1We have a collection of these “Allegoricæ Homericæ.†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.2Berni’s “Bojardo,†canto xxxi. 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.3The “Allegoria dalla Poema†is appended to the ancient editions of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.†The one before me is dated Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern editors. When we detect Tasso seriously describing Godfrey 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. 215.5BookIII.canto viii.6It has been observed of Upton that, though an excellent classical 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 DamÅ“tas and his ugly daughter Mopsa.7Upton’s note at the close of the fifth book of “The Faery Queen.â€
1We have a collection of these “Allegoricæ Homericæ.†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.
2Berni’s “Bojardo,†canto xxxi. 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.
O voi ch’avete gl’intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde,
Sotto il velame degli versi strani.
3The “Allegoria dalla Poema†is appended to the ancient editions of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata.†The one before me is dated Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern editors. When we detect Tasso seriously describing Godfrey 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.
5BookIII.canto viii.
6It has been observed of Upton that, though an excellent classical 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 Damœtas and his ugly daughter Mopsa.
7Upton’s note at the close of the fifth book of “The Faery Queen.â€
THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY.
Inthe 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 fashion of the world now-a-days,†distinguishes his drama both as “a Pleasant Tragedy†and “a Pitiful Comedy.â€1This 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 title of comedy to such scriptural pieces asThe Nativity,The Adoration of the Kings, andThe Massacre of the Innocents; and in Spain, at the same period, they also called their moral pieces comedies. The title of one of these indicates their matter,La Doleria del Sueño 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 inHamletboth 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 hispoem as he has done over the creation of a classical 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 entitled 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 classical form; Tragedy, which soared to the sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and Terence.
We owe this firstTRAGEDYin our language, represented before the Queen in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who plannedThe Mirror for Magistrates, and left as its modelThe Induction.Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he anticipated 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 inThe Mirror for MagistratesSackville had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy ofFerrex and Porrex, or, as it was sometimes entitled,The Tragedy of Gorboduc, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet the titlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor inThomas 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 classical 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 analogous 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 noblemen our poets owe their emancipation 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 hisInduction; 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 destitute 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 doctrineof passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition, were silently removed from the later ones.2It 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 lust 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 damning irony.
There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this drama,3that 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 constitution 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 byThe Mirror for Magistrates, the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes ofGorboducare 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 titlepage 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 surreptitiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their own free management and deceptive titlepages.
We must not decide onthe first tragedyby a comparison with the more attractive and impassioned 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 pronounced 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 classical form the approval of some great moderns.Rymer, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on tragedy, was astonished to find “such a classical 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.â€
These are edicts from the school of classical 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 classical 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 ofkingsandstatesmenshould be less happily imitated by apoetthan aprivy-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.â€
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 itEurope. 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.
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 nothad 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 aPLAUDITE!
The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest comedy in our language, the titlepage 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 thanJohn 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 enshrinedGammer Gurton’s Needlein their “Reliquary;†and literary superstition
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 asserted that “Stillhad displayed the true genius of comedy, and the choice of hissubjectonly 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 oflanguage.†Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the grossness of the “Gammer.â€â€”“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, styledRalph Roister Doister, was discovered;5a 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 class—that of “Comedy,†but this term was then so indistinct that the poet adds the more usual one of “Enterlude.â€
Gammer Gurtonis a representation of sordid rusticity.Roister Doisteropens the moveable scenery of domestic life in the metropolis—touched with care, and warm with reality. The plot, without involution, progresses through the acts. An egotistical and affectedly amorous hair-brain, ever lamenting the dangerous beauty of his ridiculous self, fancies to marry a fair dame. He is hit off as
So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,I trow, never was any creature living.
So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,
I trow, never was any creature living.
He is the whetstone of a sharp parasite, whose opening monologue exhibits his full portrait—
But, know ye, that for all this merry note of mine,He might oppose me now that should ask where I dine.
But, know ye, that for all this merry note of mine,
He might oppose me now that should ask where I dine.
