Part 10

If it were not for the fact that _The Supposes_ (acted 1566) is a translation of Ariosto's play of the same title, I should be inclined to say that it was the first English comedy in every way worthy of the name. It certainly is, for many reasons, entitled to be called the first comedy in the English tongue. It is written, not for children, nor to educate, but for grown-ups and solely to delight. It is done into English, not for the vulgar, but for the more advanced taste of the translator's own Inn of Court; it has, therefore, qualities to captivate those who are capable of appreciating high comedy. It is composed, like its original, in straightforward, sparkling prose. It has, also, the rarest features of the fusion drama: it combines character and situation, each depending upon the other; it combines wit of intellect with humour of heart and fact, intricate and varied plot with motive and steady movement, comic but not farcical incident and language with complications surprising, serious, and only not hopelessly embarrassing. It conducts a romantic intrigue in a realistic fashion through a world of actualities. With the blood of the New Comedy, the Latin Comedy, the Renaissance in its veins, it is far ahead of its English contemporaries, if not of its time. Without historical apology or artistic concessions it would act well to-day. Both whimsical and grave, its ironies are _pro bono publico_; it is constructive as well as critical, imaginative as well as actual. Indeed, when one compares Gascoigne's work with the original and observes the just liberties that he has taken, the Englishing of sentiment as well as of phrase, one is tempted to say, with Tom Nashe, that in comedy, as in other fields, this writer first "beat a path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his departure." He did not contrive the plot; but no dramatist before him had selected for his audience, translated, and adapted a play so amusing and varied in interest, so graceful, simple, and idiomatic in its style. It was said by R. T., in 1615, that Gascoigne was one of those who first "brake the ice for our quainter poets who now write, that they may more safely swim through the main ocean of sweet poesy"--a remark which would lose much of its force if restricted to the poet's achievements in satire alone; in the drama of the humanists he excelled his contemporaries, and in the romantic comedy of intrigue he anticipated those who, like Greene and Shakespeare,[84] adapted the Italian plot to English manners and the English taste. Nor are these the only claims of Gascoigne to consideration: _The Supposes_, as Professor Herford has justly remarked, is the most Jonsonian of English comedies before Jonson.

=12. Survivals of the Moral Interlude=

Though we must refrain from description, we cannot forbear mention of a few survivals of the moral interlude, which, though themselves rudimentary, were not without esteem even in an age when the drama, by combination and adaptation of its possibilities, was producing other results infinitely superior to the older strain. These functionless survivals of the moral were the following, all controversial: _Newe Custome_, an anti-papist play, perhaps written as early as 1550-53; _Albyon Knight_, a political fragment acted between 1560 and 1565; _Kyng Daryus_, a peculiarly insipid disputation, evidently anti-papist, printed in 1565; and _The Conflict of Conscience_, a doctrinal drama by Nathaniel Woodes, Minister in Norwich, which presents a mixture of individual and even historical characters with abstractions, stands midway between the allegorical interlude and the drama of concrete experience, displays a commendable realism in spots, and is a more virile production than the others of this group. It was not published till 1581, but was probably written soon after 1563.

