Part 10

This period of the English drama, though it is far from being one of crude effort, could not therefore yet be one of full consummation. In tragedy the advance which had been made in the choice of great themes, in knitting closer the connection between the theatre and the national history, in vindicating to passion its right to adequate expression, was already enormous. In comedy the advance had been less decisive and less independent; much had been gained in reaching greater freedom of form and something in enlarging the range of subjects; but artificiality had proved a snare in the one direction, while the licence of the comic stage, upheld by favourite "clowns," such as Kemp or Tarlton, had not succumbed before less elastic demands. The way of escaping from the dilemma had, however, been already recognized to lie in the construction of suitable plots, for which a full storehouse was open in the popular traditions preserved in national ballads, and in the growing literature of translated foreign fiction, or of native imitations of it. Meanwhile, the aberration of the comic stage to political and religious controversy, which it could never hope to treat with Attic freedom in a country provided with a strong monarchy and a dogmatic religion, seemed likely to extinguish the promise of the beginnings of English romantic comedy.

Shakespeare.

These were the circumstances under which the greatest of dramatists began to devote his genius to the theatre. Shakespeare's career as a writer of plays can have differed little in its beginnings from those of his contemporaries and rivals. Before or while he was proceeding from the re-touching and re-writing of the plays of others to original dramatic composition, the most gifted of those whom we have termed his predecessors had passed away. He had been decried as an actor before he was known as an author; and after living through days of darkness for the theatre, if not for himself, attained, before the close of the century, to the beginnings of his prosperity and the beginnings of his fame. But if we call him fortunate, it is not because of such rewards as these. As a poet, Shakespeare was no doubt happy in his times, which intensified the strength of the national character, expanded the

## activities of the national mind, and were able to add their stimulus

even to such a creative power as his. He was happy in the antecedents of the form of literature which commended itself to his choice, and in the opportunities which it offered in so many directions for an advance to heights yet undiscovered and unknown. What he actually accomplished was due to his genius, whose achievements are immeasurable like itself. His influence upon the progress of English drama divides itself in very unequal proportions into a direct and an indirect influence. To the former alone reference can here be made.

Shakespeare and the national historical drama.

Already the first editors of Shakespeare's works in a collected form recognized so marked a distinction between his plays taken from English history and those treating other historical subjects (whether ancient or modern) that, while they included the latter among the tragedies at large, they grouped the former as _histories_ by themselves. These _histories_ are in their literary genesis a development of the _chronicle histories_ of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries, the taste for which had greatly increased towards the beginning of his own career as a dramatist, in accordance with the general progress of national life and sentiment in this epoch. Though it cannot be assumed that Shakespeare composed his several dramas from English history in the sequence of the chronology of their themes, his genius gave to the entire series an inner harmony, and a continuity corresponding to that which is distinctive of the national life, such as not unnaturally inspired certain commentators with the wish to prove it a symmetrically constructed whole. He thus brought this peculiarly national species to a perfection which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his later contemporaries and successors to make more than an occasional addition to his series. None of them was, however, found able or ready to take up the thread where Shakespeare had left it, after perfunctorily attaching the present to the past by a work (probably not all his own) which must be regarded as the end rather than the crown of the series of his _histories_.[181] But to furnish such supplements accorded little with the tastes and tendencies of the later Elizabethans; and with the exception of an isolated work,[182] the national historical drama in Shakespeare reached at once its perfection and its close. The ruder form of the old chronicle history for a time survived the advance made upon it; but the efforts in this field of T. Heywood,[183] S. Rowley,[184] and others are, from a literary point of view, anachronisms.

Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a more direct influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same fidelity as that of the English _histories_, even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes, and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his predecessors, as well as with his successors, "_is_ that nature which they paint and draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just, as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare's process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a single one[185] is in both design and effect a comedy of character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art, which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging to the individuality of his poetic genius.

His style and its influence.

