From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 6

The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's example until the theaters were closed by Parliament, in 1642. Of the Stuart dramatists the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I. These were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions. Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, and died a few years before him. He was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas. His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of London, was five years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine years. He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays. Although the life of one of these partners was conterminous with Shakspere's, their works exhibit a later phase of the dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson. Their plays, like the former's, belong to the romantic drama. They present a poetic and idealized version of life, deal with the highest pa.s.sions and the wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic. But, while Shakspere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every license. They sought to stimulate the jaded appet.i.te of their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character, unnatural l.u.s.ts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.

Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished Jonson's more conscientious workmans.h.i.+p, they are full of graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the Restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's throughout the year, and he added that they "understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done."

Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are gallant and pa.s.sionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous--according to the fas.h.i.+on of their times--and sensitive on the point of honor. They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration comedy. Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, _The Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked the stage, in 1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped. Coleridge said that Shakspere was coa.r.s.e, but never gross. He had the healthy coa.r.s.eness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fas.h.i.+on of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind. Chast.i.ty with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.

Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances, The Scornful Lady, The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King_--all written jointly--and _Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon its authors'

dramatic methods, but also upon the att.i.tude toward royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which grew up under the Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding night,

I must have one To father children, and to bear the name Of husband to me, that my sin may be More honorable.

This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king as her paramour, Amintor exclaims:

O thou hast named a word that wipes away All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name "The king" there lies a terror. What frail man Dares lift his hand against it? Let the G.o.ds Speak to him when they please; till when, let us Suffer and wait.

And the play ends with the words

On l.u.s.tful kings, Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent, But cursed is he that is their instrument.

Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere's Ophelia. All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, a "gentle forlornness" under wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In _Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding_, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless pa.s.sion for Philaster--who is in love with Arethusa--puts on the dress of a page and enters his service. He employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, is sent by the duke to Olivia. Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. Afterward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies,

Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing Worthy your n.o.ble thoughts. 'Tis not a life, 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.

Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly, but in all their piteous pa.s.sages there is nothing equal to the natural pathos--the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character--of that one brief question and answer in _King Lear_.

_Lear_. So young and so untender?

_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true.

The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the romantic drama; and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys made the deception easier. Viola's situation in _Twelfth Night_ is precisely similiar to Euphrasia's, but there is a difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his contemporaries. The audience in _Twelfth Night_ is taken into confidence and made aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while Euphrasia's _incognito_ is preserved till the fifth act, and then disclosed by an accident. This kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakspere. In this instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability.

Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her ident.i.ty, have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and truth of Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their plays with pleasure, and remembers here and there a pa.s.sage of fine poetry, or a n.o.ble or lovely trait, but their characters, as wholes, leave a fading impression. Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?

The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succ.u.mbs to his guilty pa.s.sion. He is rescued from the consequences of his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the denouement to chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakspere always wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator.

In one of John Ford's tragedies the situation which in _A King and No King_ is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and pa.s.sion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings.

Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the _Sad Shepherd_. Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. The _Knight of the Burning Pestle,_ written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings.

In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in the great murder scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure pa.s.sion; but in Webster it is mingled with something physically repulsive. Thus his _d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ is presented in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of mad-men and, "behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if dead." Treated in this elaborate fas.h.i.+on, that "terror," which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about them:

She would not after the report keep fresh As long as flowers on graves.

We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruined, yield no echo.

O this gloomy world I In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of feeling.

Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young,

says the brother of the d.u.c.h.ess, when he has procured her murder and stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the old editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be acted by the shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination. It was to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud n.o.bles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin.

But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. The last of the race was James s.h.i.+rley, who died in 1666, and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I.

and the Commonwealth.

In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there are a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in natural science--which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist; and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These are outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific att.i.tude of mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, or _Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors_, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this _Anatomy_, in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are considered in numerous part.i.tions, sections, members, and subsections.

The work is a mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that the _Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.

The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to refute were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the dec.u.man or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx or lozenge. Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library, museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and deeply read in the school-men and the Christian Fathers. He was a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, _Religio Medici_, published in 1642, and _Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial_, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose; that stately, c.u.mbrous, brocaded prose which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing.

Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men. His _Religio Medici_ is full of a wise tolerance and a singular elevation of feeling. "At the sight of a cross, or crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour." "They only had the advantage of a bold and n.o.ble faith who lived before his coming." "They go the fairest way to heaven that would serve G.o.d without a h.e.l.l." "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of G.o.d." The last chapter of the _Urn Burial_ is an almost rhythmical descant on mortality and oblivion. The style kindles slowly into a somber eloquence. It is the most impressive and extraordinary pa.s.sage in the prose literature of the time. Browne, like Hamlet, loved to "consider too curiously." His subtlety led him to "pose his apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity--with incarnation and resurrection;" and to start odd inquiries: "what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles a.s.sumed when he hid himself among women;" or whether, after Lazarus was raised from the dead, "his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance." The quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn. "Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector." "Generations pa.s.s while some trees stand, and old families survive not three oaks." "Mummy is become merchandise; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."

One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among other things, a _Church History of Britain;_ a book of religious meditations, _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_; and a "character" book, _The Holy and Profane State._ His most important work, the _Worthies of England,_ was published in 1662, the year after his death. This was a description of every English county; its natural commodities, manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and excellent common sense. Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expression and bits of eccentric suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of humor was imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnolia_, and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.

Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II., bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are religious cla.s.sics.

Taylor, like Sidney was a "warbler of poetic prose." He has been called the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the poet of the _Faerie Queene_. In fullness and resonance Taylor's diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a c.o.c.k, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single pa.s.sage of Taylor's is the opening chapter in _Holy Dying_. From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there acc.u.mulates rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect things in its wording in all our prose literature. "But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."

With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider extension. Of this sort are the _Letters from Italy_, and other miscellanies included in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, or remains of Sir Henry Wotton, English emba.s.sador at Venice in the reign of James I., and subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the _Table Talk_--full of incisive remarks--left by John Selden, whom Milton p.r.o.nounced the first scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's _Polyolbion_, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little _Lives_ of good old Izaak Walton, the first edition of whose _Compleat Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number; of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle.

The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in Providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's _Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.

Piscator and his friend Venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore-tree during a pa.s.sing shower. They repair, after the day's fis.h.i.+ng, to some honest ale-house, with lavender in the window and a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing catches--"old-fas.h.i.+oned poetry but choicely good"--composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub.

They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the red cow's milk and they never cease their praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.

The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the Elizabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors. That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher--a cousin of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian allegory, the _Purple Island_, descriptive of the human body. George Herbert and others made anagrams, and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fas.h.i.+on to its extreme in Italy and in Spain. The English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen of the established church: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of them--a layman.

The one who set the fas.h.i.+on was Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, whom Dryden p.r.o.nounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles. When this poet has occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compa.s.ses:

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like the other foot obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--

Me it sucked first and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide and sacrilege all in one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the school-men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.

Thou canst not every day give me my heart: If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it: Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart It stays at home, and thou with losing sav'st it.

Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a real pa.s.sion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines:

Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought That one might almost say her body thought.

This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The ordinary laws of the a.s.sociation of ideas were reversed with them. It was not the nearest, but the remotest, a.s.sociation that was called up.

"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always a.n.a.lytic: they broke every image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1633. The t.i.tles in this volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's _Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression in poetry. The verses ent.i.tled _Virtue_--

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

are known to most readers, as well as the line,

Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.

The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, and the _Pulley_, are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this pa.s.sage from _Whitsunday_,

Listen, sweet dove, unto my song, And spread thy golden wings on me, Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing and fly away with thee,