Of the decadent stock of morals and interludes, there were, however, some specimens between the years 1553 and 1578 that exhibited an advance in quality, if not in kind. Three of these, _The Longer thou Livest_, _All for Money_, and _Tide Taryeth no Man_, Mr. Fleay[85] lumps together as simple instances of the survival of the older 'morality' after the introduction of tragedy and comedy on the models of Seneca and Plautus, and makes the further statement that none of them teaches us anything as to the historical development of the drama in England. With the utmost respect for the knowledge of this most helpful historian, I must say that, as a matter of judgment, none of these dramas, least of all, _Longer thou Livest_, should be classed with the moral plays of mere survival. While the authors of these and similar specimens did not produce a new kind, they did more than repeat the old. They revived and enriched the moral interlude by infusion of new strains, and so produced, by culture, a most interesting group of what may be called variations of the moral. To this class of morals belong also the _Triall of Treasure_, _Like wil to Like_, and the _Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene_. It must be said also that a few moral tragedies of the period, like R. B.'s _Apius and Virginia_ (about 1563, pr. 1575), and Preston's _King Cambises_ (S. R. 1569-70), have some claim to belong to this group, and that if there were space they should receive attention for their vital dramatic quality and their development of the character of the Vice. The Hap-hazard of the former, far from being, as Dr. Ward has said, "redundant to the action," suggests the "conspiracies" which Apius adopts, and is the heart of rascality and fun; he is consequently a Vice of the old type; but he is also the representative (in accordance with his name and express profession) of the caprice of the individual and the irony of fortune. He is the Vice, efficient for evil, but in process of evolution into the inclination or humour of a somewhat later period of dramatic history: the inclination not immoral but unmoral, the artistic impersonation of comic extravagance, in accordance with which Every Man is in his Vice, and every Vice is but a Humour. The Ambidexter of the latter tragedy plays "with both hands finely" in the main action, and at the same time serves to provoke the jocosity of those admirably concrete ruffians, Huf, Ruf, and Snuf, and of the clown of the play. The _Horestes_, written by John Pikerynge in 1567, must, although a tragedy, also be mentioned here.[86] The Vice under his dual designation of Corage and Revenge is of the weathervane variety; and in realistic and humorous qualities the play closely resembles the preceding two. They were a noble but futile effort to bottle the juices of tragedy, classical-historical at that, in the leathers of moral interlude.

=13. The Movement towards Romantic Comedy=

We may now proceed with the main current of comedy. Between 1570 and 1590 the best plays are coloured by a distinctively romantic element; and this is noticeable, not only in the productions of the greater authors, Lyly, Peele, Greene, and the like, elsewhere discussed in this volume, but in those of minor writers too frequently ignored. As I have already said, the romantic in life appears to spring from a desire to assert one's independence and realize the possibilities of the resulting freedom. "Our pent wills fret And would the world subdue." But since the conditions of life are largely opposed to the complete fulfilment of our desires, it is the privilege and function of romance, and of romantic comedy according to its kind, to idealize the stubborn facts--the "limits we did not set" in favour of our ecstatic but still human urgency. This privilege the comedy of romance exercises sometimes with an eye to nature and probability, and sometimes with some respect for imaginative possibility, but quite frequently with no other guide than mere caprice. The subjects of such comedy may be briefly summarized as passion, heroism, and wonder. Of these the first is manifest in examples of ideal friendship, its devotion and self-sacrifice; and a play of such nature we have already considered in the _Damon and Pithias_. It also yields the furnishings of love, the resulting obstacles, and the issue; and a play of this kind we have considered in _The Supposes_, which is a domestic comedy of intrigue. Of heroism the possibilities are suggested by the words travel, adventure, chivalry, war, conquest; those of wonder are as various as the chances of birth, wealth and fortune, pomp and power, myth and fable: they are fostered by that which is remote, preternatural, supernatural.

To the romance of wonder, saints' plays, legends, and biblical stories had purveyed from early times. From 1570 on the narrative of chivalry and adventure, of which shadowy lineaments had already appeared in one or two miracle plays and in the interludes of Wit and Science, began to gather to itself kindred elements of romantic interest, and to occupy the stage with such plays as _Common Conditions_, written perhaps between 1572 and 1576, and _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, written perhaps as early,--dramas of love, fable, and adventure, absolutely free from didactic purpose. At the same time still another variety of romantic comedy, unhampered by the trammels of instructive intent, but dealing essentially in domestic intrigue, kept alive the method of _The Supposes_. This variety was represented by _The Bugbears_, between 1561 and 1584, and _The Two Italian Gentlemen_ (S. R. 1584), which, based upon Italian models, availed themselves on the one hand of a burlesque parody of the magical, and on the other of genuine English mirth. The latter indeed added something of the 'humours' element soon to be exploited by Porter, Chapman, and Jonson. Beside these dramas, there sprang into notice a certain half-moral, half-romantic kind of play which, availing itself of the mould of the interlude, fused therein the materials of the chivalrous, the magical, and the passionate, and produced certain anomalous comedies of great popularity between the year 1580 and the end of the century. The best of these "pleasant and stately morals" are: _The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_, _The Three Ladies of London_, _The Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London_.