He runs over a nomenclature of a most variegated acquaintance, with some fugitive strictures exquisitely personal. We find ourselves in a more advanced stage in society than we expected in the reigns of our last Henry or Edward. Such personages abounded in the twenty years of peace and luxury under James the First, when the obsequious hanger-on flourished among the town-heroes of “The Gull’s Horn-book.†This parasite is also one of those domestic dependents whose shrewdness and artifices supply a perpetual source of comic invention; such as those found among the Latin dramatists, whose scenes and incidents are Grecian, and from whom this “Matthew Merry-greek†by his name seems happily transplanted. This poet delights by scenes coloured with the truth of nature, and by the clear conception of his domestic personages. There is a group of domestics—the ancient housekeeper spinning on her distaff amidst her maidens, some sowing, some knitting, all in free chat; these might have formed a study for the vivid Teniers, and even for Shakspeare in his happiest vein. They are not the domestics of Swift and of Mandeville—the spoilers of the establishment; not that they are without the common feelings of the servants’ hall, for they have at heart the merry prosperity of their commonwealth. After their “drudgerie,†to dissipate their “weariness†was the fundamental principle of the freedom of servitude. Their chorus is “lovingly to agree.†A pleasant song, on occasion of the reception of “a new-come man†in the family, reveals the “mystery†of their ancient craft.6
These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an artless mode, which, however, long continued to be the practice of our comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in his periodical paper, “The Lover,†condemned it as no better a device than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in this identical paper an old bachelor is called “Wildgoose,†and the presumed author of “TheLover†is Marmaduke “Myrtle.†Anstey has made the most happy use of characteristic names in the “Bath Guide,†which is an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever an author’s judgment equals the felicity of his invention.
Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity:—so true it is that the familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read or chanted is a metre which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined to have been within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries, whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has, therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also that the very measure of this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the decasyllabic measure have called it “a long hobbling metre,†has been actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with the design of reviving rhymed comedy.7
The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men. This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer’s name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College, was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle prepared by a scrivener’s hand, for our gay amourists then could not always compose, if they could write their billets-doux, being maliciously read to the lady, by purposelyneglecting the punctuation, turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson, in his “Art of Logic,†gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we may have “a double sense and contrary meaning.†He fortunately added that his example was “taken out of an interlude made byNicholas Udall.â€
This was the learnedUdall, the Master of Eton School; and this very comedy had been so universally admired, that “Roister-Doister†became a proverbial phrase to designate a hair-brained coxcomb. We now possess two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English people in rural and in city life by two contemporaries, who wanted not the art of “holding the mirror up to nature.â€
1“A Moral and Pitiful Comedie,†entitled, “All for Money,†&c., by T. Lupton, 1578. In the prologue the author calls it “A Pleasant Tragedy.â€2The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley’s “Old Plays.â€3Warton has analysed this drama in his “History of English Poetry,†vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and Hawkins.4This our first tragedy,Ferrex and Porrex, offers a striking evidence of our literary knowledge. Dryden, alluding to it, refers to a spurious copy published under the title ofGorboducbut he could not have seen it, for he calls itQueen Gorboduc, whereas he isKing; and he appears to think that it was written inrhyme; and notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope requested Spence to reprintGorboduc, they were so little cognisant of these matters, that the spurious and defectiveGorboducwas printed instead of the genuineFerrex and Porrex. This ignorance of our ancient writers lasted to a later period.5Reprinted by the Rev. Mr. Briggs, the possessor. After a limited reprint it was republished as the first number of a cheap edition of Old English Dramas, published by T. White, 1830; a work carried on to a few volumes only. The text reads apparently very correct, and seems to have passed under a skilful eye. I have read it with attention, because I read it with delight. [It has since been reprinted by the Shakspeare Society, carefully collated from the unique original now in Eton College Library, by Mr. Payne Collier.]6This song of Domesticity, as probably it never has been noticed, I preserve in the note, that the reader may decide on the melody of such native simplicity.This song may have been written about the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth. The short ballad metres in our ancient poems are perfectly harmonious, and the songs are racy and joyous,—I.A thing very fitteFor them that have witteAnd are felowes knitteServants in one house to bee,As fast fast for to sitte,And not oft to flitteNor varie a whitte,But lovingly to agree.II.No man complainyngNor other disdainyngFor losse or for gainyng,But felowes or friends to bee,No grudge remainyng,No work refrainyng,Nor helpe restrainyng,But lovingly to agree.III.No man for despiteBy worde or by writeHis felowe to twite,But further in honestie;No good turns entwiteNor old sores recite,But let all goe quite,And lovingly to agree.IV.After drudgerieWhen they be werie,Then to be merie,To laugh and sing they be freeWith chip and cherie,High derie derie,Trill on the berie,And lovingly to agree!7Hayley.
