Chapter VII: The Third Dramatic Period (1)

I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of anonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last. The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour to attempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one hand from their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. We must be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it is certain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance in the latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into the earliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period of flourishing and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In some of them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others, as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour--a flavour not perceptible in Shakespere, much less in Marlowe--appears. But in none of them is that other flavour of pronounced decadence, which appears in the work of men so great as Massinger and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in the creative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in a comparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustly said, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at on one side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenth century; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restoration dramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more than Shakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work of Beaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work of their, in some sense, successors Massinger and Ford.

It will have been observed that I cleave to the old-fashioned nomenclature, and speak of "Beaumont and Fletcher." Until very recently, when two new editions have made their appearance, there was for a time a certain tendency to bring Fletcher into greater prominence than his partner, but at the same time and on the whole to depreciate both. I am in all things but ill-disposed to admit innovation without the clearest and most cogent proofs; and although the comparatively short life of Beaumont makes it impossible that he should have taken part in some of the fifty-two plays traditionally assigned to the partnership (we may perhaps add Mr. Bullen's remarkable discovery of _Sir John Barneveldt_, in which Massinger probably took Beaumont's place), I see no reason to dispute the well-established theory that Beaumont contributed at least criticism, and probably original work, to a large number of these plays; and that his influence probably survived himself in conditioning his partner's work. And I am also disposed to think that the plays attributed to the pair have scarcely had fair measure in comparison with the work of their contemporaries, which was so long neglected. Beaumont and Fletcher kept the stage--kept it constantly and triumphantly--till almost, if not quite, within living memory; while since the seventeenth century, and since its earlier part, I believe that very few plays of Dekker's or Middleton's, of Webster's or of Ford's, have been presented to an English audience. This of itself constituted at the great revival of interest in Elizabethan literature something of a prejudice in favour of _les oublies et les dedaignes_, and this prejudice has naturally grown stronger since all alike have been banished from the stage. The Copper Captain and the Humorous Lieutenant, Bessus and Monsieur Thomas, are no longer on the boards to plead for their authors. The comparative depreciation of Lamb and others is still on the shelves to support their rivals.

Although we still know but little about either Beaumont or Fletcher personally, they differ from most of their great contemporaries by having come of "kenned folk," and by having to all appearance, industrious as they were, had no inducement to write for money. Francis Beaumont was born at Gracedieu, in Leicestershire in 1584. He was the son of a chief-justice; his family had for generations been eminent, chiefly in the law; his brother, Sir John Beaumont, was not only a poet of some merit, but a man of position, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, married a Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletcher soon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than his friend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, and his uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of _Licia_), a dignitary of the Church. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thus cousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having been educated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as Corpus Christi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in 1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five years before him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and the other not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection of printed plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute has been indulged in as to their probable shares,--the most likely opinion being that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities in criticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical and revising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed to represent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the two finest, _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_; while as to the third play, which may be put on the same level, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, early assertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority, maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator than Shakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Massinger (we know this for certain from Sir Aston Cokain), and with Rowley and others, while Shirley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some modern criticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usually unprofitable tests of separation to the great mass of his work. With this we need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficient idiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one, except as a matter of amusement, to try to split it up.

Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both in defects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come upon Beaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defects. There is in the work of the pair, and especially in Fletcher's work when he wrought alone, a certain loose fluency, an ungirt and relaxed air, which contrasts very strongly with the strenuous ways of the elder playwrights. This exhibits itself not in plotting or playwork proper, but in style and in versification (the redundant syllable predominating, and every now and then the verse slipping away altogether into the strange medley between verse and prose, which we shall find so frequent in the next and last period), and also in the characters. We quit indeed the monstrous types of cruelty, of lust, of revenge, in which many of the Elizabethans proper and of Fletcher's own contemporaries delighted. But at the same time we find a decidedly lowered standard of general morality--a distinct approach towards the _fay ce que voudras_ of the Restoration. We are also nearer to the region of the commonplace. Nowhere appears that attempt to grapple with the impossible, that wrestle with the hardest problems, which Marlowe began, and which he taught to some at least of his followers. And lastly--despite innumerable touches of tender and not a few of heroic poetry--the actual poetical value of the dramas at their best is below that of the best work of the preceding time, and of such contemporaries as Webster and Dekker. Beaumont and Fletcher constantly delight, but they do not very often transport, and even when they do, it is with a less strange rapture than that which communicates itself to the reader of Shakespere _passim_, and to the readers of many of Shakespere's fellows here and there.

