and vigor of humorous invention, a tender and earnest
grace of romantic poetry, which may atone alike for these passing
blemishes and for the lack of such clear-cut perfection of character and
such dramatic progression of interest as we find only in the yet higher
poets of our heroic age.
The severest critic of his shortcomings or his errors, if not
incompetent to appreciate his achievements and his merits, must
recognize in Chapman an original poet, one who held of no man and
acknowledged no master, but throughout the whole generation of our
greatest men, from the birth of Marlowe wellnigh to the death of Jonson,
held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition,
not without an occasional pause for kindly and graceful salutation of
such younger and still nobler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. With
Shakespeare we should never have guessed that he had come at all in
contact, had not the intelligence of Mr. Minto divined or rather
discerned him to be the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare's sonnets
with a grave note of passionate satire, hitherto as enigmatic as almost
all questions connected with those divine and dangerous poems. This
conjecture the critic has fortified by such apt collocation and
confrontation of passages that we may now reasonably accept it as an
ascertained and memorable fact.
The objections which a just and adequate judgment may bring against
Chapman's master-work, his translation of Homer, may be summed up in
three epithets: it is romantic, laborious, Elizabethan. The qualities
implied by these epithets are the reverse of those which should
distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting this apart, and
considering the poems as in the main original works, the superstructure
of a romantic poet on the submerged foundations of Greek verse, no
praise can be too warm or high for the power, the freshness, the
indefatigable strength and inextinguishable fire which animate this
exalted work, and secure for all time that shall take cognizance of
English poetry an honored place in its highest annals for the memory of
Chapman.
CYRIL TOURNEUR