1“A Moral and Pitiful Comedie,†entitled, “All for Money,†&c., by T. Lupton, 1578. In the prologue the author calls it “A Pleasant Tragedy.â€
2The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley’s “Old Plays.â€
3Warton has analysed this drama in his “History of English Poetry,†vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and Hawkins.
4This our first tragedy,Ferrex and Porrex, offers a striking evidence of our literary knowledge. Dryden, alluding to it, refers to a spurious copy published under the title ofGorboducbut he could not have seen it, for he calls itQueen Gorboduc, whereas he isKing; and he appears to think that it was written inrhyme; and notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope requested Spence to reprintGorboduc, they were so little cognisant of these matters, that the spurious and defectiveGorboducwas printed instead of the genuineFerrex and Porrex. This ignorance of our ancient writers lasted to a later period.
5Reprinted by the Rev. Mr. Briggs, the possessor. After a limited reprint it was republished as the first number of a cheap edition of Old English Dramas, published by T. White, 1830; a work carried on to a few volumes only. The text reads apparently very correct, and seems to have passed under a skilful eye. I have read it with attention, because I read it with delight. [It has since been reprinted by the Shakspeare Society, carefully collated from the unique original now in Eton College Library, by Mr. Payne Collier.]
6This song of Domesticity, as probably it never has been noticed, I preserve in the note, that the reader may decide on the melody of such native simplicity.
This song may have been written about the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth. The short ballad metres in our ancient poems are perfectly harmonious, and the songs are racy and joyous,—
I.A thing very fitteFor them that have witteAnd are felowes knitteServants in one house to bee,As fast fast for to sitte,And not oft to flitteNor varie a whitte,But lovingly to agree.II.No man complainyngNor other disdainyngFor losse or for gainyng,But felowes or friends to bee,No grudge remainyng,No work refrainyng,Nor helpe restrainyng,But lovingly to agree.III.No man for despiteBy worde or by writeHis felowe to twite,But further in honestie;No good turns entwiteNor old sores recite,But let all goe quite,And lovingly to agree.IV.After drudgerieWhen they be werie,Then to be merie,To laugh and sing they be freeWith chip and cherie,High derie derie,Trill on the berie,And lovingly to agree!
I.
A thing very fitte
For them that have witte
And are felowes knitte
Servants in one house to bee,
As fast fast for to sitte,
And not oft to flitte
Nor varie a whitte,
But lovingly to agree.
II.
No man complainyng
Nor other disdainyng
For losse or for gainyng,
But felowes or friends to bee,
No grudge remainyng,
No work refrainyng,
Nor helpe restrainyng,
But lovingly to agree.
III.
No man for despite
By worde or by write
His felowe to twite,
But further in honestie;
No good turns entwite
Nor old sores recite,
But let all goe quite,
And lovingly to agree.
IV.
After drudgerie
When they be werie,
Then to be merie,
To laugh and sing they be free
With chip and cherie,
High derie derie,
Trill on the berie,
And lovingly to agree!
7Hayley.
THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.
Theestablishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the “children†or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country till an Act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies, classing them with “rogues and vagabonds.†Throughout the kingdom there was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments—it was the national anticipation of a public theatre.
If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester1“to exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;†and she added, “within our city of London, and of any of our cities.†This was a boon royally given, in which her “loving subjects†might gather from the tone of this dramatic state-paper, that the queen had resolved in council that the public should not be denied sharing in her own amusements.
