A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 26

The honour of being last in the great succession of Elizabethan dramatists is usually a.s.signed to James s.h.i.+rley.[62] Though last, s.h.i.+rley is only in part least, and his plays deserve more reading than has usually fallen to their lot. Not only in the general character of his plays--a character hardly definable, but recognisable at once by the reader--but by the occurrence of such things as the famous song, "The glories of our blood and state," and not a few speeches and tirades, s.h.i.+rley has a right to his place; as he most unquestionably has also by date. He was born in London in 1596, was educated at Merchant Tailors' School, and was a member of both universities, belonging to St. John's College at Oxford, and to Catherine Hall at Cambridge. Like other dramatists he vacillated in religion, with such sincerity as to give up a living to which, having been ordained, he had been presented. He was a schoolmaster for a time, began to write plays about the date of the accession of Charles I., continued to do so till the closing of the theatres, then returned to schoolmastering, and survived the Restoration nearly seven years, being buried at St. Giles's in 1666. He appears to have visited Ireland, and at least one monument of his visit remains in the eccentric play of _St. Patrick for Ireland_. He is usually credited with thirty-nine plays, to which it is understood that others, now in MS., have to be added, while he may also have had a hand in some that are printed but not attributed to him. s.h.i.+rley was neither a very great nor a very strong man; and without originals to follow, it is probable that he would have done nothing. But with Fletcher and Jonson before him he was able to strike out a certain line of half-humorous, half-romantic drama, and to follow it with curious equality through his long list of plays, hardly one of which is very much better than any other, hardly one of which falls below a very respectable standard. He has few or no single scenes or pa.s.sages of such high and sustained excellence as to be specially quotable; and there is throughout him an indefinable flavour as of study of his elders and betters, an appearance as of a highly competent and gifted pupil in a school, not as of a master and leader in a movement. The palm is perhaps generally and rightly a.s.signed to _The Lady of Pleasure_, 1635, a play bearing some faint resemblances to Ma.s.singer's _City Madam_, and Fletcher's _n.o.ble Gentleman_ (s.h.i.+rley is known to have finished one or two plays of Fletcher's), and in its turn the original, or at least the forerunner of a long line of late seventeenth and eighteenth century plays on the extravagance and haughtiness and caprice of fine ladies. s.h.i.+rley indeed was much acted after the Restoration, and exhibits, though on the better side, the transition of the older into the newer school very well.

Of his tragedies _The Traitor_ has the general suffrage, and perhaps justly. One of s.h.i.+rley's most characteristic habits was that not of exactly adapting an old play, but of writing a new one on similar lines accommodated to the taste of his own day. He constantly did this with Fletcher, and once in _The Cardinal_ he was rash enough to endeavour to improve upon Webster. His excuse may have been that he was evidently in close contact with the last survivors of the great school, for besides his work with or on Fletcher, he collaborated with Chapman in the tragedy of _Chabot_ and the comedy of _The Ball_--the latter said to be one of the earliest _loci_ for the use of the word in the sense of an entertainment.

His versification profited by this personal or literary familiarity. It is occasionally lax, and sins especially by the redundant syllable or syllables, and by the ugly break between auxiliary verbs and their complements, prepositions and their nouns, and so forth. But it never falls into the mere shapelessness which was so common with his immediate and younger contemporaries. Although, as has been said, long pa.s.sages of high sustained poetry are not easily producible from him, two short extracts from _The Traitor_ will show his style favourably, but not too favourably.

Amidea, the heroine, declares her intention--

[62] There was a contemporary, Henry s.h.i.+rley, who was also a playwright.

His only extant play, _The Martyred Soldier_, a piece of little merit, has been reprinted by Mr. Bullen.

"To have my name Stand in the ivory register of virgins, When I am dead. Before one factious thought Should lurk within me to betray my fame To such a blot, my hands shall mutiny And boldly with a poniard teach my heart To weep out a repentance."

And this of her brother Florio's is better still--

"Let me look upon my sister now: Still she retains her beauty, Death has been kind to leave her all this sweetness Thus in a morning have I oft saluted My sister in her chamber: sat upon Her bed and talked of many harmless pa.s.sages.

