From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 5

At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.

Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and careless in construction, and he puts cla.s.sical allusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage. He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such pa.s.sages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.

In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection, hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more developed state of the art. But the work of this early school settled the shape which the English drama was to take. It fixed the practice and traditions of the national theater. It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action. It decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death. It established blank verse, with occasional riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and "business" parts. And it introduced songs, a feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing. Even the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.

Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to construct a theory--and support it with some show of reason--that the plays which pa.s.s under his name were really written by Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his t.i.tle to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and fifty years after the event. That the single authors.h.i.+p of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric. But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in America was already nine years old. The important known facts of his life can be told almost in a sentence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, married when he was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587, and became an actor, play writer, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and the Globe theaters. He seemingly prospered, and retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616. His _Venus and Adonis_ was printed in 1593, his _Rape of Lucrece_ in 1594, and his _Sonnets_ in 1609. So far as is known, only eighteen of the thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed during his life-time. These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little more than stage books, or librettos. The first collected edition of his works was the so-called "First Folio" of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player. There is a number of references to him in the literature of the time; some generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known verses; others singularly unappreciative, like Webster's mention of "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspere." But all these together do not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. There is, indeed, nothing to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among them in the person of "Our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare." The age, for the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to review writing and literary biography. Nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man. He lost his ident.i.ty completely in the characters of his plays, as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do. His sonnets have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character and life, but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than convincing.

Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. _Henry VI_. and the b.l.o.o.d.y tragedy of _t.i.tus Andronicus_, if Shakspere's at all, are doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage. The _Taming of the Shrew_ seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere and some other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in parts of _Henry VIII., Pericles_, and _Timon of Athens_. Such partners.h.i.+ps were common among the Elizabethan dramatists, the most ill.u.s.trious example being the long a.s.sociation of Beaumont and Fletcher.

The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories, comedies, and tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them briefly in that order.

It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try his fortune. Elizabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587. The following year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain had sent to revenge Mary's death; and hard upon these events followed the gallant exploits of Grenville, Ess.e.x, and Raleigh.

That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now born in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Englishmen, is evident from many a pa.s.sage in his plays.

This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in a silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, England, bound in with the triumphant sea!

His English histories are ten in number. Of these _King John_ and _Henry VIII._ are isolated plays. The others form a consecutive series, in the following order: _Richard II._ the two parts of _Henry IV., Henry V.,_ the three parts of _Henry VI.,_ and _Richard III._ This series may be divided into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group of four plays. In the first the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster. But the power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation. In the second group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the tyranny of Gloucester. The happy conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series, when this new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry VII., the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne and restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, by b.l.o.o.d.y atonement, from the stain of Richard II.'s murder. These eight plays are, as it were, the eight acts of one great drama; and, if such a thing were possible, they should be represented on successive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy. In order of composition the second group came first. _Henry VI_. is strikingly inferior to the others. _Richard III_.

is a good acting play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great tragedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, in a literary sense, it is unequal to _Richard II.,_ or the two parts of _Henry IV_. The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the immortal Falstaff.

The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his _King John_ with the two plays on that subject which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old "Chronicle histories," such as _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ and the _Famous Victories of Henry V._, follow a merely chronological, or biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe.

Shakspere's order was logical. He compressed and selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction; bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect, even though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.

Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's Lost_ was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a number of _humors_, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play, unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story turned on a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's _Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The _Taming of the Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays; a _bourgeois_ domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.

The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play.

Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.

The fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the _Mennaechmi_ of Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of play, though there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this play, as in the _Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure_, and the _Tempest_, the plan of construction is as follows. There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters. The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the n.o.blest motives, the strongest pa.s.sions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_. In others, like _Measure for Measure_, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close. Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like _Winter's Tale_, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the t.i.tle-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies."

The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic. It was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and Audrey, in _As You Like It_; sometimes closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action.

The _Merry Wives of Windsor_ is an exception to this plan of construction. It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-cla.s.s English life, and, is written almost throughout in prose. It is his only pure comedy, except the _Taming of the Shrew_.

Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned it to a new account. The two species graded into one another. Thus _Cymbeline_ is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as _Winter's Tale_--to which its plot bears a resemblance--and is only technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death. In some of the tragedies, as in _Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, the comedy element is reduced to a minimum. But in others, as _Romeo and Juliet_, and _Hamlet_, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast. Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the moralities. The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in _As You Like It_, and Thersites in _Troilus and Cressida_, are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with sc.r.a.ps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man's nature.

The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless _t.i.tus Andronicus_ be his, was, doubtless, _Romeo and Juliet_, which is full of the pa.s.sion and poetry of youth and of first love. It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work. He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet. _Romeo and Juliet_ is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama.

It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances. This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, _Hamlet, Oth.e.l.lo, Lear, Macbeth_, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special sense, in _Hamlet_, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and, if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in pa.s.sing into tragedy, he intensified and concentrated the attention upon a single character. This difference is seen even in the naming of the plays; the tragedies always take their t.i.tles from their heroes, the comedies never.

Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned were the three Roman plays, _Julius Caesar, Coriola.n.u.s,_ and _Anthony and Cleopatra_. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot of none of his plays, but took material that he found at hand. In these Roman tragedies he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist. It is most instructive to compare _Julius Caesar_ with Ben Jonson's _Catiline_ and _Seja.n.u.s_. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In _Catiline_ he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. _Seja.n.u.s_ is a mosaic of pa.s.sages from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.