The pleasures of the people were not, however, yet those of their grave seignors. The puritanic spirit of the anti-dramatists, which sometimes divided the councils of the queen, had lodged among the honest wardmotes. A protracted contest between the privy-council and the lord mayor in common council, with protests and petitions, roseup; and long it seemed hopeless to patronise the players, who were not suffered to play. The Recorder Fleetwood, of whom we have many curious police-reports in the style of alieutenant de police—as the chief of his own spies, and the executioner of his own decrees—had himself a fertile dramatic invention, which was largely developed in the singular “orders of the common-council†against the alarming innovation ofPUBLIC PLAYSin the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.2There was not a calamity, moral and physical, which could happen to any city which the Recorder has not made concomitant with the opening of playhouses. The infection of the plague was, however, then an irrefutable argument. In this contest between the court and the city, the common-council remained dogged assertors of their privileges; they drove the players from their sacred precincts to the boundaries and to “the liberties,†where, however, they harassed these children of fancy by a novel claim, that none were to be free in the “liberties†but themselves, which argument was submitted to the law officers for their decision. The privy-council once more interfered, by a declaration that the chief justices had not yet been able to determine their case, and therefore there was to be no present “intermeddling.†It is evident that the government all along had resolved that the people should have a theatre. After two years of opposition to the patent granted to the players in 1574, the first playhouse was built—a timber house in the suburbs—and received the appropriate title of “The Theatre;†and about the same time “The Curtain†rose in its vicinage, a name supposed to have been derived from that appendage to a stage; for to those who had been accustomed to the open stage of an inn-yard, thedrop or “curtain†separating the actors from the audience was such a novelty, that it left its name to the house. The Blackfriars, the Round Globe, the Square Fortune—whence Edward Alleyn, by his histrionic fame, drew the wealth which endowed Dulwich College—are names almost consecrated by the eminent geniuses whose lives were connected with these theatres; and at one time it appears that seventeen playhouses had been erected; they were, however, wooden and thatched, till the Fortune was built with brick, and, in the theatrical phrase, “the heavens,†that is, the open top, was tiled.
The popular fervour of the drama had now a centrical attraction; a place of social resort, with a facility of admission, was now opened;3and when yet there was no reading public, the theatre would be substituted for the press; and often, wearied of the bearward and coarser sports, they flocked to the more intellectual entertainment. The playhouse was a wider sphere for their exertions, and it opened an arduous competition for the purveyors of these incessant novelties. The managers of theatres had now to look about for plays and playwrights. A general demand required, not only an abundant, but, unfortunately, a rapid supply. What a crisis for genius, for its development and its destruction!
This was an event in the history of our literature which has not occurred in the literary history of any other European people. It was about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth that a race of dramatic writers burst forth on the nation—writers, not easily numbered, of innumerable dramas.
Literature now opened a new avenue for a poor scholar, the first step of advancement in society from a collegiatelife for those who found their future condition but ill provided for. A secretaryship, a chaplainship, or to be a gentleman’s usher—in a word, an humble retainer in great families—circumscribed the ambition of the meek and the worthy; but there were others, in “their first gamesome age,†whose
——doting sires,Carked and cared to have them lettered—But their kind college from the teat did tent,And forced them walk before they weaned were.4
——doting sires,
Carked and cared to have them lettered—
But their kind college from the teat did tent,
And forced them walk before they weaned were.4
This, however, is but the style of apology which one of them gives to veil the fact that many were ejected from “the teat.†Fiery emanations these, compelled to leave their cloistered solitudes, restless and reckless, they rushed to the metropolis, where this new mart of genius in the rising dramatic age was opened. Play-writing and play-acting, for they were often combined, were too magical a business to resist its delusions.
They wrote, with rare exceptions, without revision. An act or two, composed with some meditation to awaken interest—a few moveable scenes rapidly put together—and, at some fortunate moment, a burst of poetry—usually wound up in pell-mell confusion; for how could they contrive a catastrophe to the chaos? Such writers relied on the passing curiosity which their story might raise, and more on the play of the actors, who, in the last bustling scenes, might lend an interest which the meagre dialogue of the economical poet so rarely afforded. They never wrote for posterity, and seem never to have pretended to it. They betrayed no sympathy for their progeny; the manager’s stock was the foundling hospital for this spurious brood; the Muse even often sold her infant while it still lay on the breast. The huddled act of a play was despatched to the manager as the lure of a temporary loan, accompanied by a promissory note of expedition; and assuredly they kept to their word if ever they concluded the work.
