CHAPTER XV.
HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE, FROM 1550 TO 1600.
_Italian Tragedy and Comedy--Pastoral Drama--Spanish Drama--Lope De Vega--French Dramatists--Early English Drama--Second Æra; of Marlowe and his Contemporaries--Shakspeare--Character of several of his Plays written within this Period._
|Italian tragedy.|
1. Many Italian tragedies are extant, belonging to these fifty years, though not very generally known, nor can I speak of them except through Ginguéné and Walker, the latter of whom has given a few extracts. The Marianna and Didone of Lodovico Dolce, the Œdipus of Anguillara, the Merope of Torelli, the Semiramis of Manfredi, are necessarily bounded, in the conduct of their fable, by what was received as truth. But others, as Cinthio had done, preferred to invent their story, in deviation from the practice of antiquity. The Hadriana of Groto, the Acripanda of Decio da Orto, and the Torrismond of Tasso are of this kind. In all these we find considerable beauties of language, a florid and poetic tone, but declamatory and not well adapted to the rapidity of action, in which we seem to perceive the germ of that change from common speech to recitative, which, fixing the attention of the hearer on the person of the actor rather than on his relation to the scene, destroyed in great measure the character of dramatic representation. The Italian tragedies are deeply imbued with horror; murder and cruelty, with all attending circumstances of disgust, and every pollution of crime, besides a profuse employment of spectral agency, seem the chief weapons of the poet’s armoury to subdue the spectator. Even the gentleness of Tasso could not resist the contagion in his Torrismond. These tragedies still retain the chorus at the termination of every act. Of the Italian comedies little can be added to what has been said before; no comic writer of this period is comparable in reputation to Machiavel, Ariosto, or even Aretin.[1242] They are rather less licentious; and in fact, the profligacy of Italian manners began, in consequence probably of a better example in the prelates of the church, to put on some regard for exterior decency in the latter part of the century.
[1242] Ginguéné, vol. vi.
|Pastoral drama.|
2. These regular plays, though possibly deserving of more attention than they have obtained, are by no means the most important portion of the dramatic literature of Italy in this age. A very different style of composition has, through two distinguished poets, contributed to spread the fame of Italian poetry, and the language itself, through Europe. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were abundantly productive of pastoral verse; a style pleasing to those who are not severe in admitting its conventional fictions. The pastoral dialogue had not much difficulty in expanding to the pastoral drama. In the Sicilian gossips of Theocritus, and in some other ancient eclogues, new interlocutors supervene, which is the first germ of a regular action. Pastorals of this kind had been written, and possibly represented, in Spain, such as the Mingo Rebulgo, in the middle of the fifteenth century.[1243] Ginguéné has traced the progress of similar representations, becoming more and more dramatic, in Italy.[1244] But it is admitted that the honour of giving the first example of a true pastoral fable to the theatre was due to Agostino Beccari of Ferrara. This piece, named Il Sagrifizio, was acted at that court in 1554. Its priority in a line which was to become famous appears to be its chief merit. In this, as in earlier and more simple attempts at pastoral dialogue, the choruses were set to music.[1245]
[1243] Bouterwek’s Spanish Literature, i. 129.
[1244] vi. 327 et post.
[1245] Id. vi. 332.
|Aminta of Tasso.|
3. This pleasing, though rather effeminate, species of poetry was carried, more than twenty years afterwards, one or two unimportant imitations of Beccari having intervened, to a point of excellence, which perhaps it has never surpassed, in the Aminta of Tasso. Its admirable author was then living at the court of Ferrara, yielding up his heart to those seductive illusions of finding happiness in the favour of the great, and even in ambitious and ill-assorted love, which his sounder judgment already saw through, the Aminta bearing witness to both states of mind. In the character of Tirsi he has drawn himself, and seems once (though with the proud consciousness of genius), to hint at that eccentric melancholy, which soon increased so fatally for his peace.
Ne già cose scrivea degne di riso, Se ben cose facea degne di riso.
The language of all the interlocutors in the Aminta is alike, nor is the satyr less elegant or recondite than the learned shepherds. It is in general too diffuse and florid, too uniform and elaborate, for passion; especially if considered dramatically, in reference to the story and the speakers. But it is to be read as what it is, a beautiful poem; the delicacy and gracefulness of many passages rendering them exponents of the hearer’s or reader’s feelings, though they may not convey much sympathy with the proper subject. The death of Aminta, however, falsely reported to Sylvia, leads to a truly pathetic scene. It is to be observed that Tasso was more formed by classical poetry, and more frequently an imitator of it, than any earlier Italian. The beauties of the Aminta are in great measure due to Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Anacreon, and Moschus.
|Pastor Fido of Guarini.|
4. The success of Tasso’s Aminta produced the Pastor Fido of Guarini, himself long in the service of the duke of Ferrara, where he had become acquainted with Tasso; though in consequence of some dissatisfaction at that court, he sought the patronage of the duke of Savoy. The Pastor Fido was first represented at Turin in 1585, but seems not to have been printed for some years afterwards. It was received with general applause; but the obvious resemblance to Tasso’s pastoral drama could not fail to excite a contention between their respective advocates, which long survived the mortal life of the two poets. Tasso, it has been said, on reading the Pastor Fido, was content to observe that, if his rival had not read the Aminta, he would not have excelled it. If his modesty induced him to say no more than this, very few would be induced to dispute his claim; the characters, the sentiments are evidently imitated; and in one celebrated instance a whole chorus is parodied with the preservation of every rhyme.[1246] But it is far more questionable whether the palm of superior merit, independent of originality, should be awarded to the later poet. More elegance and purity of taste belong to the Aminta, more animation and variety to the Pastor Fido. The advantage in point of morality, which some have ascribed to Tasso, is not very perceptible; Guarini may transgress rather more in some passages, but the tone of the Aminta, in strange opposition to the pure and pious life of its author, breathes nothing but the avowed laxity of an Italian court. The Pastor Fido may be considered, in a much greater degree than the Aminta, a prototype of the Italian opera; not that it was spoken in recitative; but the short and rapid expressions of passion, the broken dialogue, the frequent changes of personages and incidents, keep the effect of representation and of musical accompaniment continually before the reader’s imagination. Any one who glances over a few scenes of the Pastor Fido will, I think, perceive that it is the very style which Metastasio, and inferior coadjutors of musical expression, have rendered familiar to our ears.
[1246] This is that beginning, O bella età dell’oro.
|Italian opera.|
5. The great invention, which though chiefly connected with the history of music and of society, was by no means without influence upon literature, the melodrame, usually called the Italian opera, belongs to the very last years of this century. Italy, long conspicuous for such musical science and skill as the Middle Ages possessed, had fallen, in the first part of the sixteenth century, very short of some other countries, and especially of the Netherlands, from which the courts of Europe, and even of the Italian princes, borrowed their performers and their instructors. A revolution in church music, which had become particularly dry and pedantic, was brought about by the genius of Palestrina about 1560; and the art, in all its departments, was cultivated with an increased zeal for all the rest of the century.[1247] In the splendour that environed the houses of Medici and Este, in the pageants they loved to exhibit, music, carried to a higher perfection by foreign artists, and by the natives that now came forward to emulate them, became of indispensable importance; it had already been adapted to dramatic representation in choruses; interludes and pieces written for scenic display were now given with a perpetual accompaniment, partly to the songs, partly to the dance and pantomime which intervened between them.[1248] Finally, Ottavio Rinuccini, a poet of considerable genius, but who is said to have known little of musical science, by meditating on what is found in ancient writers on the accompaniment to their dramatic dialogue, struck out the idea of recitative. This he first tried in the pastoral of Dafne, represented privately in 1594; and its success led him to the composition of what he entitled a tragedy for music, on the story of Eurydice. This was represented at the festival on the marriage of Mary of Medicis in 1600. “The most astonishing effects,” says Ginguéné, “that the theatrical music of the greatest masters has produced, in the perfection of the science, are not comparable to those of this representation, which exhibited to Italy the creation of a new art.”[1249] It is, however, a different question whether this immense enhancement of the powers of music, and consequently of its popularity, has been favourable to the development of poetical genius in this species of composition; and in general it may be said that, if music has, on some occasions, been a serviceable handmaid, and even a judicious monitress, to poetry, she has been apt to prove but a tyrannical mistress. In the melodrame, Corniani well observes, poetry became her vassal, and has been ruled with a despotic sway.
[1247] Ranke, with the musical sentiment of a German, ascribes a wonderful influence in the revival of religion after the middle of the century to the compositions of Palestrina. Church music had become so pedantic and technical that the council of Trent had some doubts whether it should be retained. Pius IV. appointed a commission to examine this question, who could arrive at no decision. The artists said it was impossible to achieve what the church required, a coincidence of expression between the words and the music. Palestrina appeared at this time, and composed the mass of Marcellus, which settled the dispute for ever. Other works by himself and his disciples followed, which elevated sacred music to the highest importance among the accessories of religious worship. Die Päpste, vol. i. p. 498. But a large proportion of the performers, I apprehend, were Germans, especially in theatrical music.
[1248] Ginguéné, vol. vi., has traced the history of the melodrame with much pains.
