19. Notwithstanding the defence made by La Harpe, I cannot but agree

with the French Academy, in their criticism on this play, that the

subject is essentially ill-chosen. No circumstances can be imagined,

no skill can be employed, that will reconcile the mind to the marriage

of a daughter with one that has shed her father’s blood. And the law

of unity of time, which crowds every event of the drama within a few

hours, renders the promised consent of Chimène (for such it is) to

this union still more revolting and improbable.[528] The knowledge of

this termination re-acts on the reader during a second perusal, so as

to give an irresistible impression of her insincerity in her previous

solicitations for his death. She seems, indeed, in several passages,

little else than a tragic coquette, and one of the most odious

kind.[529] The English stage at that time was not exempt from great

violations of nature and decorum; yet, had the subject of the Cid

fallen into the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is one which

they would have willingly selected for the sake of the effective

situations and contrasts of passion it affords, the part of Chimène

would have been managed by them with great warmth and spirit, though

probably not less incongruity and extravagance; but I can scarcely

believe that the conclusion would have been so much in the style of

comedy. Her death, or retirement into a monastery, would have seemed

more consonant to her own dignity and to that of a tragic subject.

Corneille was, however, borne out by the tradition of Spain, and by

the authority of Guillen de Castro, whom he imitated.

[528] La Harpe has said that Chimène does not promise at last to

marry Rodrigue, though the spectator perceives that she will do

so. He forgets that she has commissioned her lover’s sword in the

duel with Don Sancho:--

Sors vainqueur d’un combat dont Chimène est le prix.--Act v.,

sc. 1.

[529] In these lines, for example, of the third act,

scene 4th:--

Malgré les feux si beaux qui rompent ma colère,

Je ferai mon possible à bien venger mon père;,

Mais malgré la rigueur d’un si cruel devoir,

Mon unique souhait est de ne rien pouvoir.

It is true that he found this in his Spanish original, but that

does not render the imitation judicious, or the sentiment either

moral, or even theatrically specious.

|Style of Corneille.|

20. The language of Corneille is elevated, his sentiments, if

sometimes hyperbolical, generally noble, when he has not to deal with

the passion of love; conscious of the nature of his own powers, he has

avoided subjects wherein this must entirely predominate; it was to be,

as he thought, an accessory but never a principal source of dramatic

interest. In this, however, as a general law of tragedy, he was

mistaken; love is by no means unfit for the chief source of tragic

distress, but comes in generally with a cold and feeble effect as a

subordinate emotion. In those Roman stories he most affected, its

expression could hardly be otherwise than insipid and incongruous.

Corneille probably would have dispensed with it like Shakspeare in

Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar; but the taste of his contemporaries,

formed in the pedantic school of romance, has imposed fetters on his

genius in almost every drama. In the Cid, where the subject left him

no choice, he has perhaps succeeded better in the delineation of love

than on any other occasion; yet even here we often find the cold

exaggerations of complimentary verse, instead of the voice of nature.

But other scenes of this play, especially in the first act, which

bring forward the proud Castilian characters of the two fathers of

Rodrigo and Chimène, are full of the nervous eloquence of Corneille;

and the general style, though it may not have borne the fastidious

criticism either of the Academy or of Voltaire, is so far above

anything which had been heard on the French stage, that it was but a

very frigid eulogy in the former to say that it “had acquired a

considerable reputation among works of the kind.” It had at that time

astonished Paris; but the prejudices of Cardinal Richelieu and the

envy of inferior authors, joined perhaps to the proverbial

unwillingness of critical bodies to commit themselves by warmth of

praise, had some degree of influence on the judgment which the Academy

pronounced on the Cid, though I do not think it was altogether so

unjust and uncandid as has sometimes been supposed.

|Les Horaces.|

21. The next tragedy of Corneille, Les Horaces, is hardly open to less

objection than the Cid; not so much because there is, as the French

critics have discovered, a want of unity in the subject, which I do

not quite perceive, nor because the fifth act is tedious and

uninteresting, as from the repulsiveness of the story, and the jarring

of the sentiments with our natural sympathies. Corneille has

complicated the legend in Livy with the marriage of the younger

Horatius to the sister of the Curiatii, and thus placed his two female

personages in a nearly similar situation, which he has taken little

pains to diversify by any contrast in their characters. They speak on

the contrary, nearly in the same tone, and we see no reason why the

hero of the tragedy should not, as he seems half disposed, have

followed up the murder of his sister by that of his wife. More skill

is displayed in the opposition of character between the combatants

themselves; but the mild, though not less courageous or patriotic,

Curiatius attaches the spectator, who cares nothing for the triumph of

Rome, or the glory of the Horatian name. It must be confessed that the

elder Horatius is nobly conceived; the Roman energy, of which we find

but a caricature in his brutish son, shines out in him with an

admirable dramatic spirit. I shall be accused, nevertheless, of want

of taste, when I confess that his celebrated _Qu’il mourût_, has

always seemed to me less eminently sublime than the general suffrage

of France has declared it. There is nothing very novel or striking in

the proposition, that a soldier’s duty is to die in the field rather

than desert his post by flight; and in a tragedy full of the

hyperboles of Roman patriotism, it appears strange that we should be

astonished at that which is the principle of all military honour. The

words are emphatic in their position, and calculated to draw forth the

actor’s energy; but this is an artifice of no great skill; and one can

hardly help thinking, that a spectator in the pit would spontaneously

have anticipated the answer of a warlike father to the feminine

question,

Que vouliez-vous qu’il fît contre trois?

The style of this tragedy is reckoned by the critics superior to that

of the Cid; the nervousness and warmth of Corneille is more displayed;

and it is more free from incorrect and trivial expression.

|Cinna.|

22. Cinna, the next in order of time, is probably that tragedy of

Corneille which would be placed at the head by a majority of

suffrages. His eloquence reached here its highest point; the speeches

are longer, more vivid in narration, more philosophical in argument,

more abundant in that strain of Roman energy, which he had derived

chiefly from Lucan, more emphatic and condensed in their language and

versification. But, as a drama, this is deserving of little praise;

the characters of Cinna and Maximus are contemptible, that of

Emilia is treacherous and ungrateful. She is indeed the type of a

numerous class who have followed her in works of fiction, and

sometimes, unhappily, in real life; the female patriot, theoretically,

at least, an assassin, but commonly compelled, by the iniquity of the

times, to console herself in practice with safer transgressions. We

have had some specimens; and other nations, to their shame and sorrow,

have had more. But even the magnanimity of Augustus, whom we have not

seen exposed to instant danger, is uninteresting, nor do we perceive

why he should bestow his friendship as well as his forgiveness on the

detected traitor that cowers before him. It is one of those subjects,

which might, by the invention of a more complex plot than history

furnishes, have better excited the spectator’s attention, but not his

sympathy.

|Polyeucte.|

23. A deeper interest belongs to Polyeucte; and this is the only

tragedy of Corneille wherein he affects the heart. There is indeed a

certain incongruity which we cannot overcome between the sanctity of

Christian martyrdom and the language of love, especially when the

latter is rather the more prominent of the two in the conduct of the

drama.[530] But the beautiful character of Pauline would redeem much

greater defects than can be ascribed to this tragedy. It is the

noblest, perhaps, on the French stage, and conceived with admirable

delicacy and dignity.[531] In the style, however, of Polyeucte, there

seems to be some return towards the languid tone of common-place which

had been wholly thrown off in Cinna.[532]

[530] The coterie at the Hôtel Rambouillet thought that Polyeucte

would not succeed, on account of its religious character.

Corneille, it is said, was about to withdraw his tragedy, but was

dissuaded by an actor of so little reputation that he did not

even bear a part in the performance. Fontenelle, p. 101.

[531] Fontenelle thinks that it shows “un grand attachement à son

devoir, et un grand caractère” in Pauline to desire that Severus

should save her husband’s life, instead of procuring the latter

to be executed that she might marry her lover. Réflexions sur la

Poétique, sect. 16. This is rather an odd notion of what is

sufficient to constitute an heroic character. It is not the

conduct of Pauline, which in every Christian or virtuous woman

must naturally be the same, but the fine sentiments and language

which accompany it, that render her part so noble.

[532] In the second scene of the second act, between Severus and

Pauline, two characters of the most elevated class, the former

quits the stage with this line: Adieu trop vertueux objet, et

trop charmant. The latter replies: Adieu, trop malheureux, et

trop parfait amant.

|Rodogune.|

24. Rodogune is said to have been a favourite with the author. It can

hardly be so with the generality of his readers. The story has all the

atrocity of the older school, from which Corneille had emancipated the

stage. It borders even on ridicule. Two princes, kept by their mother,

one of those furies whom our own Webster or Marston would have

delighted to draw, in ignorance which is the elder, and consequently

entitled to the throne, are enamoured of Rodogune. Their mothers make

it a condition of declaring the succession, that they shall shed the

blood of this princess. Struck with horror at such a proposition, they

refer their passion to the choice of Rodogune, who, in her turn,

demands the death of their mother. The embarrassment of these amiable

youths may be conceived. La Harpe extols the fifth act of this

tragedy, and it may perhaps be effective in representation.

|Pompey.|

25. Pompey, sometimes inaccurately called the Death of Pompey, is more

defective in construction than even any other tragedy of Corneille.

The hero, if Pompey is such, never appears on the stage, and his death

being recounted at the beginning of the second act, the real subject

of the piece, so far as it can be said to have one, is the punishment

of his assassins; a retribution demanded by the moral sense of the

spectator, but hardly important enough for dramatic interest. The

character of Cæsar is somewhat weakened by his passion for Cleopatra,

which assumes more the tone of devoted gallantry than truth or

probability warrant; but Cornelia, though with some Lucanic

extravagance, is full of a Roman nobleness of spirit, which renders

her, after Pauline, but at a long interval, the finest among the

female characters of Corneille. The language is not beneath that of

his earlier tragedies.

|Heraclius.|

26. In Heraclius we begin to find an inferiority of style. Few

passages, especially after the first act, are written with much

vigour; and the plot, instead of the faults we may ascribe to some of

the former dramas, a too great simplicity and want of action, offends

by the perplexity of its situations, and still more by their nature;

since they are wholly among the proper resources of comedy. The true

and the false Heraclius, each uncertain of his paternity, each afraid

to espouse one who may or may not be his sister, the embarrassment of

Phocas, equally irritated by both, but aware that in putting either to

death, he may punish his own son, the art of Leontine who produces

this confusion, not by silence but by a series of inconsistent

falsehoods, all these are in themselves ludicrous, and such as in

comedy could produce no other effect than laughter.

|Nicomède.|

27. Nicomède is generally placed by the critics below Heraclius, an

opinion in which I should hardly concur. The plot is feeble and

improbable, but more tolerable than the strange entanglements of

Heraclius; and the spirit of Corneille shines out more in the

characters and sentiments. None of his later tragedies deserve much

notice, except that we find one of his celebrated scenes in Sertorius,

a drama of little general merit. Nicomède and Sertorius were both

first represented after the middle of the century.

|Faults and beauties of Corneille.|

28. Voltaire has well distinguished the fine scenes of Corneille, and

the fine tragedies of Racine. It can perhaps hardly be said that, with

the exception of Polyeucte, the former has produced a single play

which, taken as a whole, we can commend. The keys of the passions were

not given to his custody. But in that which he introduced upon the

French stage, and which long continued to be its boast, impressive

energetic declamation, thoughts masculine, bold, and sometimes

sublime, conveyed in a style for the most part clear, condensed, and

noble, and in a rhythm sonorous and satisfactory to the ear, he has

not since been equalled. Lucan, it has always been said, was the

favourite study of Corneille. No one indeed can admire one who has not

a strong relish for the other. That the tragedian has ever surpassed

the highest flights of his Roman prototype, it might be difficult to

prove; but if his fire is not more intense, it is accompanied by less

smoke; his hyperboles, for such he has, are less frequent and less

turgid; his taste is more judicious, he knows better, especially in

description, what to chuse and where to stop. Lucan, however, would

have disdained the politeness of the amorous heroes of Corneille, and

though often tedious, often offensive to good taste, is never languid

or ignoble.

|Le Menteur.|

29. The first French comedy written in polite language without low wit

or indecency, is due to Corneille, or rather, in some degree, to the

Spanish author whom he copied in Le Menteur. This has been improved a

little by Goldoni, and our own well-known farce, The Liar, is borrowed

from both. The incidents are diverting, but it belongs to the

subordinate class of comedy, and a better moral would have been shown

in the disgrace of the principal character. Another comedy about the

same time, Le Pedant Joué, by Cyrano de Bergerac, had much success. It

has been called the first comedy in prose, and the first wherein a

provincial dialect is introduced; the remark, as to the former

circumstances, shows a forgetfulness of Larivey. Molière has borrowed

freely from this play.

|Other French tragedies.|

30. The only tragedies, after those of Corneille, anterior to 1650,

which the French themselves hold worthy of remembrance, are the

Sophonisbe of Mairet; in which some characters, and some passages are

vigorously conceived, but the style is debased by low and ludicrous

thoughts, which later critics never fail to point out with

severity;[533] the Scevole of Duryer, the best of several good

tragedies, full of lines of great simplicity in expression, but which

seem to gain force by their simplicity, by one who, though never

sublime, adopted with success the severe reasoning style of

Corneille;[534] the Marianne of Tristan, which, at its appearance in

1637, passed for a rival of the Cid, and remained for a century on the

stage, but is now ridiculed for a style alternately turgid and

ludicrous; and the Wenceslas of Rotrou, which had not ceased thirty

years since to be represented, and perhaps is so still.