This facility of production may be accounted for, not only from the more obvious cause which instigated theirincessant toil, but from the ready sources whence they drew their materials. They dramatised evanescent subjects, in rapid competition, like the ballad-makers of their own day, or the novelists of ours; they caught “the Cynthia of the minuteâ€â€”a domestic incident—a tragic tale engaging the public attention produced many domestic tragedies founded on actual events; they were certain of exciting the sympathies of an audience. Two remarkable ones have been ascribed to Shakespeare by skilful judges:Arden of Feversham, where the repentance of an adulterous wife in the agony of conscience so powerfully reminds one of the great poet, that the German, Tieck, who has recently translated it, has not hesitated to subscribe to the opinion of some of our own critics; andThe Yorkshire Tragedy, which was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has been held to be authentic; and surelyThe Yorkshire Tragedyat least possessed an equal claim with the monstrousTitus Andronicus5not to be ejected from the writings of Shakespeare. It is most probable that that, among others, was among the old plays which he often took in hand; and our judicial decisions have not always found “the divinity which stirs within them.†The Italian novelists, which had been recently translated inPainter’s“Palace of Pleasure,†these dramatists ransacked for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a combinationof natural incidents, which varies the dry matter-of-fact drawn from the “Chronicles,†which in their hands too often produced mere skeletons of poetry. They borrowed from the ancients when they could. Plautus was a favourite. They wrote for a day, and did not expect to survive many.
The rapid succession of this multitude of plays is remarkable; many have wholly perished by casualties and dispersions, and some possibly may still lie unsunned in their manuscript state.6We have only the titles of many which were popular, while the names of some of these artificers have come down to us without any of their workmanship. In a private collection, Langbaine had gathered about a thousand plays, besides interludes and drolls; and yet these were but a portion of those plays, for many never passed through the press; the list of anonymous authors is not only considerable, but some of these are not inferior in invention and style to the best.7We may judge of the prolific production of these authors byThomas Heywood, a fluent and natural writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and whohas casually informed us that “he had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays.â€
The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to us.8It was justly observed by Gifford, that these dramatic poets, either from mortification or humility, abstained from dwelling, or even entering upon their personal history. Though frequent in dedications, they are seldom explicit; and even their prefaces fail to convey any information, except of their wants or their grievances, from evils which are rarely specified. The truth is, that this whole poetical race, which suddenly broke out together, a sort of wild insurrection of genius, early found that they were nothing more than the hirelings of some crafty manager, at whose beck and mercy they lived. Writing plays was soon held to be as discreditable an occupation as that of the players themselves; indeed, not seldom the poets themselves were actors—these departments were so frequently combined, that the term player is sometimes used equally for a performer on the stage, and a writer of plays.
This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days—their criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another; the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery probably practised by a fourth;9are adapted to enter into moral, if not into literary history.
The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of genius—for such were many amongthem—feels how precious are the slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence. However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.
An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured in an obscure lodging, which a poor man’s charity had yielded, when lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man’s charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet—that his coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.
Even their small theatres appeared to the poet “thronged,†and the heart of the dramatist would swell at “the shouts and claps.†Drayton, who, at a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world “the proud round†of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection which he has entitled “Idea,†and which no successful dramatist will read without some happy emotion.
In pride of wit, whenhigh desire of fameGave life and courage to my labouring pen,And first the sound and vertue of my nameWere grace and credit in the ears of men;With those thethronged theatersthat presse,I inthe circuitfor the Lawrell strove,Where thefull praise, I freely must confesse,In heate of blood and modest minde might move;WithSHOWTSandCLAPSat every littlePAWSEWhen theprowdROUNDon everie side hath rung.