[1249] P. 474. Corniani, vii. 31, speaks highly of the poetical abilities of Rinuccini. See also Galluzzi, Storia del Gran Ducato, v. 547.
|The national taste revives in the Spanish drama.|
6. The struggle that seemed arduous in the earlier part of this century between the classical and national schools of dramatic poetry in Spain, proved of no long duration. The latter became soon decisively superior; and before the end of the present period, that kingdom was in possession of a peculiar and extensive literature, which has attracted the notice of Europe, and has enriched both the French theatre and our own. The spirit of the Spanish drama is far different from that which animated the Italian writers; there is not much of Machiavel in their comedy, and still less of Cinthio in their tragedy. They abandoned the Greek chorus, which still fettered their contemporaries, and even the division into five acts, which later poets, in other countries, have not ventured to renounce. They gave more complication to the fable, sought more unexpected changes of circumstance, were not solicitous in tragedy to avoid colloquial language or familiar incidents, showed a preference to the tragi-comic intermixture of light with serious matter, and cultivated grace in poetical diction more than vigour. The religious mysteries, once common in other parts of Europe, were devoutly kept up in Spain; and under the name of Autos Sacramentales, make no inconsiderable portion of the writings of their chief dramatists.[1250]
[1250] Bouterwek.
7. Andrès, favourable as he is to his country, is far from enthusiastic in his praises of the Spanish theatre. Its exuberance has been its ruin; no one, he justly remarks, can read some thousand plays in the hope of finding a few that are tolerable. Andrès, however, is not exempt from a strong prejudice in favour of the French stage. He admits the ease and harmony of the Spanish versification, the purity of the style, the abundance of the thoughts, and the ingenious complexity of the incidents. This is peculiarly the merit of the Spanish comedy, as its great defect, in his opinion, is the want of truth and delicacy in the delineation of the passions, and of power to produce a vivid impression on the reader. The best work, he concludes rather singularly, of the comic poets of Spain has been the French theatre.[1251]
[1251] Vol. v. p. 138.
|Lope de Vega.|
|His extraordinary fertility.|
8. The most renowned of these is Lope de Vega, so many of whose dramas appeared within the present century, that although, like Shakspeare, he is equally to be claimed by the next, we may place his name, once for all, in this period. Lope de Vega is called by Cervantes a prodigy of nature; and such he may justly be reckoned; not that we can ascribe to him a sublime genius, or a mind abounding with fine original thought, but his fertility of invention and readiness of versifying are beyond competition. It was said foolishly, if meant as praise, of Shakspeare, and we may be sure untruly, that he never blotted a line. This may also be presumed of Vega. “He required,” says Bouterwek, “no more than four and twenty hours to write a versified drama of three acts in redondillas, interspersed with sonnets, tercets, and octaves, and from beginning to end abounding in intrigues, prodigies, or interesting situations. This astonishing facility enabled him to supply the Spanish theatre with upwards of 2000 original dramas, of which not more than 300 have been preserved by printing. In general the theatrical manager carried away what he wrote before he had even time to revise it; and immediately a fresh applicant would arrive to prevail on him to commence a new piece. He sometimes wrote a play in the short space of three or four hours.” ... “Arithmetical calculations have been employed in order to arrive at a just estimate of Lope de Vega’s facility in poetic composition. According to his own testimony, he wrote on an average five sheets a day; it has therefore been computed that the number of sheets which he composed during his life must have amounted to 133,225; and that, allowing for the deduction of a small portion of prose, Lope de Vega must have written upwards of 21,300,000 verses. Nature would have overstepped her bounds and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity of invention and composition, attained perfection in any department of literature.”[1252]
[1252] P. 361-363. Montalvan, Lope’s friend, says that he wrote 1800 plays and 400 autos. In a poem of his own, written in 1609, he claims 483 plays, and he continued afterwards to write for the stage. Those that remain and have been collected in twenty-five volumes are reckoned at about 300.
|His versification.|
9. This peculiar gift of rapid composition will appear more extraordinary when we attend to the nature of Lope’s versification, very unlike the irregular lines of our old drama, which it is not perhaps difficult for a practised hand to write or utter extemporaneously. “The most singular circumstance attending his verse,” says Lord Holland, “is the frequency and difficulty of the tasks which he imposes on himself. At every step we meet with acrostics, echoes, and compositions of that perverted and laborious kind, from attempting which another author would be deterred by the trouble of the undertaking, if not by the little real merit attending the achievement. They require no genius, but they exact much time; which one should think that such a voluminous poet could little afford to waste. But Lope made a parade of his power over the vocabulary: he was not contented with displaying the various order in which he could dispose the syllables and marshal the rhymes of his language; but he also prided himself upon the celerity with which he brought them to go through the most whimsical but the most difficult evolutions. He seems to have been partial to difficulties for the gratification of surmounting them.” This trifling ambition is usual among second-rate poets, especially in a degraded state of public taste; but it may be questionable, whether Lope de Vega ever performed feats of skill more surprising in this way than some of the Italian _improvisatori_, who have been said to carry on at the same time three independent sonnets, uttering, in their unpremeditated strains, a line of each in alternate succession. There is reason to believe, that their extemporaneous poetry, is as good as anything in Lope de Vega.
|His popularity.|
10. The immense popularity of this poet, not limited, among the people itself, to his own age, bespeaks some attention from criticism. “The Spaniards who affect fine taste in modern times,” says Schlegel, “speak with indifference of their old national poets; but the people retain a lively attachment to them, and their productions are received on the stage, at Madrid, or at Mexico, with passionate enthusiasm.” It is true that foreign critics have not in general pronounced a very favourable judgment of Lope de Vega. But a writer of such prodigious fecundity is ill appreciated by single plays; the whole character of his composition manifests that he wrote for the stage, and for the stage of his own country, rather than for the closet of a foreigner. His writings are divided into spiritual plays, heroic and historical comedies, most of them taken from the annals and traditions of Spain, and lastly, comedies of real life, or, as they were called, “of the hat and sword,” (capa y espada) a name answering to the _comœdia togata_ of the Roman stage. These have been somewhat better known than the rest, and have, in several instances, found their way to our own theatre, by suggesting plots and incidents to our older writers. The historian of Spanish literature, to whom I am so much indebted, has given a character of these comedies, in which the English reader will perhaps recognise much that might be said also of Beaumont and Fletcher.
|Character of his comedies.|
11. “Lope de Vega’s comedies de Capa y Espada, or those which may properly be denominated his dramas of intrigue, though wanting in the delineation of character, are romantic pictures of manners, drawn from real life. They present, in their peculiar style, no less interest with respect to situation than his heroic comedies, and the same irregularity in the composition of the scenes. The language, too, is alternately elegant and vulgar, sometimes highly poetic, and sometimes, though versified, reduced to the level of the dullest prose. Lope de Vega seems scarcely to have bestowed a thought on maintaining probability in the succession of the different scenes; ingenious complication is with him the essential point in the interest of his situations. Intrigues are twisted and entwined together, until the poet, in order to bring his piece to a conclusion, without ceremony cuts the knots he cannot untie, and then he usually brings as many couples together as he can by any possible contrivance match. He has scattered through his pieces occasional reflections and maxims of prudence; but any genuine morality, which might be conveyed through the stage, is wanting, for its introduction would have been inconsistent with that poetic freedom on which the dramatic interest of the Spanish comedy is founded. His aim was to paint what he observed, not what he would have approved, in the manners of the fashionable world of his age; but he leaves it to the spectator to draw his own inferences.”[1253]
[1253] Bouterwek, p. 375.
|Tragedy of Don Sancho Ortiz.|
12. An analysis of one of these comedies from real life is given by Bouterwek, and another by Lord Holland. The very few that I have read appear lively and diversified, not unpleasing in the perusal, but exciting little interest and rapidly forgotten. Among the heroic pieces of Lope de Vega a high place appears due to the Estrella de Sevilla, published with alterations by Triquero, under the name of Don Sancho Ortiz.[1254] It resembles the Cid in its subject. The king, Sancho the Brave, having fallen in love with Estrella, sister of Don Bustos Tabera, and being foiled by her virtue,[1255] and by the vigilance of her brother, who had drawn his sword upon him, as in disguise he was attempting to penetrate into her apartment, resolves to have him murdered, and persuades Don Sancho Ortiz, a soldier full of courage and loyalty, by describing the attempt made on his person, to undertake the death of one whose name is contained in a paper he gives him. Sancho is the accepted lover of Estrella, and is on that day to espouse her with her brother’s consent. He reads the paper, and after a conflict which is meant to be pathetic, but in our eyes is merely ridiculous, determines, as might be supposed, to keep his word to his sovereign. The shortest course is to contrive a quarrel with Bustos, which produces a duel, wherein the latter is killed. The second act commences with a pleasing scene of Estrella’s innocent delight in her prospect of happiness; but the body of her brother is now brought in, and the murderer, who had made no attempt to conceal himself, soon appears in custody. His examination before the judges, who endeavour in vain to extort one word from him in his defence, occupies part of the third act. The king, anxious to save his life, but still more so to screen his own honour, requires only a pretext to pardon the offence. But the noble Castilian disdains to save himself by falsehood, and merely repeats that he had not slain his friend without cause, and that the action was atrocious, but not criminal.
Dice que fue atrocidad, Pero que no fue delito.
[1254] In Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, a more complete analysis than what I have offered is taken from the original play. I have followed the _rifaccimento_ of Triquero, which is substantially the same.
[1255] Lope de Vega has borrowed for Estrella the well-known answer of a lady to a king of France, told with several variations of names, and possibly true of none.
Soy (she says), Para esposa vuestra poco, Paro dama vuestra mucho.