[533] Suard, ubi supra.

[534] Suard, p. 196.

|Wenceslas of Rotrou.|

31. This tragedy, the best work of a fertile dramatist, who did

himself honour by a ready acknowledgment of the superiority of

Corneille, instead of canvassing the suffrages of those who always

envy genius, is by no means so much below that great master, as, in

the unfortunate efforts of his later years, he was below himself.

Wenceslas was represented in 1647. It may be admitted that Rotrou had

conceived his plot, which is wholly original, in the spirit of

Corneille; the masculine energy of the sentiments, the delineation of

bold and fierce passions, of noble and heroic love, the attempt even

at political philosophy, are copies of that model. It seems indeed

that in several scenes Rotrou must, out of mere generosity to

Corneille, have determined to out-do one of his most exceptionable

passages, the consent of Chimène to espouse the Cid. His own

curtain drops on the vanishing reluctance of his heroine to accept the

hand of a monster whom she hated, and who had just murdered her lover

in his own brother. It is the Lady Anne of Shakspeare; but Lady Anne

is not a heroine. Wenceslas is not unworthy of comparison with the

second class of Corneille’s tragedies. But the ridiculous tone of

language and sentiment, which the heroic romance had rendered popular,

and from which Corneille did not wholly emancipate himself, often

appears in this piece of Rotrou; the intrigue is rather too complex,

in the Spanish style, for tragedy; the diction seems frequently

obnoxious to the most indulgent criticism; but above all, the story is

essentially ill contrived, ending in the grossest violation of

poetical justice ever witnessed on the stage, the impunity and even

the triumph of one of the worst characters that was ever drawn.

SECT. III.

ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

_London Theatres--Shakspeare--Jonson--Beaumont and Fletcher--Massinger--

Other English Dramatists._

|Popularity of the stage under Elizabeth.|

32. The English drama had been encouraged through the reign of

Elizabeth by increasing popularity, notwithstanding the strenuous

opposition of a party sufficiently powerful to enlist the magistracy,

and, in a certain measure, the government on its side. A progressive

improvement in dramatic writing, possibly also, though we know less of

this, in the skill of the actors, ennobled, while it kept alive, the

public taste; the crude and insipid compositions of an Edwards or a

Whetstone, among numbers more whose very names are lost, gave way to

the real genius of Greene and Marlowe, and after them, to Shakspeare.

|Number of theatres.|

33. At the beginning of this century, not less than eleven regular

play-houses had been erected in London and its suburbs; several of

which, it appears, were still in use, an order of the privy council in

1600, restraining the number to two being little regarded. Of these,

the most important was that of the Black Friars, with which another,

called the Globe, on the opposite side of the river, was connected;

the same company performing at the former in winter, at the latter in

summer. This was the company of which Burbage, the best actor of the

day, was chief, and to which Shakspeare, who was also a proprietor,

belonged. Their names appear in letters patent, and other legal

instruments.[535]

[535] Shakspeare probably retired from the stage, as a performer,

soon after 1603; his name appears among the actors of Sejanus in

1603, but not among those of Volpone in 1605. There is a

tradition that James I. wrote a letter thanking Shakspeare for

the compliment paid to him in Macbeth. Malone, it seems, believed

this: Mr. Collier does not, and probably most people will be

equally sceptical. Collier, i. 370.

|Encouraged by James.|

34. James was fond of these amusements, and had encouraged them in

Scotland. The Puritan influence, which had been sometimes felt in the

council of Elizabeth, came speedily to an end; though the

representation of plays on Sundays, a constant theme of complaint, but

never wholly put down, was now abandoned, and is not even tolerated by

the declaration of sports. The several companies of players, who, in

her reign, had been under the nominal protection of some men of rank,

were now denominated the servants of the king, the queen, or other

royal personages.[536] They were relieved from some of the vexatious

control they had experienced, and subjected only to the gentle sway of

the Master of the Revels. It was his duty to revise all dramatic works

before they were represented, to exclude profane and unbecoming

language, and specially to take care that there should be no

interference with matters of state. The former of these functions must

have been rather laxly exercised; but there are instances in which a

licence was refused on account of very recent history being touched in

a play.

[536] Id. p. 347. But the privilege of peers to grant licences to

itinerant players, given by statute 14 Eliz., c. 5, and 39 Eliz.,

c. 4, was taken away by 1 Jac. I., c. 7, so that they became

liable to be treated as vagrants. Accordingly there were no

established theatres in any provincial city, and strollers,

though dear to the lovers of the buskin, were always obnoxious to

grave magistrates. The licence, however, granted to Burbage,

Shakspeare, Hemmings, and others in 1603 authorizes them to act

plays not only at the usual house, but in any other part of the

kingdom. Burbage was reckoned the best actor of his time, and

excelled as Richard III.

|General taste for the stage.|

35. The reigns of James and Charles were the glory of our theatre.

Public applause, and the favour of princes, were well bestowed on

those bright stars of our literature who then appeared. In 1623, when

Sir Henry Herbert became Master of the Revels, there were five

companies of actors in London. This indeed is something less

than at the accession of James, and the latest historian of the drama

suggests the increase of puritanical sentiments as a likely cause of

this apparent decline. But we find little reason to believe that there

was any decline in the public taste for the theatre; and it may be as

probable an hypothesis, that the excess of competition, at the end of

Elizabeth’s reign, had rendered some undertakings unprofitable; the

greater fishes, as usual in such cases, swallowing up the less. We

learn from Howes, the continuator of Stow, that within sixty years

before 1631 seventeen play-houses had been built in the metropolis.

These were now larger and more convenient than before. They were

divided into public and private; not that the former epithet was

inapplicable to both; but those styled public were not completely

roofed, nor well provided with seats, nor were the performances by

candlelight; they resembled more the rude booths we still see at

fairs, or the constructions in which interludes are represented by day

in Italy; while private theatres, such as that of the Black Friars,

were built in nearly the present form. It seems to be the more

probable opinion that moveable scenery was unknown on these theatres.

“It is a fortunate circumstance,” Mr. Collier has observed, “for the

poetry of our old plays that it was so; the imagination of the auditor

only was appealed to: and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many

of the finest descriptive passages in Shakspeare, his contemporaries,

and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to

the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.” In this

remark, which seems as original as just, I entirely concur. Even in

this age the prodigality of our theatre in its peculiar boast,

scene-painting, can hardly keep pace with the creative powers of

Shakspeare; it is well that he did not live when a manager was to

estimate his descriptions by the cost of realizing them on canvas, or

we might never have stood with Lear on the cliffs of Dover, or amidst

the palaces of Venice with Shylock and Antonio. The scene is

perpetually changed in our old drama, precisely because it was not

changed at all. A powerful argument might otherwise have been

discovered in favour of the unity of place, that it is very cheap.

|Theatres closed by the parliament.|

36. Charles, as we might expect, was not less inclined to this liberal

pleasure than his predecessors. It was to his own cost that Prynne

assaulted the stage in his immense volume, the Histrio-mastix. Even

Milton, before the foul spirit had wholly entered into him, extolled

the learned sock of Jonson, and the wild wood-notes of Shakspeare. But

these days were soon to pass away; the ears of Prynne were avenged; by

an order of the two houses of parliament, Sept. 2, 1642, the theatres

were closed, as a becoming measure, during the season of public

calamity and impending civil war; but, after some unsuccessful

attempts to evade this prohibition, it was thought expedient, in the

complete success of the party who had always abhorred the drama, to

put a stop to it altogether; and another ordinance of Jan. 22, 1648,

reciting the usual objections to all such entertainments, directed the

theatres to be rendered unserviceable. We must refer the reader to the

valuable work which has supplied the sketch of these pages for further

knowledge;[537] it is more our province to follow the track of those

who most distinguished a period so fertile in dramatic genius; and

first, that of the greatest of them all.

[537] I have made no particular references to Mr. Collier’s

_double_ work, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals

of the Stage; it will be necessary for the reader to make use of

his index; but few books lately published contain so much

valuable and original information, though not entirely arranged

in the most convenient manner. He seems, nevertheless, to have

obligations to Dodsley’s preface to his Collection of Old Plays,

or rather, perhaps, to Reed’s edition of it.

|Shakspeare’s Twelfth Night.|

37. Those who originally undertook to marshal the plays of Shakspeare

according to chronological order, always attending less to internal

evidence than to the very fallible proofs of publication they could

obtain, placed Twelfth Night last of all, in 1612 or 1613. It

afterwards rose a little higher in the list; but Mr. Collier has

finally proved that it was on the stage early in 1602, and was at that

time chosen, probably as rather a new piece, for representation at one

of the Inns of Court.[538] The general style resembles, in my

judgment, that of Much Ado about Nothing, which is referred with

probability to the year 1600. Twelfth Night, notwithstanding some very

beautiful passages, and the humorous absurdity of Malvolio, has not

the coruscations of wit and spirit of character that distinguish the

excellent comedy it seems to have immediately followed; nor is the

plot nearly so well constructed. Viola would be more interesting, if

she had not indelicately, as well as unfairly towards Olivia,

determined to win the Duke’s heart before she had seen him. The part

of Sebastian has all that improbability which belongs to mistaken

identity, without the comic effect for the sake of which that is

forgiven in Plautus and in the Comedy of Errors.

[538] Vol. i., p. 327.

|Merry Wives of Windsor.|

38. The Merry Wives of Windsor is that work of Shakspeare in which he

has best displayed English manners; for though there is something of

this in the historical plays, yet we rarely see in them such a picture

of actual life as comedy ought to represent. It may be difficult to

say for what cause he has abstained from a source of gaiety whence his

prolific invention and keen eye for the diversities of character might

have drawn so much. The Masters Knowell and Well-born, the young

gentlemen who spend their money freely, and make love to rich widows,

an insipid race of personages, it must be owned, recur for ever in the

old plays of James’s reign; but Shakspeare threw an ideality over this

class of characters, the Bassanios, the Valentines, the Gratianos, and

placed them in scenes which neither by dress nor manners recalled the

prose of ordinary life.[539] In this play, however, the English

gentleman, in age and youth, is brought upon the stage, slightly

caricatured in Shallow, and far more so in Slender. The latter,

indeed, is a perfect satire, and I think was so intended, on the

brilliant youth of the provinces, such as we may believe it to have

been before the introduction of newspapers and turnpike roads, awkward

and boobyish among civil people, but at home in rude sports, and proud

of exploits at which the town would laugh, yet perhaps with more

courage and good nature than the laughers. No doubt can be raised that

the family of Lucy is ridiculed in Shallow; but those who have had

recourse to the old fable of the deer stealing, forget that Shakspeare

never lost sight of his native county, and went, perhaps every summer,

to Stratford. It is not impossible that some arrogance of the

provincial squires towards a player, whom, though a gentleman by birth

and the recent grant of arms, they might not reckon such, excited his

malicious wit to those admirable delineations.

[539] “No doubt,” says Coleridge, “they (Beaumont and Fletcher)

imitated the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than

Shakspeare, who was unable not to be too much _associated_ to

succeed in this.” Table Talk, ii., 396. I am not quite sure that

I understand this expression; but probably the meaning is not

very different from what I have said.