While Collier thinks that, in point of positive dramatic interest, the _Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune_ requires but brief notice, Dr. Ward holds that the beginnings of romantic comedy were foreshadowed by the play.[87] It is, in fact, both dramatically and historically, one of the most important productions of its date. It was printed in 1589, but played, perhaps, as early as 1582. Mr. Fleay has assigned it to Kyd, but I do not see sufficient reason for the attribution; if we must find an author for it, Robert Wilson's claims might be urged. The _Rare Triumphs_ affords an excellent instance of the fusion of moral and romance. In the Induction, Love and Fortune dispute concerning their respective influence in the affairs of mankind. By mutual agreement the _debat_ seeks its solution in a practical demonstration of the issues involved. And so we find our intellectual as well as emotional interest enlisted in the chances of an Italian story of love, adventure, and magic. Within a moral interlude of classical and mythological origin we discover a romantic comedy. The influence of the supernatural not merely envelops, but permeates the whole; the Acts present the destinies of the mortals of the inner play, the inter-acts the continued intervention of the immortals of the outer. The spectacular effect is, moreover, heightened by the introduction of dumb shows, after the fashion of the masque. In dramatic interest proper few romantic fables of 1582 can compare with the inner story: the love of Hermione for Fidelia, the duel between Hermione and Fidelia's brother, the exile of the lover and his retirement to the cave of his unknown father, the hermit Bomelio; Bomelio's attempt to right matters by magic, the destruction of his necromantic books, his madness, his recovery, and the resolution of difficulties through the instrumentality of the heroine. Such a fable is anything but silly and meagre, as Collier would have it, especially when we consider its conjunction with the humorous and vivid. In the outer play the clown is Vulcan, at whose call Jupiter mediates, "like an honest man in the parish," between the disputatious goddesses. In the inner play Penulo the parasite and Lentulo the clown, though neither of them a Vice, supply the comic delectations of the rôle. The disguise of Bomelio as physician, his dialect, his misfortune and raving, are excellently contrived and conducted. In at least half a dozen particulars one may detect æsthetic possibilities later to be matured in more than one Shakespearian play: foreshadowings of plot and principal actors, as in _The Tempest_; foreshadowings of minor characters like Dr. Caius, or like the Francis of _1 Henry IV_. The play is, in brief, refreshing; the humour, substantial and English; the language, conversational, dramatic, sometimes in prose and then excellent. The versification, however, is of that stiffer quality which warrants Mr. Fleay's conjecture of 1582, or thereabout, as the date of composition.

