Chapter 3

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case of _A Winter's Tale_, where the musical obsession is less prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts "When daffodils begin to peer" and "Lawn as white as driven snow" into one bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as "two nonsensical songs" sung by "a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed to think that such "nonsense" could be foisted on Shakespeare's text. Strange that those learned men were unable to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden sentimentality, like the Clown's

"Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown!"

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tenderness that the firm hand of the creator of character reveals itself.

But it is in _The Tempest_ that Shakespeare's supremacy as a writer of songs is most brilliantly developed. Here are seven or eight lyrics, and among them are some of the loveliest things that any man has written. What was ever composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately fairy-like than Ariel's First Song?

"Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd,-- The wild waves whist."

That is, not "kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctuators pretend, but, parenthetically, "kissed one another,--the wild waves being silent the while." Even fairies do not kiss waves, than which no embrace could be conceived less rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowe here, from _Hero and Leander_,

"when all is whist and still, Save that the sea playing on yellow sand Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land!"

But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written the lyrical parts of _The Tempest_. This song is in emotional sympathy with Ferdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic, not a piece of pretty verse foisted in to add to the entertainment.

Ariel's Second Song has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in _The White Devil_, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's Fourth Song,--"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginative genius of English poetry, recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance at Dry den's recension of _The Tempest_ we may be inclined to think that the "wicked dam" soon won back her mastery. With all respect to Dryden, what are we to think of his discretion in eking out Shakespeare's insufficiencies with such staves as this:--

"Upon the floods we'll sing and play And celebrate a halcyon day; Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise, Muzzle your roaring boys."

and so forth? What had happened to the ear of England in seventy years?

As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song scarcely survived Shakespeare himself. The early Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker in particular, broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But most playwrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The only man who came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist was John Fletcher, whose "Lay a garland on my hearse" nobody could challenge if it were found printed first in a Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in "Valentinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shakespeare's, though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing spontaneity of "Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark, hark, the lark." It has grown to be the habit of anthologists to assert Shakespeare's right to "Roses, their sharp spikes being gone." The mere fact of its loveliness and perfection gives them no authority to do so; and to my ear the rather stately procession of syllables is reminiscent of Fletcher. We shall never be certain; and who would not swear that "Hear, ye ladies that are coy" was by the same hand that wrote "Sigh no more, ladies," if we were not sure of the contrary? But the most effective test, even in the case of Fletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is, or is not, an inherent portion of the dramatic structure of the play. This is the hall-mark of Shakespeare, and perhaps of him alone.

CATHARINE TROTTER,

THE PRECURSOR OF THE BLUESTOCKINGS

The practically complete absence of the Woman of Letters from our tropical and profuse literature of the early and middle seventeenth century has often been observed with wonder. While France had her Madeleine de Scudery and her Mlle. de Gournay and her Mere Angelique Arnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon no incursions into philosophy, fiction, or theology. More and more eagerly, however, they read books; and as a consequence of reading, they began at last to write. The precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. Behn died in 1689, and it seemed at first that she had left no heritage to her sex. But there presently appeared a set of female writers, who enlivened the last years of the century, but who were soon eclipsed by the wits of the age of Anne, and who have been entirely forgotten. It is to the most interesting of these "transient phantoms" that I wish to draw attention.

The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her seem to belong to the age of Dryden, but she was in reality younger than Addison and most of the other contemporaries of Pope. She was born on August 16th, 1679, the younger daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R.N.; her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballenden, probably of the well-known Catholic family of that ilk. She "had the honour of being nearly related to the illustrious families of Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale and Drummond, Earl of Perth." The Jacobite fourth Earl of Perth seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom he wrote in 1684 that he was "an ornament to his country." Apparently the gallant captain was attached to Trinity House, where his probity and integrity earned him the epithet of "honest David," and where he attracted the notice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising statesman was appointed Master. Captain Trotter had served the Crown from his youth, "with great gallantry and fidelity, both by land and sea," and had been very successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a commander in the Navy. We get an impression of high respectability in the outer, but not outermost, circles of influential Scottish society. Doubtless the infancy of Catharine was spent in conditions of dependent prosperity. These conditions were not to last. When she was four years old Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition to demolish Tangier, and he took Captain Trotter with him as his commodore. In this affair, as before, the captain distinguished himself by his ability, and instead of returning to London after Tangier he was recommended to King Charles II. as the proper person to convoy the fleet of the Turkey Company to its destination. Apparently it was understood that this would be the final reward of his services and that he was to "make his fortune" out of the Turks. Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely to Scanderoon, he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died, in the course of January 1684, in company with all the other officers of his ship. Every misfortune now ensued; the purser, who was thus left to his own devices, helped himself to the money destined for the expenses of the voyage, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose hands the captain had left his private fortune took this occasion to go bankrupt. The King, in these melancholy circumstances, granted an Admiralty pension to the widow, but when he died early in the following year this was no longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotter family might well murmur:--