39. The Merry Wives of Windsor was first printed in 1602, but very

materially altered in a subsequent edition. It is wholly comic; so

that Dodd, who published the Beauties of Shakspeare, confining himself

to poetry, says it is the only play which afforded him nothing to

extract. This play does not excite a great deal of interest; for Anne

Page is but a sample of a character not very uncommon, which, under a

garb of placid and decorous mediocrity, is still capable of pursuing

its own will. But in wit and humorous delineation no other goes beyond

it. If Falstaff seems, as Johnson has intimated, to have lost some of

his powers of merriment, it is because he is humiliated to a point

where even his invention and impudence cannot bear him off victorious.

In the first acts he is still the same Jack Falstaff of the Boar’s

Head. Jonson’s earliest comedy, Every Man in his Humour, had appeared

a few years before the Merry Wives of Windsor; they both turn on

English life in the middle classes, and on the same passion of

jealousy. If, then, we compare these two productions of our greatest

comic dramatists, the vast superiority of Shakspeare will appear

undeniable. Kitely, indeed, has more energy, more relief, more perhaps

of what might appear to his temper matter for jealousy, than the

wretched, narrow-minded Ford; he is more of a gentleman, and commands

a certain degree of respect; but dramatic justice is better dealt upon

Ford by rendering him ridiculous, and he suits better the festive

style of Shakspeare’s most amusing play. His light-hearted wife, on

the other hand, is drawn with more spirit than Dame Kitely; and the

most ardent admirer of Jonson would not oppose Master Stephen to

Slender, or Bobadil to Falstaff. The other characters are not parallel

enough to admit of comparison; but in their diversity (nor is

Shakspeare, perhaps, in any one play more fertile), and their amusing

peculiarity, as well as in the construction and arrangement of the

story, the brilliancy of the wit, the perpetual gaiety of the

dialogue, we perceive at once to whom the laurel must be given. Nor is

this comparison instituted to disparage Jonson, whom we have praised,

and shall have again to praise so highly, but to show how much easier

it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend with Shakspeare.

|Measure for Measure.|

40. Measure for Measure, commonly referred to the end of 1603,

is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which

Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power

of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being which he has

searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him;

his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in

language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could

grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of

dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. The Duke

is designed as the representative of this philosophical character. He

is stern and melancholy by temperament, averse to the exterior shows

of power, and secretly conscious of some unfitness for its practical

duties. The subject is not very happily chosen, but artfully improved

by Shakspeare. In most of the numerous stories of a similar nature,

which before or since his time have been related, the sacrifice of

chastity is really made, and made in vain. There is, however,

something too coarse and disgusting in such a story; and it would have

deprived him of a splendid exhibition of character. The virtue of

Isabella, inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something

very grand and elevated; yet one is disposed to ask, whether, if

Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone

away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that

her reproaches against her miserable brother when he clings to life

like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh. There is great skill in

the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have

had anything like a satisfactory termination; yet it is never

explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and

being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and

confidence in Angelo. His intention, as hinted towards the end, to

marry Isabella, is a little too common-place, it is one of

Shakspeare’s hasty half-thoughts. The language of this comedy is very

obscure, and the text seems to have been printed with great

inaccuracy. I do not value the comic parts highly; Lucio’s impudent

profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural

ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior

repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, Measure for Measure ranks

high; the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and

Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe

in the fifth act are admirably written and very interesting; except so

far as the spectator’s knowledge of the two stratagems which have

deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation

at Isabella’s imaginary wrong which her lamentations would excite.

Several of the circumstances and characters are borrowed from the old

play of Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra; but very little of the

sentiments or language. What is good in Measure for Measure is

Shakspeare’s own.

|Lear.|

41. If originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every

play of Shakspeare that to name one as the most original seems a

disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of

genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the

model of regular tragedy than Macbeth or Othello, and even more than

Hamlet; but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these,

and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of

the poet as the other two. Lear himself is perhaps the most wonderful

of dramatic conceptions, ideal to satisfy the most romantic

imagination, yet idealized from the reality of nature. In preparing us

for the most intense sympathy with this old man, he first abases him

to the ground; it is not Œdipus, against whose respected age the gods

themselves have conspired; it is not Orestes, noble minded and

affectionate, whose crime has been virtue; it is a headstrong feeble

and selfish being, whom, in the first act of the tragedy, nothing

seems capable of redeeming in our eyes; nothing but what follows,

intense woe, unnatural wrong. Then comes on that splendid madness, not

absurdly sudden, as in some tragedies, but in which the strings that

keep his reasoning power together give way one after the other in the

frenzy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find what in life may

sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in

calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to

unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out, more profound than Lear in

his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent, for such

is the condition of madness, but in themselves fragments of coherent

truth, the reason of an unreasonable mind.

|Timon of Athens.|

42. Timon of Athens is cast as it were in the same mould as Lear; it

is the same essential character, the same generosity more from wanton

ostentation than love of others, the same fierce rage under

the smart of ingratitude, the same rousing up, in that tempest, of

powers that had slumbered unsuspected in some deep recess of the soul;

for had Timon or Lear known that philosophy of human nature in their

calmer moments which fury brought forth, they would never have had

such terrible occasion to display it. The thoughtless confidence of

Lear in his children has something in it far more touching than the

self-beggary of Timon; though both one and the other have prototypes

enough in real life. And as we give the old king more of our pity, so

a more intense abhorrence accompanies his daughters and the worse

characters of that drama, than we spare for the miserable sycophants

of the Athenian. Their thanklessness is anticipated, and springs from

the very nature of their calling; it verges on the beaten road of

comedy. In this play there is neither a female personage, except two

courtezans, who hardly speak, nor any prominent character (the honest

steward is not such) redeemed by virtue enough to be estimable; for

the cynic Apemantus is but a cynic, and ill replaces the noble Kent of

the other drama. The fable, if fable it can be called, is so

extraordinarily deficient in action, a fault of which Shakspeare is

not guilty in any other instance, that we may wonder a little how he

should have seen in the single delineation of Timon a counterbalance

for the manifold objections to this subject. But there seems to have

been a period of Shakspeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and

ill content with the world or his own conscience; the memory of hours

misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the

experience of man’s worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen

associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches;--these, as

they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to

have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of

one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first

seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an

undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of

manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the

exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the

Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely

contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet, this is mingled with the impulses

of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary

circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with

a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety

and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across

the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the

exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the

same period: As you Like It, being usually referred to 1600; Hamlet,

in its altered form, to about 1602; Timon to the same year; Measure

for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of

Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral

speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of

character in the personages. Timon is less read and less pleasing than

the great majority of Shakspeare’s plays; but it abounds with signs of

his genius. Schlegel observes that of all his works it is that which

has most satire; comic in representation of the parasites, indignant

and Juvenalian in the bursts of Timon himself.

|Pericles.|

43. Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part,

the work of Shakspeare. From the poverty and bad management of the

fable, the want of any effective or distinguishable character, for

Marina is no more than the common form of female virtue, such as all

the dramatists of that age could draw, and a general feebleness of the

tragedy as a whole, I should not believe the structure to have been

Shakspeare’s. But many passages are far more in his manner than in

that of any contemporary writer with whom I am acquainted; and the

extrinsic testimony, though not conclusive, being of some value, I

should not dissent from the judgment of Steevens and Malone, that it

was, in no inconsiderable degree, repaired and improved by his touch.

Drake has placed it under the year 1590, as the earliest of

Shakspeare’s plays, for no better reason, apparently, than that he

thought it inferior to all the rest. But if, as most will agree, it

were not quite his own, this reason will have less weight; and the

language seems to me rather that of his second or third manner than of

his first. Pericles is not known to have existed before 1609.

44. The majority of readers, I believe, assign to Macbeth, which seems

to have been written about 1606, the pre-eminence among the works of

Shakspeare; many, however, would rather name Othello, one of his

latest, which is referred to 1611; and a few might prefer Lear to

either. The great epic drama, as the first may be called,

deserves, in my own judgment, the post it has attained, as being, in

the language of Drake, “the greatest effort of our author’s genius,

the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever

beheld.” It will be observed that Shakspeare had now turned his mind

towards the tragic drama. No tragedy but Romeo and Juliet belongs to

the sixteenth century; ten, without counting Pericles, appeared in the

first eleven years of the present. It is not my design to distinguish

each of his plays separately; and it will be evident that I pass over

some of the greatest. No writer, in fact, is so well known as

Shakspeare, or has been so abundantly, and, on the whole, so ably

criticised; I might have been warranted in saying even less than I

have done.

|His Roman tragedies. Julius Cæsar.|

45. Shakspeare was, as I believe, conversant with the better class of

English literature which the reign of Elizabeth afforded. Among other

books, the translation by North, of Amyot’s Plutarch, seems to have

fallen into his hands about 1607. It was the source of three tragedies

founded on the lives of Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, the first

bearing the name of Julius Cæsar. In this the plot wants even that

historical unity which the romantic drama requires; the third and

fourth acts are ill connected; it is deficient in female characters,

and in that combination which is generally apparent amidst all the

intricacies of his fable. But it abounds in fine scenes and fine

passages; the spirit of Plutarch’s Brutus is well seized, the

predominance of Cæsar himself is judiciously restrained, the

characters have that individuality which Shakspeare seldom misses; nor

is there, perhaps, in the whole range of ancient and modern eloquence

a speech more fully realising the perfection that orators have striven

to attain than that of Antony.

|Antony and Cleopatra.|

46. Antony and Cleopatra is of rather a different order; it does not

furnish, perhaps, so many striking beauties as the last, but is at

least equally redolent of the genius of Shakspeare. Antony, indeed,

was given him by history, and he has but embodied in his own vivid

colours the irregular mind of the Triumvir, ambitious and daring

against all enemies but himself. In Cleopatra he had less to guide

him; she is another incarnation of the same passions, more lawless and

insensible to reason and honour, as they are found in women. This

character being not one that can please, its strong and spirited

delineation has not been sufficiently observed. It has, indeed, only a

poetical originality; the type was in the courtezan of common life,

but the resemblance is that of Michael Angelo’s Sybils to a muscular

woman. In this tragedy, like Julius Cæsar, as has been justly observed

by Schlegel, the events that do not pass on the stage are scarcely

made clear enough to one who is not previously acquainted with

history, and some of the persons appear and vanish again without

sufficient reason. He has, in fact, copied Plutarch too exactly.

|Coriolanus.|

47. This fault is by no means discerned in the third Roman tragedy of

Shakspeare, Coriolanus. He luckily found an intrinsic historical unity

which he could not have destroyed, and which his magnificent

delineation of the chief personage has thoroughly maintained.

Coriolanus himself has the grandeur of sculpture; his proportions are

colossal, nor would less than this transcendent superiority by which

he towers over his fellow-citizens, warrant, or seem for the moment to

warrant, his haughtiness and their pusillanimity. The surprising

judgment of Shakspeare is visible in this. A dramatist of the second

class, a Corneille, a Schiller, or an Alfieri, would not have lost the

occasion of representing the plebeian form of courage and patriotism.