The attempt to enliven the "old moral" by an infusion of passion and intrigue, and to parade it in the trappings of romance, across the background of contemporary English life and manners, is what distinguishes Robert Wilson's "right excellent and famous Comœdy called the _Three Ladies of London_," printed 1584, and its sequel, _The Pleasant and Stately Morall of the Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London_, registered in 1588. Of these plays, the latter trades in pomp and chivalry; the earlier in something like the motives of romantic interest. "The acuteness and political subtlety evinced in several of the scenes of the _Three Ladies_" have been justly commended by Collier, who points with careful attention also to "the severity of the author's satirical touch, his amusing illustrations of manners, his exposure of the tricks of foreign merchants, and the humour and drollery which he has thrown into his principal comic personage." This is Simplicity, the fool or clown, droll, indifferent, honest, and by no means so simple as he appears: a descendant of the historical Will Summer, a forerunner of the Dogberrys and Malaprops, and the elder brother of an Honesty of another play, _A Knack to Know a Knave_, in which the same author probably had a hand. Standing over against three belated specimens of the Vice, Simplicity unites the shrewdness, manners, and humour of that personage--but in superior quality--with the prudence, the penetration, and the conception of honour peculiar to the professional jester. He also plays a vital part in the main action, and is worthy to be regarded as one of the best clowns, if not the best, in the history of the moral interlude. His forthright utterances in the _Three Ladies_ and his easy and witty prose in the sequel mark him for a model likely to have influenced the younger dramatists of the day. The minor plot-interest of the honest Jew, Gerontus, the rascally Christian, Mercatore, and the Judge, is significant, not only as the reverse of the conception dramatized in the _Jew of Malta_ and the _Merchant of Venice_, but as, with one exception, the earliest elaboration of the motif that was to become prominent in the drama of the next few years. Qualities romantic and real invest the career of the three Ladies; and the characterization of the numerous minor personages is both subtle and suitable to their different classes and interests.

Although the _Three Lordes and Ladies_, one of the earliest sequels in the history of English drama, is "more of a moral" than its predecessor and makes no improvement in plot-structure, it is of importance fully equal. For what it lacks in passion and romance is more than counterbalanced by technical qualities--the blank verse, the fluent prose, the wit of Simplicity and the pages, the scenic display, the variety of incidents, and the portrayal of manners. If we consider the definite transition from abstractions to social and individual traits of character in this play and the preceding,--the multi-fold impersonation of worldly wisdom, fraud, and shoddy, one might say the resolution of the rôle of Vice into its component specialties; the corresponding offset of all these by ensamples of virtuous living, but still human; and the attendant _troupe_ of more obvious 'humours,' Simplicity and the pages, Painful Penury, Diligence, and the rest,--it will be evident that these plays of Robert Wilson are the merging of moral interlude in romantic and social comedy. On this account I cannot agree with Dr. Ward,[88] who says that in construction and conception they mark no advance whatever upon the older moralities. I think they mark a significant advance. In them the moral has arrived at a consciousness of the demands of art; and, attempting to fulfil its possibilities, it acquires body, spirit, and _bouquet_, even though, in the moment of fermentation, it bursts the bottle. Still we must remember that we have now reached a date, 1588-90, by which much of the best work of Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, and Greene had already been produced, and we must, therefore, not attribute to Wilson an importance greater than that of an industrious and inventive contemporary, hospitable to ideas, but essentially conservative in practice. He is at once "father of interludes," as interludes then were regarded, and an intermediary between the interlude of moral abstractions and the comedy of humours. He appears, also, to have played so lively a part in the dramatic history of his day that Mr. Fleay is justified in calling this period by his name; and, therefore, a few further words concerning him and other plays which he seems to have written might well be said here, but we must reserve them for another occasion.