This, I think, is a fair allowance. But, when it is made, a goodly capital whereon to draw still remains to our poets. In the first place, no sound criticism can possibly overlook the astonishing volume and variety of their work. No doubt they did not often (if they ever did) invent their fables. But they have never failed to treat them in such a way as to make them original, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention and constitutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all the more pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughly workmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity for endless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of the finest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their dramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, in its absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are always interesting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always more or less attractive. It used to be fashionable to praise their "young men," probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with the brutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy. They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (let it be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of _Philaster_. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection of Imogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But for portraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid of love-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed assertion of the mythologists that jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted, affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me to Fletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence of their comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than that of _A King and no King_, of the _Humorous Lieutenant_, of _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, their charming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonic virtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good, solid, pleasant, and plentiful substitutes for it.

It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many times fifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. The play which usually opens the series, _The Maid's Tragedy_, is perhaps the finest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a little improbable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked it much; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchical tone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place, the authors' greatest dramatic weakness--a weakness common indeed to all their tribe except Shakespere--the representation of sudden and quite insufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault of theirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtue punished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. The Aspatia of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and the Bellario of _Philaster_, pathetic as they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pathos is great, and the quarrel or threatened quarrel of the friends Amintor and Melantius, the horrible trial put upon Amintor by his sovereign and the abandoned Evadne, as well as the whole part of Evadne herself when she has once been (rather improbably) converted, are excellent. A passage of some length from the latter part of the play may supply as well as another the sufficient requirement of an illustrative extract:--

_Evad._ "O my lord!

_Amin._ How now?

_Evad._ My much abused Lord! (_Kneels._)

_Amin._ This cannot be.

_Evad._ I do not kneel to live, I dare not hope it;
The wrongs I did are greater: look upon me
Though I appear with all my faults.

_Amin._ Stand up.
This is a new way to beget more sorrow.
Heav'n knows, I have too many; do not mock me;
Though I am tame and bred up with my wrongs
Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap
Like a hand-wolf into my natural wildness
And do an outrage: pray thee, do not mock me.

_Evad._ My whole life is so leprous, it infects
All my repentance: I would buy your pardon
Though at the highest set, even with my life:
That slight contrition, that's no sacrifice
For what I have committed.

_Amin._ Sure I dazzle.
There cannot be a Faith in that foul woman
That knows no God more mighty than her mischiefs:
Thou dost still worse, still number on thy faults
To press my poor heart thus. Can I believe
There's any seed of virtue in that woman
Left to shoot up, that dares go on in sin
Known, and so known as thine is? O Evadne!
'Would, there were any safety in thy sex,
That I might put a thousand sorrows off,
And credit thy repentance! But I must not;
Thou'st brought me to that dull calamity,
To that strange misbelief of all the world
And all things that are in it; that, I fear
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,
Only remembering that I grieve.

_Evad._ My lord,
Give me your griefs: you are an innocent,
A soul as white as Heav'n. Let not my sins
Perish your noble youth: I do not fall here
To shadows by dissembling with my tears
(As, all say, women can) or to make less
What my hot will hath done, which Heav'n and you
Knows to be tougher than the hand of time
Can cut from man's remembrance; no, I do not;
I do appear the same, the same Evadne
Drest in the shames I liv'd in; the same monster:
But these are names of honour, to what I am;
I do present myself the foulest creature
Most pois'nous, dang'rous, and despis'd of men,
Lerna e'er bred, or Nilus: I am hell,
Till you, my dear lord, shoot your light into me
The beams of your forgiveness: I am soul-sick;
And wither with the fear of one condemn'd,
Till I have got your pardon.

_Amin._ Rise, Evadne.
Those heavenly Powers, that put this good into thee,
Grant a continuance of it: I forgive thee;
Make thyself worthy of it, and take heed,
Take heed, Evadne, this be serious;
Mock not the Pow'rs above, that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing eyes, if that thou playest
With thy repentance, the best sacrifice.

_Evad._ I have done nothing good to win belief,
My life hath been so faithless; all the creatures
Made for Heav'n's honours, have their ends, and good ones,
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women;
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; and when they die, like tales
Ill told, and unbeliev'd they pass away
And go to dust forgotten: But, my lord,
Those short days I shall number to my rest,
(As many must not see me) shall, though late
(Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,)
Since I can do no good, because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it;
I will redeem one minute of my age,
Or, like another Niobe, I'll weep
Till I am water.