A tribune would have been made to utter noble speeches, and some

critics would have extolled the balance and contrast of the antagonist

principles. And this might have degenerated into the general saws of

ethics and politics, which philosophical tragedians love to pour

forth. But Shakspeare instinctively perceived that to render the

arrogance of Coriolanus endurable to the spectator, or dramatically

probable, he must abase the plebeians to a contemptible populace. The

sacrifice of historic truth is often necessary for the truth of

poetry. The citizens of early Rome, “_rusticorum mascula militum

proles_,” are indeed calumniated in his scenes, and might almost

pass for burgesses of Stratford; but the unity of emotion is not

dissipated by contradictory energies. Coriolanus is less rich in

poetical style than the other two, but the comic parts are full of

humour. In these three tragedies it is manifest that Roman character,

and still more Roman manners, are not exhibited with the precision of

a scholar; yet there is something that distinguishes them from the

rest, something of a _grandiosity_ in the sentiments and

language, which shows us that Shakspeare had not read that history

without entering into its spirit.

|His retirement and death.|

48. Othello, or perhaps the Tempest, is reckoned by many the latest of

Shakspeare’s works. In the zenith of his faculties, in possession of

fame disproportionate indeed to what has since accrued to his memory,

but beyond that of any contemporary, at the age of about forty-seven,

he ceased to write, and settled himself at a distance from all

dramatic associations in his own native town; a home, of which he had

never lost sight, nor even permanently quitted, the birthplace of his

children, and to which he brought what might then seem affluence in a

middle station, with the hope, doubtless, of a secure decline into the

yellow leaf of years. But he was cut off in 1616, not probably in the

midst of any schemes for his own glory, but to the loss of those

enjoyments which he had accustomed himself to value beyond it. His

descendants, it is well known, became extinct in little more than half

a century.

|Greatness of his genius.|

49. The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature--it is

the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near to him in the

creative powers of the mind; no man had ever such strength at once,

and such variety of imagination. Coleridge has most felicitously

applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom,

certainly none so deserving of it, μυριονους [myrionous], the

thousand-souled Shakspeare.[540] The number of characters in his plays

is astonishingly great, without reckoning those, who, although

transient, have often their individuality, all distinct, all types of

human life in well defined differences. Yet he never takes an abstract

quality to embody it, scarcely perhaps a definite condition of

manners, as Jonson does; nor did he draw much, as I conceive, from

living models; there is no manifest appearance of personal caricature

in his comedies, though in some slight traits of character this may

not improbably have been the case. Above all, neither he nor his

contemporaries wrote for the stage in the worst, though most literal,

and of late years the most usual sense; making the servants and

handmaids of dramatic invention to lord over it, and limiting the

capacities of the poet’s mind to those of the performers. If this

poverty of the representative department of the drama had hung like an

incumbent fiend on the creative power of Shakspeare, how would he have

poured forth with such inexhaustible prodigality the vast diversity of

characters that we find in some of his plays? This it is in which he

leaves far behind not the dramatists alone, but all writers of

fiction. Compare with him Homer, the tragedians of Greece, the poets

of Italy, Plautus, Cervantes, Molière, Addison, Le Sage, Fielding,

Richardson, Scott, the romancers of the elder or later schools--one

man has far more than surpassed them all. Others may have been as

sublime, others may have been more pathetic, others may have equalled

him in grace and purity of language, and have shunned some of its

faults; but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out

of the human heart, whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the

dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It is,

if not entirely wanting, very little manifested in comparison with

him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent period,

whom we are about to approach.

[540] Table-talk, vol. ii., p. 301. Coleridge had previously

spoken of Shakspeare’s _oceanic_ mind, which, if we take it in

the sense of multitudinous unity, ποντιων κυματων ανηριθμον

γελασμα [pontiôn kymatôn anêrithmon gelasma], will present the

same idea as μυριονουσ [myrionous] in a beautiful image.

|His judgment.|

50. These dramatists, as we shall speedily perceive, are hardly less

inferior to Shakspeare in judgment. To this quality I particularly

advert, because foreign writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed

an extraordinary barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong

indeed to an age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its

entertainments, and are of course to be classed with what is called

the romantic school, which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach.

But no one who has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare,

or contemporary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing

of the theatres in the civil war, will pretend to deny that there is

far less regularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be

desired, in a large proportion of these (perhaps in all the tragedies)

than in his own. We need only repeat the names of the Merchant of

Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, the Merry Wives of

Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excellently

constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But even where an

analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is generally an

unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter’s Tale is not a

model to follow, but we feel that the Winter’s Tale is a single story;

it is even managed as such with consummate skill. It is another proof

of Shakspeare’s judgment, that he has given action enough to his

comedies without the bustling intricacy of the Spanish stage. If his

plots have any little obscurity in some parts, it is from copying his

novel or history too minutely.

51. The idolatry of Shakspeare has been carried so far of late years,

that Drake and perhaps greater authorities have been unwilling to

acknowledge any faults in his plays. This, however, is an extravagance

rather derogatory to the critic than honourable to the poet. Besides

the blemishes of construction in some of his plots, which are

pardonable but still blemishes, there are too many in his style. His

conceits and quibbles often spoil the effect of his scenes and take

off from the passion he would excite. In the last act of Richard II.,

the Duke of York is introduced demanding the punishment of his son

Aumale for a conspiracy against the king, while the Duchess implores

mercy. The scene is ill conceived and worse executed throughout; but

one line is both atrocious and contemptible. The Duchess having dwelt

on the word _pardon_, and urged the king to let her hear it from

his lips, York takes her up with this stupid quibble:

Speak it in French, King; say, Pardonnez moi.

It would not be difficult to find several other instances, though

none, perhaps, quite so bad, of verbal equivocations, misplaced and

inconsistent with the person’s, the author’s, the reader’s sentiment.

|His obscurity.|

52. Few will defend these notorious faults. But is there not one, less

frequently mentioned, yet of more continual recurrence; the extreme

obscurity of Shakspeare’s diction? His style is full of new words and

new senses. It is easy to pass this over as obsoleteness; but though

many expressions are obsolete and many provincial, though the labour

of his commentators has never been so profitably, as well as so

diligently, employed as in tracing this by the help of the meanest and

most forgotten books of the age, it is impossible to deny that

innumerable lines in Shakspeare were not more intelligible in his time

than they are at present. Much of this may be forgiven, or rather is

so incorporated with the strength of his reason and fancy that we love

it as the proper body of Shakspeare’s soul. Still can we justify the

very numerous passages which yield to no interpretation, knots which

are never unloosed, which conjecture does but cut, or even those,

which if they may at last be understood, keep the attention in

perplexity till the first emotion has passed away? And these occur not

merely in places where the struggles of the speaker’s mind may be well

denoted by some obscurities of language, as in the soliloquies of

Hamlet and Macbeth, but in dialogues between ordinary personages, and

in the business of the play. We learn Shakspeare, in fact, as we learn

a language, or as we read a difficult passage in Greek, with the eye

glancing on the commentary; and it is only after much study that we

come to forget a part, it can be but a part, of the perplexities he

has caused us. This was no doubt one reason that he was less read

formerly, his style passing for obsolete, though in many parts, as we

have just said, it was never much more intelligible than it is.[541]

[541] “Shakspeare’s style is so pestered with figurative

expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure. It is true

that in his later plays he had worn off somewhat of this

rust.”--Dryden’s Works (Malone), vol. ii., part ii., p. 252. This

is by no means the truth, but rather the reverse of it: Dryden

knew not at all which were earlier, or which later, of

Shakspeare’s plays.

|His popularity.|

53. It does not appear probable that Shakspeare was ever placed below,

or merely on a level with the other dramatic writers of this

period.[542] That his plays were not so frequently represented as

those of Fletcher, is little to the purpose; they required a more

expensive decoration, a larger company of good performers, and

above all, they were less intelligible to a promiscuous audience. But

it is certain that throughout the seventeenth century, and even in the

writings of Addison and his contemporaries, we seldom or never meet

with that complete recognition of his supremacy, that unhesitating

preference of him to all the world, which has become the faith of the

last and the present century. And it is remarkable that this

apotheosis, so to speak, of Shakspeare was originally the work of what

has been styled a frigid and tasteless generation--the age of George

II. Much is certainly due to the stage itself, when those appeared,

who could guide and control the public taste, and discover that in the

poet himself which sluggish imaginations could not have reached. The

enthusiasm for Shakspeare is nearly coincident with that for Garrick;

it was kept up by his followers, and especially by that highly-gifted

family which has but recently been withdrawn from our stage.

[542] A certain William Cartwright, in commendatory verses

addressed to Fletcher, has the assurance to say:

Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies

I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fools’ replies.

But the suffrage of Jonson himself, of Milton, and of many more

that might be quoted, tends to prove that his genius was esteemed

beyond that of any other, though some might compare inferior

writers to him in other qualifications of the dramatist. Even

Dryden, who came in a worse period, and had no undue reverence

for Shakspeare, admits that “he was the man who of all modern,

and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive

soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he

drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes

anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse

him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation; he

was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to

read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”--Dryden’s

Prose Works (Malone’s edition), vol. i., part ii., p. 99.

|Critics on Shakspeare.|

54. Among the commentators on Shakspeare, Warburton, always striving

to display his own acuteness and scorn of others, deviates more than

anyone else from the meaning. Theobald was the first who did a little.

Johnson explained much well, but there is something magisterial in the

manner wherein he dismisses each play like a boy’s exercise, that

irritates the reader. His criticism is frequently judicious, but

betrays no ardent admiration for Shakspeare. Malone and Steevens were

two laborious commentators on the meaning of words and phrases; one

dull, the other clever; but the dullness was accompanied by candour

and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of both.

Neither seems to have had a full discernment of Shakspeare’s genius.

The numerous critics of the last age who were not editors have poured

out much that is trite and insipid, much that is hypercritical and

erroneous; yet, collectively, they not only bear witness to the public

taste for the poet, but taught men to judge and feel more accurately

than they would have done for themselves. Hurd and Lord Kaimes,

especially the former, may be reckoned among the best of this

class;[543] Mrs. Montagu, perhaps, in her celebrated Essay, not very

far from the bottom of the list. In the present century, Coleridge and

Schlegel, so nearly at the same time that the question of priority and

even plagiarism has been mooted, gave a more philosophical, and, at

the same time, a more intrinsically exact view of Shakspeare, than

their predecessors. What has since been written, has often been highly

acute and æsthetic, but occasionally with an excess of refinement

which substitutes the critic for the work. Mrs. Jameson’s Essays on

the Female Characters of Shakspeare are among the best. It was right

that this province of illustration should be reserved for a woman’s

hand.

[543] Hurd, in his notes on Horace’s Art of Poetry, vol. .,

p. 52, has some very good remarks on the diction of Shakspeare,

suggested by the “callida junctura” of the Roman poet,

illustrated by many instances. These remarks both serve to bring

out the skill of Shakspeare, and to explain the disputed passage

in Horace. Hurd justly maintains the obvious construction of that

passage: “notum si callida verbum Reddiderit junctura novum.”

That proposed by Lambinus and Beattie, which begins with _novum_,

is inadmissible, and gives a worse sense.

|Ben Jonson.|

55. Ben Jonson, so generally known by that familiar description that

some might hardly recognise him without it, was placed next to

Shakspeare by his own age. They were much acquainted, and belonged to

the oldest, perhaps, and not the worst of clubs, formed by Sir Walter

Raleigh about the beginning of the century, which met at the Mermaid

in Friday-street. We may easily believe the testimony of one of its

members, that it was a feast of the most subtle and brilliant

wit.[544] Jonson had abundant powers of poignant and sarcastic humour,

besides extensive reading, and Shakspeare must have brought to the

Mermaid the brightness of his fancy. Selden and Camden, the former in

early youth, are reported to have given the ballast of their strong

sense and learning to this cluster of poets. There has been, however,

a prevalent tradition that Jonson was not without some malignant and

envious feelings towards Shakspeare. Gifford has repelled this

imputation with considerable success, though we may still suspect that

there was something caustic and saturnine in the temper of Jonson.

[544] Gifford’s Life of Jonson, p. 65. Collier, iii., 275.

|The Alchemist.|

56. The Alchemist is a play which long remained on the stage, though I

am not sure that it has been represented since the days of Garrick,

who was famous in Abel Drugger. Notwithstanding the indiscriminate and

injudicious panegyric of Gifford, I believe there is no reader of

taste but will condemn the outrageous excess of pedantry with which

the first acts of this play abound; pedantry the more intolerable,

that it is not even what, however unfit for the English stage,

scholars might comprehend, but the gibberish of obscure treatises on

alchemy, which, whatever the commentators may chuse to say, was as

unintelligible to all but a few half-witted dupes of that imposture as

it is at present. Much of this, it seems impossible to doubt, was

omitted in representation. Nor is his pedantic display of learning

confined to the part of the Alchemist, who had certainly a right to

talk in the style of his science, if he had done it with some

moderation: Sir Epicure Mammon, a worldly sensualist, placed in the

author’s own age, pours out a torrent of gluttonous cookery from the

kitchens of Heliogabalus and Apicius; his dishes are to be camels’

heels, the beards of barbels and dissolved pearl, crowning all with

the paps of a sow. But while this habitual error of Jonson’s vanity is

not to be overlooked, we may truly say, that it is much more than

compensated by the excellencies of this comedy. The plot, with great

simplicity, is continually animated and interesting; the characters

are conceived and delineated with admirable boldness, truth, spirit,

and variety; the humour, especially in the two Puritans, a sect who

now began to do penance on the stage, is amusing; the language, when

it does not smell too much of book-learning, is forcible and clear.