13. In this embarrassment Estrella appears, demanding, not the execution of justice on her brother’s murderer, but that he should be delivered up to her. The king, with his usual feebleness, consents to this request, observing that he knows by experience it is no new thing for her to be cruel. She is, however, no sooner departed with the royal order, than the wretched prince repents, and determines to release Sancho, making compensation to Estrella by marrying her to a ricohombre of Castile. The lady meantime reaches the prison, and in an interview with her unfortunate lover, offers him his liberty, which by the king’s concession is in her power. He is not to be outdone in generous sentiments, and steadily declares his resolution to be executed. In the fifth act this heroic emulation is reported by one who had overheard it to the king. All the people of this city, he replies, are heroes, and outstrip nature herself by the greatness of their souls. The judges now enter, and with sorrow report their sentence that Sancho must suffer death. But the king is at length roused, and publicly acknowledges that the death of Bustos had been perpetrated by his command. The president of the tribunal remarks that, as the king had given the order, there must doubtless have been good cause. Nothing seems to remain but the union of the lovers. Here, however, the high Castilian principle once more displays itself. Estrella refuses to be united to one she tenderly loves, but who has brought such a calamity into her family; and Sancho himself, willingly releasing her engagement, admits that their marriage under such circumstances would be a perpetual torment. The lady therefore chooses, what is always at hand in Catholic fiction, the dignified retirement of a nunnery, and the lover departs to dissipate his regrets in the Moorish war.
14. Notwithstanding all in the plan and conduct of this piece, which neither our own state of manners, nor the laws of any sound criticism can tolerate, it is very conceivable that, to the factitious taste of a Spanish audience in the age of Lope de Vega, it would have appeared excellent. The character of Estrella is truly noble, and much superior in interest to that of Chimene. Her resentment is more genuine, and free from that hypocrisy which, at least in my judgment, renders the other almost odious and contemptible. Instead of imploring the condemnation of him she loves, it is as her own prisoner that she demands Sancho Ortiz, and this for the generous purpose of setting him at liberty. But the great superiority of the Spanish play is at the close. Chimene accepts the hand stained with her father’s blood, while Estrella sacrifices her own wishes to a sentiment which the manners of Spain, and we may add, the laws of natural decency required.
|His spiritual plays.|
15. The spiritual plays of Lope de Vega abound with as many incongruous and absurd circumstances as the mysteries of our forefathers. The Inquisition was politic enough to tolerate, though probably the sternness of Castilian orthodoxy could not approve, these strange representations which, after all, had the advantage of keeping the people in mind of the devil, and of the efficacy of holy water in chasing him away. But the regular theatre, according to Lord Holland, has always been forbidden in Spain by the church, nor do the kings frequent it.
|Numancia of Cervantes.|
16. Two tragedies by Bermudez, both on the story of Ines de Castro, are written on the ancient model, with a chorus, and much simplicity of fable. They are, it is said, in a few scenes impressive and pathetic, but interrupted by passages of flat and tedious monotony.[1256] Cervantes was the author of many dramatic pieces; some of which are so indifferent as to have been taken for intentional satires upon the bad taste of his times, so much of it do they display. One or two, however, of his comedies have obtained some praise from Schlegel and Bouterwek. But his tragedy of Numancia stands apart from his other dramas, and, as I conceive, from anything on the Spanish stage. It is probably one of his earlier works, but was published for the first time in 1784. It is a drama of extraordinary power, and may justify the opinion of Bouterwek that, in different circumstances, the author of Don Quixote might have been the Æschylus of Spain. If terror and pity are the inspiring powers of tragedy, few have been for the time more under their influence than Cervantes in his Numancia. The story of that devoted city, its long resistance to Rome, its exploits of victorious heroism, that foiled repeatedly the consular legions, are known to every one. Cervantes has opened his tragedy at the moment when Scipio Æmilianus, enclosing the city with a broad trench, determines to secure its reduction by famine. The siege lasted five months, when the Numantines, exhausted by hunger, but resolute never to yield, setting fire to a pile of their household goods, after slaying their women and children, cast themselves into the flame. Every circumstance that can enhance horror, the complaints of famished children, the desperation of mothers, the sinister omens of rejected sacrifice, the appalling incantations that reanimate a recent corpse to disclose the secrets of its prison-house, are accumulated with progressive force in this tremendous drama. The love-scenes of Morando and Lira, two young persons whose marriage had been frustrated by the public calamity, though some incline to censure them, contain nothing beyond poetical truth, and add, in my opinion, to its pathos, while they somewhat relieve its severity.
[1256] Bouterwek, 296.
17. Few, probably, would desire to read the Numancia a second time. But it ought to be remembered that the historical truth of this tragedy, though, as in the Ugolino of Dante, it augments the painfulness of the impression, is the legitimate apology of the author. Scenes of agony, and images of unspeakable sorrow, when idly accumulated by an inventor at his ease, as in many of our own older tragedies, and in much of modern fiction, give offence to a reader of just taste, from their needlessly trespassing upon his sensibility. But in that which excites an abhorrence of cruelty and oppression, or which, as the Numancia, commemorates ancestral fortitude, there is a moral power, for the sake of which the sufferings of sympathy must not be flinched from.
18. The Numancia is divided into four jornadas or acts, each containing changes of scene, as on our own stage. The metre, by a most extraordinary choice, is the regular octave stanza, ill-adapted as that is to the drama, intermixed with the favourite redondilla. The diction, though sometimes what would seem tame and diffuse to us, who are accustomed to a bolder and more figurative strain in tragedy than the southern nations require, rises often with the subject to nervous and impressive poetry. There are, however, a few sacrifices to the times. In a finely imagined prosopopœia, where Spain, crowned with towers, appears on the scene to ask the Duero what hope there could be for Numancia, the river-god, rising with his tributary streams around him, after bidding her despair of the city, goes into a tedious consolation, in which the triumphs of Charles and Philip are specifically, and with as much tameness as adulation, brought forward as her future recompense. A much worse passage occurs in the fourth act, where Lira, her brother lying dead of famine, and her lover of his wounds before her, implores death from a soldier who passes over the stage. He replies that some other hand must perform that office; he was born only to adore her.[1257] This frigid and absurd line, in such a play by such a poet, is an almost incredible proof of the mischief which the Provençal writers, with their hyperbolical gallantry, had done to European poetry. But it is just to observe that this is the only faulty passage, and that the language of the two lovers is simple, tender, and pathetic. The material accompaniments of representation on the Spanish theatre seem to have been full as defective as on our own. The Numancia is printed with stage directions, almost sufficient to provoke a smile in the midst of its withering horrors.
[1257] Otra mano, otro hierro ha da acabaros, Que yo solo naciò por adoraros.
|French theatre; Jodelle.|
19. The mysteries which had delighted the Parisians for a century and a half were suddenly forbidden by the parliament as indecent and profane in 1548. Four years only elapsed before they were replaced, though not on the same stage, by a different style of representation. Whatever obscure attempts at a regular dramatic composition may have been traced in France at an earlier period, Jodelle was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the true father of their theatre. His tragedy of Cleopatre, and his comedy of La Rencontre, were both represented for the first time before Henry II. in 1552. Another comedy, Eugene, and a tragedy on the story of Dido, were published about the same time. Pasquier, who tells us this, was himself a witness of the representation of the two former.[1258] The Cleopatre, according to Fontenelle, is very simple, without action or stage effect, full of long speeches, and with a chorus at the end of every act. The style is often low and ludicrous, which did not prevent this tragedy, the first-fruits of a theatre which was to produce Racine, from being received with vast applause. There is in reality, amidst these raptures that frequently attend an infant literature, something of an undefined presage of the future which should hinder us from thinking them quite ridiculous. The comedy of Eugene is in verse, and, in the judgment of Fontenelle, much superior to the tragedies of Jodelle. It has more action, a dialogue better conceived, and some traits of humour and nature. This play, however, is very immoral and licentious; and it may be remarked that some of its satire falls on the vices of the clergy.[1259]
[1258] Cette comedie, et la Cleopatre furent representées devant le roy Henri à Paris en l’Hostel de Rheims, avec un grand applaudissement de toute la compagnie: et depuis encore au college de Boncourt, ou toutes les fenestres estoient tapissées d’une infinité de personnages d’honneur, et la cour si pleine d’escoliers que les portes du college en regorgeoient. Je le dis comme celuy qui y estois present, avec le grand Tornebus en une mesme chambre. Et les entreparleurs estoient tous hommes de nom. Car même Remy Belleau et Jean de la Peruse jouoient les principaux roullets. Suard tells us, that the old troop of performers, the Confrères de la Passion, whose mysteries had been interdicted, availed themselves of an exclusive privilege granted to them by Charles VI. in 1400, to prevent the representation of the Cleopatre by public actors. Jodelle was therefore forced to have it performed by his friends. See Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 6. Fontenelle, Hist. du Theatre François (in Œuvres de Font. edit. 1776) vol. iii. p. 52. Beauchamps, Recherches sur les Theatres de France. Suard, Melanges de Literature, vol. iv. p. 59. The last writer, in what he calls Coup d’Œil sur l’Histoire de l’Ancien Theatre Français (in the same volume) has given an amusing and instructive sketch of the French drama down to Corneille.
