Part 13

It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing, “To this antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity . . . laying its chief stress on humility.” Milton had a zeal for righteousness, a noble purity and noble pride. But if you look for saintly humility, for the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit of charity and forgiveness, look for them in the Anglican Herbert, not in the Puritan Milton. Humility was no fruit of the system which Calvin begot and which begot John Knox. The Puritans were great invokers of the sword of the Lord and of Gideon—the sword of Gideon and the dagger of Ehud. There went a sword out of Milton’s mouth against the enemies of Israel, a sword of threatenings, the wrath of God upon the ungodly. The temper of his controversial writings is little short of ferocious. There was not much in him of that “sweet reasonableness” which Matthew Arnold thought the distinctive mark of Christian ethics. He was devout, but not with the Christian devoutness. I would not call him a Christian at all, except, of course, in his formal adherence to the creed of Christianity. Very significant is the inferiority of “Paradise Regained” to “Paradise Lost.” And in “Paradise Lost” itself, how weak and faint is the character of the Saviour! You feel that he is superfluous, that the poet did not need him. He is simply the second person of the Trinity, the executive arm of the Godhead; and Milton is at pains to invent things for him to do—to drive the rebellious angels out of heaven, to preside over the six days’ work of creation, etc. I believe it was Thomas Davidson who said that in “Paradise Lost” “Christ is God’s good boy.”

We are therefore not unprepared to discover, from Milton’s “Treatise of Christian Doctrine,” that he had laid aside the dogma of vicarious sacrifice and was, in his last years, a Unitarian. It was this Latin treatise, translated and published in 1824, which called out Macaulay’s essay, so urbanely demolished by Matthew Arnold, and which was triumphantly reviewed by Dr. Channing in the _North American_. It was lucky for Dr. Channing, by the way, that he lived in the nineteenth century and not in the seventeenth. Two Socinians, Leggatt and Wightman, were burned at the stake as late as James the First’s reign, one at Lichfield and the other at Smithfield.

Milton, then, does not belong with those broadly human, all tolerant, impartial artists, who reflect, with equal sympathy and infinite curiosity, every phase of life: with Shakespeare and Goethe or, on a lower level, with Chaucer and Montaigne; but with the intense, austere and lofty souls whose narrowness is likewise their strength. His place is beside Dante, the Catholic Puritan.

[7] Mr. Charles Francis Adams informs me that a letter of inquiry sent by him to the _Evening Post_ has brought out three or four references to Milton in the “Magnalia,” besides other allusions to him in the publications of the period. Mr. Adams adds, however, that there is nothing to show that “Paradise Lost” was much read in New England prior to 1750. The “Magnalia” was published in 1702.

SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES

THE one contribution of the Elizabethan stage to the literature of the world is the plays of Shakespeare. It seems unaccountable to us to-day that the almost infinite superiority of his work to that of all his contemporaries was not recognized in his own lifetime. There is frequent mention in the literature of his time, of “the excellent dramatic writer, Master Wm. Shakespeare” and usually in the way of praise, but in the same category with other excellent dramatic writers, like Jonson, Chapman, Webster, and Beaumont, and with no apparent suspicion that he is in a quite different class from these, and forms indeed a class by himself—is _sui generis_. In explanation of this blindness it should be said, first that time is required to give the proper perspective to literary values, and secondly that there is an absence of critical documents from the Elizabethan period. There were no reviews or book notices or literary biographies. A man in high place who was incidentally an author, a great philosopher and statesman like Bacon, a diplomatist and scholar like Sir Henry Wotton, a bishop or a learned divine, like Sanderson, Donne or Herbert, might be thought worthy to have his life recorded. But a mere man of letters—still more a mere playwriter—was not entitled to a biography. Nowadays every writer of fair pretensions has his literary portrait in the magazines. His work is criticized, assayed, analyzed; and as soon as he is dead, his life and letters appear in two volumes. We do not know what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought of him, except for a few complimentary verses, and a few brief notices scattered through the miscellaneous books and pamphlets of the time; and these in no wise characterize or distinguish him, or set him apart from the crowd of fellow playwrights, from among whom he has since so thoroughly emerged. Aside from the almost universal verdict of posterity that Shakespeare is one of the greatest, if not actually the greatest literary genius of all time, there are two testimonies to his continued vitality. One of these is the fact that his plays have never ceased to be played. At least twenty of his plays still belong to the acted drama. Several of the others, less popular, are revived from time to time. We do not often have a chance in England or America to see “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Measure for Measure,” or “Richard II”—all pieces of the highest intellectual interest—to see them behind the footlights. But all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays are given annually in Germany. Indeed, the Germans claim to have appropriated Shakespeare and to have made him their own.

