Part 11

In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of "humours" (which found the most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays[198]), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name into the Restoration age[199] and cannot be said to have ever died out. In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist's labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible _verve_ of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic versatility of Shirley--not to mention many later and not necessarily minor names[200]--mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness and correctness--the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the representation of the living realities of life--but in a lightness not incompatible with sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment resulting from accumulated experience, enabled them to advance from success to success. Thus the comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the _interregnum_ of the Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes assumed with later growths of English comedy.

The later academical drama.

Such was also the case with a special growth which had continued side by side, but in growing frequency of contact, with the progress of the national drama. The academical drama of the later Elizabethan period and of the first two Stuart reigns by no means fell off either in activity or in variety from that of the preceding generations. At Oxford, after an apparent break of several years--though in the course of these one or two new plays, including a _Tancred_ by Sir Henry Wotton at Queen's, seem to have been produced--a long succession of English plays, some in Latin doubtless from time to time intervening, were performed, from the early years of the 17th century onwards to the dark days of the national theatre and beyond. The production of these plays was distributed among several colleges, among which the most conspicuously active were Christ Church and St John's, where a whole series of festal performances took place under the collective title of _The Christmas Prince_ (i.e. master of the Christmas revels). They included a wide variety of pieces, from the treatment by an author unnamed of the story of "Ovid's owne Narcissus" (1602) and S. Daniel's _Queen's Arcadia_ (1606) to Barten Holiday's _Technogamia_ (1618), a complicated allegory on the relations between the arts and sciences quite in the manner of the moralities; interspersed by romantic dramas of the ordinary contemporary type by T. Goffe (1591-1629), W. Cartwright, J. Maine (1604-1672) and others. At Cambridge the list of Latin and English academical plays, performed in the latter half of Elizabeth's reign at Trinity, St John's, Queen's and a few other colleges, contains several examples in each language which for one reason or another possess a special interest. Thus E. Forsett's _Pedantius_, probably acted at Trinity in 1581, ridicules a personage who lived very near the rose--the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey;[201] a _Laelia_, acted at Queen's in 1590 and again in 1598, resembles _Twelfth Night_ in part of its plot; while in _Silvanus_, performed in 1596, probably at St John's, there are certain striking similarities to _As You Like It_. These are in Latin, as are the comedies _Hispanus_ (containing some curious allusions to the Armada, Drake and Dr Lopez) and _Machiavellus_, acted at St John's in 1597.[202] By far the most interesting of the English plays of the later Cambridge series, and, it may be averred, of the remains of the English academical drama as a whole, are the Parnassus Plays (q.v.), successively produced at St John's in 1598-1602, which illustrate with much truthfulness as well as fancy the relations between university life and the outside world, including the world of letters and of the stage. Upon a different, but also a very notable, aspect of English university life--the relations between town and gown--a partisan light is thrown by _Club-Law_, acted at Clare in 1599--and in G. Ruggle's celebrated Latin comedy of _Ignoramus_, twice acted by members of Clare at Trinity in 1615 before King James I. On one of these occasions were also produced in English T. Tomkis' comedy _Albumazar_ (a play absurdly attributed to Shakespeare), and Phineas Fletcher's _Sicelides_, a "piscatory" (i.e. a pastoral drama in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen). Latin and English plays continued to be brought out in Cambridge till the year of the outbreak of the Civil War, T. Randolph and A. Cowley[203] being among the authors of some of the latest so produced; and with the Restoration the usage recommenced, the _Adelphi_ of Terence and other Latin comedies being performed as they had been a century earlier. A complete survey and classification of the English academical drama, for which the materials are at last being collected and compared, will prove of an importance which is only beginning to be recognized to the future historian of the English drama.

The stage.

To return to the general current of that drama. The rivals against which it had to contend in the times with which its greatest epoch came to an end have in their turn been noticed. From the masks and triumphs at court and at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the city pageants and shows by land and water--from the tilts and tournaments at Whitehall to the more philosophical devices at the Inns of Court and the academical plays at the universities--down even to the brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the "Ninevitical motions" of the puppets--in all these ways the various sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign performers--French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses--paid visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of

## acting maintained itself at least on the level to which it had been

brought by Shakespeare's associates and contemporaries, Burbage and Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others "of the older sort." The profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field) occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation of the artistic merit of actors who valued the dignity of their own profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the old school of clowns. Women's parts were still acted by boys, many of whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus continued which must assuredly have placed the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never obtained), and which may, while it has been held to have facilitated freedom of fancy, more certainly encouraged the extreme licence of expression cherished by the dramatists. The arrangement of the stage, which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for their being organically connected with one another, remained essentially what it had been in Shakespeare's days; though the primitive expedients for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was apparently cultivated with much greater care; and the English stage of this period had probably gone a not inconsiderable way in a direction to which it is obviously in the interests of the dramatic art to set some bounds, if it is to depend for its popular success upon its qualities as such, and upon the interpretation of its agents upon the stage. At the same time, the drama had begun largely to avail itself of adventitious aids to favour. The system of prologues and epilogues, and of dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their chief patron, the public.

The drama and Puritanism.

Closing of the theatres.

Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent of this supervision was the master of the revels; but under James I. a special ordinance, in harmony with the king's ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was passed "against representing any modern Christian king in plays on the stage." The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less decisive repression and punishment.[204] But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[205] though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions,[206] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[207] and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors[208] abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne's _Histrio-Mastix_ (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its protectors. The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded "that while these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne." Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings (1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were published in this period;[209] while at fairs about the country were acted farces called "drolls," consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its friends or its foes could have supposed.

Revival of the drama.