The Alchemist is one of the three plays which usually contest the

superiority among those of Jonson.

|Volpone or The Fox.|

57. The second of these is The Fox, which, according to general

opinion, has been placed above the Alchemist. Notwithstanding the

dissent of Gifford, I should concur in this suffrage. The fable

belongs to a higher class of comedy. Without minutely inquiring

whether the Roman hunters after the inheritance of the rich, so well

described by Horace, and especially the costly presents by which they

endeavoured to secure a better return, are altogether according to the

manners of Venice, where Jonson has laid his scene, we must

acknowledge that he has displayed the base cupidity, of which there

will never be wanting examples among mankind, in such colours as all

other dramatic poetry can hardly rival. Cumberland has blamed the

manner, in which Volpone brings ruin on his head by insulting, in

disguise, those whom he had duped. In this, I agree with Gifford,

there is no violation of nature. Besides their ignorance of his

person, so that he could not necessarily foresee the effects of

Voltore’s rage, it has been well and finely said by Cumberland

himself, that there is a moral in a villain’s out-witting himself. And

this is one that many dramatists have displayed.

58. In the choice of subject, The Fox is much inferior to Tartuffe, to

which it bears some very general analogy. Though the Tartuffe is not a

remarkably agreeable play, The Fox is much less so; five of the

principal characters are wicked almost beyond any retribution that

comedy can dispense; the smiles it calls forth are not those of gaiety

but scorn; and the parts of an absurd English knight and his wife,

though very humorous, are hardly prominent enough to enliven the

scenes of guilt and fraud which pass before our eyes. But, though too

much pedantry obtrudes itself, it does not overspread the pages with

nonsense, as in the Alchemist; the characters of Celia and Bonario

excite some interest; the differences, one can hardly say the

gradations, of villainy are marked with the strong touches of Jonson’s

pen; the incidents succeed rapidly and naturally; the dramatic effect,

above all, is perceptible to every reader, and rises in a climax

through the last two acts to the conclusion.

|The Silent Woman.|

59. The Silent Woman, which has been named by some with the Alchemist

and the Fox, falls much below them in vigorous delineation and

dramatic effect. It has more diversity of manners than of character,

the amusing scenes border sometimes on farce, as where two cowardly

knights are made to receive blows in the dark, each supposing them to

come from his adversary, and the catastrophe is neither pleasing nor

probable. It is written with a great deal of spirit, and has a value

as the representation of London life in the higher ranks at that time.

But, upon the whole, I should be inclined to give to Every Man in his

Humour a much superior place. It is a proof of Jonson’s extensive

learning that the story of this play, and several particular passages,

have been detected in a writer so much out of the beaten track as

Libanius.[545]

[545] Gifford discovered this. Dryden, who has given an

examination of the Silent Woman, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,

takes Morose for a real character, and says that he had so been

informed. It is possible that there might be some foundation of

truth in this; the skeleton is in Libanius, but Jonson may have

filled it up from the life. Dryden gives it as his opinion that

there is more wit and acuteness of fancy in this play than in any

of Ben Jonson’s, and that he has described the conversation of

gentlemen with more gaiety and freedom than in the rest of his

comedies, p. 107.

|Sad Shepherd.|

60. The pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd is the best testimony to

the poetical imagination of Jonson. Superior in originality,

liveliness, and beauty, to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, it

reminds us rather, in language and imagery, of the Midsummer Night’s

Dream, and, perhaps, no other poetry has come so near to that of

Shakspeare. Jonson, like him, had an extraordinary command of English,

in its popular and provincial idioms, as well as what might be gained

from books; and though his invincible pedantry now and then obtrudes

itself into the mouths of shepherds, it is compensated by numerous

passages of the most natural and graceful expression. This beautiful

drama is imperfect, hardly more than half remaining, or more probably

having ever been written. It was also Jonson’s last song; age and

poverty had stolen upon him; but, as one has said, who experienced the

same destiny, “the life was in the leaf,” and his laurel remained

verdant amidst the snow of his honoured head. The beauties of the Sad

Shepherd might be reckoned rather poetical than dramatic; yet the

action is both diversified and interesting to a degree we seldom find

in the pastoral drama; there is little that is low in the comic

speeches, nothing that is inflated in the serious.

|Beaumont and Fletcher.|

61. Two men, once united by friendship, and for ever by fame, the

Dioscuri of our zodiac, Beaumont and Fletcher, rose upon the horizon

as the star of Shakspeare, though still in its fullest brightness, was

declining in the sky. The first, in order of time, among more than

fifty plays published with their joint names, is the Woman-Hater,

represented, according to Langbaine, in 1607, and ascribed to Beaumont

alone by Seward, though, I believe, merely on conjecture.[546]

Beaumont died, at the age of thirty, in 1615; Fletcher in 1625. No

difference of manner is perceptible, or, at least, no critic has

perceived any, in the plays that appeared between these two epochs; in

fact, the greater part were not printed till 1647, and it is only

through the records of the play-house that we distinguish their dates.

The tradition, however, of their own times, as well as the earlier

death of Beaumont, give us reason to name Fletcher, when we mention

one singly, as the principal author of all these plays; and, of late

years, this has, perhaps, become more customary than it used to be. A

contemporary copy of verses, indeed, seems to attribute the greater

share in the Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, and King and no King, to

Beaumont. But testimony of this kind is very precarious. It is

sufficient that he bore a part in these three.

[546] Vol. i., p. 3. He also thinks The Nice Valour exclusively

Beaumont’s. These two appear to me about the worst in the

collection.

|Corrupt state of their text.|

62. Of all our early dramatic poets, none have suffered such mangling

by the printer as Beaumont and Fletcher. Their style is generally

elliptical, and not very perspicuous; they use words in peculiar

senses, and there seems often an attempt at pointed expression, in

which its meaning has deserted them. But, after every effort to

comprehend their language, it is continually so remote from all

possibility of bearing a rational sense, that we can only have

recourse to one hypothesis, that of an extensive and irreparable

corruption of the text. Seward and Simpson, who, in 1750, published

the first edition in which any endeavour was made at illustration or

amendment, though not men of much taste, and too fond of extolling

their authors, showed some acuteness, and have restored many passages

in a probable manner, though often driven out at sea to conjecture

something, where the received reading furnished not a vestige which

they could trace. No one since has made any great progress in this

criticism, though some have carped at these editors for not performing

more. The problem of actual restoration in most places, where the

printers or transcribers have made such strange havoc, must evidently

be insoluble.

|The Maid’s Tragedy.|

63. The first play in the collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher,

though not the earliest, is the Maid’s Tragedy, and it is among the

best. None of their female characters, though they are often very

successful in beautiful delineations of virtuous love, attaches our

sympathy like Aspasia. Her sorrows are so deep, so pure, so unmerited,

she sustains the breach of plighted faith in Amyntor, and the taunts

of vicious women with so much resignation, so little of that termagant

resentment these poets are apt to infuse into their heroines, the

poetry of her speeches is so exquisitely imaginative, that, of those

dramatic persons who are not prominent in the development of a story,

scarce any, even in Shakspeare, are more interesting. Nor is the

praise due to the Maid’s Tragedy confined to the part of Aspasia. In

Melantius we have Fletcher’s favourite character, the brave, honest

soldier, incapable of suspecting evil, till it becomes impossible to

be ignorant of it, but unshrinking in its punishment. That of Evadne

well displays the audacious security of guilt under the safeguard of

power; it is highly theatrical, and renders the success of this

tragedy not surprising in times when its language and situations could

be endured by the audience. We may remark in this tragedy, as in many

others of these dramatists, that, while pouring out the unlimited

loyalty fashionable at the court of James, they are full of implied

satire, which could hardly escape observation. The warm eulogies on

military glory, the scorn of slothful peace, the pictures of dissolute

baseness in courtiers, seem to spring from a dislike, very usual among

the English gentry, a rank to which they both belonged, for that

ignominious government; and though James was far enough removed from

such voluptuous tyrants as Fletcher has pourtrayed in this and some

other plays, they did not serve to exemplify the advantages of

monarchy in the most attractive manner.

64. The Maid’s Tragedy, unfortunately, beautiful and essentially moral

as it is, cannot be called a tragedy for maids; and, indeed, should

hardly be read by any respectable woman. It abounds with that

studiously protracted indecency which distinguished Fletcher beyond

all our early dramatists, and is so much incorporated with his plays,

that very few of them can be so altered as to become tolerable at

present on the stage. In this he is strikingly contrasted with

Shakspeare, whose levities of this kind are so transitory, and so much

confined to language, that he has borne the process of purification

with little detriment to his genius, or even to his wit.

|Philaster.|

65. Philaster has been in his day one of the best known and most

popular of Fletcher’s plays.[547] This was owing to the pleasing

characters of Philaster and Bellario, and to the frequent sweetness of

the poetry. It is nevertheless not a first-rate play. The plot is most

absurdly managed. It turns on the suspicion of Arethusa’s infidelity.

And the sole ground of this is that an abandoned woman, being detected

herself, accuses the princess of unchastity. Not a shadow of

presumptive evidence is brought to confirm this impudent assertion,

which, however, the lady’s father, her lover, and a grave sensible

courtier do not fail implicitly to believe. How unlike the chain of

circumstance, and the devilish cunning by which the Moor is wrought up

to think his Desdemona false! Bellario is suggested by Viola; there is

more picturesqueness, more dramatic importance, not, perhaps, more

beauty and sweetness of affection, but a more eloquent development of

it in Fletcher; on the other hand, there is still more of that

improbability which attends a successful concealment of sex by mere

disguise of clothes, though no artifice has been more common on the

stage. Many other circumstances in the conduct of Fletcher’s story are

ill-contrived. It has less wit than the greater part of his comedies;

for among such, according to the old distinction, it is to be ranked,

though the subject is elevated and serious.

[547] Dryden says, but I know not how truly, that Philaster was

“the first play that brought Beaumont and Fletcher in esteem; for

before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully,”

p. 100. Philaster was not printed, according to Langbaine, till

1620; I do not know that we have any evidence of the date of its

representation.

|King and No King.|

66. King and No King is, in my judgment, inferior to Philaster. The

language has not so much of poetical beauty. The character of Arbaces

excites no sympathy; it is a compound of vain-glory and violence,

which rather demands disgrace from poetical justice than reward.

Panthea is innocent, but insipid; Mardonius a good specimen of what

Fletcher loves to exhibit, the plain honest courtier. As for Bessus,

he certainly gives occasion to several amusing scenes; but his

cowardice is a little too glaring; he is neither so laughable as

Bobadil, nor so sprightly as Parolles. The principal merit of this

play, which rendered it popular on the stage for many years, consists

in the effective scenes where Arbaces reveals his illicit desire. That

especially with Mardonius is artfully and elaborately written.

Shakspeare had less of this skill; and his tragedies suffer for it in

their dramatic effect. The scene between John and Hubert is an

exception, and there is a great deal of it in Othello; but in general

he may be said not to have exerted the power of detaining the

spectator in that anxious suspense, which creates almost an actual

illusion, and makes him tremble at every word, lest the secret which

he has learned should be imparted to the imaginary person on the

stage. Of this there are several fine instances in the Greek

tragedians, the famous scene in the Œdipus Tyrannus being the best;

and it is possible that the superior education of Fletcher may

have rendered him familiar with the resources of ancient tragedy.