[1259] Fontenelle, p. 61.
|Garnier.|
20. The Agamemnon of Toutain, published in 1557, is taken from Seneca, and several other pieces about the same time or soon afterwards, seem also to be translations.[1260] The Jules Cesar of Grevin was represented in 1560.[1261] It contains a few lines that La Harpe has extracted, as not without animation. But the first tragedian that deserves much notice after Jodelle was Robert Garnier, whose eight tragedies were collectively printed in 1580. They are chiefly taken from mythology or ancient history, and are evidently framed according to a standard of taste which has ever since prevailed on the French stage. But they retain some characteristics of the classical drama which were soon afterwards laid aside; the chorus is heard between every act, and a great portion of the events is related by messengers. Garnier makes little change in the stories he found in Seneca or Euripides; nor had love yet been thought essential to tragedy. Though his speeches are immeasurably long, and overladen with pompous epithets, though they have often much the air of bad imitations of Seneca’s manner, from whom probably, if any one should give himself the pains to make the comparison, some would be found to have been freely translated, we must acknowledge that in many of his couplets the reader perceives a more genuine tone of tragedy, and the germ of that artificial style which reached its perfection in far greater men than Garnier. In almost every line there is some fault, either against taste or the present rules of verse; yet there are many which a good poet would only have had to amend and polish. The account of Polyxena’s death in La Troade is very well translated from the Hecuba. But his best tragedy seems to be Les Juives, which is wholly his own, and displays no inconsiderable powers of poetical description. In this I am confirmed by Fontenelle, who says that this tragedy has many noble and touching passages; in which he has been aided by taking much from scripture, the natural sublimity of which cannot fail to produce an effect.[1262] We find, however, in Les Juives a good deal of that propensity to exhibit cruelty, by which the Italian and English theatres were at that time distinguished. Pasquier says, that every one gave the prize to Garnier above all who had preceded him, and after enumerating his eight plays, expresses his opinion that they would be admired by posterity.[1263]
[1260] Beauchamps. Suard.
[1261] Suard, p. 73. La Harpe, Cours de Literature. Grevin also wrote comedies which were very licentious, as those of the 16th century generally were in France and Italy, and were not in England, or, I believe, in Spain.
[1262] P. 71. Suard who dwells much longer on Garnier than either Fontenelle or La Harpe, observes, as I think, with justice: Les ouvrages de Garnier meritent de faire epoque dans l’histoire du theatre, non par la beauté de ses plans; il n’en faut chercher de bons dans aucune des tragedies du seizième siècle; mais les sentimens qu’il exprime sont nobles, son style a souvent de l’elevation sans enflure et beaucoup de sensibilité sa versification est facile et souvent harmonieuse. C’est lui qui a fixé d’une manière invariable la succession alternative des rimes masculines et feminines. Enfin c’est le premier des tragiques Français dont le lecture pût être utile à ceux qui voudraient suivre la même carriere; on a même pretendu que son Hyppolite avait beaucoup aidé Racine dans la composition de Phêdre. Mais s’il l’a aidé, c’est comme l’Hyppolite de Seneque, dont celui de Garnier n’est qu’une imitation, p. 81.
[1263] Ibid.
|Comedies of Larivey.|
21. We may consider the comedies of Larivey, published in 1579, as making a sort of epoch in the French drama. This writer, of whom little is known, but that he was a native of Champagne, prefers a claim to be the first who chose subjects for comedy from real life in France (forgetting in this those of Jodelle), and the first who wrote original dramas in prose. His comedies are six in number, to which three were added in a subsequent edition, which is very rare.[1264] These six are Le Laquais, La Veuve, Les Esprits, Le Morfondu, Les Jaloux, and Les Ecoliers. Some of them are partly borrowed from Plautus and Terence; and in general they belong to that school, presenting the usual characters of the Roman stage, with no great attempt at originality. But the dialogue is conducted with spirit; and in many scenes, especially in the play called Le Laquais, which, though the most free in all respects, appears to me the most comic and amusing, would remind any reader of the minor pieces of Molière, being conceived, though not entirely executed, with the same humour. All these comedies of Larivey are highly licentious both in their incidents and language. It is supposed in the Biographie Universelle that Molière and Regnard borrowed some ideas from Larivey; but both the instances alleged will be found in Plautus.
[1264] The first edition itself, I conceive, is not very common; for few writers within my knowledge have mentioned Larivey. Fontenelle, I think, could not have read his plays, or he would have give him a place in his brief sketch of the early French stage, as the father of comedy in prose. La Harpe was too superficial to know anything about him. Beauchamps, vol. ii. p. 68, acknowledges his pretensions, and he has a niche in the Biographie Universelle. Suard has also done him some justice.
|Theatres in Paris.|
22. No regular theatre was yet established in France. These plays of Garnier, Larivey, and others of that class, were represented either in colleges or in private houses. But the Confrères de la Passion, and another company, the Enfans de Sans Souci, whom they admitted into a participation of their privilege, used to act gross and stupid farces, which few respectable persons witnessed. After some unsuccessful attempts, two companies of regular actors appeared near the close of the century; one, in 1598, having purchased the exclusive right of the Confrères de la Passion, laid the foundations of the Comedie Française, so celebrated and so permanent; the other, in 1600, established by its permission a second theatre in the Marais. But the pieces they represented were still of a very low class.[1265]
[1265] Suard.
|English stage.|
|Gammar Gurton’s Needle.|
23. England at the commencement of this period could boast of little besides the scripture mysteries, already losing ground, but which have been traced down to the close of the century, and the more popular moral plays, which furnished abundant opportunities for satire on the times, for ludicrous humour, and for attacks on the old or the new religion. The latter, however, were kept in some restraint by the Tudor government. These moralities gradually drew nearer to regular comedies, and sometimes had nothing but an abstract name given to an individual, by which they could be even apparently distinguished from such. We have already mentioned Ralph Royster Doyster, written by Udal in the reign of Henry VIII., as the earliest English comedy in a proper sense, so far as our negative evidence warrants such a position. Mr. Collier has recovered four acts of another, called Misogonus, which he refers to the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.[1266] It is, like the former, a picture of London life. A more celebrated piece is Gammar Gurton’s Needle, commonly ascribed to John. Still, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells. No edition is known before 1575, but it seems to have been represented in Christ’s College at Cambridge, not far from the year 1565.[1267] It is impossible for anything to be meaner in subject and characters than this strange farce; but the author had some vein of humour, and writing neither for fame nor money, but to make light-hearted boys laugh, and to laugh with them, and that with as little grossness as the story would admit, is not to be judged with severe criticism. He comes however below Udal, and perhaps the writer of Misogonus. The Supposes of George Gascoyne, acted at Gray’s Inn in 1566, is but a translation in prose from the Suppositi of Ariosto. It seems to have been published in the same year.[1268]
[1266] Hist. of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 464.
[1267] Mr. Collier agrees with Malone in assigning this date, but it is merely conjectural, as one rather earlier might be chosen with equal probability. Still is said in the biographies to have been born in 1543; but this date seems to be too low. He became Margaret’s professor of divinity in 1570. Gammar Gurton’s Needle must have been written while the protestant establishment, if it existed, was very recent, for the parson is evidently a papist.
[1268] Warton, iv. 304. Collier, iii. 6. The original had been first published in prose, 1525, and from this Gascoyne took his translation, adopting some of the changes Ariosto had introduced when he turned it into verse; but he has invented little of his own. Ibid.
|Gorboduc of Sackville.|
24. But the progress of literature soon excited in one person an emulation of the ancient drama. Sackville has the honour of having led the way. His tragedy of Gorboduc was represented at Whitehall before Elizabeth in 1562.[1269] It is written in what was thought the classical style, like the Italian tragedies of the same age, but more inartificial and unimpassioned. The speeches are long and sententious; the action, though sufficiently full of incident, passes chiefly in narration; a chorus, but in the same blank verse measure as the rest, divides the acts; the unity of place seems to be preserved, but that of time is manifestly transgressed. The story of Gorboduc, which is borrowed from our fabulous British legends, is as full of slaughter as was then required for dramatic purposes; but the characters are clearly drawn and consistently sustained; the political maxims grave and profound; the language not glowing or passionate, but vigorous; and upon the whole it is evidently the work of a powerful mind, though in a less poetical mood than was displayed in the Induction to the Mirror of Magistrates. Sackville, it has been said, had the assistance of Norton in this tragedy; but Warton has decided against this supposition from internal evidence.[1270]
[1269] The 18th of January, 1561, to which date its representation is referred by Mr. Collier, seems to be 1562, according to the style of the age; and this tallies best with what is said in the edition of 1571, that it had been played about nine years before. See Warton, iv. 179.
[1270] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iv. 194. Mr. Collier supports the claim of Norton to the first three acts, which would much reduce Sackville’s glory, ii. 481. I incline to Warton’s opinion, grounded upon the identity of style, and the superiority of the whole tragedy to anything we can certainly ascribe to Norton, a coadjutor of Sternhold in the old version of the Psalms, and a contributor to the Mirror of Magistrates.
|Preference given to the irregular form.|
25. The regular form adopted in Gorboduc, though not wholly without imitators, seems to have had little success with the public.[1271] An action passing visibly on the stage, instead of a frigid narrative, a copious intermixture of comic buffoonery with the gravest story, were requisites with which no English audience would dispense. Thus Edwards treated the story of Damon and Pythias, which, though according to the notions of those times, it was too bloodless to be called a tragedy at all, belonged to the elevated class of dramatic compositions.[1272] Several other objects were taken from ancient history; this indeed became the usual source of the fable; but if we may judge from those few that have survived, they were all constructed on the model which the mysteries had accustomed our ancestors to admire.
