CHAPTER XXIII.

HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

ON THE ITALIAN AND SPANISH DRAMA.

_Character of the Italian Theatre in this Age--Bonarelli--The Spanish Theatre--Calderon--Appreciation of his merits as a Dramatic Poet._

|Decline of the Italian Theatre.|

1. The Italian theatre, if we should believe one of its historians, fell into total decay during the whole course of the seventeenth century, though the number of dramatic pieces of various kinds was by no means small. He makes a sort of apology for inserting in a copious list of dramatic performances any that appeared after 1600, and stops entirely with 1650.[511] But in this he seems hardly to have done justice to a few, which, if not of remarkable excellence, might be selected from the rest. Andreini is perhaps best known by name in England, and that for one only of his eighteen dramas, the Adamo, which has been supposed, on too precarious grounds, to have furnished the idea of Paradise Lost in the original form, as it was planned by its great author. The Adamo was first published in 1613, and afterwards with amplification in 1641. It is denominated “A Sacred Representation;” and, as Andreini was a player by profession, must be presumed to have been brought upon the stage. It is, however, asserted by Riccoboni, that those who wrote regular tragedies did not cause them to be represented; probably he might have scrupled to give that epithet to the Adamo. Hayley and Walker have reckoned it a composition of considerable beauty.

[511] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien, vol. i.

2. The majority of Italian tragedies in the seventeenth century were taken, like the Adamo, from sacred subjects, including such as ecclesiastical legends abundantly supplied. Few of these gave sufficient scope, either by action or character, for the diversity of excitement which the stage demands. Tragedies more truly deserving that name were the Solimano of Bonarelli, the Tancredi of Campeggio, the Demetrius of Rocco, which Salfi prefers to the rest, and the Aristodemo of Carlo de Dottori. A drama by Testi, L’Isola di Alcina, had some reputation; but in this, which the title betrays not to be a legitimate tragedy, he introduced musical airs, and thus trod on the boundaries of a rival art.[512] It has been suggested, with no inconsiderable probability, that in her passion for the melodrame Italy lost all relish for the graver tone of tragedy. Music, at least the music of the opera, conspired with many more important circumstances to spread an effeminacy over the public character.

[512] Salfi, Continuation de Ginguéné, vol. xii., chap. 9. Besides this larger work, Salfi published, in 1829, a short essay on the Italian stage, Saggio Storico-Critico della Commedia Italiana.

|Filli di Sciro.|

3. The pastoral drama had always been allied to musical sentiment, even though it might be without accompaniment. The feeling it inspired was nearly that of the opera. In this style we find one imitation of Tasso and Guarini, inferior in most qualities, yet deserving some regard, and once popular even with the critics of Italy. This was the Filli di Sciro of Bonarelli, published at Ferrara, a city already fallen into the hands of priests, but round whose deserted palaces the traditions of poetical glory still lingered, in 1607, and represented by an academy in the same place soon afterwards. It passed through numerous editions, and was admired, even beyond the Alps, during the whole century, and perhaps still longer. It displays much of the bad taste and affectation of that period. Bonarelli is as strained in the construction of his story and in his characters, as he is in his style. Celia, the heroine of this pastoral, struggles with a double love, the original idea, as he might truly think, of his drama, which he wrote a long dissertation in order to justify. It is, however, far less conformable to the truth of nature than to the sophisticated society for which he wrote. A wanton capricious court lady might perhaps waver, with some warmth of inclination towards both, between two lovers, “Alme dell’alma mia,” as Celia calls them, and be very willing to possess either. But what is morbid in moral affection seldom creates sympathy, or is fit either for narrative poetry or the stage. Bonarelli’s diction is studied and polished to the highest degree; and though its false refinement and affected graces often displease us, the real elegance of insulated passages makes us pause to admire. In harmony and sweetness of sound he seems fully equal to his predecessors, Tasso and Guarini; but he has neither the pathos of the one, nor the fertility of the other. The language and turn of thought seems, more than in the Pastor Fido to be that of the opera, wanting indeed nothing but the intermixture of air to be perfectly adapted to music. Its great reputation, which even Crescimbeni does his utmost to keep up, proves the decline of good taste in Italy, and the lateness of its revival.[513]