_But now 'tis night, and a long night with her:_ _I shall ne'er see these curtains drawn again_ _Until we meet in heaven._"

Here the touch, a little weakened it may be, but still the touch of the great age, is perceptible, especially in the last lines, where the metaphor of the "curtains," common enough in itself for eyelids, derives freshness and appositeness from the previous mention of the bed. But s.h.i.+rley is not often at this high tragic level. His supposed first play, _Love Tricks_, though it appeared nearly forty years before the Restoration, has a curious touch of post-Restoration comedy in its lively, extravagant, easy farce.

Sometimes, as in _The Witty Fair One_, he fell in with the growing habit of writing a play mainly in prose, but dropping into verse here and there, though he was quite as ready to write, as in _The Wedding_, a play in verse with a little prose. Once he dramatised the _Arcadia_ bodily and by name.

At another time he would match a downright interlude like the _Contention for Honour and Riches_ with a thinly-veiled morality like _Honoria and Mammon_. He was a proficient at masques. _The Grateful Servant_, _The Royal Master_, _The Duke's Mistress_, _The Doubtful Heir_, _The Constant Maid_, _The Humorous Courtier_, are plays whose very t.i.tles speak them, though the first is much the best. _The Changes_ or _Love in a Maze_ was slightly borrowed from by Dryden in _The Maiden Queen_, and _Hyde Park_, a very lively piece, set a fas.h.i.+on of direct comedy of manners which was largely followed, while _The Brothers_ and _The Gamester_ are other good examples of different styles. Generally s.h.i.+rley seems to have been a man of amiable character, and the worst thing on record about him is his very ungenerous gibing dedication of _The Bird in a Cage_ to Prynne, then in prison, for his well-known attack on the stage, a piece of retaliation which, if the enemy had not been "down," would have been fair enough.

Perhaps s.h.i.+rley's comedy deserves as a whole to be better spoken of than his tragedy. It is a later variety of the same kind of comedy which we noted as written so largely by Middleton,--a comedy of mingled manners, intrigue, and humours, improved a good deal in coherence and in stage management, but dest.i.tute of the greater and more romantic touches which emerge from the chaos of the earlier style. Nearly all the writers whom I shall now proceed to mention practised this comedy, some better, some worse; but no one with quite such success as s.h.i.+rley at his best, and no one with anything like his industry, versatility, and generally high level of accomplishment. It should perhaps be said that the above-mentioned song, the one piece of s.h.i.+rley's generally known, is not from one of his more characteristic pieces, but from _The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_, a work of quite the author's latest days.

Thomas Randolph, the most gifted (according to general estimate rather than to specific performance) of the Tribe of Ben, was a much younger man than s.h.i.+rley, though he died more than thirty years earlier. Randolph was born near Daventry in 1605, his father being a gentleman, and Lord Zouch's steward. He was educated at Westminster, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow, and he was also incorporated at Oxford. His life is supposed to have been merry, and was certainly short, for he died, of what disease is not known, in his thirtieth year. He left, however, no inconsiderable literary results; and if his dramas are not quite so relatively good as his poems (there is certainly none of them which is in its own kind the equal of the fine answer to Ben Jonson's threat to leave the stage and the Ode to Anthony Stafford), still they are interesting and show a strong intellect and great literary facility. The two earliest, _Aristippus_ and _The Conceited Pedlar_, the first a slight dramatic sketch, the second a monologue, are eminent examples of the cla.s.s of university, not to say of undergraduate, wit; but far stronger and fuller of promise than most specimens of that cla.s.s. _The Jealous Lovers_, a play with cla.s.sical nomenclature, and at first seeming to aim at the Terentian model, drifts off into something like the Jonsonian humour-comedy, of which it gives some good studies, but hardly a complete example. Much better are _The Muses' Looking-Gla.s.s_ and _Amyntas_, in which Randolph's academic schemes and names do not hide his vivid and fertile imagination. _The Muses' Looking-Gla.s.s_, a play vindicating the claim of the drama in general to the t.i.tle, is a kind of morality, but a morality carried off with infinite spirit, which excuses the frigid nature of the abstractions presented in it, and not seldom rises to the height of real comedy. The scene between Colax and Dyscolus, the professional flatterer and the professional snarler, is really excellent: and others equally good might be picked out. Of the two I am inclined to think that this play shows more natural genius in the writer for its style, than the pretty pastoral of _Amyntas_, which has sometimes been preferred to it. The same penchant for comedy appears in _Down with Knavery_, a very free and lively adaptation of the _Plutus_ of Aristophanes. There is no doubt that Randolph's work gives the impression of considerable power. At the same time it is fair to remember that the author's life was one very conducive to precocity, inasmuch as he underwent at once the three stimulating influences of an elaborate literary education, of endowed leisure to devote himself to what literary occupations he pleased, and of the emulation caused by literary society. Jonson's friends.h.i.+p seems to have acted as a forcing-house on the literary faculties of his friends, and it is quite as possible that, if Randolph had lived, he would have become a steady-going soaker or a diligent but not originally productive scholar, as that he would have produced anything of high substantive and permanent value. It is true that many great writers had not at his age done such good work; but then it must be remembered that they had also produced little or nothing in point of bulk. It may be plausibly argued that, good as what Randolph's first thirty years gave is, it ought to have been better still if it was ever going to be of the best. Hut these excursions into possibilities are not very profitable, and the chief excuse for indulging in them is that Randolph's critics and editors have generally done the same, and have as a rule perhaps pursued the indulgence in a rather too enthusiastic and sanguine spirit. What is not disputable at all is the example given by Randolph of the powerful influence of Ben on his "tribe."