[1271] The Jocasta of Gascoyne, translated with considerable freedom, in adding, omitting, and transposing, from the Phœnissæ of Euripides, was represented at Gray’s Inn in 1566. Warton, iv. 196. Collier, iii. 7. Gascoyne had the assistance of two obscure poets in this play.
[1272] Collier, iii. 2.
|First theatres.|
26. The office of Master of the Revels, in whose province it lay to regulate, among other amusements of the court, the dramatic shows of various kinds, was established in 1546. The inns of court vied with the royal palace in these representations, and Elizabeth sometimes honoured the former with her presence. On her visits to the universities, a play was a constant part of the entertainment. Fifty-two names, though nothing more, of dramas acted at court under the superintendence of the Master of the Revels, between 1568 and 1580, are preserved.[1273] In 1574 a patent was granted to the Earl of Leicester’s servants to act plays in any part of England, and in 1576 they erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It will be understood, that the servants of the Earl of Leicester were a company under his protection; as we apply the word, Her Majesty’s Servants, at this day, to the performers of Drury Lane.[1274]
[1273] Collier, i. 193, et post, iii. 24. Of these fifty-two plays eighteen were upon classical subjects, historical or fabulous, twenty-one taken from modern history or romance, seven may by their titles, which is a very fallible criterion, be comedies or farces from real life, and six may, by the same test, be moralities. It is possible, as Mr. C. observes, that some of these plays, though no longer extant in their integrity, may have formed the foundation of others; and the titles of a few in the list countenance this supposition.
[1274] See Mr. Collier’s excellent History of Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakspeare, vol. i., which having superseded the earlier works of Langbaine, Reid, and Hawkins, so far as this period is concerned, it is superfluous to quote them.
|Plays of Whetstone and others.|
27. As we come down towards 1580, a few more plays are extant. Among these may be mentioned the Promos and Cassandra of Whetstone, on the subject which Shakspeare, not without some retrospect to his predecessors, so much improved in Measure for Measure.[1275] But in these early dramas there is hardly anything to praise; or, if they please us at all, it is only by the broad humour of their comic scenes. There seems little reason, therefore, for regretting the loss of so many productions, which no one contemporary has thought worthy of commendation. Sir Philip Sydney, writing about 1583, treats our English stage with great disdain. His censures indeed fall chiefly on the neglect of the classical unities, and on the intermixture of kings with clowns.[1276] It is amusing to reflect, that this contemptuous reprehension of the English theatre (and he had spoken in as disparaging terms of our general poetry) came from the pen of Sydney, when Shakspeare had just arrived at manhood. Had he not been so prematurely cut off, what would have been the transports of that noble spirit, which the ballad of Chevy Chase could “stir as with the sound of a trumpet,” in reading the Faery Queen or Othello!
[1275] Promos and Cassandra is one of the Six Old Plays reprinted by Stevens. Shakspeare found in it not only the main story of Measure for Measure, which was far from new, and which he felicitously altered, by preserving the chastity of Isabella, but several of the minor circumstances and names, unless even these are to be found in the novels, from which all the dramatists ultimately derived their plot.
[1276] “Our tragedies and comedies, not without cause, are cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry;” and proceeds to ridicule their inconsistencies and disregard to time and place. Defence of Poesy.
|Marlowe and his contemporaries.|
|Tamburlaine.|
|Blank verse of Marlowe.|
28. A better æra commenced not long after, nearly coincident with the rapid development of genius in other departments of poetry. Several young men of talent appeared, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lily, Lodge, Kyd, Nash, the precursors of Shakspeare, and real founders, as they may in some respects be called, of the English drama. Sackville’s Gorboduc is in blank verse, though of bad and monotonous construction; but his followers wrote, as far as we know, either in rhyme or in prose.[1277] In the tragedy of Tamburlaine, referred by Mr. Collier to 1586, and the production wholly or principally, of Marlowe,[1278] a better kind of blank verse is first employed; the lines are interwoven, the occasional hemistich and redundant syllables break the monotony of the measure, and give more of a colloquial spirit to the dialogue. Tamburlaine was ridiculed on account of its inflated style. The bombast, however, which is not so excessive as has been alleged, was thought appropriate to such oriental tyrants. This play has more spirit and poetry than any which, upon clear grounds, can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification.[1279] If Marlowe did not re-establish blank verse, which is difficult to prove, he gave it at least a variety of cadence, and an easy adaptation of the rhythm to the sense, by which it instantly became in his hands the finest instrument that the tragic poet has ever employed for his purpose, less restricted than that of the Italians, and falling occasionally almost into numerous prose, lines of fourteen syllables being very common in all our old dramatists, but regular and harmonious at other times as the most accurate ear could require.
[1277] It may be a slight exception to this that some portions of the second part of Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra are in blank verse. This play is said never to have been represented. Collier, iii. 64.
[1278] Nash has been thought the author of Tamburlaine by Malone, and his inflated style, in pieces known to be his, may give some countenance to this hypothesis. It is mentioned, however, as “Marlowe’s Tamburlaine” in the contemporary diary of Henslow, a manager or proprietor of a theatre, which is preserved at Dulwich College. Marlowe and Nash are allowed to have written “Dido Queen of Carthage” in conjunction. Mr. Collier has produced a body of evidence to show that Tamburlaine was written, at least principally, by the former, which leaves no room, as it seems, for further doubt, vol. iii. p. 113.
[1279] Shakspeare having turned into ridicule a passage or two in Tamburlaine, the critics have concluded it to be a model of bad tragedy. Mr. Collier, iii. 115-126, has elaborately vindicated its dramatic merits, though sufficiently aware of its faults.
|Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,|
|and Faustus.|
29. The savage character of Tamburlaine, and the want of all interest as to every other, render this tragedy a failure in comparison with those which speedily followed from the pen of Christopher Marlowe. The first two acts of the Jew of Malta are more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare; and perhaps we may think that Barabas, though not the prototype of Shylock, a praise of which he is unworthy, may have suggested some few ideas to the inventor. But the latter acts, as is usual with our old dramatists, are a tissue of uninteresting crimes and slaughter.[1280] Faustus is better known; it contains nothing, perhaps, so dramatic as the first part of the Jew of Malta; yet the occasional glimpses of repentance and struggles of alarmed conscience in the chief character are finely brought in. It is full of poetical beauties; but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it on the whole rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting; and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own.[1281]
[1280] “Blood,” says a late witty writer, “is made as light of in some of these old dramas as _money_ in a modern sentimental comedy; and as _this_ is given away till it reminds us that it is nothing but counters, so _that_ is spilt till it affects us no more than its representative, the paint of the property-man in the theatre.” Lamb’s specimens of Early Dramatic Poets, i. 19.
[1281] The German story of Faust is said to have been published for the first time in 1587. It was rapidly translated into most languages of Europe. We need hardly name the absurd supposition, that Faust, the great printer, was intended.
|His Edward II.|
|Plays whence Henry Vl. was taken.|
30. Marlowe’s Life of Edward II. which was entered on the books of the Stationers’ Company in 1593, has been deemed by some the earliest specimen of the historical play founded upon English chronicles. Whether this be true or not, and probably it is not, it is certainly by far the best after those of Shakspeare.[1282] And it seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which Shakspeare remodelled in the second and third parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition.[1283] These plays claim certainly a very low rank among those of Shakspeare: his original portion is not inconsiderable; but it is fair to observe, that some of the passages most popular, such as the death of Cardinal Beaufort, and the last speech of the Duke of York, are not by his hand.
[1282] Collier observes that, “the character of Richard II. in Shakspeare seems modelled in no slight degree upon that of Edward II.” But I am reluctant to admit that Shakspeare modelled his _characters_ by those of others; and it is natural to ask whether there were not an extraordinary likeness in the dispositions as well as fortunes of the two kings.
[1283] These old plays were reprinted by Stevens in 1766. Malone, on a laborious comparison of them with the second and third parts of Henry VI., has ascertained that 1771 lines in the latter plays were taken from the former unaltered, 2373 altered by Shakspeare, while 1899 were altogether his own. It remains to inquire, who are to claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which has passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakspeare. The solution seems to be given, as well as we can expect, in a passage often quoted from Robert Greene’s Groat’sworth of Wit, published not long before his death in September 1592. “Yes,” says he, addressing himself to some one who has been conjectured to be Peele, but more probably Marlowe, “trust them (the players) not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tyger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only _Shakescene_ in a country.” An allusion is here manifest to the “tyger’s heart, wrapt in a woman’s hide,” which Shakspeare borrowed from the old play. The Contention of the Houses, and which is here introduced to hint the particular subject of plagiarism that prompts the complaint of Greene. The bitterness he displays must lead us to suspect that he had been one himself of those who were thus preyed upon. But the greater part of the plays in question is in the judgment, I conceive, of all competent critics, far above the powers either of Greene or Peele, and exhibits a much greater share of the spirited versification, called by Jonson the “mighty line,” of Christopher Marlowe. Malone, upon second thoughts, gave both these plays to Marlowe, having, in his dissertation on the three parts of Henry VI., assigned one to Greene, the other to Peele. None of the three parts have any resemblance to the manner of Peele.
|Peele.|
31. No one could think of disputing the superiority of Marlowe, to all his contemporaries of this early school of the English drama. He was killed in a tavern fray in 1593. There is more room for difference of tastes as to the second place. Mr. Campbell has bestowed high praises upon Peele. “His David and Bethsabe is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender: and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity [sic] and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare.”[1284] I must concur with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive. Peele has some command of imagery, but in every other quality it seems to me that he has scarce any claim to honour; and I doubt if there are three lines together in any of his plays that could be mistaken for Shakspeare’s. His Edward I. is a gross tissue of absurdity, with some facility of language, but nothing truly good. It has also the fault of grossly violating historic truth, in hideous misrepresentation of the virtuous Eleanor of Castile; probably from the base motive of rendering the Spanish nation odious to the vulgar. This play, which is founded on a ballad equally false, is referred to the year 1593. The versification of Peele is much inferior to that of Marlowe; and though sometimes poetical he seems rarely dramatic.