[513] Istoria della volgar Poesia, iv. 147. He places the Filli di Sciro next to the Aminta.

|Translations of Spanish dramas.|

4. A new fashion which sprang up about 1620, both marks the extinction of taste for genuine tragedy, and by furnishing a substitute, stood in the way of its revival. Translations from Spanish tragedies and tragi-comedies, those of Lope de Vega and his successors, replaced the native muse of Italy. These were in prose and in three acts, irregular of course, and with very different characteristics from those of the Italian school. “The very name of tragedy,” says Riccoboni, “became unknown in our country; the _monsters_ which usurped the place did not pretend to that glorious title. Tragi-comedies rendered from the Spanish, such as Life is a Dream (of Calderon), the Samson, the Guest of Stone, and others of the same class, were the popular ornaments of the Italian stage.”[514]

[514] Hist. du Théâtre Italien, i. 47. The extemporaneous comedy was called commedia dell’arte. “It consisted,” says Salfi, “in a mere sketch or plan of a dramatic composition, the parts in which having been hardly shadowed out were assigned to different actors who were to develop them in extemporaneous dialogue. Such a sketch was called a scenario, containing the subject of each scene, and those of Flaminio Scala were celebrated. Saggio Storico-Critico, p. 38. The pantomime, as it exists among us, is the descendant of this extemporaneous comedy, but with little of the wit and spirit of its progenitor.

|Extemporaneous comedy.|

5. The extemporaneous comedy had always been the amusement of the Italian populace, not to say of all who wished to unbend their minds. An epoch in this art was made in 1611 by Flaminio Scala, who first published the outline or canvas of a series of these pieces, the dialogue being of course reserved for the ingenious performers.[515] This outline was not quite so short as that sometimes given in Italian play bills; it explained the drift of each actor’s part in the scene, but without any distinct hint of what he was to say. The construction of these fables is censured by Riccoboni as both weak and licentious; but it would not be reasonable to expect that it should be otherwise. The talent of the actors supplied the deficiency of writers. A certain quickness of wit, and tact in catching the shades of manner, comparatively rare among us, are widely diffused in Italy. It would be, we may well suspect, impossible to establish an extemporaneous theatre in England which should not be stupidly vulgar.[516] But Bergamo sent out many Harlequins, and Venice many Pantaloons. They were respected, as brilliant wit ought to be. The emperor Mathias ennobled Cecchini, a famous Harlequin, who was, however, a man of letters. These actors sometimes took the plot of old comedies as their outline, and disfigured them, so as hardly to be known, by their extemporaneous dialogue.[517]

[515] Salfi, p. 40.

[516] This is only meant as to dialogue and as to the public stage. The talent of a single actor, like the late Charles Mathews, is not an exception; but even the power of strictly extemporaneous comedy, with the agreeable poignancy that the minor theatre requires, is not wanting among some whose station and habits of life restrain its exercise to the most private circles.

[517] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien. Salfi, xii., 518. An elaborate disquisition on the extemporaneous comedy by Mr. Panizzi, in the Foreign Review for 1829 (not the Foreign Quarterly, but one early extinguished), derives it from the mimes and Atellanian comedies of ancient Italy, tracing them through the middle ages. The point seems sufficiently proved. The last company of performers in this old, though plebeian, family existed within about thirty years in Lombardy; a friend of mine at that time witnessed the last of the Harlequins. I need hardly say that this character was not a mere skipper over the stage, as we have seen him, but a very honest and lively young Bergamasque. The plays of Gasparo Gozzi, if plays they are, are mere hints to guide the wit of extemporaneous actors.