These scenes in the present play would have been more highly powerful

if the interest could have been thrown on any character superior to

the selfish braggart Arbaces. It may be said perhaps that his

humiliation through his own lawless passions, after so much insolence

of success, affords a moral; he seems, however, but imperfectly cured

at the conclusion, which is also hurried on with unsatisfactory

rapidity.

|The Elder Brother.|

67. The Elder Brother has been generally reckoned among the best of

Fletcher’s comedies. It displays in a new form an idea not very new in

fiction, the power of love, on the first sight of a woman, to vivify a

soul utterly ignorant of the passion. Charles, the Elder Brother, much

unlike the Cymon of Dryden, is absorbed in study; a mere scholar,

without a thought beyond his books. His indifference, perhaps, and

ignorance about the world are rather exaggerated and border on

stupidity; but it was the custom of the dramatists in that age to

produce effect in representation by very sudden developments, if not

changes, of character. The other persons are not ill conceived; the

honest, testy Miramont, who admires learning without much more of it

than enables him to sign his name; the two selfish worldly fathers of

Charles and Angelina, believing themselves shrewd, yet the easy dupes

of coxcomb manners from the court; the spirited Angelina; the spoiled

but not worthless Eustace, show Fletcher’s great talent in dramatic

invention. In none of his mere comedies has he sustained so uniformly

elegant and pleasing a style of poetry; the language of Charles is

naturally that of a refined scholar, but now and then perhaps we find

old Miramont talk above himself. The underplot hits to the life the

licentious endeavours of an old man to seduce his inferior; but, as

usual, it reveals vice too broadly. This comedy is of very simple

construction, so that Cibber was obliged to blend it with another, The

Custom of the Country, in order to compose from the two his Love Makes

a Man, by no means the worst play of that age. The two plots, however,

do not harmonize very well.

|The Spanish Curate.|

68. The Spanish Curate is in all probability taken from one of those

comedies of intrigue, _capa y espada_, which the fame of Lope de

Vega had made popular in Europe. It is one of the best specimens of

that manner; the plot is full of incident and interest, without being

difficult of comprehension, nor, with fair allowance for the

conventions of the stage and manners of the country, improbable. The

characters are in full relief without caricature. Fletcher, with an

artifice of which he is very fond, has made the fierce resentment of

Violante break out unexpectedly from the calmness she had shown in the

first scenes; but it is so well accounted for, that we see nothing

unnatural in the development of passions for which there had been no

previous call. Ascanio is again one of Fletcher’s favourite

delineations; a kind of Bellario in his modest affectionate

disposition; one in whose prosperity the reader takes so much pleasure

that he forgets it is, in a worldly sense, inconsistent with that of

the honest-hearted Don Jamie. The doting husband, Don Henrique

contrasts well with the jealous Bartolus; and both afford by their

fate the sort of moral which is looked for in comedy. The underplot of

the lawyer and his wife, while it shows how licentious in principle as

well as indecent in language the stage had become, is conducted with

incomparable humour and amusement. Congreve borrowed part of this in

the Old Bachelor without by any means equalling it. Upon the whole, as

a comedy of this class, it deserves to be placed in the highest rank.

|The Custom of the Country.|

69. The Custom of the Country is much deformed by obscenity,

especially the first act. But it is full of nobleness in character and

sentiment, of interesting situations, of unceasing variety of action.

Fletcher has never shown what he so much delights in drawing, the

contrast of virtuous dignity with ungoverned passion in woman, with

more success than in Zenocia and Hippolyta. Of these three plays, we

may say, perhaps, that there is more poetry in the Elder Brother, more

interest in the Custom of the Country, more wit and spirit in the

Spanish Curate.

|The Loyal Subject.|

70. The Loyal Subject ought also to be placed in a high rank among the

works of Beaumont and Fletcher. There is a play by Heywood, The Royal

King and Loyal Subject, from which the general idea of several

circumstances of this have been taken. That Heywood’s was the

original, though the only edition of it is in 1637, while the Loyal

Subject was represented in 1615, cannot bear a doubt. The former is

expressly mentioned in the epilogue as an old play, belonging to a

style gone out of date, and not to be judged with rigour. Heywood has,

therefore, the praise of having conceived the character of Earl

Marshal, upon which Fletcher somewhat improved in Archas; a brave

soldier of that disinterested and devoted loyalty, which bears all

ingratitude and outrage at the hands of an unworthy and misguided

sovereign. In the days of James there could be no more courtly moral.

In each play, the prince, after depriving his most deserving subject

of honours and fortune, tries his fidelity by commanding him to send

two daughters, whom he had educated in seclusion, to the court, with

designs that the father may easily suspect. The loyalty, however, of

these honest soldiers, like the hospitality of Lot, submits to

encounter this danger; and the conduct of the young ladies soon proves

that they might be trusted in the fiery trial. In the Loyal Subject,

Fletcher has beautifully, and with his light touch of pencil, sketched

the two virtuous sisters; one high-spirited, intrepid, undisguised,

the other shrinking with maiden modesty, a tremulous dewdrop in the

cup of a violet. But unfortunately his original taint betrays itself,

and the elder sister cannot display her scorn of licentiousness

without borrowing some of its language. If Shakspeare had put these

loose images into the mouth of Isabella, how differently we should

have esteemed her character!

71. We find in the Loyal Subject what is neither pleasing nor

probable, the disguise of a youth as a girl. This was, of course, not

offensive to those who saw nothing else on the stage. Fletcher did not

take this from Heywood. In the whole management of the story he is

much superior; the nobleness of Archas and his injuries are still more

displayed than those of the Earl Marshal; and he has several new

characters, especially Theodore, the impetuous son of the Loyal

Subject, who does not brook the insults of a prince as submissively as

his father, which fill the play with variety and spirit. The language

is in some places obscure and probably corrupt, but abounding with

that kind of poetry which belongs to Fletcher.

|Beggar’s Bush.|

72. Beggar’s Bush is an excellent comedy; the serious parts

interesting, the comic diverting. Every character supports itself

well; if some parts of the plot have been suggested by As you Like it,

they are managed so as to be original in spirit. Few of Fletcher’s

plays furnish more proofs of his characteristic qualities. It might be

represented with no great curtailment.

|The Scornful Lady.|

73. The Scornful Lady is one of those comedies which exhibit English

domestic life, and have, therefore, a value independent of their

dramatic merit. It does not equal Beggar’s Bush, but is full of

effective scenes, which, when less regard was paid to decency, must

have rendered it a popular play. Fletcher, in fact, is as much

superior to Shakspeare in his knowledge of the stage, as he falls

below him in that of human nature. His fertile invention was turned to

the management of his plot (always with a view to representation), the

rapid succession of incidents, the surprises and embarrassments which

keep the spectator’s attention alive. His characters are but vehicles

to the story; they are distinguished, for the most part, by little

more than the slight peculiarities of manner, which are easily caught

by the audience; and we do not often meet, especially in his comedies,

with the elaborate delineations of Jonson, or the marked

idiosyncracies of Shakspeare. Of these, his great predecessors, one

formed a deliberate conception of a character, whether taken from

general nature or from manners, and drew his figure, as it were, in

his mind, before he transferred it to the canvas; with the other, the

idea sprang out of the depths of his soul, and though suggested by the

story he had chosen, became so much the favourite of his genius as he

wrote, that in its development he sometimes grew negligent of his

plot.

|Valentinian.|

74. No tragedy of Fletcher would deserve higher praise than

Valentinian, if he had not, by an inconceivable want of taste and

judgment, descended from beauty and dignity to the most preposterous

absurdities. The matron purity of the injured Lucina, the ravages of

unrestrained self-indulgence on a mind not wholly without glimpses of

virtue in Valentinian, the vileness of his courtiers, the spirited

contrast of unconquerable loyalty in Ætius, with the natural

indignation at wrong in Maximus, are brought before our eyes in some

of Fletcher’s best poetry, though in a text that seems even more

corrupt than usual. But after the admirable scene in the third act,

where Lucina (the Lucretia of this story) reveals her injury, perhaps

almost the only scene in this dramatist, if we except the Maid’s

Tragedy, that can move us to tears, her husband Maximus, who even here

begins to forfeit our sympathy by his ready consent, in the

Spanish style of perverted honour, to her suicide, becomes a

treacherous and ambitious villain; the loyalty of Ætius turns to

downright folly, and the rest of the play is but such a series of

murders as Marston or the author of Andronicus might have devised. If

Fletcher meant, which he very probably did, to inculcate as a moral,

that the worst of tyrants are to be obeyed with unflinching

submission, he may have gained applause at court, at the expense of

his reputation with posterity.

|The Two Noble Kinsmen.|

75. The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play that has been honoured by a

tradition of Shakspeare’s concern in it. The evidence as to this is

the title page of the first edition; which, though it may seem much at

first sight, is next to nothing in our old drama, full of misnomers of

this kind. The editors of Beaumont and Fletcher have insisted upon

what they take for marks of Shakspeare’s style; and Schlegel, after

“seeing no reason for doubting so probable an opinion,” detects the

spirit of Shakspeare in a certain ideal purity which distinguishes

this from other plays of Fletcher, and in the conscientious fidelity

with which it follows the Knight’s Tale in Chaucer. The Two Noble

Kinsmen has much of that elevated sense of honour, friendship,

fidelity, and love, which belongs, I think, more characteristically to

Fletcher, who had drunk at the fountain of Castilian romance, than to

one, in whose vast mind this conventional morality of particular

classes was subordinated to the universal nature of man. In this

sense, Fletcher is always, in his tragic compositions, a very ideal

poet. The subject itself is fitter for him than for Shakspeare. In the

language and conduct of this play, with great deference to better and

more attentive critics, I see imitations of Shakspeare rather than

such resemblances as denote his powerful stamp. The madness of the

jailor’s daughter, where some have imagined they saw the masterhand,

is doubtless suggested by that of Ophelia, but with an inferiority of

taste and feeling, which it seems impossible not to recognise. The

painful and degrading symptom of female insanity, which Shakspeare has

touched with his gentle hand, is dwelt upon by Fletcher with all his

innate impurity. Can anyone believe that the former would have written

the last scene in which the jailor’s daughter appears on the stage?

Schlegel has too fine taste to believe that this character came from

Shakspeare, and it is given up by the latest assertor of his claim to

a participation in the play.[548]

[548] A “Letter on Shakspeare’s Authorship of the Drama, entitled

the Two Noble Kinsmen,” Edinburgh, 1833, notwithstanding this

title, does not deny a considerable participation to Fletcher. He

lays no great stress on the external evidence. But in arguing

from the similarity of style in many passages to that of

Shakspeare, the author, with whose name I am unacquainted, shows

so much taste and so competent a knowledge of the two dramatists,

that I should perhaps scruple to set up my own doubts in

opposition. His chief proofs are drawn from the force and

condensation of language in particular passages, which,

doubtless, is one of the great distinctions between the two. But

we might wish to have seen this displayed in longer extracts than

such as the author of this Letter has generally given us. It is

difficult to say of a man like Fletcher that he could not have

written single lines in the spirit of his predecessor. A few

instances, however, of longer passages will be found; and I

believe that it is a subject upon which there will long be a

difference of opinion.

|The Faithful Shepherdess.|

76. The Faithful Shepherdess, deservedly among the most celebrated

productions of Fletcher, stands alone in its class, and admits of no

comparison with any other play. It is a pastoral drama, in imitation

of the Pastor Fido, at that time very popular in England. The Faithful

Shepherdess, however, to the great indignation of the poets, did not

succeed on its first representation. There is nothing in this

surprising; the tone of pastoral is too far removed from the

possibilities of life for a stage which appealed, like ours, to the

boisterous sympathies of a general audience. It is a play very

characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity,

indecency, and absurdity. There is some justice in Schlegel’s remark,

that it is an immodest eulogy on modesty. But this critic, who does

not seem to appreciate the beauty of Fletcher’s poetry, should hardly

have mentioned Guarini as a model whom he might have followed. It was

by copying the Corisca of the Pastor Fido that Fletcher introduced the

character of the vicious shepherdess Cloe; though, according to his

times, and, we must own, to his disposition, he has greatly aggravated

the faults to which just exception has been taken in his original.

77. It is impossible to withhold our praise from the poetical beauties

of this pastoral drama. Every one knows that it contains the germ of

Comus; the benevolent Satyr, whose last proposition to “stray in the

middle air, and stay the sailing rack, or nimbly take hold of the

moon” is not much in the character of these sylvans, has been

judiciously metamorphosed by Milton to an attendant spirit; and a more

austere, as well as more uniform language has been given to the

speakers. But Milton has borrowed largely from the imagination of his

predecessor; and by quoting the lyric parts of the Faithful

Shepherdess, it would be easy to deceive any one not accurately

familiar with the songs of Comus. They abound with that rapid

succession of ideal scenery, that darting of the poet’s fancy from

earth to heaven, those picturesque and novel metaphors, which

distinguish much of the poetry of this age, and which are ultimately,

perhaps, in great measure referrible to Shakspeare.

|Rule a Wife and Have a Wife.|

78. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife is among the superior comedies of its

class. That it has a prototype on the Spanish theatre must appear

likely; but I should be surprised if the variety and spirit of

character, the vivacity of humour, be not chiefly due to our own

authors. Every personage in this comedy is drawn with a vigorous

pencil; so that it requires a good company to be well represented. It

is indeed a mere picture of roguery; for even Leon, the only character

for whom we can feel any sort of interest, has gained his ends by

stratagem; but his gallant spirit redeems this in our indulgent views

of dramatic morality, and we are justly pleased with the discomfiture

of fraud and effrontery in Estifania and Margarita.

|Some other plays.|

79. The Knight of the Burning Pestle is very diverting, and more

successful perhaps than any previous attempt to introduce a drama

within a drama. I should hardly except the Induction to the Taming of

a Shrew. The burlesque, though very ludicrous, does not transgress all

bounds of probability. The Wild-goose Chase, The Chances, The Humorous

Lieutenant, Women Pleased, Wit without Money, Monsieur Thomas, and

several other comedies, deserve to be praised for the usual

excellencies of Fletcher, his gaiety, his invention, his ever varying

rapidity of dialogue and incident. None are without his defects; and

we may add, what is not in fairness to be called a defect of his,

since it applies perhaps to every dramatic writer, except Shakspeare

and Molière, that, being cast as it were in a common mould, we find

both a monotony in reading several of these plays, and a difficulty of

distinguishing them in remembrance.