Very little is known of another of that tribe, Richard Brome. He was once servant to Ben Jonson, who, though in his own old age he was himself an unsuccessful, and Brome a very successful, dramatist, seems always to have regarded him with favour, and not to have been influenced by the rather illiberal attempts of Randolph and others to stir up bad blood between them. Brome deserved this favour, and spoke n.o.bly of his old master even after Ben's death. He himself was certainly dead in 1653, when some of his plays were first collected by his namesake (but it would seem not relation), Alexander Brome. The modern reprint of his dramas takes the liberty, singular in the collection to which it belongs, of not attempting any kind of critical or biographical introduction, and no book of reference that I know is much more fertile, the latest authority--the _Dictionary of National Biography_, in which Brome is dealt with by the very competent hand of the Master of Peterhouse--having little enough to tell. Brome's work, however, speaks for itself and pretty distinctly to all who care to read it. It consists, as printed (for there were others now lost or uncollected), of fifteen plays, all comedies, all bearing a strong family likeness, and all belonging to the cla.s.s of comedy just referred to--that is to say, a cross between the style of Jonson and that of Fletcher. Of the greater number of these, even if there were s.p.a.ce here, there would be very little to say beyond this general description. Not one of them is rubbish; not one of them is very good; but all are readable, or would be if they had received the trouble spent on much far inferior work, of a little editing to put the mechanical part of their presentation, such as the division of scenes, stage directions, etc., in a uniform and intelligible condition.

Their names (_A Mad Couple well Matched_, _The Sparagus Garden_, _The City Wit_, and so forth) tell a good deal about their most common form; while in _The Lovesick Court_, and one or two others, the half-courtly, half-romantic comedy of Fletcher takes the place of urban humours. One or two, such as _The Queen and Concubine_, attempt a statelier and tragi-comic style, but this was not Brome's forte. Sometimes, as in _The Antipodes_, there is an attempt at satire and comedy with a purpose. There are, however, two plays which stand out distinctly above the rest, and which are the only plays of Brome's known to any but diligent students of this cla.s.s of literature. These are _The Northern La.s.s_ and _A Jovial Crew_. The first differs from its fellows only as being of the same cla.s.s, but better; and the dialect of the _ingenue_ Constance seems to have been thought interesting and pathetic. _The Jovial Crew_, with its lively pictures of gipsy life, is, though it may have been partly suggested by Fletcher's _Beggar's Bush_, a very pleasant and fresh comedy. It seems to have been one of its author's last works, and he speaks of himself in it as "old."

Our two next figures are of somewhat minor importance. Sir Aston c.o.kain or c.o.c.kaine, of a good Derbys.h.i.+re family, was born in 1608, and after a long life died just before the accession of James II. He seems (and indeed positively a.s.serts himself) to have been intimate with most of the men of letters of Charles I.'s reign; and it has been unkindly suggested that posterity would have been much more indebted to him if he had given us the biographical particulars, which in most cases are so much wanted concerning them, instead of wasting his time on translated and original verse of very little value, and on dramatic composition of still less. As it is, we owe to him the knowledge of the not unimportant fact that Ma.s.singer was a collaborator of Fletcher. His own plays are distinctly of the lower cla.s.s, though not quite valueless. _The Obstinate Lady_ is an echo of Fletcher and Ma.s.singer; _Trappolin Creduto Principe_, an adaptation of an Italian farce, is a good deal better, and is said, with various stage alterations, to have held the boards till within the present century under the t.i.tle of _A Duke and no Duke_, or _The Duke and the Devil_. It is in fact a not unskilful working up of some well-tried theatrical motives, but has no great literary merit. The tragedy of _Ovid_, a regular literary tragedy in careful if not very powerful blank verse, is c.o.kain's most ambitious effort. Like his other work it is clearly an "echo" in character.