Already "in Oliver's time" private performances took place from time to time at noblemen's houses and (though not undisturbed) in the old haunt of the drama, the Red Bull. In 1656 the ingenuity of Sir William Davenant whose name (though not really so significant in the dramatic as in another field of English literature) is memorable as connecting together two distinct periods in it, ventured on a bolder step in the production of a quasi-dramatic entertainment "of declamation and music"; and in the following year he brought out with scenery and music a piece which was afterwards in an enlarged form acted and printed as the first part of his opera, _The Siege of Rhodes_. This entertainment he afterwards removed from the private house where it had been produced to the Cockpit, where he soon ventured upon the performance of regular plays written by himself. Thus, under the cover of two sister arts, whose aid was in the sequel to prove by no means altogether beneficial to its progress, the English drama had boldly anticipated the Restoration, and was no longer hiding its head when that much-desired event was actually brought about. Soon after Charles II.'s entry into London, two theatrical companies are known to have been acting in the capital. For these companies patents were soon granted, under the names of "the Duke (of York)'s" and "the King's Servants," to Davenant and one of the brothers Killigrew respectively--the former from 1662 acting at Lincoln's Inn Fields, then at Dorset Garden in Salisbury Court, the latter from 1663 at the Theatre Royal near Drury Lane. These companies were united from 1682, a royal licence being granted in 1695 to a rival company which performed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and which migrated to Covent Garden in 1733. Meanwhile, Vanbrugh had in 1705 built the theatre in the Haymarket; and a theatre in Goodman's Fields--afterwards rendered famous by the first appearance of Garrick--led a fitful existence from 1729 to 1733. The act of 1737 deprived the crown of the power of licensing any more theatres; so that the history of the English stage for a long period was confined to a restricted area. The rule which prevailed after the Restoration, that neither of the rival companies should ever attempt a play produced by the other, operated beneficially both upon the activity of dramatic authorship and upon the progress of the art of acting, which was not exposed to the full effects of that deplorable spirit of personal rivalry which too often leads even most intelligent actors to attempt parts for which they have no special qualification. There can be little doubt that the actor's art has rarely flourished more in England than in the days of T. Betterton and his contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Eleanor Gwyn have, together with many others, survived in various connexions among the memories of the Restoration age. No higher praise has ever been given to an actor than that which Addison bestowed upon Betterton, in describing his performance of _Othello_ as a proof that Shakespeare could not have written the most striking passages of the character otherwise than he has done.

The Irish stage.

It may here be noticed that the fortunes of the Irish theatre in general followed those of the English, of which of course it was merely a branch. Of native dramatic compositions in earlier times not a trace remains in Ireland; and the drama was introduced into that country as an English exotic--apparently already in the reign of Henry VIII., and more largely in that of Elizabeth. The first theatre in Dublin was built in 1635; but in 1641 it was closed, and even after the Restoration the Irish stage continued in a precarious condition till near the end of the century. About that time an extraordinarily strong taste for the theatre took possession of Irish society, and during the greater part of the 18th century the Dublin stage rivalled the English in the brilliancy of its stars. Betterton's rival, R. Wilks, Garrick's predecessor in the homage paid to Shakespeare, Macklin, and his competitor for favour, the "silver-tongued" Barry, were alike products of the Irish stage, as were Mrs Woffington and other well-known actresses. Nor should it be forgotten that three of the foremost English writers of comedy in its later days, Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, were Irish, the first by education, and the latter two by birth also.

The later Stuart drama.

Already in the period preceding the outbreak of the Civil War the English drama had perceptibly sunk from the height to which it had been raised by the great Elizabethans. When it had once more recovered possession of that arena with which no living drama can dispense, it would have been futile to demand that the dramatists should return altogether into the ancient paths, unaffected by the influences, native or foreign, in operation around them. But there was no reason why the new drama should not, like the Elizabethan, have been true in spirit to the higher purposes of the dramatic art, to the nobler tendencies of the national life, and to the demands of moral law. Because the later Stuart drama as a whole proved untrue to these, and, while following its own courses, never more than partially returned from the aberrations to which it condemned itself, its history is that of a decay which the indisputable brilliancy, borrowed or original, of many of its productions is incapable of concealing.

Tragedy.

Owing in part to the influence of the French theatre, which by this time had taken the place of the Spanish as the ruling drama of Europe, the separation between tragedy and comedy is clearly marked in post-Restoration plays. Comic scenes are still occasionally introduced into tragedies by some dramatists who adhered more closely to the Elizabethan models (such as Otway and Crowne), but the practice fell into disuse; while the endeavour to elevate comedy by pathetic scenes and motives is one of the characteristic marks of the beginning of another period in English dramatic literature. The successive phases through which English tragedy passed in the later Stuart times cannot be always kept distinct from one another; and the guidance offered by the theories put forth by some of the dramatists in support of their practice is often delusive. Following the example of Corneille, Dryden and his contemporaries and successors were fond of proclaiming their adherence to this or that principle of dramatic construction or form, and of upholding, with much show of dialectical acumen, maxims derived by them from French or other sources, or elaborated with modifications and variations of their own, but usually amounting to little more than what Scott calls "certain romantic whimsical imitations of the dramatic art." Students of the drama will find much entertainment and much instruction in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues and treatises. They will acknowledge that Dryden's incomparable vigour does not desert him either in the exposing or in the upholding of fallacies, while _le bon sens_, which he hardly ever fails to exhibit, and which is a more eclectic gift than common-sense, serves as a sure guide to the best intelligence of his age. Even Rymer,[210] usually regarded as having touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, will be found to be not wholly without grains of salt. But Restoration tragedy itself must not be studied by the light of Restoration criticism. So long as any dramatic power remained in the tragic poets--and it is absent from none of the chief among them from Dryden to Rowe--the struggle between fashion (disguised as theory) and instinct (tending in the direction of the Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of the former.