|Spanish stage.|

|Calderon. Number of his pieces.|

6. Lope de Vega was at the height of his glory at the beginning of this century. Perhaps the majority of his dramas fall within it; but enough has been said on the subject in the last volume. His contemporaries and immediate successors were exceedingly numerous; the effulgence of dramatic literature in Spain corresponding exactly in time to that of England. Several are named by Bouterwek and Velasquez; but one only, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, must be permitted to arrest us. This celebrated man was born in 1600 and died 1683. From an early age till after the middle of the century when he entered the church, he contributed, with a fertility only eclipsed by that of Lope, a long list of tragic, historic, comic, and tragi-comic dramas to the Spanish stage. In the latter period of his life, he confined himself to the religious pieces, called Autos Sacramentales. Of these, 97 are published in the collective edition of 1726, besides 127 of his regular plays. In one year, 1635, it is said that twelve of his comedies appeared. But the authenticity of so large a number has been questioned; he is said to have given a list of his sacred plays, at the age of eighty, consisting of only 68. No collection was published by himself. Some of his comedies, in the Spanish sense, it may be observed, turn more or less on religious subjects, as their titles show: El Purgatorio de San Patricio--La Devocion de la Cruz--Judas Maccabeus--La Cisma de Inghilterra. He did not dislike contemporary subjects. In El Sitio de Breda, we have Spinola, Nassau, and others then living on the scene. Calderon’s metre is generally trochaic, of eight or seven syllables, not always rhyming; but verses de arte mayor, as they are called, or anapæstic lines of eleven or twelve syllables, and also hendecasyllables frequently occur.

|His comedies.|

7. The comedies, those properly so called, _de capa y espada_, which represent manners, are full of incident, but not perhaps crowded so as to produce any confusion; the characters have nothing very salient, but express the sentiments of gentlemen with frankness and spirit. We find in every one a picture of Spain: gallantry, jealousy, quick resentment of insult, sometimes deep revenge. The language of Calderon is not unfrequently poetical, even in these lighter dramas, but hyperbolical figures and insipid conceits deform its beauty. The gracioso, or witty servant, is an unfailing personage; but I do not know (my reading, however, being extremely limited) that Calderon displays much brilliancy or liveliness in his sallies.

8. The plays of Calderon required a good deal of theatrical apparatus, unless the good nature of the audience dispensed with it. But this kind of comedy must have led to scenical improvements. They seem to contain no indecency, nor do the intrigues ever become criminal, at least in effect; most of the ladies indeed are unmarried. Yet they have been severely censured by later critics on the score of their morality, which is, no doubt, that of the stage, but considerably purified in comparison with the Italian and French of the sixteenth century. Calderon seems to bear no resemblance to any English writer of his age, except, in a certain degree, to Beaumont and Fletcher. And as he wants their fertility of wit and humour, we cannot, I presume, place the best of his comedies on a level with even the second class of theirs. But I should speak, perhaps, with more reserve of an author, very few of whose plays I have read, and with whose language I am very imperfectly acquainted; nor should I have ventured so far, if the opinion of many European critics had not seemed to warrant my frigid character of one who has sometimes been so much applauded.

|La Vida es Sueno.|

9. La Vida es Sueno rises, in its subject as well as style, above the ordinary comedies of Calderon. Basilius, king of Poland, a deep philosopher, has, by consulting the stars, had the misfortune of ascertaining that his unborn son, Sigismund, would be under some extraordinary influences of evil passion. He resolves in consequence to conceal his birth, and to bring him up in a horrible solitude, where, it hardly appears why, he is laden with chains, and covered with skins of beasts, receiving meantime an excellent education, and becoming able to converse on every subject, though destitute of all society but that of his keeper Clotaldo. The inheritance of the crown of Poland is supposed to have devolved on Astolfo, duke of Moscovy, or on his cousin Estrella, who, as daughter of an elder branch, contests it with him. The play opens by a scene, in which Rosaura, a Moscovite lady, who, having been betrayed by Astolfo, has fled to Poland in man’s attire, descends the almost impassable precipices which overhang the small castle wherein Sigismund is confined. This scene and that in which he first appears, are impressive and full of beauty, even now that we are are become accustomed in excess to these theatrical wonders. Clotaldo discovers the prince in conversation with a stranger, who, by the king’s general order must be detained, and probably for death. A circumstance leads him to believe that this stranger is his son; but the Castilian loyalty transferred to Poland forbids him to hesitate in obeying his instructions. The king, however, who has fortunately determined to release his son, and try an experiment upon the force of the stars, coming in at this time, sets Rosaura at liberty.