In pride of wit, whenhigh desire of fame
Gave life and courage to my labouring pen,
And first the sound and vertue of my name
Were grace and credit in the ears of men;
With those thethronged theatersthat presse,
I inthe circuitfor the Lawrell strove,
Where thefull praise, I freely must confesse,
In heate of blood and modest minde might move;
WithSHOWTSandCLAPSat every littlePAWSE
When theprowdROUNDon everie side hath rung.
The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught to record of this brotherhood of genius—but nothing we know of the much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingeniousJohn Lyly; nothing of the searching and cynicalMarston; nothing of the inventive and flowingDekker; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertileHeywood; nor of the patheticWebster; nor ofMiddleton, from whose “Witch†Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor ofRowley,whom Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and graveMassinger; nor of the lonely and melancholyFord.
Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer, and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the original. One may read in that “most reverend aspect†of his, the lofty spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet’s life—when he exclaimed—
The work that I was born to do is done!The conclusionMakes the beginning of my life; for neverLet me be said to live, till I live ever!10
The work that I was born to do is done!
The conclusion
Makes the beginning of my life; for never
Let me be said to live, till I live ever!10
The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies. These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards. The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their poet,11or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for “the groundlings,†and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter’s copy. Such scenes of ribaldry havetainted even immortal pages, and have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.
As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our drama’s roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no suspicion that even his plays were oftenrifacimentosof neglected stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary anecdotes. This entry appears, “lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings for his adycions to Jeronymo,†which was an old favourite play of Kyd’s. Again, more lent for “new adycions.†When Hawkins republished “Jeronymo†in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these “adycions,†as being “foisted in by the players.†This he had detected by collation with the first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic—the passages he had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.
Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their mutual celebrities.12Could we penetrate into the recessesof the theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous. Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated, subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so, till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy ofDido, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an “invective†against proud “Ben,†and when Anthony Munday, a copious playwright, was hailed by a critic as “the best plotter,†Jonson, in his nextplay, ridiculed “the best plotter.†Can we forget that inEastward Hoe, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence Hogarth borrowed the hint of his “Idle and Industrious Apprentices,†by Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed? It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.
Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were skilful Greek scholars.13How then did it happen, that not one of these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a sudden revolution in the dramatic art.
Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has delivered himself,—
————They would haveGOOD PLAYS, and not produceSuch musty fopperies of antiquity;Which do not suit the humorous age’s back,With clothes in fashion.
————They would haveGOOD PLAYS, and not produce
Such musty fopperies of antiquity;
Which do not suit the humorous age’s back,
With clothes in fashion.
It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, theystruck out a new course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors, for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original,more suo, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass away!
Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, “to avoid stuffing it with baggage-books;†but more particularly objected to “English Plays,as unlike those of other nations, which are esteemed for learning the languages; and many of them,†he adds, “are compiled by men of great wisdom and learning.â€
The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On the principle Bodley rejected ourEnglish playshe also condemned ourEnglish philosophy; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a good-humoured menace of “a cogitation against Libraries,†which must have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with excellent truth described himself as “the carrier’s horse which cannot blench the beaten way in which I was trained.â€
In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very “English plays,†would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes, their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and their religion; and what most would have astonished our greatbibliophile, thatcollectors like himself, presuming on “their wisdom and learning,†would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to edit “these baggage-books of English plays,†and above all, that foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of these bold originals.
By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in “the Romantic†school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which would be less ambiguous if considered as “the Gothic.â€14At the time when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe, without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.15This literary phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was occurring.
Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old plays, each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is occasioned not always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the very nature of the object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our ancient drama itself. These old plays will not endure criticism. They were not written for critics, and they now exist even in spite of criticism. They were all experiments of the freest genius, rarely placed under favouring circumstances. They were emanations of strong but short conceptions, poured forth in haste and heat; they blotted their lines as rarely as we are told did Shakespeare; they revelled in their first conceptions, often forgotten in their rapid progress; the true inspiration was lodged in their breasts, the hidden volcano has often burst through its darkness, and flamed through a whole scene, for often have they written as Shakespeare wrote. We may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous lines, and many an insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies have been drawn from these elder dramatists.16We may perceive how thissudden generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar to us, have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.