A more interesting and characteristic example of the "decadence" is Henry Glapthorne. When the enthusiasm excited by Lamb's specimens, Hazlitt's, and Coleridge's lectures for the Elizabethan drama, was fresh, and everybody was hunting for new examples of the style, Glapthorne had the doubtful luck to be made the subject of a very laudatory article in the _Retrospective Review_, and two of his plays were reprinted. He was not left in this honourable but comparatively safe seclusion, and many years later, in 1874, all his plays and poems as known were issued by themselves in Mr. Pearson's valuable series of reprints. Since then Glapthorne has become something of a b.u.t.t; and Mr. Bullen, in conjecturally attributing to him a new play, _The Lady Mother_, takes occasion to speak rather unkindly of him. As usual it is a case of _ni cet exces d'honneur ni cette indignite_. Personally, Glapthorne has some of the interest that attaches to the unknown. Between 1639 and 1643, or for the brief s.p.a.ce of four years, it is clear that he was a busy man of letters. He published five plays (six if we admit _The Lady Mother_), which had some vogue, and survived as an acted poet into the Restoration period; he produced a small but not despicable collection of poems of his own; he edited those of his friend Thomas Beedome; he was himself a friend of Cotton and of Lovelace. But of his antecedents and of the life that followed this short period of literary activity we know absolutely nothing. The guess that he was at St. Paul's School is a mere guess; and in the utter and total absence of the least sc.r.a.p of biographical information about him, his editor has thought it worth while to print in full some not unamusing but perfectly irrelevant doc.u.ments concerning the peccadillos of a certain _George_ Glapthorne of Whittlesea, who was certainly a contemporary and perhaps a relation. Henry Glapthorne as a writer is certainly not great, but he is as certainly not contemptible. His tragedy of _Albertus Wallenstein_ is not merely interesting as showing a reversion to the practice, almost dropped in his time (perhaps owing to censors.h.i.+p difficulties), of handling contemporary historical subjects, but contains pa.s.sages of considerable poetical merit.

His _Argalus and Parthenia_, a dramatisation of part of the _Arcadia_, caught the taste of his day, and, like the _Wallenstein_, is poetical if not dramatic. The two comedies, _The Hollander_ and _Wit in a Constable_, are of the school which has been so frequently described, and not of its strongest, but at the same time not of its weakest specimens. _Love's Privilege_, sometimes held his best play, is a rather flabby tragi-comedy of the Fletcher-s.h.i.+rley school. In short, Glapthorne, without being positively good, is good enough to have made it surprising that he is not better, if the explanation did not present itself pretty clearly. Though evidently not an old man at the time of writing (he has been guessed, probably enough, to have been a contemporary of Milton, and perhaps a little older or a little younger), his work has the clear defects of age.

It is garrulous and given to self-repet.i.tion (so much so that one of Mr.

Bullen's reasons for attributing _The Lady Mother_ to Glapthorne is the occurrence in it of pa.s.sages almost literally repeated in his known work); it testifies to a relish of, and a habituation to, the great school, coupled with powers insufficient to emulate the work of the great school itself; it is exactly in flavour and character the last _not_ sprightly runnings of a generous liquor. There is nowhere in it the same absolute flatness that occurs in the lesser men of the Restoration school, like the Howards and Boyle; the ancient gust is still too strong for that. It does not show the vulgarity which even Davenant (who as a dramatist was ten years Glapthorne's senior) too often displays. But we feel in reading it that the good wine has gone, that we have come to that which is worse.