The influences of Shakespeare's diction and versification upon those of the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, though it would be next to impossible to state them definitely. In these points, Shakespeare's manner as a writer was progressive; and this progress has been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays to be used as an aid in seeking to determine their chronological sequence. The general laws of this progress accord with those of the natural advance of creative genius; artificiality gives way to freedom, and freedom in its turn submits to a greater degree of regularity and care. In versification as in diction the earliest and the latest period of Shakespeare's dramatic writing are more easily recognizable than what lies between and may be called the _normal_ period, the plays belonging to which in form most resemble one another, and are least affected by distinguishable peculiarities--such as the rhymes and intentionally euphuistic colouring of style which characterize the earliest, or the feminine endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike, Shakespeare's style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to be regarded as the _norm_ of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.

Influence of his method of construction.

The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction that Shakespeare's plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations in general, and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama--to use a term which is perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare's public was for _incident_--a demand which of itself necessitated a method of construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two

## actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one

by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,--a proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life must be left to prove.

His characters.

Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in _characterization_--in the drawing of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art--that he remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in

## particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as

supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and sinned.

Forms of the later Elizabethan drama.

The pastoral drama.

By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama, every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation, and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such an aftergrowth as the _auto_, and the confines of the religious drama were only now and then tentatively touched.[186] The direct imitations of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models, was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,[187] while experiments like W. Alexander's (afterwards earl of Stirling) _Monarchicke Tragedies_[188] (1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more exclusively so than Milton's imposing _Samson Agonistes_, which belongs to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the Englishman's festive digestion long continued robust, and he liked his amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many English dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their lyrical gifts and of their inventive powers. The former could never become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended elements derived from it into the action of his romantic comedies. In more or less isolated works Jonson, Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph, and others sought to rival Tasso and Guarini--Jonson[189] coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment, Fletcher[190] bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic execution; Daniel being distinguished by simpler beauties of style in both verse and prose.[191]

The mask.

The mask (or masque) was a more elastic kind of composition, mixing in varying proportions its constituent elements of declamation and dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and scenery. In its least elaborate literary form--which, of course, externally was the most elaborate--it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the distinctness of its characters or the fulness of the action introduced into its scheme, brought it nearer to the regular drama. A frequent ornament of Queen Elizabeth's progresses, it was cultivated with increased assiduity in the reign of James I., and in that of his successor outshone, by the favour it enjoyed with court and nobility, the attractions of the regular drama itself. Most of the later Elizabethan dramatists contributed to this species, upon which Shakespeare expended the resources of his fancy only incidentally in the course of his dramas; but by far the most successful writer of masks was Ben Jonson, of whose numerous compositions of this kind many hold a permanent place in English poetic literature, and "next" whom, in his own judgment, "only Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask." From a poetic point of view, however, they were at least rivalled by Dekker and Ford; in productivity and favour T. Campion, who was equally eminent as poet and as musician, seems for a time to have excelled. Inasmuch, however, as the history of the mask in England is to a great extent that of "painting and carpentry" and of Inigo Jones, and as, moreover, this kind of piece, while admitting dramatic elements, is of its nature occasional, it need not further be pursued here. The _Microcosmus_ of T. Nabbes (printed 1637), which is very like a morality, seems to have been the first mask brought upon the public stage. It was the performance of a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the invective of _Histrio-Mastix_ against the stage the occasion for disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great nobleman's castle that Milton--a Puritan of a very different cast--not long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of English poems. _Comus_ has been judged and condemned as a drama--unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask.

The later Elizabethan drama.

The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as they are, his tragic works[192] stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history,[193] always with vigour, and at times with genuine effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action. Mention has been made above of Ford's isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme--ranging as these plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance--of equally astonishing variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction, original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations--among others to Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And, in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of this kind;[194] but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class,[195] to which some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of _motives_ employed--at least as a rule--in the tragic drama of this period was comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled masculine passion--such are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion, which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,[196] master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,[197] surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by any of their contemporaries--a power seconded by a beauty of diction and softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked; but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.