80. The later writers, those especially after the Restoration, did not

fail to appropriate many of the inventions of Fletcher. He and his

colleague are the proper founders of our comedy of intrigue, which

prevailed through the seventeenth century, the comedy of Wycherley,

Dryden, Behn, and Shadwell. Their manner, if not their actual plots,

may still be observed in many pieces that are produced on our stage.

But few of those imitators came up to the sprightliness of their

model. It is to be regretted that it is rarely practicable to adapt

any one of his comedies to representation without such changes as

destroy their original raciness, and dilute the geniality of their

wit.

|Origin of Fletcher’s plays.|

81. There has not been much curiosity to investigate the sources of

his humorous plays. A few are historical; but it seems highly probable

that the Spanish stage of Lope de Vega and his contemporaries often

furnished the subject, and perhaps many of the scenes, to his

comedies. These possess all the characteristics ascribed to the

comedies of intrigue so popular in that country. The scene too is more

commonly laid in Spain, and the costume of Spanish manners and

sentiments more closely observed, than we should expect from the

invention of Englishmen. It would be worth the leisure of some lover

of theatrical literature to search the collection of Lope de Vega’s

works, and, if possible, the other Spanish writers at the beginning of

the century, in order to trace the footsteps of our two dramatists.

Sometimes they may have had recourse to novels. The Little French

Lawyer seems to indicate such an origin. Nothing had as yet been

produced, I believe, on the French stage from which it could have been

derived, but the story and most of the characters are manifestly of

French derivation. The comic humour of La Writ in this play we may

ascribe to the invention of Fletcher himself.[549]

[549] Dryden reckons this play with the Spanish Curate, the

Chances, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, among those which he

supposes to be drawn from Spanish novels. Essay on Dramatic

Poetry, p. 204. By novels we should probably understand plays;

for those which he mentions are little in the style of novels.

But the Little French Lawyer has all the appearance of coming

from a French novel; the scene lies in France, and I see nothing

Spanish about it. Dryden was seldom well-informed about the early

stage.

|Defects of their plots.|

82. It is, however, not improbable that the entire plot was sometimes

original. Fertile as their invention was, to an extraordinary

degree, in furnishing the incidents of their rapid and animated

comedies, we may believe the fable itself to have sometimes sprung

from no other source. It seems indeed now and then, as if the authors

had gone forward with no very clear determination of their

catastrophe; there is a want of unity in the conception, a want of

consistency in the characters, which appear sometimes rather intended

to surprise by incongruity, than framed upon a definite model. That of

Ruy Diaz in the Island Princess, of whom it is hard to say whether he

is a brave man or a coward, or alternately one and the other, is an

instance to which many more might easily be added. In the Bloody

Brother, Rollo sends to execution one of his counsellors, whose

daughter Edith vainly interferes in a scene of great pathos and

effect. In the progress of the drama she arms herself to take away the

tyrant’s life; the whole of her character has been consistent and

energetic; when Fletcher, to the reader’s astonishment, thinks fit to

imitate the scene between Richard and Lady Anne; and the ignominious

fickleness of that lady, whom Shakspeare with wonderful skill, but in

a manner not quite pleasing, sacrifices to the better display of the

cunning crook-back, is here transferred to the heroine of the play,

and the very character upon whom its interest ought to depend. Edith

is on the point of giving up her purpose, when some others in the

conspiracy coming in, she recovers herself enough to exhort them to

strike the blow.[550]

[550] Rotrou, in his Wenceslas, as we have already observed, has

done something of the same kind; it may have been meant as an

ungenerous and calumnious attack on the constancy of the female

sex. If lions were painters, the old fable says, they would

exhibit a very different view of their contentions with men. But

lionesses are become very good painters; and it is but through

their clemency that we are not delineated in such a style as

would retaliate the injuries of these tragedians.

|Their sentiments and style dramatic.|

83. The sentiments and style of Fletcher, where not concealed by

obscurity or corruption of the text, are very dramatic. We cannot deny

that the depths of Shakspeare’s mind were often unfathomable by an

audience; the bow was drawn by a matchless hand, but the shaft went

out of sight. All might listen to Fletcher’s pleasing, though not

profound or vigorous language; his thoughts are noble, and tinged with

the ideality of romance, his metaphors vivid, though sometimes too

forced; he possesses the idiom of English without much pedantry,

though in many passages he strains it beyond common use; his

versification, though studiously irregular, is often rhythmical and

sweet. Yet we are seldom arrested by striking beauties; good lines

occur in every page, fine ones but rarely; we lay down the volume with

a sense of admiration of what we have read, but little of it remains

distinctly in the memory. Fletcher is not much quoted, and has not

even afforded copious materials to those who cull the beauties of

ancient lore.

|Their characters.|

84. In variety of character there can be no comparison between

Fletcher and Shakspeare. A few types return upon us in the former; an

old general, proud of his wars, faithful and passionate, a voluptuous

and arbitrary king (for his principles of obedience do not seem to

have inspired him with much confidence in royal virtues), a supple

courtier, a high-spirited youth, or one more gentle in manners but not

less stout in action, a lady, fierce and not always very modest in her

chastity, repelling the solicitations of licentiousness, another

impudently vicious, form the usual pictures for his canvas. Add to

these, for the lighter comedy, an amorous old man, a gay spendthrift,

and a few more of the staple characters of the stage, and we have the

materials of Fletcher’s dramatic world. It must be remembered that we

compare him only with Shakspeare, and that as few dramatists have been

more copious than Fletcher, few have been so much called upon for

inventions, in which the custom of the theatre has not exacted much

originality. The great fertility of his mind in new combinations of

circumstance gives as much appearance of novelty to the personages

themselves as an unreflecting audience requires. In works of fiction,

even those which are read in the closet, this variation of the mere

dress of a character is generally found sufficient for the public.

|Their tragedies.|

85. The tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, by which our ancestors

seem to have meant only plays wherein any of the personages, or at

least any whom the spectator would wish to keep alive, dies on the

stage, are not very numerous, but in them we have as copious an

effusion of blood as any contemporary dramas supply. The conclusion

indeed of these, and of the tragi-comedies, which form a larger class,

is generally mismanaged. A propensity to take the audience by surprise

leads often to an unnatural and unsatisfactory catastrophe; it seems

their aim to disappoint common expectation, to baffle reasonable

conjecture, to mock natural sympathy. This is frequently the practice

of our modern novelists, who find no better resource in the poverty of

their invention to gratify the jaded palate of the world.

|Inferior to their comedies.|

86. The comic talents of these authors far exceeded their skill in

tragedy. In comedy they founded a new school, at least in England, the

vestiges of which are still to be traced in our theatre. Their plays

are at once distinguishable from those of their contemporaries by the

regard to dramatic effect which influenced the writers’ imagination.

Though not personally connected with the stage, they had its picture

ever before their eyes. Hence their incidents are numerous and

striking, their characters sometimes slightly sketched, not drawn like

those of Jonson, from a preconceived design, but preserving that

degree of individual distinctness which a common audience requires,

and often highly humorous without extravagance; their language

brilliant with wit, their measure, though they do not make great use

of prose, very lax and rapid, running frequently to lines of thirteen

and fourteen syllables. Few of their comedies are without a mixture of

grave sentiments or elevated characters; and though there is much to

condemn in their indecency and even licentiousness of principle, they

never descend to the coarse buffoonery not unfrequent in their age.

Never were dramatic poets more thoroughly gentlemen, according to the

standard of their times; and, when we consider the court of James I.,

we may say that they were above that standard.[551]

[551] “Their plots were generally more regular than Shakspeare’s,

especially those which were made before Beaumont’s death: and

they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much

better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in

repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done.

Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they

made it not their business to describe; they represented all the

passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe

the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection;

what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than

ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent

entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through

the year for one of Shakspeare’s or Jonson’s; the reason is

because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies, and pathos

in their more serious plays, which suits generally with all men’s

humours. Shakspeare’s language is likewise a little obsolete, and

Jonson’s wit falls short of theirs.”--Dryden, p. 101.

|Their female characters.|

87. The best of Fletcher’s characters are female; he wanted that large

sweep of reflection and experience which is required for the greater

diversity of the other sex. None of his women delight us like Imogen

and Desdemona; but he has many Imogens and Desdemonas of a fainter

type. Spacelia, Zenocia, Celia, Aspasia, Evanthe, Lucina, Ordella,

Oriana, present the picture that cannot be greatly varied without

departing from its essence, but which never can be repeated too often

to please us, of faithful, tender, self-denying female love, superior

to everything but virtue. Nor is he less successful, generally, in the

contrast of minds stained by guilty passion, though in this he

sometimes exaggerates the outline till it borders on caricature. But

it is in vain to seek in Fletcher the strong conceptions of

Shakspeare, the Shylocks, the Lears, the Othellos. Schlegel has well

said that “scarce anything has been wanting to give a place to

Beaumont and Fletcher among the great dramatists of Europe, but more

of seriousness and depth, and the regulating judgment which prescribes

the due limits in every part of composition.” It was for want of the

former qualities that they conceive nothing in tragedy very forcibly;

for want of the latter that they spoil their first conception by

extravagance and incongruity.[552]

[552] “Shakspeare,” says Dryden, “writ better between man and

man, Fletcher betwixt man and woman; consequently, the one

described friendship better, the other love; yet, Shakspeare

taught Fletcher to write love, and Juliet and Desdemona are

originals. It is true the scholar had the softer soul, but the

master had the kinder.... Shakspeare had an universal mind which

comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher a more

confined and limited; for though he treated love in perfection,

yet honour, ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger

passions, he either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude

all, he was a limb of Shakspeare,” p. 301. This comparison is

rather generally than strictly just, as is often the case with

the criticisms of Dryden. That Fletcher wrote better than

Shakspeare “between man and woman,” or in displaying love, will

be granted when he shall be shown to have excelled Ferdinand and

Miranda, or Posthumus and Imogen. And, on the other hand, it is

unjust to deny him credit for having sometimes touched the

stronger emotions, especially honour and ambition, with great

skill, though much inferior to that of Shakspeare.

88. The reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher was at its height, and

most of their plays had been given to the stage, when a worthy

inheritor of their mantle appeared in Philip Massinger. Of his extant

dramas the Virgin Martyr, published in 1622, seems to be the

earliest; but we have reason to believe that several are lost; and

even this tragedy may have been represented some years before. The far

greater part of his remaining pieces followed within ten years; the

Bashful Lover, which is the latest now known, was written in 1636.

Massinger was a gentleman, but in the service, according to the

language of those times, of the Pembroke family; his education was at

the university, his acquaintance both with books and with the manners

of the court is familiar, his style and sentiments are altogether

those of a man polished by intercourse of good society.