I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often cla.s.sed with, and to some extent belongs to the post-Reformation school, he is ours for other purposes than that of mere mention. His Shakespere travesties (in one of which he was a.s.sisted by a greater than he), and even the operas and "entertainments" with which he not only evaded the prohibition of stage plays under the Commonwealth, but helped to produce a remarkable change in the English drama, do not concern us. But it must be remembered that Davenant's earlier, most dramatic, and most original playmaking was done at a time far within our limits. When the tragedy of _Albovine_ (Alboin) was produced, the Restoration was more than thirty years distant, and Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, and Marston--men in the strictest sense of the Elizabethan school--were still living, and, in the case of all but Marston, writing.

_The Cruel Brother_, which, though printed after, was licensed before, dates three years earlier; and between this time and the closing of the theatres Davenant had ten plays acted and printed coincidently with the best work of Ma.s.singer, s.h.i.+rley, and Ford. Nor, though his fame is far below theirs, is the actual merit of these pieces (the two above mentioned, _The Wits_, _News from Plymouth_, _The Fair Favourite_, _The Unfortunate Lovers_, etc.), so much inferior as the fame. The chief point in which Davenant fails is in the failing grasp of verse above noted. This is curious and so characteristic that it is worth while to give an example of it, which shall be a fair average specimen and not of the worst:--

"O n.o.ble maid, what expiation can Make fit this young and cruel soldier for Society of man that hath defiled The genius of triumphant glorious war With such a rape upon thy liberty!

Or what less hard than marble of The Parian rock can'st thou believe my heart, That nurst and bred him my disciple in The camp, and yet could teach his valour no More tenderness than injured Scytheans use When they are wroth to a revenge? But he Hath mourned for it: and now Evandra thou Art strongly pitiful, that dost so long Conceal an anger that would kill us both."

_Love and Honour_, 1649.

Here we have the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, the big manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble that stutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the poetical tongue.

In such a language as this poetry became impossible, and it is still a matter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made it tolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so, but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blank verse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, never seems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objected was execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, he wrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the best Elizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself in his earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do not remember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that he was consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenant and others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop.

One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatists of our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of the decadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase--

"Stumbled from above And reeled in slippery roads of alien art,"

is represented in the English theatre by four plays, _Aglaura_, _Brennoralt_, _The Sad One_, and the comedy of _The Goblins_. Of the tragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are the best thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rather suggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty.

His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, which have been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramatic verse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas--a combination of extravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence in short of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mere versification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may be perhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, which is not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, _The Goblins_.

There are several good points about this play--an abundance of not altogether stagey n.o.ble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound gallants, and not antic.i.p.ating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the Restoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly a clever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as the plot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at h.e.l.l and devils in caverns close to a populous city, and brings into the action a series of the most absurd escapes, duels, chance-meetings, hidings, findings, and all manner of other devices for spinning out an unnatural story. Many who know nothing more of Suckling's plays know that _Aglaura_ enjoys the eccentric possession of two fifth acts, so that it can be made a tragedy or a tragi-comedy at pleasure. _The Sad One_, which is unfinished, is much better. The tragedy of _Brennoralt_ has some pathos, some pretty scenes, and some charming songs; but here again we meet with the most inconceivably bad verse, as here--a pa.s.sage all the more striking because of its attempt, wilful or unconscious, to echo Shakespere:--

"Sleep is as nice as woman; The more I court it, the more it flies me.

Thy elder brother will be kinder yet, Unsent-for death will come. To-morrow!

Well, what can to-morrow do?

'Twill cure the sense of honour lost; I and my discontents shall rest together, What hurt is there in this? But death against The will is but a slovenly kind of potion; And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs.

So does it at fourscore too, when the soul's Mewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears.

Pis.h.!.+ 'tis mere fondness in our nature.

A certain clownish cowardice that still Would stay at home and dares not venture Into foreign countries, though better than Its own. Ha! what countries? for we receive Descriptions of th' other world from our divines As blind men take relations of this from us: My thoughts lead me into the dark, and there They'll leave me. I'll no more on it. Within!"

Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if not at once of _Hamlet_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_, at any rate of _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_.

To complete this sketch of the more famous and fortunate dramatists who have attained to separate presentation, we must give some account of lesser men and of those wholly anonymous works which are still to be found only in collections such as Dodsley's, or in single publications. As the years pa.s.s, the list of independently published authors increases. Mr. Bullen, who issued the works of Thomas Nabbes and of Davenport, has promised those of W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easy talent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy.