Now the only seventeenth century play outside of Shakespeare which still keeps the stage is Massinger’s comedy, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” This has frequently been given in America, with artists like Edwin Booth and E. L. Davenport in the leading rôle, Sir Giles Overreach. A number of the plays of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and perhaps other Elizabethan dramatists continued to be played down to the middle of the eighteenth century, and a few of them as late as 1788. Fletcher’s comedy, “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,” was acted in 1829; and Dekker’s “Old Fortunatus”[8] enjoyed a run of twelve performances in 1819. But these were sporadic revivals. Professor Gayley concludes that of the two hundred and fifty comedies, exclusive of Shakespeare’s, produced between 1600 and 1625, “only twenty-six survived upon the stage in the middle of the eighteenth century: in 1825, five; and after 1850, but one,—‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts,’—while at the present-day no fewer than sixteen out of Shakespeare’s seventeen comedies are fixtures upon the stage.” Now and then a favorite Elizabethan play like Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” or Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” or Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” is presented by amateurs before a college audience or a dramatic club, or some other semi-private bunch of spectators. Middleton’s “Spanish Gipsy” was thus presented in 1898 before the Elizabethan Stage Society and was rather roughly handled by the newspaper critics. But these are literary curiosities and mean something very different from the retention of a play on the repertoire of the professional public theatres. It is a case of revival, not of survival.

But even if Shakespeare’s plays should cease to be shown,—a thing by no means impossible, since theatrical conditions change,—they would never cease to be read. Already he has a hundred readers for one spectator. And one proof of this eternity of fame is the extent to which his language has taken possession of the English tongue. In Bartlett’s “Dictionary of Quotations” there are over one hundred and twenty pages of citations from Shakespeare, including hundreds of expressions which are in daily use and are as familiar as household words. These include not merely maxims and sentences universally current, such as “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “The course of true love never did run smooth,” “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” but detached phrases: “wise saws and modern instances,” “a woman’s reason,” “the sere, the yellow leaf,” “damnable iteration,” “sighing like a furnace,” “the funeral baked meats,” “the primrose path of dalliance,” “a bright, particular star,” “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,” “the bubble reputation,” “Richard’s himself again,” “Such stuff as dreams are made on.” There is only one other book—the English Bible—which has so wrought itself into the very tissue of our speech. This is not true of the work of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists. I cannot, at the moment, recall any words of theirs that have this stamp of universal currency except Christopher Marlowe’s “Love me little, so you love me long.” Coleridge prophesied that the works of the other Elizabethan playwrights would in time be reduced to notes on Shakespeare: i.e., they would be used simply to illustrate or explain difficult passages in Shakespeare’s text. This is an extreme statement and I cannot believe it true. For the dramas of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, and many others will never lack readers, though they will find them not among general readers, but among scholars, men of letters, and those persons, not so very few in number, who have a strong appetite for plays of all kinds. Moreover, vast as is the distance between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, historically he was one of them. The stage was his occasion, his opportunity. Without the Elizabethan theatre there would have been no Shakespeare. Let us seek to get some idea, then, of what this Elizabethan drama was, which formed the Shakespearean background and environment. Of course, in the short space at my disposal, I cannot take up individual authors, still less individual plays. I shall have to give a very general outline of the matter as a whole.