"One mischief brings another on his neck, As mighty billows tumble in the seas."

From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine experienced the precarious lot of those who depend for a livelihood on the charity of more or less distant relatives. We dimly see a presentable mother piteously gathering up such crumbs as fell from the tables of the illustrious families with whom she was remotely connected. But the Duke of Lauderdale himself was now dead, and the Earl of Perth had passed the zenith of his power. No doubt in the seventeenth century the protection of poor relations was carried on more systematically than it is to-day, and certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her two daughters genteelly. The first years were the worst; the accession of William III. brought back to England and to favour Gilbert Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old. Mrs. Trotter found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop, and when Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension was renewed.

There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's writings, and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts were finally wrecked. With a competency she might have achieved a much more prominent place in English literature than she could ever afford to reach. She offers a curious instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and we get the impression that she was never, during her long and virtuous career, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the imagination. As a child, however, she seems to have awakened hopes of a high order. She was a prodigy, and while little more than an infant she displayed an illumination in literature which was looked upon, in that age of female darkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French, "by her own application without any instructor," but was obliged to accept some assistance in acquiring Latin and logic. The last-mentioned subject became her particular delight, and at a very tender age she drew up "an abstract" of that science "for her own use." Thus she prepared for her future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church of England, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with the conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but as events turned out it cannot but have added to the sorrows of that much-tried woman, her mother. (It should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican faith when she was twenty-eight years of age.)

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of James II. came to a close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were now in a poor plight. The new Earl of Lauderdale was in great distress for money; Lord Dartmouth, abandoned by the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he died on October 25th, 1691, in which year the estates of the Earl of Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted out of the country. Ruin simultaneously fell on all the fine friends of our infant prodigy, and we can but guess how it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other Jacobites left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance shows that she cultivated their friendship. She published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox; she was then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a young man of twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agreeable manners, and who had just made a name for himself by poems addressed to Dryden and by a prologue to Congreve's _Old Batchelor_. He was afterwards to become famous for a little while as a political historian. Catharine Trotter's verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as "lovely youth," and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms which are almost boisterous. This poem was not only her introduction to the public, but, through Bevil Higgons, was probably the channel of her acquaintance with Congreve and Dryden.

Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to celebrated people; she now certainly wrote to Congreve and doubtless to Dryden. A freedom in correspondence ran in the family. Her poor mother is revealed to us as always "renewing her application" to somebody or other. We next find the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of Dorset, from whom she must have concealed her Jacobite propensities. Dorset was the great public patron of poetry under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged sixteen, having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It was very graciously granted, and _Agnes de Castro_, in five acts and in blank verse, "written by a young lady," was produced at the Theatre Royal in 1695, under the "protection" of Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event caused a considerable commotion. No woman had written for the English stage since the death of Mrs. Behn, and curiosity was much excited. Mrs. Verbruggen, that enchanting actress, but in male attire, recited a clever, ranting epilogue at the close of the performance, in which she said:--

"'tis whispered here Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair,"

but the secret was an open one. Wycherley, who contributed verses, knew all about it, and so did Mrs. Manley, while Powell and Colley Cibber were among the actors. We may be sure that little Mistress Trotter's surprising talents were the subjects of much discussion at Will's Coffee House, and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre was anxiously debated at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her success in Agnes de Castro was the principal asset which Drury Lane had to set that season against Congreve's splendid adventure with Love for Love.

Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years before.[2] The conception of court life at Coimbra in the fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is innocent of Portuguese local colour. But, as the dramatic work of a girl of sixteen, the play is rather extraordinary for nimble movement and adroit theatrical arrangements. It is evident that Catharine Trotter was well versed in the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonder how a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her opportunity. The English playhouse under William III. was no place for a very young lady, even if she wore a mask. There is a good deal of meritorious character-drawing in Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent and tenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the fierce purity of Agnes and the infatuation of the Prince. Towards the close of the first act there is a capital scene of exquisite confusion between this generous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at all an unpromising one.

Early in 1696 _Agnes de Castro_, still anonymous, was published as a book, and for the next five or six years we find Catharine Trotter habitually occupied in writing for the stage. Without question she did so professionally, though in what way dramatists at the close of the seventeenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. A very rare play, _The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets_, the authorship of which has hitherto defied conjecture, was acted at Drury Lane after Catharine Trotter had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which smouldered between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were Mrs. Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite of Barbara Villiers, and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage-struck consort of a tailor. These rather ridiculous women professed themselves followers of Catharine, and they produced plays of their own not without some success. With her they formed the trio of Female Wits who were mocked in the lively but, on the whole, rather disappointing play I have just mentioned, in the course of which it is spitefully remarked of Calista--who is Miss Trotter--that she has "made no small struggle in the world to get into print," and is "now in such a state of wedlock to pen and ink that it will be very difficult" for her "to get out of it."

In acting _The Female Wits_ Mrs. Temple, who had played the Princess in _Agnes de Castro_, took the part of Calista, and doubtless, in the coarse fashion of those days, made up exactly like poor Catharine Trotter, who was described as "a Lady who pretends to the learned Languages, and assumes to herself the name of a Critic." This was a character, however, which she would not have protested against with much vigour, for she had now quite definitely taken up the position of a reformer and a pioneer. She posed as the champion of women's intellectual rights, and she was accepted as representing in active literary work the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed in her remarkable _Serious Proposal to Ladies_ of 1694. We turn again to _The Female Wits_, and we find Marsilia (Mrs. Manley) describing Calista to Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Fix) as "the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing! She pretends to grammar! writes in mood and figure! does everything methodically!" Yet when Calista appears on the stage, Mrs. Manley rushes across to fling her arms around her and to murmur: "O charmingest Nymph of all Apollo's Train, let me embrace thee!" Later on Calista says to Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, "I cannot but remind you, Madam ... I read Aristotle in his own language"; and of a certain tirade in a play of Ben Jonson she insists: "I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into Latin." Mrs. Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she "can go no further than the eight parts of speech." This brings down upon her an icy reproof from Calista: "Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say ... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that loose theatre of William III.

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their peculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her tragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is all begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day were violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women.

"You as your Sex's champion art come forth To fight their quarrel and assert their worth,"

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:--

"You stand the first of stage-reformers too."

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of our bluestocking. _Fatal Friendship_ enjoyed a success which Catharine Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a _She-Gallants_, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her plays to be. _Fatal Friendship_ has an ingenious plot, in which the question of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia, sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), is wooed by the wealthy Roquelaure, although she is secretly married to Gramont, who is also too poor to support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades him--in order that his best friend, Castalio, may be released from a debtor's prison--bigamously to many Lamira, a wealthy widow. But Castalio is in love with Lamira, and is driven to frenzy by Gramont's illegal marriage. It all depends upon income in a manner comically untragical. The quarrel between the friends in the fifth act is an effective piece of stage-craft, but the action is spoiled by a ridiculous general butchery at the close of all. However, the audience was charmed, and even "the stubbornest could scarce deny their Tears."

_Fatal Friendship_ was played at the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, and no doubt it was Congreve who brought Miss Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm friendship for her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her success and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which the great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratulations of his young admirer, and it breathes an eager cordiality. Congreve requested Betterton to present him to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for her company is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of _The Female Wits_ insinuates that Congreve made the looking-over of Catharine's scenes "his pretence for daily visits." Another satirist, in 1698, describes Congreve sitting very gravely with his hat over his eyes, "together with the two she-things called Poetesses which write for his house," half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar, too, seeing the celebrated writer of _Fatal Friendship_ in the theatre on the third night of the performance of his _Love and a Bottle_, had "his passions wrought so high" by a sight of the beautiful author that he wrote her a letter in which he called her "one of the fairest of the sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as the cynosure of delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through _Love and a Bottle_ without a blush, even _her_ standard of decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough, coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered a rebuff.