_Microcosmus_ (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality, and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. _The Bride_, _Covent Garden_, _Tottenham Court_, range with the already characterised work of Brome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interesting history of _King John and Matilda_, as well as the lively comedy of _The City Nightcap_, together with other work, deserved, and have now received, collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probably to be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, he collaborated with Middleton, with Ma.s.singer, with Webster, with Fletcher, with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It would appear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which he brought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-life humours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together with not a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect.

But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as _A New Wonder_, _a Woman Never Vexed_, and _A Match at Midnight_, he shows not merely this same _vis comica_ and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramatic situations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty of knitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with a half namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in his chronicle play _When you see Me you know Me_, and his romantic drama of _The n.o.ble Spanish Soldier_, has distinctly outstripped the ordinary dramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had a home in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of "Dramatists of the Restoration," though his dramatic fame was obtained many years before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of _Cupid and Psyche_, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which the best known is _The Antiquary_, are fair but not excessively favourable samples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy, which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from, either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy.

Among the single plays comparatively few are of the latter kind. _The Miseries of Enforced Marriage_, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itself with the wholly tragical _Yorks.h.i.+re Tragedy_, and is a kind of introduction to it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is _A Warning to Fair Women_) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem to have been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past and present. Their cla.s.s is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, in one sense or another, very interesting cla.s.s of the dramas attributed, and in general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to the fullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are _Fair Em_, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Edward III._, _The Birth of Merlin_, _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, _A Warning to Fair Women_, _The Arraignment of Paris_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Mucedorus_, _George a Green the Pinner of Wakefield_, _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, _The London Prodigal_, _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Sir John Oldcastle_, _The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street_, _The Yorks.h.i.+re Tragedy_, and _Locrine_. Four of these, _Edward III._, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Arden of Feversham_, and _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, are in whole or parts very far superior to the rest. Of that rest _The Yorks.h.i.+re Tragedy_, a violent and bloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruined gambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful, though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, not indeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In _Edward III._ and _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_ there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot, character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in both certain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonis.h.i.+ngly Shakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing of them by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of critics declare for the part authors.h.i.+p of Shakespere in _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_; I avow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he did not write any part of _Edward III._, and I should take it to be a case of a kind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not very original faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, and wrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death or diversion to non-literary employments, left no other monument of himself that can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with _Arden of Feversham_ and _The Merry Devil_ is different. We shall presently speak of the latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian about it, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant human sentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work of the time. But _Arden of Feversham_ is a very different piece of work. It is a domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife, being led by her pa.s.sion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at last carry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versification has much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him, but that the dramatic grasp of character both in princ.i.p.als and in secondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand.

Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the play definitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibit themselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of his undoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which are both wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it could be admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown off while he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare.

But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exact reproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_, licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terror pieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, but which seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It is black enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. _The Queen of Aragon_, by Habington, though in a different key, has something of the starchness rather than strength which characterises _Castara_. A much higher level is reached in the fine anonymous tragedy of _Nero_, where at least one character, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse, if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. The strange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him _The Distracted Emperor_, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagne and Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. _The Return from Parna.s.sus_ (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and its contribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for the judgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere pa.s.sages are only the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between the universities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chiefly on the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to provide for themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university and especially undergraduate life. The comedy of _Wily Beguiled_ has also a strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and _Lingua_, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. _The Dumb Knight_, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical cla.s.s; but in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, the authors.h.i.+p of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great names have been put forward, a really delightful example of romantic comedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit, appears. _The Merry Devil_ probably stands highest among all the anonymous plays of the period on the lighter side, as _Arden of Feversham_ does on the darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's _Two Angry Women of Abingdon_ (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, and a singularly exact picture of manners. With _Ram Alley_, attributed to the Irishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of the bustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connection with Middleton. To the same cla.s.s belong Haughton's pleasant _Englishmen for my Money_, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite the father's favour, are ousted from the courts.h.i.+p of three fair sisters; _Woman is a Weatherc.o.c.k_, and _Amends for Ladies_ (invective and palinode), by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eya.s.ses who competed with regular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "_Tu Quoque_" or _The City Gallant_, attributed to the actor Cook, and deriving its odd first t.i.tle from a well-known comedian of the time, and the catchword which he had to utter in the play itself; _The Hog hath Lost his Pearl_, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married against his will, by Taylor; _The Heir_ and _The Old Couple_, by Thomas May, more famous still for his Latin versification; the rather overpraised _Ordinary_ of Cartwright, Ben Jonson's most praised son; _The City Match_ by Dr.