Having grasped the conceptions of the characters of Brutus, Ca.s.sius, and Mark Anthony, as Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's own. _Timon of Athens_ is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and _Troilus and Cressida_, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction. In losing their ideal remoteness the heroes of the _Iliad_ lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.

It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as "warbling his native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist. It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and at all points perfect. But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, with the finer requirements of his art. Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be a.s.signed for his method in a given case than that "the audience liked puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, for example, his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in _Faustus_. Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions; and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. The ghost in _Hamlet_ is merely an embodied suspicion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama. In the same way, the fairies in _Midsummer Night's Dream_ are the personified caprices of the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and dislikes they control, save in the instance where Bottom is "translated"

(that is, becomes mad) and has sight of the invisible world. So in the _Tempest_, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man's necessities.

Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays. He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of cla.s.sical taste, have at length learned to know him. An ever-growing ma.s.s of Shakespearian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or ill.u.s.trative, testifies to the durability and growth of his fame. Above all, his plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage. It is common to speak of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood, in some sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries. The rest shared with him in the mighty influences of the age. Their plays are touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint heirs. But, as a whole, they are obsolete. They live in books, but not in the hearts and on the tongues, of men.

The most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare was Ben Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other's gracious impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare.

He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low countries, became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was twice imprisoned--once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his part in the comedy of _Eastward Hoe_, which gave offense to King James.

He lived down to the time of Charles I (1635), and became the acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit combats at the Mermaid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns.

What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whom they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.[22]

The inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply

O rare Ben Jonson!

[Footnote 22: Francis Beaumont. _Letter to Ben Jonson_.]

Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the _vetus comaedia_ of Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were cla.s.sical and not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting no admixture of tragic motives. There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his dramatic creations. They were comedies not of character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors. His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his _dramatis personae_ consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors, fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and "Pauls men." In his first play, _Every Man in his Humor_ (acted in 1598), in _Every Man Out of his Humor, Bartholomew Fair_, and, indeed, in all of his comedies, his subject was the fas.h.i.+onable affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London life. His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humorists, and "squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls," by playing them off upon each other, involving them in all manner of comical misadventures, and rendering them utterly ridiculous and contemptible. There was thus a perishable element in his art, for manners change; and, however effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been before an audience of Jonson's day, it is as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day as _Patience_, or the _Colonel_. Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious footnotes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy dwells, and can admire the dramatist's solid good sense, his great learning, his skill in construction, and the astonis.h.i.+ng fertility of his invention. His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere's, but built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious particulars. The difference will be plainly manifest if such a character as Slender, in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, be compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's plays; with Master Stephen, for example, in _Every Man in his Humor_; or, if Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy, perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature.

_Cynthia's Revels_ was a satire on the courtiers and the _Poetaster_ on Jonson's literary enemies. The _Alchemist_ was an exposure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with learning. _Volpone_ is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh and disagreeable piece; and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy. The _Silent Woman_ is, perhaps, the easiest of all Jonson's plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate.

There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon a single humor or eccentricity, as in some of Moliere's lighter comedies, like _Le Malade Imaginaire_, or _Le Medecin malgre lui_.

In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakspere's, but they have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his _Love's Triumph, Hymn to Diana_, the adaptation from Philostratus,

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

and many others ent.i.tle their author to rank among the first of English lyrists. Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous verse, the _Forest_ and _Underwoods_; others in the numerous masques which he composed. These were a species of entertainment, very popular at the court of James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate dances, and costly scenery. Jonson left an unfinished pastoral drama, the _Sad Shepherd_, which contains pa.s.sages of great beauty; one, especially, descriptive of the shepherdess

Earine, Who had her very being and her name With the first buds and breathings of the spring, Born with the primrose and the violet And earliest roses blown.

1. A History of Elizabethan Literature. George Saintsbury.

London: Macmillan & Co., 1877.

2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. London: Macmillan & Co., 1877.

3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose. Edited by J. Hannah. London: Bell & Daldy, 1870.

4. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1867.

5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright. Macmillan & Co. (Golden Treasury Series.)

6. The Cambridge Shakspere. (Clark & Wright.)

7. Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.

8. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman. Cunningham's Edition. London: J.C. Hotten, (3 vols.)

CHAPTER IV.

THE AGE OF MILTON.

1608-1674.

The Elizabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had pa.s.sed since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought and style which had marked the writers of her reign prolonged themselves in their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart kings and the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in spirit. Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself. In periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times. There were seeds of civil and religious discord in Elizabethan England. As between the two parties in the Church there was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement. The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian. The form of government was Episcopal, but there was a large body of Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change. In the ritual and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elizabeth was a worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though circ.u.mstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe she kept many Catholic notions; disapproved, for example, of the marriage of priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in the State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity. The authors of the _Martin Marprelate_ pamphlets against the bishops were punished by death or imprisonment. While the queen lived things were kept well together and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a Catholic.

But during the reign of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I. (1625-1649) Puritanism grew stronger through repression. "England," says the historian Green, "became the people of a book, and that book the Bible."

The power of the king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent became also political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne. The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile camps. On the side of Church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time. But on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the exalted imagination of English Puritanism. The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history of his generation, as Shakspere does of the generation preceding.