Amenities of Literature Part 44

The badge of the O'Neals was "a b.l.o.o.d.y hand." In the ecstasy of divination he exclaims, "This lady with the b.l.o.o.d.y-handed babe is--the wife of O'Neal!" The dying lady had told her sad tale, but never had she hinted at the Irish origin. Her knight had fallen a victim to Acrasia; a suitable incident in the legend of temperance--a result of that "pa.s.sion" at which the poet pointed, and described as one which

Robs Reason of her due regality.

And this simple incident is converted into the fate of the O'Neals, presenting an image of the miseries of the Irish rebellion!

We pa.s.s by the contemporary portraits inscribed by our speculative historian with real names. When fancy is busy, likenesses are often found; a single feature is sometimes taken for a whole physiognomy.

Never surely did our conjecturer shoot wider of the mark than when he discovered in the two burlesque characters of the poltroon Braggadochio and his cheating squire Trompart, the Duke of Anjou and his envoy Simier. These were eminent characters known in the court of Elizabeth.

To the French prince the Queen seemed partial, and once placed a ring on his finger, too sanguinely accepted as a plight of betrothment; and Simier was a discreet diplomatist, whom the Queen publicly commended for his conduct. To have degraded such distinguished men by such vulgar baseness would have been a discrepancy in the taste and decorum of our courtly poet which Spenser never betrayed.[6]

In regard to Spenser, after all these allusions problematical for a succeeding generation, the poet is no longer to be judged by the darkness which has hidden small and fugitive matters. We cannot know the degree which Spenser allowed himself in distant allusions to the court of Elizabeth, or, as the poet himself vaguely said, to "Fairy-land;" he may have promised far more than he would care to perform; for an epical poet must have found the descent into a chronicler of scandalous legends, a portrayer of so many nameless personages, incompatible with the flow and elevation of his themes. And for what was never ascertained in its own age we dare not confide to that mystical vaticinator of past events, a conjectural historian!

Our interpreter of allegory was honest as well as hardy; in truth, he is sometimes startled at the historical revelations which crowd on his mind. It required "the hound's fine footing," to borrow the beautiful figure of Spenser himself, for our conjecturer to course in this field of allegory. With great candour he says, "Let us take care we do not overrun our game, or start more game than we are able to catch." His occasional dilemmas are amusing. He perplexed himself by a discovery that Amoret, whom he had made the lady of Sir Walter Rawleigh, might also have served for Mary Queen of Scots. In this critical crucifixion, he cries in torture, "I will neither affirm nor deny that Amoret is the type of Mary Queen of Scots!" But he had his ecstasies; for on another occasion, having indulged a very extravagant fancy, he exclaims in joyous rapture, "This may show how far types and symbols may be carried!" Yet, with his accustomed candour, he lowers down. "If the reader should think my arguments too flimsy, and extended beyond their due limits, and should laugh

To see their thrids so thin as spiders frame, And eke so short that seem'd their ends out shortly came,

let him consider the lat.i.tude of interpretation all types and symbolical writings admit."[7] Truly that lat.i.tude has been too often abused on graver subjects than "The Faery Queen;" but the honesty of our mystical interpreter of double senses may plead for the extravagance of his ingenuity whenever he needs our indulgence.

Enough on this curious subject of allegory--this child of darkness among the luminous progeny of fancy. We have shown its changeable nature, and how frequently it fails in unity and clearness; we have demonstrated that "the double sense"--this system of types and symbols--has served as an imposture, since allegories have been deduced from works which were not allegorical, and forced interpretations of an ambiguous sense have led to fallacies which have fatally been introduced into history, into politics, and into theology.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We have a collection of these "Allegoricae Homericae." Even the great Verulam caught the infectious ingenuity; and, in "the wisdom of the ancients," explains everything with the skill of a great Homeric scholiast.

[2] Berni's "Bojardo," canto x.x.xi. st. 2. He has hardly improved the verse in the "Inferno," canto ix. ver. 61.--

O voi ch'avete gl'intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde, _Sotto il velame degli versi strani_.

[3] The "Allegoria dalla Poema" is appended to the ancient editions of Ta.s.so's "Gerusalemme Liberata." The one before me is dated Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern editors. When we detect Ta.s.so seriously describing G.o.dfrey as the type of the human understanding--Rinaldo, and Tancred, and others, as different faculties of the soul--and the common soldiers as the body of man--we regret that an honourable mind should degrade itself by such literary imposture. At length, having succeeded in imposing on others, he attempted to impose on himself; for he actually commenced a second "Jerusalem" on the allegorical system, and did not more happily succeed in his elder days than our Akenside in his philosophical destruction of his youthful poem.