Jasper Mayne. All these figure in the last, and most of them have figured in the earlier editions of Dodsley, with a few others hardly worth separate notice. Mr. Bullen's delightful volumes of _Old Plays_ add the capital play of _d.i.c.k of Devons.h.i.+re_ (see _ante_), the strange _Two Tragedies in One_ of Robert Yarington, three lively comedies deriving their names from originals of one kind or another, _Captain Underwit_, _Sir Giles Goosecap_, and _Dr.

Dodipoll_, with one or two more. One single play remains to be mentioned, both because of its intrinsic merit, and because of the controversy which has arisen respecting the question of priority between it and Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_. This is _Alb.u.mazar_, attributed to one Thomas Tomkis, and in all probability a university play of about the middle of James's reign.

There is nothing in it equal to the splendid bursts of Sir Epicure Mammon, or the all but first-rate comedy of Face, Dol, and Subtle, and of Abel Drugger; but Gifford, in particular, does injustice to it, and it is on the whole a very fair specimen of the work of the time. Nothing indeed is more astonis.h.i.+ng than the average goodness of that work, even when all allowances are made; and unjust as such a mere enumeration as these last paragraphs have given must be, it would be still more unjust to pa.s.s over in silence work so varied and so full of talent.[63]

[63] A note may best serve for the plays of Thomas Goff (1591-1629), acted at his own college, Christ Church, but not published till after his death.

The three most noteworthy, _The Raging Turk_, _The Courageous Turk_, and the _Tragedy of Orestes_, were republished together in 1656, and a comedy, _The Careless Shepherdess_, appeared in the same year. The tragedies, and especially _The Raging Turk_, have been a byword for extravagant frigidity, though, as they have never been printed in modern times, and as the originals are rare, they have not been widely known at first hand. A perusal justifies the worst that has been said of them: though Goff wrote early enough to escape the Caroline dry-rot in dramatic versification. His lines are stiff, but they usually scan.

CHAPTER XII

MINOR CAROLINE PROSE

The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more leisurely life a.s.sisted to a great extent in the production of his work.

The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified if it had produced nothing but _The Anatomy of Melancholy_; though there is something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly have grown, and it is as unique as the inst.i.tutions which produced it.

The author of the _Anatomy_ was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in Leicesters.h.i.+re, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He was educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch--the equivalent of a fellow--in 1599, and seems to have pa.s.sed the whole of the rest of his life there, though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and the rectory of Segrave in Leicesters.h.i.+re, at both of which latter places he seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing inconsistent with that character in the _Anatomy_. The picture of him which Anthony a Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his epitaph (_Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia_), that having cast his nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed suicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death) at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of charity.

The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of men and books is _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, first printed in 1621, and enlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the _Anatomy_, giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very much wanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, old and new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history is rather curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from the date of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped out of notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it was revived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or five editions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thus circulated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have been followed without much alteration in some later issues.

The book itself has been very variously judged. Fuller, in one of his least worthy moments, called it "a book of philology." Anthony Wood, hitting on a notion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenient commonplace book of cla.s.sical quotations, which, with all respect to Anthony's memory (whom I am more especially bound to honour as a Merton man), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected, appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his _Ill.u.s.trations of Sterne_ pointed out the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior.

Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man," exhibited perhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which, after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton's contemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled.

Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of a quarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers of English literature have loved him.

The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps no great wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by the bristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with full and careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaborate but apparently futile marshalling in "part.i.tions" and "members," in "sections" and "subsections," and by the measureless license of digression which the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling some hundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the author calls himself, to the reader--an epistle which gives a true foretaste of the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not scholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and even the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "part.i.tions" a curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature, effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw out a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compa.s.s of the scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowest terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his notebook, but in developing his own thoughts,--a mine hardly less rich if less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to have been put at his disposal.

The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe in brief s.p.a.ce. The melancholy of which the author treats, and of which, no doubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mere Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole round of human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found all to be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some _amari aliquid_. It is at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whose bodily health was not quite so robust as his mental const.i.tution. It is the satiety of learning of a man who, nevertheless, knows that learning, or at least literature, is the only cure for his disease.