=14. Conclusion=

With but one or two exceptions the plays which we have so far passed in review fail in some respect or other of the plot that makes a comedy. A plot that is argumentative, that is a ratiocination or _exemplum_ conducted by abstractions, is not sufficient to constitute comedy, though it may contribute to its development a unity of interest, a spiritual sequence; nor are sporadic situations and incidents sufficient, though humorously conceived and executed; nor glimpses of types, characters or manners, nor hints of passion, nor satiric speeches and dialogues, though artistically dramatized, true, appropriate, and witty. None of these constitutes comedy. Comedy demands action vitalized by a plot that is capable of revealing the social significance of the individual: an action of sufficient scope and reality to display the spirit of society in individual types and manners, or in character and sentiment; a plot sufficiently urgent to interest us, not only in the phenomena, in the concomitants, of every deed, but in its motive and inherent passion. The comedy of external life may present, by means of typical individuals and conventional manners, a reflex of that which is actual, or a criticism of it; and such a play will be realistic or satirical. The comedy of the inner life, on the other hand, since it reveals the characteristics of humanity in the heat and moment of passion, may present a vision of the ideal made concrete; it is therefore at once interpretative, constructive, and romantic. These two kinds of comedy are alike in that they display the triumph of freedom when regulated by common sense, the adjustment of the individual to society. But as they vary in function and result, so these kinds of comedy differ in the quality of action which each may present. The play of convention and manners can use only the externals of action, actions that neither strike deep nor spring from the depths, for such a play aims to reproduce appearances or merely to re-create them--to criticise and correct rather than construct. The play of character and passion, not the so-called realistic, but idealistic, selects for presentation actions whose springs are in the inner life; and that is because it would present men and women as they should be,--individuals widening the social, pressing toward the ideal, not by overstepping that which is conventional, but by informing it with new meaning and pushing back its limits. Comedy, therefore, is in the plot, and the plot must proceed from the wisdom essential to a comic view of life: acceptance of the social environment as it appears to be, because one believes in society as it should be. The dramatist, his plot and his characters, are the exponents of common sense and freedom, of the light of life as it is with the sweetness of life as it may be. Common sense, however, may become prosaic, or liberty licentious; and it is in preventing such extremes that wit and humour perform their function. Neither of these can alone make a comedy, but one of them may sometimes save it. Both should certainly characterize it. But for the former, the drama of appearances might be caricature, abuse, horse-play, or homily; but for the latter, romantic comedy would be bathos. No amount of wit, however, could save a play that did not possess a significant sequence of material and event. Though the booths of Bartholomew Fair agitate the diaphragm, they do not constitute comedy. Without plot the lunges of wit lack point; and as for the plotless play of passion, it ends in Bedlam, whence all the humour in the world cannot redeem it.

It was a step forward when allegory made way for concrete characters and manners, and the motives born of social intercourse; a further step when the dramatist ceased instructing and sought to amuse. But the final step implied the still rarer ability to create something integral and critical in one, something that should act what life means, and so unconsciously demonstrate that it is purposive, and more hopeful and amusing than we thought. Naturally enough, our earlier comic plots, when they were escaping from the symbolic, lacked sometimes in significance, and sometimes in sequence. The fables of _Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton_ mark an advance in technical construction; but they do not escape the farcical, for their subjects are trivial. There were likewise many experiments to be made in the materials of intrigue and passion before _Damon and Pithias_ and _The Supposes_ could fulfil, even in part, the requirements of significant romance. And when, at last, the play with a plot had come to its own, it was long before it attained wisdom to suffuse the appearances of life with their illuminating characteristic, and imagination to colour the course of characteristic events.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In _The Academy_, January 11, 1890.

[2] Manly, _Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_, vol. I., p. xxvii; for examples of dramatic tropes from the _Regularis Concordia Monachorum_ and the Winchester troper, see pp. xix-xxvi.

[3] _Non novo quidem instituto, sed de consuetudine_, etc., says _Bulæus, Hist. Univ., Par._ II., 226 (edit. 1665); Collier, _English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals of the Stage_, I. 14.

[4] In his _Lives of the Abbots of St. Albans_.

[5] In the _Household Book_, Henry VII.; Collier, _Hist._, vol. I, p. 53 n.

[6] _Gesch. des neueren Dramas_, I. 141.

[7] See Wright's _Early Mysteries_, etc., Klein's _Geschichte des Dramas_, III. 638 _et seq._, Creizenach, _Gesch. d. n. Dramas_, I. 37 _et seq._ Quadrio speaks in his _Storia_, III. ii. 52, of a Pietro Babyone, an Englishman, who, according to Bale, wrote a Latin comedy in verse, _c._ 1366.

[8] Ward, I. 52.

[9] Creizenach, I. 101.

[10] Historians of the Church of York, Rolls Series, No. 71, i. 328. Quoted by A. F. Leach in _Some English Plays and Players_, Furnivall Miscellany, p. 206.