[1284] Specimens of English Poetry, i. 140. Hawkins says of three lines in Peele’s David and Bethsabe, that they contain a metaphor worthy of Æschylus:--
At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt; And his fair spouse with bright and fiery wings Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.
It may be rather Æschylean, yet I cannot much admire it. Peele seldom attempts such flights. “His genius was not boldly original; but he had an elegance of fancy, a gracefulness of expression, and a melody of versification which, in the earlier part of his career, was scarcely approached.” Collier, iii. 191.
|Greene.|
32. A third writer for the stage in this period is Robert Greene, whose “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay” may probably be placed about the year 1590. This comedy, though savouring a little of the old school, contains easy and spirited versification, superior to Peele, and though not so energetic as that of Marlowe, reminding us perhaps more frequently of Shakspeare.[1285] Greene succeeds pretty well in that florid and gay style, a little redundant in images, which Shakspeare frequently gives to his princes and courtiers, and which renders some unimpassioned scenes in the historic plays effective and brilliant. There is great talent shown, though upon a very strange canvas, in Greene’s “Looking-glass for London and England.” His angry allusion to Shakspeare’s plagiarism is best explained by supposing that he was himself concerned in the two old plays which have been converted into the second and third parts of Henry VI.[1286] In default of a more probable claimant, I have sometimes been inclined to assign the first part of Henry VI. to Greene. But those who are far more conversant with the style of our dramatists do not suggest this; and we are evidently ignorant of many names, which might have ranked not discreditably by the side of these tragedians. The first part, however, of Henry VI. is, in some passages, not unworthy of Shakspeare’s earlier days, nor, in my judgment, unlike his style; nor in fact do I know any one of his contemporaries who could have written the scene in the Temple Garden. The light touches of his pencil have ever been still more inimitable, if possible, than its more elaborate strokes.[1287]
[1285] “Green in facility of expression and in the flow of his blank verse is not to be placed below his contemporary Peele. His usual fault, more discoverable in his plays than in his poems, is an absence of simplicity; but his pedantic classical references, frequently without either taste or discretion, he had in common with the other scribbling scholars of the time. It was Shakspeare’s good fortune to be in a great degree without the knowledge, and therefore, if on no other account, without the defect.” Collier, iii. 153. Tieck gives him credit for “a happy talent, a clear spirit, and a lively imagination, which characterise all his writings.” Collier iii. 148.
[1286] Mr. Collier says, iii. 146, Greene may possibly have had a hand in the True History of Richard Duke of York. But why possibly? when he claims it, if not in express words, yet so as to leave no doubt of his meaning. See the note in p. 377.
In a poem written on Greene in 1594, are these lines:--
Green is the pleasing object of an eye; Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him: Green is the ground of every painter’s die; Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him: Nay more, the men that so eclipsed his fame, Purloined his plumes, can they deny the same?
This seems an allusion to Greene’s own metaphor, and must be taken for a covert attack on Shakspeare, who had by this time pretty well eclipsed the fame of Greene.
[1287] “These three gifted men (Peele, Greene, and Marlowe), says their late editor, Mr. Dyce (Peele’s Works, preface xxxv.), though they often present to us pictures that in design and colouring outrage the truth of nature, are the earliest of our tragic writers who exhibit any just delineation of the workings of passion; and their language, though now swelling into bombast, and now sinking into meanness, is generally rich with poetry, while their versification, though somewhat monotonous, is almost always flowing and harmonious. They as much excel their immediate predecessors as they are themselves excelled by Shakspeare.” Not quite as much.
|Other writers of this age.|
|Heywood’s Woman killed with Kindness.|
33. We can hardly afford time to dwell on several other writers anterior to Shakspeare. Kyd, whom Mr. Collier places, as a writer of blank verse, next to Marlowe,[1288] Lodge,[1289] Lily, Nash, Hughes, and a few more, have all some degree of merit. Nor do the anonymous tragedies, some of which were formerly ascribed to Shakspeare, and which even Schlegel, with less acuteness of criticism than is usual with him, has deemed genuine, always want a forcible delineation of passion, and a vigorous strain of verse, though not kept up for many lines. Among these are specimens of the domestic species of tragic drama, drawn probably from real occurrences, such as Arden of Feversham and the Yorkshire Tragedy, the former of which, especially, has very considerable merit. Its author, I believe has not been conjectured; but it may be referred to the last decade of the century.[1290] Another play of the same kind, A Woman killed with Kindness, bears the date of 1600, and is the earliest production of a fertile dramatist, Thomas Heywood. The language is not much raised above that of comedy, but we can hardly rank a tale of guilt, sorrow, and death, in that dramatic category. It may be read with interest and approbation at this day, being quite free from extravagance either in manner or language, the besetting sin of our earlier dramatists, and equally so from buffoonery. The subject resembles that of Kotzebue’s drama, the Stranger, but is managed with a nobler tone of morality. It is true that Mrs. Frankfort’s immediate surrender to her seducer, like that of Beaumelé in the Fatal Dowry, makes her contemptible; but this, though it might possibly have originated in the necessity created by the narrow limits of theatrical time, has the good effect of preventing that sympathy with her guilt, which is reserved for her penitence.
[1288] Collier, iii. 207. Kyd is author of Jeronymo, and of the “Spanish Tragedy,” a continuation of the same story. Shakspeare has selected some of their absurdities for ridicule, and has left an abundant harvest for the reader. Parts of the Spanish Tragedy, Mr. C. thinks, “are in the highest degree pathetic and interesting.” This perhaps may be admitted, but Kyd is not, upon the whole, a pleasing dramatist.
[1289] Lodge, one of the best poets of the age, was concerned, jointly with Greene, in the Looking Glass for London. In this strange performance the prophet Hosea is brought to Nineveh, and the dramatis personæ, as far as they are serious, belong to that city: but all the farcical part relates to London. Of Lodge Mr. C. says, that he is “second to Kyd in vigour and boldness of conception, but as a drawer of character, so essential a part of dramatic poetry, he unquestionably has the advantage,” iii. 214.
[1290] The murder of Arden of Feversham occurred under Edward VI., but the play was published in 1592. The impression made by the story must have been deep to produce a tragedy so long afterwards. It is said by Mr. Collier, that Professor Tieck has inclined to think Arden of Feversham a genuine work of Shakspeare. I cannot but venture to suspect that, if this distinguished critic were a native, he would discern such differences of style, as render this hypothesis improbable. The speeches in Arden of Feversham have spirit and feeling, but there is none of that wit, that fertility of analogical imagery, which the worst plays of Shakspeare display. The language is also more plain and perspicuous than we ever find in him, especially on a subject so full of passion. Mr. Collier discerns the hand of Shakspeare in the Yorkshire Tragedy, and thinks that “there are some speeches which could scarcely have proceeded from any other pen,” Collier, iii. 51. It was printed with his name in 1608; but this, which would be thought good evidence in most cases, must not be held sufficient. It is impossible to explain the grounds of internal persuasion in these nice questions of æsthetic criticism, but I cannot perceive the hand of Shakspeare in any of the anonymous tragedies.
|William Shakspeare.|
34. Of William Shakspeare,[1291] whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested; he is Falstaff, and Mercutio, and Malvolio, and Jaques, and Portia, and Imogen, and Lear, and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakspeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of “the blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle,” an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakspeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us, than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary can be produced.
[1291] Though I shall not innovate in a work of this kind, not particularly relating to Shakspeare, I must observe, that Sir Frederic Madden has offered very specious reasons (in the Archæologia, vol. xxvi.), for believing that the poet and his family spelt their name _Shakspere_, and that there are, at least, no exceptions in his own autographs, as has commonly been supposed. A copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne, a book which he had certainly read (see Malone’s note on Tempest, act ii. scene 1), has been lately discovered with the name _W. Shakspere_ clearly written in it, and there seems no reason to doubt that it is a genuine signature. This book has, very properly, been placed in the British Museum, among the choice κειμηλια [keimêlia] of that repository.
|His first writings for the stage.|
35. It is generally supposed that he settled in London about 1587, being then twenty-three years old. For some time afterwards we cannot trace him distinctly. Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, he describes in his dedication to Lord Southampton, as “the first heir of his invention.” It is however certain that it must have been written some years before, unless we take these words in a peculiar sense, for Greene, in his Groat’sworth of Wit, 1592, alludes, as we have seen, to Shakspeare as already known among dramatic authors. It appears by this passage, that he had converted the two plays on the wars of York and Lancaster into what we read as the second and third parts of Henry VI. What share he may have had in similar repairs of the many plays then represented, cannot be determined. It is generally believed that he had much to do with the tragedy of Pericles, which is now printed among his works, and which external testimony, though we should not rely too much on that as to Shakspeare, has assigned to him; but the play is full of evident marks of an inferior hand.[1292] Its date is unknown; Drake supposes it to have been his earliest work, rather from its inferiority than on any other ground. Titus Andronicus is now by common consent denied to be, in any sense, a production of Shakspeare; very few passages, I should think not one, resemble his manner.[1293]
[1292] Malone, in a dissertation on the tragedy of Pericles, maintained that it was altogether an early work of Shakspeare. Stevens contended that it was a production of some older poet, improved by him; and Malone had the candour to own that he had been wrong. The opinion of Stevens is now general. Drake gives the last three acts, and part of the former, to Shakspeare; but I can hardly think his share is by any means so large.