10. In the next act Sigismund, who, by the help of a sleeping potion, has been conveyed to the palace, wakes in a bed of down, and in the midst of royal splendour. He has little difficulty in understanding his new condition, but preserves a not unnatural resentment of his former treatment. The malign stars prevail; he treats Astolfo with the utmost arrogance, reviles and threatens his father, throws one of his servants out of the window, attempts the life of Clotaldo and the honour of Rosaura. The king, more convinced than ever of the truth of astrology, directs another soporific draught to be administered; and in the next scene we find the prince again in his prison. Clotaldo, once more at his side, persuades him that his late royalty has passed in a dream, wisely observing, however, that asleep or awake, we should always do what is right.

11. Sigismund, after some philosophical reflections, prepares to submit to the sad reality which has displaced his vision. But in the third act, an unforeseen event recalls him to the world. The army, become acquainted with his rights, and indignant that the king should transfer them to Astolfo, break into his prison, and place him at their head. Clotaldo expects nothing but death. A new revolution, however, has taken place. Sigismund, corrected by the dismal consequences of giving way to passion in his former dream, and apprehending a similar waking once more, has suddenly overthrown the sway of the sinister constellations that had enslaved him; he becomes generous, mild, and master of himself; and the only pretext for his disinheritance being removed, it is easy that he should be reconciled to his father, that Astolfo, abandoning a kingdom he can no longer claim, should espouse the injured Rosaura, and that the reformed prince should become the husband of Estrella. The incidents which chiefly relate to these latter characters, have been omitted in this slight analysis.

12. This tragi-comedy presents a moral not so contemptible in the age of Calderon, as it may now appear; that the stars may influence our will, but do not oblige it. If we could extract an allegorical meaning from the chimeras of astrology, and deem the stars but names for the circumstances of birth and fortune which affect the character as well as condition of every man, but yield to the persevering energy of self-correction, we might see in this fable the shadow of a permanent and valuable truth. As a play, it deserves considerable praise; the events are surprising without excessive improbability, and succeed each other without confusion; the thoughts are natural and poetically expressed; and it requires, on the whole, less allowance for the different standard of national taste than is usual in the Spanish drama.

|A Secreto agravio secreta vengança.|

13. A Secreto agravio secreta vengança is a domestic tragedy which turns on a common story--a husband’s revenge on one whom he erroneously believes to be still a favoured, and who had been once an accepted lover. It is something like Tancred and Sigismunda, except that the lover is killed instead of the husband. The latter puts him to death secretly, which gives name to the play. He afterwards sets fire to his own house, and in the confusion designedly kills his wife. A friend communicates the facts to his sovereign, Sebastian, king of Portugal, who applauds what has been done. It is an atrocious play, and speaks terrible things as to the state of public sentiment in Spain, but abounds with interesting and touching passages.