[4] "Edinburgh Review," vol. vii. p. 215.

[5] Book III. canto viii.

[6] It has been observed of Upton that, though an excellent cla.s.sical scholar, he was little versed in the romances of chivalry. In the romance of "Gyron le Courtois" he would have found the original of the farcical Knight Braggadochio; a fact, long after I had written the above, which I owe to Mr. Southey. Such ludicrous caricatures are unusual with the delicacy and elegance of Spenser; and they seem never to have been struck in his mint. I suspect we should not have had such farcical personages in the "Faery Queen," had not Spenser's propensity to imitation induced him to follow his beloved patron, who has not happily introduced in the "Arcadia" the low comic of Damoetas and his ugly daughter Mopsa.

[7] Upton's note at the close of the fifth book of "The Faery Queen."

THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY.

In the transition from the simpler interlude to the aggrandizement of a more complicate scene and more numerous personages, so indistinct were the notions of tragedy and comedy, that the writer of a morality in 1578, declaring that his purpose was to represent "the manners of men, and fas.h.i.+on of the world now-a-days," distinguishes his drama both as "a Pleasant Tragedy" and "a Pitiful Comedy."[1] This play, indeed, may be placed among the last of the ancient dramas; and it is probable that the author considered that these vague expressions might serve to designate a superior order of dramatic productions.

The term Comedy was as indefinite in France as with ourselves. Margaret of Valois, in 1544, gave the t.i.tle of comedy to such scriptural pieces as _The Nativity_, _The Adoration of the Kings_, and _The Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents_; and in Spain, at the same period, they also called their moral pieces comedies. The t.i.tle of one of these indicates their matter, _La Doleria del Sueno del Mundo; Comedia tratada por via de Philosophia Moral_,--"The Anguish of the Sleep of the World; a Comedy treated in the style of Philosophic Morality." Comedy was the general appellative for a play. Shakspeare himself calls the play of the players in _Hamlet_ both a tragedy and a comedy. It is quite evident that at this period they had no distinct conception of comedy merely as a pleasant exhibition of society. Aristotle had not afforded them a correct description in our sense, drawing his notions from the old comedy, those personal satires or farcical lampoons acted on the Athenian stage.

To this day we remain still unsatisfied what Dante meant by calling his great poem a "Commedia." Dante throws the same sort of mystery over the species of his poem as he has done over the creation of a cla.s.sical diction for his own Italy. According to his interpretation, the lofty style was denominated tragic, and in opposition to it he has called his work "Commedia," as of a more humble style; and on another occasion he describes comedy as something that begins sadly and ends happily, as we find it in his great poem. We must, however, accept the definition as very obscure, when we consider that both his subject and his diction so often led him to sublimity of conception and expression; but the style of criticism was yet unformed in the days of the Italian Homer.

It is remarkable that Boccaccio has ent.i.tled his pastoral of "Ameto" a "Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine." It is difficult to imagine that the almost contemporaneous commentator would have misused the word; we might presume he attached the idea of a drama to this disputed term.

While these indistinct notions of tragedy and comedy were prevalent with us, even long after we had a public theatre, we really possessed tragedy and comedy in their more cla.s.sical form; Tragedy, which soared to the sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and Terence.

We owe this first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who planned _The Mirror for Magistrates_, and left as its model _The Induction_. SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he antic.i.p.ated the grave melodious stanza and the picturing invention of Spenser. But called away from the land of the muses to the political cabinet, this fine genius seems repeatedly to have consigned his works to the hands of others; even his lighter productions are still concealed from us in their anonymous condition. As in _The Mirror for Magistrates_ Sackville had resigned that n.o.ble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of _Ferrex and Porrex_, or, as it was sometimes ent.i.tled, _The Tragedy of Gorboduc_, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet the t.i.tlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor in THOMAS NORTON, who, as much as we know of him in other things, was a worthy partner of Sternhold and Hopkins.