What is loosely called the Elizabethan drama, consists of the plays written, performed, or printed in England between the accession of the queen in 1558 and the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament at the breaking out of the civil war in 1642. But if we are looking for work of literary and artistic value, we need hardly go back of 1576, the date of the building of the first London playhouse. This was soon followed by others and by the formation of permanent stock companies. Heretofore there had been bands of strolling players, under the patronage of various noblemen, exhibiting sometimes at court, sometimes in innyards, bear-baiting houses, and cockpits, and even in churches. Plays of an academic character both in Latin and English had also been performed at the universities and the inns of court. But now the drama had obtained a local habitation and a certain professional independence. Actors and playwriters could make a living—some of them, indeed, like Burbage, Alleyn, and Shakespeare made a very substantial living, or even became rich and endowed colleges (Dulwich College, e.g.). One Henslow, an owner and manager, had at one time three theatres going and a long list of dramatic authors on his payroll; was, in short, a kind of Elizabethan theatrical syndicate, and from Henslow’s diary we learn most of what we know about the business side of the old drama. In those days London was a walled town of not more than 125,000 inhabitants. As five theatre companies, and sometimes seven, counting the children of Paul’s and of the Queen’s Chapel, were all playing at the same time, a public of that size was fairly well served. You have doubtless read descriptions, or seen pictures, of these old playhouses, The Theatre, The Curtain, The Rose, The Swan, The Fortune, The Globe, The Belle Savage, The Red Bull, The Black Friars. They varied somewhat in details of structure and arrangement, and some points about them are still uncertain, but their general features are well ascertained. They were built commonly outside the walls, at Shoreditch or on the Bankside across the Thames, in order to be outside the jurisdiction of the mayor and council, who were mostly Puritan and were continually trying to stop the show business. They were of wood, octagonal on the outside, circular on the inside, with two or three tiers of galleries, partitioned off in boxes. The stage and the galleries were roofed, but the pit, or yard, was unroofed and unpaved; the ordinary, twopenny spectators unaccommodated with seats but _standing_ on the bare ground and being liable to a wetting if it rained. The most curious feature of the old playhouse to a modern reader is the stage. This was not, as in our theatres, a recessed or picture frame stage, but a platform stage, which projected boldly out into the auditorium. The “groundlings” or yard spectators, surrounded it on three sides, and it was about on a level with their shoulders. The building specifications for The Swan playhouse called for an auditorium fifty-five feet across, the stage to be twenty-seven feet in depth, so that it reached halfway across the pit, and was entirely open on three sides. At the rear of the stage was a traverse, or draw curtain, with an alcove, or small inner stage behind it, and a balcony overhead. There was little or no scenery, but properties of various kinds were in use, chairs, beds, tables, etc. When it is added to this that shilling spectators were allowed to sit upon the stage, where for an extra sixpence they were accommodated with stools, and could send the pages for pipes and tobacco, and that from this vantage ground they could jeer at the actors, and exchange jokes and sometimes missiles, like nuts or apples, with the common people in the pit, why, it becomes almost incomprehensible to the modern mind how the players managed to carry on the action at all; and fairly marvellous how under such rude conditions, the noble blank verse declamations and delicate graces of romantic poetry with which the old dramas abound could have got past. A modern audience will hardly stand poetry, or anything, in fact, but brisk action and rapid dialogue. Cut out the soliloquies, cut out the reflections and the descriptions. Elizabethan plays are stuffed with full-length descriptions of scenes and places: Dover Cliff; the apothecary’s shop where Romeo bought the poison; the brook in which Ophelia drowned herself; the forest spring where Philaster found Bellario weeping and playing with wild flowers. In this way they make up for the want of stage scenery. It would seem as if the seventeenth century audiences were more naïve than twentieth century ones, more willing to lend their imaginations to the artist, more eager for strong sensation and more impressible by beauty of language, and less easily disturbed by the incongruous and the absurd in the external machinery of the theatre, which would be fatal to illusion in modern audiences with our quick sense of the ridiculous. You know, for example, that there were no actresses on the Elizabethan stage, but the female parts were taken by boys. This is one practical reason for those numerous plots in the old drama where the heroine disguises herself as a young man. I need mention only Viola, Portia, Rosalind, Imogen, and Julia in Shakespeare. And the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and many others are full of similar situations. Now if you have seen college dramatics, where the same practice obtains, you have doubtless noticed an inclination in the spectators to laugh at the deep bass voices, the masculine strides, and the muscular arms of the ladies in the play. But trifles like these did not apparently trouble our simple forefathers.