|Style of Calderon.|

14. It has been objected to Calderon, and the following defence of Bouterwek seems very insufficient, that his servants converse in a poetical style like their masters. “The spirit, on these particular occasions,” says that judicious but lenient critic, “must not be misunderstood. The servants in Calderon’s comedies always imitate the language of their masters. In most cases they express themselves like the latter, in the natural language of real life, and often divested of that colouring of the ideas, without which a dramatic work ceases to be a poem. But whenever romantic gallantry speaks in the language of tenderness, admiration, or flattery, then, according to Spanish custom, every idea becomes a metaphor; and Calderon, who was a thorough Spaniard, seized these opportunities to give the reins to his fancy, and to suffer it to take a bold lyric flight beyond the boundaries of nature. On such occasions the most extravagant metaphoric language, in the style of the Italian Marinists, did not appear unnatural to a Spanish audience; and even Calderon himself had for that style a particular fondness, to the gratification of which he sacrificed a chaster taste. It was his ambition to become a more refined Lope de Vega, or a Spanish Marini. Thus, in his play, Bien vengas mal, si vengas solo, a waiting-maid, addressing her young mistress who has risen in a gay humour, says--“Aurora would not have done wrong had she slumbered that morning in her snowy crystal, for that the sight of her mistress’s charms would suffice to draw aside the curtains from the couch of Sol.” She adds that, using a Spanish idea, “it might then indeed be said that the sun had risen in her lady’s eyes.” Valets, on the like occasion, speak in the same style; and when lovers address compliments to their mistresses, and these reply in the same strain, the play of far-fetched metaphors is aggravated by antitheses to a degree which is intolerable to any but a Spanish-formed taste. But it must not be forgotten that this language of gallantry was in Calderon’s time spoken by the fashionable world, and that it was a vernacular property of the ancient national poetry.”[518] What is this but to confess that Calderon had not genius to raise himself above his age, and that he can be read only as a “Triton of the minnows;” one who is great but in comparison with his neighbours? It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author’s position, and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper of his nation. All this is true, relatively to the author himself, and may be pleaded against a condemnation of his talents; but the excuse of the man is not that of the work.

[518] P. 507. It has been ingeniously hinted in the Quarterly Review, vol. xxv., that the high-flown language of servants in Spanish dramas, is a parody on that of their masters, and designed to make it ridiculous. But this is probably too refined an excuse.

|His merits sometimes over-rated.|

15. The fame of Calderon has been latterly revived in Europe through the praise of some German critics, but especially the unbounded panegyric of one of their greatest men, William Schlegel. The passage is well known for its brilliant eloquence. Every one must differ with reluctance and respect from this accomplished writer; and an Englishman, acknowledging with gratitude and admiration what Schlegel has done for the glory of Shakspeare, ought not to grudge the laurels he showers upon another head. It is, however, rather as a poet than a dramatist that Calderon has received this homage; and in his poetry it seems to be rather bestowed on the mysticism, which finds a responsive chord in so many German hearts, than on what we should consider a more universal excellence, a sympathy with, and a power over all that is true and beautiful in nature and in man. Sismondi (but the distance between Weimar and Geneva in matters of taste is incomparably greater than by the public road), dissenting from this eulogy of Schlegel, which he fairly lays before the reader, stigmatizes Calderon as eminently the poet of the age wherein he lived, the age of Philip IV. Salfi goes so far as to say we can hardly read Calderon without indignation; since he seems to have had no view but to make his genius subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his country.[519] In the 25th volume of the Quarterly Review an elaborate and able critique on the plays of Calderon seems to have estimated him without prejudice on either side. “His boundless and inexhaustible fertility of invention, his quick power of seizing and prosecuting everything with dramatic effect, the unfailing animal spirits of his dramas, if we may venture on the expression, the general loftiness and purity of his sentiments, the rich facility of his verse, the abundance of his language, and the clearness and precision with which he embodies his thoughts in words and figures, entitle him to a high rank as to the imagination and creative faculty of a poet, but we cannot consent to enrol him among the mighty masters of the human breast.”[520] His total want of truth to nature, even the ideal nature which poetry embodies, justifies, at least, this sentence. “The wildest flights of Biron and Romeo,” it is observed, “are tame to the heroes of Calderon; the Asiatic pomp of expression, the exuberance of metaphor, the perpetual recurrence of the same figures, which the poetry of Spain derived from its intercourse with the Arabian conquerors of the peninsula, are lavished by him in all their fulness. Every address of a lover to a mistress is thickly studded with stars and flowers; her looks are always nets of gold, her lips rubies, and her heart a rock, which the rivers of his tears attempt in vain to melt. In short, the language of the heart is entirely abandoned for that of the fancy; the brilliant but false concetti which have infected the poetical literature of every country, and which have been universally exploded by pure taste, glitter in every page, and intrude into every speech.”[521]

[519] Hist. Litt. de Ginguéné, vol. xii., p. 499.

[520] P. 24.

