Part 14

The English drama was self-originated and self-developed, like the Spanish, but unlike the classical stages of Italy and France. Coming down from the old scriptural and allegorical plays, the miracles and moralities of the Middle Ages, it began to lay its hands on subject matter of all sorts: Italian and Spanish romances and pastorals, the chronicles of England, contemporary French history, ancient history and mythology, Bible stories and legends of saints and martyrs, popular ballad and folklore, everyday English life and the dockets of the criminal courts. It treated all this miscellaneous stuff with perfect freedom, striking out its own methods. Admitting influences from many quarters, it naturally owed something to the classic drama, the Latin tragedies of Seneca, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, but it did not allow itself to be shackled by classical rules and models, like the rule of the three unities; or the precedent which forbade the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the same play; or the other precedents which allowed only three speakers on the stage at once and kept all violent action off the scene, to be reported by a messenger, rather than pass before the eyes of spectators. The Elizabethans favored strong action, masses of people, spectacular elements: mobs, battles, single combats, trial scenes, deaths, processions. The English instinct was for quantity of life, the Greek and the French for neatness of construction. The ghost which stalks in Elizabethan tragedy: in “Hamlet,” “Richard III,” Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” and Marston’s “Antonio and Mellida” comes straight from Seneca. But except for a few direct imitations of Latin plays like “Gorboduc” and “The Misfortunes of Arthur”—mostly academic performances—Elizabethan tragedy was not at all Senecan in construction. Let us take a few forms of drama, which, though not strictly peculiar to our sixteenth century theatre, were most representative of it, and were the forms in which native genius expressed itself most characteristically. I will select the tragi-comedy, the chronicle-history, and the romantic melodrama or tragedy of blood. In 1579 Sir Philip Sidney, who was a classical scholar, complained that English plays were neither right tragedies nor right comedies, but mongrel tragi-comedies which mingled kings and clowns, funerals and hornpipes. Nearly a century and a half later, Addison, also a classical scholar, wrote: “The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts. An author might as well think of weaving the adventures of Aeneas and Hudibras into one poem as of writing such a motley piece of mirth and sorrow.” Sidney’s and Addison’s principles would have condemned about half the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As to the chronicle-history play, Ben Jonson, who was a classicist writing in a romantic age, had his fling at those who with “some few foot and half-foot words fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars.” I do not know that any other nation possesses anything quite like this series of English kings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bale, Peele, Ford, and many others, which taken together cover nearly four centuries of English history. You know that the Duke of Marlboro said that all he knew of English history he had learned from Shakespeare’s plays; and these big, patriotic military dramas must have given a sort of historical education to the audiences of their time. The material, to be sure, was much of it epic rather than properly dramatic, and in the hands of inferior artists it remained lumpy and shockingly crude. To obtain comic relief, the playwrights sandwiched in between the serious parts, scenes of horseplay, buffoonery, and farce, which had little to do with the history. But in the hands of a great artist, all this was reduced to harmony. Henry IV, Part I, is not only a great literary work, but a first-class acting play. The tragedy is very high tragedy and the Falstaff scenes very broad comedy, but they are blended so skilfully that each heightens the effect of the other without disturbing the unity of impression. As to the romantic melodrama or tragedy of blood, the Elizabethans had a strong appetite for sensation, and many of their most powerful plays were of this description: Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” Shakespeare’s “Lear,” Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy,” Middleton’s “Changeling,” Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” and scores of others, which employ what has been called solution by massacre, and whose stage in the fifth act is as bloody as a shambles. Even in the best of these, great art is required to reconcile the nerves of the modern reader to the numerous killings. In the extreme examples of the type, like “Titus Andronicus” (doubtfully Shakespeare’s), Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta,” or the old “Spanish Tragedy,” or Cyril Tourneur’s “Revenger’s Tragedy,” the theme is steeped so deeply in horrors and monstrosities, that it passes over into farce. For the great defect of Elizabethan drama is excess, extravagance. In very few plays outside of Shakespeare do we find that naturalness, that restraint, decorum and moderation which is a part of the highest and finest art. Too many of the plots and situations are fantastically improbable: too many of the passions and characters strained and exaggerated, though life and vigor are seldom wanting. This is seen in their comedies as well as in their tragedies. Thus, Ben Jonson, an admirable comic artist, ranking next, I think, after Shakespeare, a very learned man and exhaustless in observation and invention; very careful, too, in construction and endeavoring a reform of comedy along truly classical lines—Ben Jonson, I say, chose for his province the comedy of humors; i.e., the exhibition of all varieties of oddity, eccentricity, whim, affectation. Read his “Every Man in His Humour” or his “Bartholomew Fair” and you will find a satirical picture of all the queer fashions and follies of his contemporary London. His characters are sharply distinguished but they are _too_ queer, too overloaded with traits, so that we seem to be in an asylum for cranks and monomaniacs, rather than in the broad, natural, open daylight of Shakespeare’s creations. So the tyrants and villains of Elizabethan melodrama are too often incredible creatures beyond the limits of humanity.