[1293] Notwithstanding this internal evidence, Meres, so early as 1598, enumerates Titus Andronicus among the plays of Shakspeare, and mentions no other but what is genuine. Drake, ii. 287. But, in criticism of all kinds, we must acquire a dogged habit of resisting testimony, when _res ipsa per se vociferatur_ to the contrary.
|Comedy of Errors.|
36. The Comedy of Errors may be presumed by an allusion it contains to have been written before the submission of Paris to Henry IV. in 1594, which nearly put an end to the civil war.[1294] It is founded on a very popular subject. This furnishes two extant comedies of Plautus, a translation from one of which, the Menœchmi, was represented in Italy earlier than any other play. It had been already, as Mr. Collier thinks, brought upon the stage in England; and another play, later than the Comedy of Errors, has been reprinted by Stevens. Shakspeare himself was so well pleased with the idea that he has returned to it in Twelfth Night. Notwithstanding the opportunity which these mistakes of identity furnish for ludicrous situations and for carrying on a complex plot, they are not very well adapted to dramatic effect, not only from the manifest difficulty of finding performers quite alike, but because, were this overcome, the audience must be in as great embarrassment as the represented characters themselves. In the Comedy of Errors there are only a few passages of a poetical vein, yet such perhaps as no other living dramatist could have written; but the story is well invented and well managed; the confusion of persons does not cease to amuse; the dialogue is easy and gay beyond what had been hitherto heard on the stage; there is little buffoonery in the wit, and no absurdity in the circumstances.
[1294] Act iii. scene 2. Some have judged the play from this passage to be as early as 1591, but on precarious grounds.
|Two Gentlemen of Verona.|
37. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ranks above the Comedy of Errors, though still in the third class of Shakspeare’s plays. It was probably the first English comedy in which characters are drawn from social life, at once ideal and true; the cavaliers of Verona and their lady-loves are graceful personages, with no transgression of the probabilities of nature; but they are not exactly the real men and women of the same rank in England. The imagination of Shakspeare must have been guided by some familiarity with romances before it struck out this play. It contains some very poetical lines. Though these two plays could not give the slightest suspicion of the depth of thought which Lear and Macbeth were to display, it was already evident that the names of Greene, and even Marlowe, would be eclipsed without any necessity for purloining their plumes.
|Love’s Labour Lost.|
|Taming of the Shrew.|
38. Love’s Labour Lost is generally placed, I believe, at the bottom of the list. There is indeed little interest in the fable, if we can say that there is any fable at all; but there are beautiful coruscations of fancy, more original conception of character than in the Comedy of Errors, more lively humour than in the Gentlemen of Verona, more symptoms of Shakspeare’s future powers as a comic writer than in either. Much that is here but imperfectly developed came forth again in his later plays, especially in As you Like it, and Much Ado about Nothing. The Taming of the Shrew is the only play, except Henry VI., in which Shakspeare has been very largely a borrower. The best parts are certainly his, but it must be confessed, that several passages, for which we give him credit, and which are very amusing, belong to his unknown predecessor. The original play, reprinted by Stevens, was published in 1594.[1295] I do not find so much genius in the Taming of the Shrew as in Love’s Labour Lost; but, as an entire play, it is much more complete.
[1295] Mr. Collier thinks that Shakspeare had nothing to do with any of the scenes where Katherine and Petruchio are not introduced. The underplot resembles, he says, the style of Haughton, author of a comedy called Englishmen for my Money, iii. 78.
|Midsummer Night’s Dream.|
39. The beautiful play of Midsummer Night’s Dream is placed by Malone as early as 1592; its superiority to those we have already mentioned affords some presumption that it was written after them. But it evidently belongs to the earlier period of Shakspeare’s genius; poetical as we account it, more than dramatic, yet rather so, because the indescribable profusion of imaginative poetry in this play overpowers our senses till we can hardly observe anything else, than from any deficiency of dramatic excellence. For in reality the structure of the fable, consisting as it does of three if not four actions, very distinct in their subjects and personages, yet wrought into each other without effort or confusion, displays the skill, or rather instinctive felicity of Shakspeare, as much as in any play he has written. No preceding dramatist had attempted to fabricate a complex plot, for low comic scenes, interspersed with a serious action upon which they have no influence, do not merit notice. The Menœchmi of Plautus had been imitated by others as well as by Shakspeare; but we speak here of original invention.
|Its machinery.|
40. The Midsummer Night’s Dream is, I believe, altogether original in one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet, the fairy machinery. A few before him had dealt in a vulgar and clumsy manner with popular superstitions; but the sportive, beneficent, invisible population of the air and earth, long since established in the creed of childhood, and of those simple as children, had never for a moment been blended with “human mortals” among the personages of the drama. Lily’s Maid’s Metamorphosis is probably later than this play of Shakspeare, and was not published till 1600.[1296] It is unnecessary to observe that the fairies of Spenser, as he has dealt with them, are wholly of a different race.
[1296] Collier, iii. 185. Lily had, however, brought fairies, without making them speak, into some of his earlier plays. Ibid.
|Its language.|
41. The language of Midsummer Night’s Dream is equally novel with the machinery. It sparkles in perpetual brightness with all the hues of the rainbow; yet there is nothing overcharged or affectedly ornamented. Perhaps no play of Shakspeare has fewer blemishes, or is from beginning to end in so perfect keeping; none in which so few lines could be erased, or so few expressions blamed. His own peculiar idiom, the dress of his mind, which began to be discernible in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, is more frequently manifested in the present play. The expression is seldom obscure, but it is never in poetry, and hardly in prose, the expression of other dramatists, and far less of the people. And here, without reviving the debated question of Shakspeare’s learning, I must venture to think, that he possessed rather more acquaintance with the Latin language than many believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, except in the sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unaccountable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream, these are much less frequent than in his later dramas. But here we find several instances. Thus, “things base and vile, holding no _quantity_,” for value; rivers, that “have overborn their _continents_,” the _continente ripa_ of Horace; “_compact_ of imagination;” “something of great _constancy_,” for consistency; “sweet Pyramus _translated_ there;” “the law of Athens, which by no means we may _extenuate_.” I have considerable doubts whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth’s reign, which was less overrun by pedantry than that of her successor; but, could authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one, who did not understand their proper meaning, would have introduced them into poetry. It would be a weak answer that we do not detect in Shakspeare any imitations of the Latin poets. His knowledge of the language may have been chiefly derived, like that of schoolboys, from the dictionary, and insufficient for the thorough appreciation of their beauties. But, if we should believe him well acquainted with Virgil or Ovid, it would be by no means surprising that his learning does not display itself in imitation. Shakspeare seems now and then to have a tinge on his imagination from former passages; but he never designedly imitates, though, as we have seen, he has sometimes adopted. The streams of invention flowed too fast from his own mind to leave him time to accommodate the words of a foreign language to our own. He knew that to create would be easier, and pleasanter, and better.[1297]
[1297] The celebrated essay by Farmer on the learning of Shakspeare, put an end to such notions as we find in Warburton and many of the older commentators, that he had imitated Sophocles, and I know not how many Greek authors. Those indeed who agree with what I have said in a former chapter as to the state of learning under Elizabeth, will not think it probable that Shakspeare could have acquired any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of such education as he received. The case of Latin is different: we know that he was at a grammar school, and could hardly have spent two or three years there without bringing away a certain portion of the language.
|Romeo and Juliet.|
42. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is referred by Malone to the year 1596. Were I to judge by internal evidence, I should be inclined to date this play before the Midsummer Night’s Dream; the great frequency of rhymes, the comparative absence of Latinisms, the want of that thoughtful philosophy, which, when it had once germinated in Shakspeare’s mind, never ceased to display itself, and several of the faults that juvenility may best explain and excuse, would justify this inference.
|Its plot.|
43. In one of the Italian novels to which Shakspeare had frequently recourse for his fable, he had the good fortune to meet with this simple and pathetic subject. What he found he has arranged with great skill. The incidents in Romeo and Juliet are rapid, various, unintermitting in interest, sufficiently probable, and tending to the catastrophe. The most regular dramatist has hardly excelled one writing for an infant and barbarian stage. It is certain that the observation of the unity of time, which we find in this tragedy, unfashionable as the name of unity has become in our criticism, gives an intenseness of interest to the story, which is often diluted and dispersed in a dramatic history. No play of Shakspeare is more frequently represented, or honoured with more tears.
|Its beauties and blemishes.|
44. If from this praise of the fable we pass to other considerations, it will be more necessary to modify our eulogies. It has been said above of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, that none of Shakspeare’s plays have fewer blemishes. We can by no means repeat this commendation of Romeo and Juliet. It may be said rather that few, if any, are more open to reasonable censure; and we are almost equally struck by its excellencies and its defects.