[521] P. 14.

SECT. II.

ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.

_Early French Dramatists of this Period--Corneille--His principal Tragedies--Rotrou._

|Plays of Hardy.|

16. Among the company who performed at the second theatre of Paris, that established in the Marais, was Hardy, who, like Shakspeare, uniting both arts, was himself the author of 600, or, as some say, 800 dramatic pieces. It is said that forty-one of these are extant in the collection of his works which I have never seen. Several of them were written, learned by heart, and represented within a week. His own inventions are the worst of all; his tragedies and tragi-comedies are borrowed with as close an adherence to the original text as possible, from Homer or Plutarch or Cervantes. They have more incident than those of his predecessors, and are somewhat less absurd; but Hardy is a writer of little talent. The Marianne is the most tolerable of his tragedies. In these he frequently abandoned the chorus, and even where he introduces it, does not regularly close the act with an ode.”[522]

[522] Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français (in Œuvres de Fontenelle, iii., 72). Suard, Mélanges de Littérature, vol. iv.

17. In the comedies of Hardy, and in the many burlesque farces represented under Henry IV. and Louis XIII., no regard was paid to decency, either in the language or the circumstances. Few persons of rank, especially ladies, attended the theatres.[523] These were first attracted by pastoral representations, of which Racan gave a successful example in his Artenice. It is hardly, however, to be called a drama.[524] But the stage, being no longer abandoned to the populace, and a more critical judgment in French literature gaining ground, encouraged by Richelieu, who built a large room in his palace for the representation of Mirame, an indifferent tragedy, part of which was suspected to be his own,[525] the ancient theatre began to be studied, rules were laid down and partially observed, a perfect decorum replaced the licentiousness and gross language of the old writers. Mairet and Rotrou, though without rising, in their first plays, much above Hardy, just served to prepare the way for the father and founder of the national theatre.[526]

[523] Suard, p. 134. Rotrou boasts that since he wrote for the theatre, it had become so well-regulated that respectable women might go to it with as little scruple as to the Luxembourg garden. Corneille, however, has, in general, the credit of having purified the stage; after his second piece, Clitandre, he admitted nothing licentious in his comedies. The only remain of grossness, Fontenelle observes, was that the lovers _se tutoyoient_; but, as he gravely goes on to remark, le tutoiement ne choque pas les bonnes mœurs; il ne choque que la politesse et la vraie galanterie, p. 91. But the last instance of this heinous offence is in Le Menteur.

[524] Suard, ubi suprà.

[525] Fontenelle, p. 84, 96.

[526] Id. p. 78. It is difficult in France, as it is with us, to ascertain the date of plays, because they were often represented for years before they came from the press. It is conjectured by Fontenelle, that one or two pieces of Mairet and Rotrou may have preceded any by Corneille.

18. The Melite of Corneille, his first production, was represented in 1629, when he was twenty-three years of age. This is only distinguished, as some say, from those of Hardy by a greater vigour of style; but Fontenelle gives a very different opinion. It had, at least, a success which caused a new troop of actors to be established in the Marais. His next, Clitandre, it is agreed, is not so good. But La Veuve is much better; irregular in action, but with spirit, character, and well-invented situations, it is the first model of the higher comedy.[527] These early comedies must, in fact, have been relatively of considerable merit, since they raised Corneille to high reputation, and connected him with the literary men of his time. The Medea, though much borrowed from Seneca, gave a tone of grandeur and dignity unknown before to French tragedy. This appeared in 1635, and was followed by the Cid next year.