It is perhaps due to their habit of mixing tragedy and comedy that the Elizabethan dramatists made so much use of the double plot; for the main plot was often tragical and the underplot comical or farcical. Shakespeare, who at all points was superior to his fellows, knew how to knit his duplicate plots together and make them interdependent. But in pieces like Middleton’s “Changeling” or “The Mayor of Queensboro,” the main plot and the subplot have nothing to do with each other and simply run along in alternate scenes, side by side. This is true of countless plays of the time and is ridiculed by Sheridan in his burlesque play “The Critic.” Let it also be remembered that an Elizabethan tragedy was always a poem—always in verse. Prose was reserved for comedy, or for the comedy scenes in a tragedy. The only prose tragedy that has come down to us from those times is the singular little realistic piece entitled “The Yorkshire Tragedy,” the story of a murder. A very constant feature of the old drama was the professional fool, jester, or kept clown, with his motley coat, truncheon, and cap and bells. In most plays he was simply a stock fun maker, though Shakespeare made a profound and subtle use of him in “As You Like It” and in “Lear.” The last court jester or king’s fool was Archie Armstrong, fool of Charles I. After the Restoration he was considered as old-fashioned and disappeared from the stage along with puns and other obsolete forms of wit. Opera and pantomime were not introduced into England until late in the seventeenth century: but the Elizabethans had certain forms of quasi-dramatic entertainment such as the court masque, the pageant, and the pastoral, which have since gone out. They were responsible for some fine poetry like Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdess,” Jonson’s fragment “The Sad Shepherd” and Milton’s “Comus.” Of late years the pageant has been locally revived in England, at Oxford, at Coventry, and elsewhere.

Now since it has ceased to be performed, what is the value of the old drama, as literature, as a body of reading plays? Of the 200 known writers for the theatre, ten at least were men of creative genius, Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger. At least a dozen more were men of high and remarkable talents, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marston, Ford, Heywood, Shirley, Tourneur, Kyd, Day, Rowley, Brome. Scarcely one of them but has contributed single scenes of great excellence, or invented one or two original and interesting characters, or written passages of noble blank verse and lovely lyrics. Even the poorest of them were inheritors or partakers of a great poetic tradition, a gift of style, so that, in plays very defective, as a whole, we are constantly coming upon lines of startling beauty like Middleton’s

Ha! what art thou that taks’t away the light Betwixt that star and me?

or Marston’s

Night, like a masque, has entered heaven’s high hall, With thousand torches ushering the way.

or Beaumont’s

Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

But when all has been said, and in spite of enthusiasts like Lamb and Hazlitt and Swinburne, I fear it must be acknowledged that, outside of Shakespeare, our old dramatists produced no plays of the absolutely first rank; no tragedies so perfect as those of Sophocles and Euripides; no comedies equal to Molière’s. Nay, I would go further, and affirm that not only has the Elizabethan drama—excluding Shakespeare—nothing to set against the first part of Goethe’s “Faust,” but that its best plays are inferior, as a whole, to the best of Aristophanes, of Calderon, of Racine, of Schiller, even perhaps of Victor Hugo, Sheridan and Beaumarchais. It is as Coleridge said: great beauties, counterbalanced by great faults. Ben Jonson is heavy-handed and laborious; Beaumont and Fletcher graceful, fluent and artistic, but superficial and often false in characterization; Webster, intense and powerful in passion, but morbid and unnatural; Middleton, frightfully uneven; Marlowe and Chapman high epic poets but with no flexibility and no real turn for drama.

Yet unsatisfactory as it is, when judged by any single play, the work of the Elizabethans, when viewed as a whole, makes an astonishing impression of fertility, of force, of range, variety, and richness, both in invention and in expression.

[8] “Every Man in his Humor” lasted well down into the nineteenth century on the stage. And here are a few haphazard dates of late performances of Elizabethan plays: “The Pilgrim,” 1812; “Philaster,” 1817; “The Chances,” 1820; “The Wild Goose Chase,” 1820; “The City Madam,” 1822; “The Humorous Lieutenant,” 1817; “The Spanish Curate,” 1840.

PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of _The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays_, by Henry A. (Augustin) Beers.]