In this first tragedy in our language, cast in the mould of cla.s.sical antiquity, we find a division of scenes and a progressive plot carried on, though somewhat heavily, through five acts; the ancient ethical choruses are preserved, changing their metres with rhyme. And here, for the first time, blank verse was recited on the stage. Notwithstanding these novel refinements, our first tragedy bears a strong impress of ancient simplicity. Every act was preceded by "a dumb show," prefiguring the incidents of the opening act; these scenical displays of something considered to be a.n.a.logous to the matter were remains of the pageants.

Blank verse, which the Earl of Surrey had first invented for his version of Virgil, the Earl of Dorset now happily applied to the dramatic dialogue. To both these n.o.blemen our poets owe their emanc.i.p.ation from rhyme; but the rhythmical artifices of blank verse were not discovered in the monotonous, uncadenced lines of its inventors. The happiest inventor does not overcome all difficulties.

SACKVILLE, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his _Induction_; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable; his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by those not versed in ancient lore. The political part of the tragedy is not dest.i.tute of interest; developing the misery of fraternal wars, the division of sovereign power, each contending for dominion, and closing in the dissolution of all government, by the despair of a people. We have ourselves witnessed in these times a similar scene of the enmity of brothers and monarchs.

A political anecdote confining this tragedy is worth recording. In the discussions of the dangers and mischiefs of such a state of insubordination, the poet, adopting the prevalent notions of the divine right and the authority of "the absolute king," inculcates the doctrine of pa.s.sive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition, were silently removed from the later ones.[2] It is an evidence that these dreary principles, which in the following reigns of James and Charles produced such fatal misunderstandings, even at this time began to be questioned. Our poet, however, under the reckless councils of a court minion, had covered the severest satire on those monarchs who rage with "the l.u.s.t of kingdoms," and "subject to no law," and who hold their enormous will to be the privilege of regal power. Sackville seems to have adopted the principle which Machiavel had artfully managed in his "Prince," in the spirit of d.a.m.ning irony.

There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this drama,[3] that it has given rise to a suspicion that the work could only be the composition of one mind and one ear. It is not in the const.i.tution of the human intellect that Norton could emulate Sackville, or that Sackville could bring himself down to Norton. This internal evidence struck Warton; and tracing it by _The Mirror for Magistrates_, the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of _Gorboduc_ are visibly marked with the greater poet's characteristics, "in a perspicuity of style and a command of numbers superior to the tone of his times." The name of Norton affixed to the t.i.tlepage might only indicate his management of the pageants! and possibly, being a licenser of books and a puritan, even his name might be a recommendation of this drama, for certain persons. Few things in those days were more loosely conducted than the business and the artifices of printers, who generally procured their copies surrept.i.tiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their own free management and deceptive t.i.tlepages.

We must not decide on _the first tragedy_ by a comparison with the more attractive and impa.s.sioned ones which soon afterwards inundated our theatres. The court-circle had never before listened to such an amazing novelty; and the poetic critic of that day p.r.o.nounced that "those stately speeches and well-sounding phrases were full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach." Sir Philip Sidney only grieved that this tragedy might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies, being "faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions." Sidney did not live to witness the code of Aristotle impugned, and his unities set at defiance, by a swarm of dramatic bees, whose wild music and native sweetness were in their own humming and their own honey.

This our first tragedy attracted by its cla.s.sical form the approval of some great moderns. RYMER, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on tragedy, was astonished to find "such a cla.s.sical fable on this side the Alps," which, he plainly tells us, "might have been a better direction to Shakspeare and Jonson than any which they had the luck to follow."

And Pope was not the less struck by the chaste style and the decorum of Sackville, who having several murders in his tragedy, veiled them from the public eye; conforming to the great Horatian canon, they are told, and not viewed in the representation. Pope in conversation declared, too, that Sackville wrote in a much purer style than Shakspeare in his first plays, without affectation and bombast! and he has delivered a more formal decision in print. "The writers of the succeeding age might have improved as much in other respects by copying from Sackville, from a propriety in the sentiments and dignity in the sentences, and an unaffected perspicuity of style, which all the succeeding poets, not excepting Shakspeare himself, either little understood or perpetually neglected."