[527] Suard, Fontenelle, La Harpe.

|The Cid.|

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.|

100. Webster belongs to the first part of the reign of James. He possessed very considerable powers, and ought to be ranked, I think, the next below Ford. With less of poetic grace than Shirley, he had incomparably more vigour; with less of nature and simplicity than Heywood, he had a more elevated genius, and a bolder pencil. But the deep sorrows and terrors of tragedy were peculiarly his province. “His imagination,” says his last editor, “had a fond familiarity with objects of awe and fear. The silence of the sepulchre, the sculptures of marble monuments, the knolling of church bells, the cearments of the corpse, the yew that roots itself in dead men’s graves, are the illustrations that most readily present themselves to his imagination.” I think this well-written sentence a little one-sided, and hardly doing justice to the variety of Webster’s power; but, in fact, he was as deeply tainted as any of his contemporaries with the savage taste of the Italian school, and in the Duchess of Malfy, scarcely leaves enough on the stage to bury the dead.

|His Duchess of Malfy.|

101. This is the most celebrated of Webster’s dramas. The story is taken from Bandello, and has all that accumulation of wickedness and horror, which the Italian novelists perversely described, and our tragedians as perversely imitated. But the scenes are wrought up with skill, and produce a strong impression. Webster has a superiority in delineating character above many of the old dramatists; he is seldom extravagant beyond the limits of conceivable nature; we find the guilt, or even the atrocity, of human passions, but not that incarnation of evil spirits which some more ordinary dramatists loved to exhibit. In the character of the Duchess of Malfy herself there wants neither originality nor skill of management, and I do not know that any dramatist after Shakspeare would have succeeded better in the difficult scene where she discloses her love to an inferior. There is, perhaps, a little failure in dignity and delicacy, especially towards the close; but the Duchess of Malfy is not drawn as an Isabella or a Portia; she is a lovesick widow, virtuous and true-hearted, but more intended for our sympathy than our reverence.

|Vittoria Corombona.|

102. The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona, is not much inferior in language and spirit to the Duchess of Malfy; but the plot is more confused, less interesting, and worse conducted. Mr. Dyce, the late editor of Webster, praises the dramatic vigour of the part of Vittoria, but justly differs from Lamb, who speaks of “the innocence, resembling boldness” she displays in the trial scene. It is rather a delineation of desperate guilt, losing in a counterfeited audacity all that could seduce or conciliate the tribunal. Webster’s other plays are less striking; in Appius and Virginia he has done, perhaps, better than any one who has attempted a subject not, on the whole, very promising for tragedy; several of the scenes are dramatic and effective; the language, as is usually the case with Webster, is written so as to display an actor’s talents, and he has followed the received history sufficiently to abstain from any excess of slaughter at the close. Webster is not without comic wit, as well as a power of imagination; his plays have lately met with an editor of taste enough to admire his beauties, and not very over-partial in estimating them.

103. Below Webster we might enumerate a long list of dramatists under the first Stuarts. Marston is a tumid and ranting tragedian, a wholesale dealer in murders and ghosts. Chapman, who assisted Ben Jonson and some others in comedy, deserves no great praise for his Bussy d’Amboise. The style in this, and in all his tragedies, is extravagantly hyperbolical; he is not very dramatic, nor has any power of exciting emotion, except in those who sympathize with a tumid pride and self-confidence. Yet he has more thinking than many of the old dramatists; and the praise of one of his critics, though strongly worded, is not without some foundation, that we “seldom find richer contemplations on the nature of man and the world.” There is also a poetic impetuosity in Chapman, such as has redeemed his translation of Homer, by which we are hurried along. His tragi-comedies, All Fools and The Gentleman-usher, are, perhaps, superior to his tragedies.[553] Rowley and Le Tourneur, especially the former, have occasionally good lines, but we cannot say that they were very superior dramatists. Rowley, however, was often in comic partnership with Massinger. Dekker merits a higher rank; he co-operated with Massinger in some of his plays, and in his own displays some energy of passion and some comic humour. Middleton belongs to this lower class of dramatic writers; his tragedy entitled “Women beware Women,” is founded on the story of Bianca Cappello; it is full of action, but the characters are all too vicious to be interesting, and the language does not rise much above mediocrity. In comedy, Middleton deserves more praise. “A Trick to catch the Old One,” and several others that bear his name are amusing and spirited. But Middleton wrote chiefly in conjunction with others, and sometimes with Jonson and Massinger.

[553] Chapman is well reviewed and at length, in an article of the Retrospective Review, vol. iv., p. 333, and again in vol. v.