45. Madame de Stael has truly remarked, that in Romeo and Juliet we have, more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love, in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm. The contrast between this impetuosity of delirious joy, in which the youthful lovers are first displayed, and the horrors of the last scene, throws a charm of deep melancholy over the whole. Once alone each of them, in these earlier moments, is touched by a presaging fear; it passes quickly away from them, but is not lost on the reader. To him there is a sound of despair in the wild effusions of their hope, and the madness of grief is mingled with the intoxication of their joy. And hence it is that, notwithstanding its many blemishes, we all read and witness this tragedy with delight. It is a symbolic mirror of the fearful realities of life, where “the course of true love,” has so often “not run smooth,” and moments of as fond illusion as beguiled the lovers of Verona have been exchanged, perhaps as rapidly, not indeed for the dagger and the bowl, but for the many-headed sorrows and sufferings of humanity.
|The characters.|
46. The character of Romeo is one of excessive tenderness. His first passion for Rosaline, which no vulgar poet would have brought forward, serves to display a constitutional susceptibility. There is indeed so much of this in his deportment and language, that we might be in some danger of mistaking it for effeminacy, if the loss of his friend had not aroused his courage. It seems to have been necessary to keep down a little the other characters, that they might not overpower the principal one; and though we can by no means agree with Dryden, that if Shakspeare had not killed Mercutio, Mercutio would have killed him, there might have been some danger of his killing Romeo. His brilliant vivacity shows the softness of the other a little to a disadvantage. Juliet is a child, whose intoxication in loving and being loved whirls away the little reason she may have possessed. It is however impossible, in my opinion, to place her among the great female characters of Shakspeare’s creation.
|The language.|
47. Of the language of this tragedy what shall we say? It contains passages that every one remembers, that are among the nobler efforts of Shakspeare’s poetry, and many short and beautiful touches of his proverbial sweetness. Yet, on the other hand, the faults are in prodigious number. The conceits, the phrases that jar on the mind’s ear, if I may use such an expression, and interfere with the very emotion the poet would excite, occur at least in the first three acts without intermission. It seems to have formed part of his conception of this youthful and ardent pair, that they should talk irrationally. The extravagance of their fancy, however, not only forgets reason, but wastes itself in frigid metaphors and incongruous conceptions; the tone of Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being one degree more mad. The voice of virgin love has been counterfeited by the authors of many fictions: I know none who have thought the style of Juliet would represent it. Nor is this confined to the happier moments of their intercourse. False thoughts and misplaced phrases deform the whole of the third act. It may be added that, if not dramatic propriety, at least the interest of the character, is affected by some of Juliet’s allusions. She seems indeed to have profited by the lessons and language of her venerable guardian; and those who adopt the edifying principle of deducing a moral from all they read, may suppose that Shakspeare intended covertly to warn parents against the contaminating influence of such domestics. These censures apply chiefly to the first three acts; as the shadows deepen over the scene, the language assumes a tone more proportionate to the interest; many speeches are exquisitely beautiful; yet the tendency to quibbles is never wholly eradicated.
|Second period of Shakspeare.|
48. The plays we have hitherto mentioned, to which one or two more might be added, belong to the earlier class, or, as we might say, to his first manner. In the second period of his dramatic life, we should place his historical plays, and such others as were written before the end of the century or perhaps before the death of Elizabeth. The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Much Ado about Nothing, are among these. The versification in these is more studied, the pauses more artificially disposed, the rhymes, though not quite abandoned, become less frequent, the language is more vigorous and elevated, the principal characters are more strongly marked, more distinctly conceived, and framed on a deeper insight into mankind. Nothing in the earlier plays can be compared, in this respect, with the two Richards, or Shylock, or Falstaff, or Hotspur.
|The historical plays.|
49. Many attempts had been made to dramatise the English chronicles, but with the single exception of Marlowe’s Edward II., so unsuccessfully, that Shakspeare may be considered as almost an original occupant of the field. He followed historical truth with considerable exactness; and, in some of his plays, as in that of Richard II., and generally in Richard III. and Henry VIII., admitted no imaginary personages, nor any scenes of amusement. The historical plays have had a great effect on Shakspeare’s popularity. They have identified him with English feelings in English hearts, and are very frequently read more in childhood, and consequently better remembered than some of his superior dramas. And these dramatic chronicles borrowed surprising liveliness and probability from the national character and form of government. A prince, and a courtier, and a slave are the stuff on which the historic dramatist would have to work in some countries; but every class of freemen, in the just subordination, without which neither human society, nor the stage, which should be its mirror, can be more than a chaos of huddled units, lay open to the selection of Shakspeare. What he invented is as truly English, as truly historical, in the large sense of moral history, as what he read.
|Merchant of Venice.|
50. The Merchant of Venice is generally esteemed the best of Shakspeare’s comedies. This excellent play is referred to the year 1597.[1298] In the management of the plot, which is sufficiently complex without the slightest confusion or incoherence, I do not conceive that it has been surpassed in the annals of any theatre. Yet there are those who still affect to speak of Shakspeare as a barbarian; and others who, giving what they think due credit to his genius, deny him all judgment and dramatic taste. A comparison of his works with those of his contemporaries, and it is surely to them that we should look, will prove that his judgment is by no means the least of his rare qualities. This is not so remarkable in the mere construction of his fable, though the present comedy is absolutely perfect in that point of view, and several others are excellently managed, as in the general keeping of the characters, and the choice of incidents. If Shakspeare is sometimes extravagant, the Marstons and Middletons are seldom otherwise. The variety of characters in the Merchant of Venice, and the powerful delineation of those upon whom the interest chiefly depends, the effectiveness of many scenes in representation, the copiousness of the wit, and the beauty of the language, it would be superfluous to extol; nor is it our office to repeat a tale so often told as the praise of Shakspeare. In the language there is the commencement of a metaphysical obscurity which soon became characteristic; but it is perhaps less observable than in any later play.
[1298] Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury, 1598, has a passage of some value in determining the age of Shakspeare’s plays, both by what it contains, and by what it omits. “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Won [the original appellation of All’s Well that Ends Well], his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II., his Richard III., Henry IV., King John, _Titus Andronicus_, and his Romeo and Juliet.” Drake, ii. 287.
|As You Like It.|
51. The sweet and sportive temper of Shakspeare, though it never deserted him, gave way to advancing years, and to the mastering force of serious thought. What he read we know but very imperfectly; yet, in the last years of this century, when five and thirty summers had ripened his genius, it seems that he must have transfused much of the wisdom of past ages into his own all-combining mind. In several of the historical plays, in the Merchant of Venice, and especially in As You Like It, the philosophic eye, turned inward on the mysteries of human nature, is more and more characteristic; and we might apply to the last comedy the bold figure that Coleridge has less appropriately employed as to the early poems, that “the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace.” In no other play, at least, do we find the bright imagination and fascinating grace of Shakspeare’s youth so mingled with the thoughtfulness of his maturer age. This play is referred with reasonable probability to the year 1600. Few comedies of Shakspeare are more generally pleasing, and its manifold improbabilities do not much affect us in perusal. The brave injured Orlando, the sprightly but modest Rosalind, the faithful Adam, the reflecting Jaques, the serene and magnanimous Duke, interest us by turns, though the play is not so well managed as to condense our sympathy, and direct it to the conclusion.
|Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour.|
52. The comic scenes of Shakspeare had generally been drawn from novels, and laid in foreign lands. But several of our earliest plays, as has been partly seen, delineate the prevailing manners of English life. None had acquired a reputation which endured beyond their own time till Ben Jonson in 1596 produced, at the age of twenty-two, his first comedy, Every Man in His Humour; an extraordinary monument of early genius, in what is seldom the possession of youth, a clear and unerring description of human character, various, and not extravagant beyond the necessities of the stage. He had learned the principles of comedy no doubt, from Plautus and Terence; for they were not to be derived from the moderns at home or abroad; but he could not draw from them the application of living passions and manners; and it would be no less unfair, as Gifford has justly observed, to make Bobadil a copy of Thraso, than to deny the dramatic originality of Kitely.
53. Every Man in his Humour is perhaps the earliest of European domestic comedies that deserves to be remembered; for the Mandragola of Machiavel shrinks to a mere farce in comparison.[1299] A much greater master of comic powers than Jonson was indeed his contemporary, and, as he perhaps fancied, his rival; but for some reason, Shakspeare had never yet drawn his story from the domestic life of his countrymen. Jonson avoided the common defect of the Italian and Spanish theatre, the sacrifice of all other dramatic objects to one only, a rapid and amusing succession of incidents; his plot is slight and of no great complexity; but his excellence is to be found in the variety of his characters, and in their individuality very clearly defined with little extravagance.
[1299] This would not have been approved by a modern literary historian. Quelle etait, avant que Molière parût et même de son temps, la comedie moderne comparable à la Calandria, à la Mandragore, aux meilleures pieces de l’Arioste, à celles de l’Aretin, du Cecchi, du Lasca, du Bentivoglio, de Francesco d’Ambra, et de tant d’Autres? Ginguéné, vi. 316. This comes of deciding before we know anything of the facts. Ginguéné might possibly be able to read English, but certainly had no sort of acquaintance with the English theatre. I should have no hesitation in replying that we could produce at least forty comedies, before the age of Molière, superior to the best of those he has mentioned, and perhaps three times that number as good as the worst.