In the eighty-four years from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to the closing of the theatres we know the names of 200 writers who contributed to the stage, and there were beside many anonymous pieces. All told, there were produced over 1500 plays; and if we count masques and pageants, and court and university plays, and other quasi-dramatic species the number does not fall much short of 2000. Less than half of these are now extant. It is not probable that any important play of Shakespeare’s is lost, although no collection of his plays was made until 1623, seven years after his death. Meanwhile about half of them had come out singly in small quartos, surreptitiously issued and very incorrectly printed. We probably have all, or nearly all, of Beaumont and Fletcher’s fifty-three plays. And Ben Jonson collected his own works carefully and saw them through the press. But Thomas Heywood wrote, either alone or in collaboration, upwards of 220, and of these only twenty-four remain. Dekker is credited with seventy-six and Rowley with fifty-five, comparatively few of which are now known to exist. One reason why such a large proportion of the Elizabethan plays is missing, is that the theatre companies which owned the stage copies were unwilling to have them printed and thereby made accessible to readers and liable to be pirated by other companies. Manuscript plays were a valuable asset, and were likely to remain in manuscript until they were destroyed or disappeared. There are still many unpublished plays of that period. Thus the manuscript of one of Heywood’s missing plays was discovered and printed as late as 1885. A curious feature of the old drama was the practice of collaboration. A capital instance of this was the long partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher. But often three, or sometimes four dramatists collaborated in a single piece. It is difficult, often impossible, to assign the different parts of the play to the respective authors and much critical ingenuity has been spent upon the problem, often with very inconclusive results. To increase the difficulty of assigning a certain authorship, many old plays were worked over into new versions. It is surmised that Shakespeare himself collaborated with Fletcher in “Henry VIII,” as well as in “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” a tragi-comedy which is not included in the Shakespeare folio; that in “Henry VI” he simply revamped old chronicle-history plays; that “Hamlet” was founded on a lost original by Kyd; that “Titus Andronicus” and possibly “Richard III” owe a great deal to Marlowe; and that the underplot of “The Taming of the Shrew” and a number of scenes in “Timon of Athens” were composed, not by Shakespeare but by some unknown collaborator. In short we are to look upon the Elizabethan theatre as a great factory and school of dramatic art, producing at its most active period, the last ten years of the queen’s reign, say, from 1593–1603, some forty or fifty new plays every year: masters and scholars working together in partnership, not very careful to claim their own, not very scrupulous about helping themselves to other people’s literary property: something like the mediaeval guilds who built the cathedrals; or the schools of Italian painters in the fifteenth century, where it is not always possible to determine whether a particular piece of work is by the master painter or by one of the pupils in his workshop. Instances of collaboration are not unknown in modern drama. Robert Louis Stevenson and W. E. Henley wrote several plays in partnership. Charles Reade in his comedy, “Masks and Faces,” called in the aid of Tom Taylor, who was an actor and practical maker of plays. But these are exceptions. Modern dramatic authorship is individual: Elizabethan was largely corporate. And the mention of Tom Taylor reminds me that Elizabethan drama was, in an important degree, the creation of the actor-playwright. Peele, Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday, and Rowley certainly, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and many others probably, were actors as well as authors. Beaumont’s father was a judge, and Fletcher’s father was the Bishop of London, but they lodged near the playhouses, and consorted with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid or the Devil Tavern or the Triple Tun or the other old Elizabethan ordinaries which were the meeting places of the wits. In fact, it is evident that the university wits; the Bohemians and hack writers in Henslow’s pay; gentlemen and men with professions, who wrote on the side, such as Thomas Lodge who was a physician; in short, the whole body of Elizabethan dramatists kept themselves in close touch with the actual stage. The Elizabethan drama was a popular, yes, a national institution. All classes of people frequented the rude wooden playhouses, some of which are reckoned to have held 3000 spectators. The theatre was to the public of that day what the daily newspaper, the ten-cent pictorial magazine, the popular novel, the moving picture show, the concert, and the public lecture all combined are to us. And I might almost add the club, the party caucus, and the political speech. For though there were social convivial gatherings like Ben Jonson’s Apollo Club, which met at the Devil Tavern, the playhouse was a place of daily resort. And there were political plays. Middleton’s “A Game at Chess,” e.g., which attracted enormous crowds and had the then unexampled run of nine successive performances, was a satirical attack on the foreign policy of the government; in which the pieces of the game were thinly disguised representatives of well-known public personages, after the manner of Aristophanes. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who figured as the Black Knight, remonstrated with the privy council, the further performance of the play was forbidden, and the author and several of the company were sent to prison. Similarly the comedy of “Eastward Ho!” written by Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Dekker, which made fun of James I’s Scotch knights, gave great offense to the king, and was stopped and all hands imprisoned. The Earl of Essex had the tragedy of “Richard II,” perhaps Shakespeare’s,—or perhaps another play on the same subject,—rehearsed before his fellow conspirators just before the outbreak of his rebellion, and the players found themselves arrested for treason.