These are edicts from the school of cla.s.sical antiquity. It was on the earnest recommendation of Pope that Spence published an edition of this tragedy, which had accidentally been put into the hands of Pope by the father of the Wartons. Our vernacular writers, even the greatest, were almost unknown in that day, and they only accidentally occurred.[4]

Spence, a feeble cla.s.sical critic, was so overcome by the notion that "a privy-counsellor" must be more versant in the language and the feelings of royalty than a plebeian poet, that in his preface pointing out "the stately speeches," he exclaimed in ecstasy--"'Tis no wonder if the language of _kings_ and _statesmen_ should be less happily imitated by a _poet_ than a _privy-counsellor_." To vindicate Shakspeare, at whom this unguarded blow seemed levelled, the historian of our poetry, seated in his professorial chair, flung his lightning on the impious critic.

"Whatever merit there is in this play, and particularly in the speeches, it is more owing to the poet than the privy-counsellor. If a first minister was to write a tragedy, I believe the piece will be the better the less it has of the first minister. When a statesman turns poet, I should not wish him to fetch his ideas or his language from the cabinet.

I know not why a king should be better qualified than a private man to make kings talk in blank verse."

Literary history would have supplied the positive fact. Cardinal Richelieu, that great minister, wrote a memorable tragedy; and, in accordance with his own familiar notions, the minister called it _Europe_. It was written in the style of "a privy-counsellor," and it was hissed! while Corneille, who wrote as a poet, for the national theatre, composed sentiments which statesmen got by heart.

Our literary antiquaries long doted on the first English comedy--_Gammer Gurton's Needle_--being a regular comedy in five acts in rhyme. The rusticity of the materials is remarkable. A diligent crone, darning the lower habiliments of Hodge, loses her needle--

A little thing, with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller (silver), Small, long, sharp at the point, and straight as any piller.

Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is since Birmingham flourished, we had not had such a pointed and polished description. In fact, the loss of the Gammer's needle sets the whole village in flames; the spark falling from the mischievous waggery of a Tom o' Bedlam in an artful insinuation against a certain gossip notable for the luxuriance of her grotesque invectives. Dame Chat is a scold, whose curses and oaths neither the fish-market nor Shakspeare himself could have gone beyond. Brawls and battles involve the justice, the curate, and the devil himself, in their agency. The prime author of all the mischief produces the catastrophe; for he contrives to make Hodge extract from a part more tender than his heart the cause of so much discord, with great risk to its point and straightness; and the parties conclude--

For Gammer Gurton's needle's sake let us have a PLAUDITE!

The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest comedy in our language, the t.i.tlepage informs us was Mr. S----, Master of Arts; and, moreover, that it was acted at the University of Cambridge. When afterwards it was ascertained that Mr. S---- was no less a person than JOHN STILL, subsequently Bishop of Bath and Wells, it did not diminish the number of its admirers. The black-letter brotherhood were long enamoured of this most ancient comedy, as a genuine beauty of the infancy of the drama. Dodsley and Hawkins enshrined _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ in their "Reliquary;" and literary superst.i.tion

Swore it was the relick of a saint.

The mere lovers of antiquity endured the raillery of the wits for the puerility of the plot, the vulgar humour, and the homeliness of the style. One had a.s.serted that "STILL had displayed the true genius of comedy, and the choice of his _subject_ only was to be regretted;"

another declared that "the vein of familiar humour and a kind of grotesque imagery are not unlike some parts of Aristophanes, but without the graces of _language_." Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the grossness of the "Gammer."--"In a polished age that writer would have chosen, nor would he perhaps have disgraced, a better subject. It has been thought surprising that a learned audience could have endured some of the indelicate scenes. But the established festivities of scholars were gross, and agreeable to their general habits." This apology has turned out to be more plausible than true.

This ancient comedy is the work of a truly comic genius, who knew not how to choose his subject, and indulged a taste repulsive to those who only admit of delicate, and not familiar humour. Its grossness, however, did not necessarily result from the prevalent grossness of the times; since a recent discovery, with which Warton was unacquainted, has shown the world that an English comedy which preceded the hitherto supposed first comedy in our language, is remarkable for its chasteness--the propriety of its great variety of characters, the truth of the manners in a wide circle of society, and the uninterrupted gaiety pervading the whole airy composition.

So recently as in 1818 an ancient printed drama, styled _Ralph Roister Doister_, was discovered;[5] a legitimate comedy of five acts in rhyme, and, as the writer himself professes, modelled on the dramas of Plautus and Terence. He claims for it the honour of the highest cla.s.s--that of "Comedy," but this term was then so indistinct that the poet adds the more usual one of "Enterlude."