89. Neither in his own age nor in modern times, does Massinger seem to

have been put on a level with Fletcher or Jonson. Several of his

plays, as has been just observed, are said to have perished in

manuscript; few were represented after the restoration; and it is only

in consequence of his having met with more than one editor, who has

published his collected works in a convenient form, that he is become

tolerably familiar to the general reader. He is, however, far more

intelligible than Fletcher; his text has not given so much

embarrassment from corruption, and his general style is as perspicuous

as we ever find it in the dramatic poets of that age. The obscure

passages in Massinger, after the care that Gifford has taken, are by

no means frequent.

|General nature of his dramas.|

90. Five of his sixteen plays are tragedies, that is, are concluded in

death; of the rest, no one belongs to the class of mere comedy, but by

the depth of the interest, the danger of the virtuous, or the atrocity

of the vicious characters, as well as the elevation of the general

style, must be ranked with the serious drama, or as it was commonly

termed, tragi-comedy. A shade of melancholy tinges the writings of

Massinger; but he sacrifices less than his contemporaries to the

public taste for superfluous bloodshed on the stage. In several of his

plays, such as the Picture, or the Renegado, where it would have been

easy to determine the catastrophe towards tragedy, he has preferred to

break the clouds with the radiance of a setting sun. He consulted in

this his own genius, not eminently pathetic, nor energetic enough to

display the utmost intensity of emotion, but abounding in sweetness

and dignity, apt to delineate the loveliness of virtue, and to delight

in its recompense after trial. It has been surmised that the religion

of Massinger was that of the church of Rome; a conjecture not

improbable, though, considering the ascetic and imaginative piety,

which then prevailed in that of England, we need not absolutely go so

far for his turn of thought in the Virgin Martyr or the Renegado.

|His delineations of character.|

91. The most striking excellence of this poet is his conception of

character; and in this I must incline to place him above Fletcher,

and, if I may venture to say it, even above Jonson. He is free from

the hard outline of the one, and the negligent looseness of the other.

He has indeed no great variety, and sometimes repeats, with such bare

modifications as the story demands, the type of his first design.

Thus, the extravagance of conjugal affection is pourtrayed, feeble in

Theodosius, frantic in Domitian, selfish in Sforza, suspicious in

Mathias; and the same impulses of doting love return upon us in the

guilty eulogies of Mallefort on his daughter. The vindictive hypocrisy

of Montreville in the Unnatural Combat, has nearly its counterpart in

that of Francesco in the Duke of Milan, and is again displayed with

more striking success in Luke. This last villain indeed, and that

original, masterly, inimitable conception, Sir Giles Overreach, are

sufficient to establish the rank of Massinger in this great province

of dramatic art. But his own disposition led him more willingly to

pictures of moral beauty. A peculiar refinement, a mixture of

gentleness and benignity with noble daring, belong to some of his

favourite characters, to Pisander in the Bondman, to Antonio in A Very

Woman, to Charolois in the Fatal Dowry. It may be readily supposed

that his female characters are not wanting in these graces. It seems

to me that he has more variety in his women than in the other sex, and

that they are less mannered than the heroines of Fletcher. A slight

degree of error or passion in Sophia, Eudocia, Marcelia, without

weakening our sympathy, serves both to prevent the monotony of

perpetual rectitude, so often insipid in fiction, and to bring forward

the development of the story.

|His subjects.|

92. The subjects chosen by Massinger are sometimes historical, but

others seem to have been taken from French or Italian novels, and

those so obscure, that his editor Gifford, a man of much reading and

industry, has seldom traced them. This indeed was an usual practice of

our ancient dramatists. Their works have consequently a

romantic character, presenting as little of the regular Plautine

comedy, as of the Greek forms of tragedy. They are merely novels in

action, following probably their models with no great variance, except

the lower and lighter episodes which it was always more or less

necessary to combine with the story. It is from this choice of

subjects, perhaps, as much as from the peculiar temper of the poets,

that love is the predominant affection of the mind which they display;

not cold and conventional, as we commonly find it on the French stage,

but sometimes, as the novelists of the South were prone to delineate

its emotions, fiery, irresistible, and almost resembling the fatalism

of ancient tragedy, sometimes a subdued captive at the chariot-wheels

of honour or religion. The range of human passion is consequently far

less extensive than in Shakspeare; but the variety of circumstance,

and the modifications of the paramount affection itself, compensated

for this deficiency.

|Beauty of his style.|

93. Next to the grace and dignity of sentiment in Massinger, we must

praise those qualities in his style. Every modern critic has been

struck by the peculiar beauty of his language. In his harmonious swell

of numbers, in his pure and genuine idiom, which a text, by good

fortune and the diligence of its last editor, far less corrupt than

that of Fletcher, enables us to enjoy, we find an unceasing charm. The

poetical talents of Massinger were very considerable; his taste

superior to that of his contemporaries; the colouring of his imagery

is rarely over-charged; a certain redundancy, as some may account it,

gives fullness, or what the painters call _impasto_, to his

style, and if it might not always conduce to effect on the stage, is,

on the whole, suitable to the character of his composition.

|Inferiority of his comic powers.|

94. The comic powers of this writer are not on a level with the

serious; with some degree of humorous conception he is too apt to aim

at exciting ridicule by caricature, and his dialogue wants altogether

the sparkling wit of Shakspeare and Fletcher. Whether from a

consciousness of this defect, or from an unhappy compliance with the

viciousness of the age, no writer is more contaminated by gross

indecency. It belongs indeed chiefly, not perhaps, exclusively, to the

characters he would render odious; but upon them he has bestowed this

flower of our early theatre with no sparing hand. Few, it must be

said, of his plays are incapable of representation merely on this

account, and the offence is therefore more incurable in Fletcher.

|Some of his tragedies particularised.|

95. Among the tragedies of Massinger, I should incline to prefer the

Duke of Milan. The plot borrows enough from history to give it

dignity, and to counterbalance in some measure the predominance of the

passion of love which the invented parts of the drama exhibit. The

characters of Sforza, Mercelia, and Francesco, are in Massinger’s best

manner; the story is skilfully and not improbably developed; the

pathos is deeper than we generally find in his writings; the eloquence

of language, especially in the celebrated speech of Sforza, before the

emperor, has never been surpassed by him. Many, however, place the

Fatal Dowry still higher. This tragedy furnished Rowe with the story

of his Fair Penitent. The superiority of the original, except in

suitableness for representation, has long been acknowledged. In the

Unnatural Combat, probably among the earliest of Massinger’s works, we

find a greater energy, a bolder strain of figurative poetry, more

command of terror and perhaps of pity, than in any other of his

dramas. But the dark shadows of crime and misery which overspread this

tragedy belong to rather an earlier period of the English stage than

that of Massinger, and were not congenial to his temper. In the Virgin

Martyr, he has followed the Spanish model of religious Autos, with

many graces of language and a beautiful display of Christian heroism

in Dorothea; but the tragedy is in many respects unpleasing.

|And of his other plays.|

96. The Picture, The Bondman, and A Very Woman may perhaps be reckoned

the best among the tragi-comedies of Massinger. But the general merits

as well as defects of this writer are perceptible in all; and the

difference between these and the rest is not such as to be apparent to

every reader. Two others are distinguishable as more English than the

rest; the scene lies at home, and in the age; and to these the common

voice has assigned a superiority. They are A New Way to Pay Old Debts,

and the City Madam. A character drawn, as it appears, from reality,

and though darkly wicked, not beyond the province of the higher

comedy, Sir Giles Overreach, gives the former drama a striking

originality and an impressive vigour. It retains, alone among the

productions of Massinger, a place on the stage. Gifford inclines to

prefer the City Madam; which, no doubt, by the masterly delineation of

Luke, a villain of a different order from Overreach, and a larger

portion of comic humour and satire than is usual with this writer, may

dispute the palm. It seems to me that there is more violent

improbability in the conduct of the plot, than in a A New Way to Pay

Old Debts.

|Ford.|

97. Massinger, as a tragic writer, appears to me second only to

Shakspeare; in the higher comedy, I can hardly think him inferior to

Jonson. In wit and sprightly dialogue, as well as in knowledge of

theatrical effect, he falls very much below Fletcher. These, however,

are the great names of the English stage. At a considerable distance

below Massinger, we may place his contemporary, John Ford. In the

choice of tragic subjects from obscure fictions which have to us the

charm of entire novelty, they resemble each other; but in the conduct

of their fable, in the delineation of their characters, each of these

poets has his distinguishing excellencies. “I know,” says Gifford,

“few things more difficult to account for, than the deep and lasting

impression made by the more tragic portions of Ford’s poetry.” He

succeeds, however, pretty well in accounting for it; the situations

are awfully interesting, the distress intense, the thoughts and

language becoming the expression of deep sorrow. Ford, with none of

the moral beauty and elevation of Massinger, has, in a much higher

degree, the power over tears; we sympathise even with his vicious

characters, with Giovanni and Annabella and Bianca. Love, and love in

guilt or sorrow, is almost exclusively the emotion he pourtrays; no

heroic passion, no sober dignity, will be found in his tragedies. But

he conducts his stories well and without confusion; his scenes are

often highly wrought and effective; his characters, with no striking

novelty, are well supported; he is seldom extravagant or regardless of

probability. The Broken Heart has generally been reckoned his finest

tragedy; and if the last act had been better prepared by bringing the

love of Calantha for Ithocles more fully before the reader in the

earlier part of the play, there would be very few passages of deeper

pathos in our dramatic literature. “The style of Ford,” it is said by

Gifford, “is altogether original and his own. Without the majestic

march which distinguishes the poetry of Massinger, and with little or

none of that light and playful humour which characterises the dialogue

of Fletcher, or even of Shirley, he is yet elegant and easy and

harmonious; and though rarely sublime, yet sufficiently elevated for

the most pathetic tones of that passion on whose romantic energies he

chiefly delighted to dwell.” Yet he censures afterwards Ford’s

affectation of uncouth phrases, and perplexity of language. Of comic

ability this writer does not display one particle. Nothing can be

meaner than those portions of his dramas which, in compliance with the

prescribed rules of that age, he devotes to the dialogue of servants

or buffoons.

|Shirley.|

98. Shirley is a dramatic writer much inferior to those who have been

mentioned, but has acquired some degree of reputation, or, at least,

notoriety of name, in consequence of the new edition of his plays.

These are between twenty and thirty in number; some of them, however,

written in conjunction with his fellow dramatists. A few of these are

tragedies, a few are comedies, drawn from English manners; but in the

greater part we find the favourite style of that age, the characters

foreign and of elevated rank, the interest serious, but not always of

buskined dignity, the catastrophe fortunate; all, in short, that has

gone under the vague appellation of tragi-comedy. Shirley has no

originality, no force in conceiving or delineating character, little

of pathos, and less, perhaps, of wit; his dramas produce no deep

impression in reading, and of course can leave none in the memory. But

his mind was poetical, his better characters, especially females,

express pure thoughts in pure language; he is never tumid or affected,

and seldom obscure; the incidents succeed rapidly, the personages are

numerous, and there is a general animation in the scenes, which causes

us to read him with some pleasure. No very good play, nor, possibly,

any very good scene could be found in Shirley; but he has many lines

of considerable beauty. Among his comedies, the Gamesters may be

reckoned the best. Charles I. is said to have declared that it was

“the best play he had seen these seven years;” and it has even been

added that the story was of his royal suggestion. It certainly

deserves praise both for language and construction of the plot, and it

has the advantage of exposing vice to ridicule; but the ladies of that

court, the fair forms whom Vandyke has immortalised, must have been

very different indeed from their posterity, as in truth I believe they

were, if they could sit it through. The Ball, and also some more among

the comedies of Shirley, are so far remarkable and worthy of being

read, that they bear witness to a more polished elegance of manners,

and a more free intercourse in the higher class, than we find in the

comedies of the preceding reign. A queen from France, and that queen

Henrietta Maria, was better fitted to give this tone than Anne of

Denmark. But it is not from Shirley’s pictures that we can draw the

most favourable notions of the morals of that age.

|Heywood.|

99. Heywood is a writer still more fertile than Shirley; between forty

and fifty plays are ascribed to him. We have mentioned one of the best

in the former volume, antedating, perhaps, its appearance by a few

years. In the English Traveller, he has returned to something like the

subject of A Woman Killed with Kindness, but with less success. This

play is written in verse, and with that ease and perspicuity, seldom

rising to passion or figurative poetry, which distinguishes this

dramatist. Young Geraldine is a beautiful specimen of the Platonic, or

rather inflexibly virtuous lover whom the writers of this age

delighted to pourtray. On the other hand, it is difficult to pronounce

whether the lady is a thorough paced hypocrite in the first acts, or

falls from virtue, like Mrs. Frankfort, on the first solicitation of a

stranger. In either case, the character is unpleasing, and, we may

hope, improbable. The under plot of this play is largely borrowed from

the Mostellaria of Plautus, and is diverting, though somewhat absurd.

Heywood seldom rises to much vigour of poetry; but his dramatic

invention is ready, his style is easy, his characters do not

transgress the boundaries of nature, and it is not surprising that he

was popular in his own age.

|Webster.|