_Amin._ I am now dissolv'd.
My frozen soul melts: may each sin thou hast
Find a new mercy! rise, I am at peace:
Hadst thou been thus, thus excellently good,
Before that devil king tempted thy frailty,
Sure, thou hadst made a star. Give me thy hand;
From this time I will know thee, and as far
As honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor.
When we meet next, I will salute thee fairly
And pray the gods to give thee happy days.
My charity shall go along with thee
Though my embraces must be far from thee.
I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentance
Locks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee,
The last kiss we must take."

The beautiful play of _Philaster_ has already been glanced at; it is sufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famous of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy, has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the chronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher's singular _vis comica_ appears. _A King and no King_ has a very serious plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, and passionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is fresh and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is perhaps more generally interesting. As for _The Scornful Lady_ it is comedy pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the younger Loveless--an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners--injures it a little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most Molieresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minor touches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow [49] are all comical and mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of _The Custom of the Country_, bring it under the ban of a rather unfair condemnation of Dryden's, pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfully trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's damning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. _The Elder Brother_ is one of those many variations on _cedant arma togae_ which men of letters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent comedy of _The Spanish Curate_ is not impaired by the fact that Dryden chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The _Spanish Friar_. In _Wit Without Money_, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a "roaring boy," a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps a little too strongly. _The Beggar's Bush_ is interesting because of its early indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's _Jovial Crew_, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and the merits of Fletcher have scarcely found better expression anywhere than in _The Humorous Lieutenant_. Celia is his masterpiece in the delineation of the type of girl outlined above, and awkward as her double courtship by Demetrius and his father Antigonus is, one somehow forgives it, despite the nauseous crew of go-betweens of both sexes whom Fletcher here as elsewhere seems to take a pleasure in introducing. As for the Lieutenant he is quite charming; and even the ultra-farcical episode of his falling in love with the king owing to a philtre is well carried off. Then follows the delightful pastoral of _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which ranks with Jonson's _Sad Shepherd_ and with _Comus_, as the three chiefs of its style in English. _The Loyal Subject_ falls a little behind, as also does _The Mad Lover_; but _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_ again rises to the first class. Inferior to Shakespere in the power of transcending without travestying human affairs, to Jonson in sharply presented humours, to Congreve and Sheridan in rattling fire of dialogue, our authors have no superior in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy of a certain kind, and they have perhaps nowhere shown their power better than in the picture of the Copper Captain and his Wife. The flagrant absurdity of _The Laws of Candy_ (which put the penalty of death on ingratitude, and apparently fix no criterion of what ingratitude is, except the decision of the person who thinks himself ungratefully treated), spoils a play which is not worse written than the rest. But in _The False One_, based on Egyptian history just after Pompey's death, and _Valentinian_, which follows with a little poetical license the crimes and punishment of that Emperor, a return is made to pure tragedy--in both cases with great success. The magnificent passage which Hazlitt singled out from _The False One_ is perhaps the author's or authors' highest attempt in tragic declamation, and may be considered to have stopped not far short of the highest tragic poetry.

[49] It may perhaps be well to mention that the references to "volumes" are to the ten-volume edition of 1750, by Theobald, Seward, and others.

"'Oh thou conqueror,
Thou glory of the world once, now the pity:
Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus?
What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on
To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian?
The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger,
That honourable war ne'er taught a nobleness
Nor worthy circumstance show'd what a man was?
That never heard thy name sung but in banquets
And loose lascivious pleasures? to a boy
That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness
No study of thy life to know thy goodness?...
Egyptians, dare you think your high pyramides
Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose,
Where your unworthy kings lie rak'd in ashes,
Are monuments fit for him! No, brood of Nilus,
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;
No pyramid set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness,
To which I leave him.'"

The chief fault of _Valentinian_ is that the character of Maximus is very indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, _The Little French Lawyer_ and _Monsieur Thomas_, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendship of Clerimont and Dinant; while no play has so many of Fletcher's agreeable young women as _Monsieur Thomas_. _The Bloody Brother_, which its title speaks as sufficiently tragical, comes between two excellent comedies, _The Chances_ and _The Wild Goose Chase_, which might serve as well as any others for samples of the whole work on its comic side. In _The Chances_ the portrait of the hare-brained Don John is the chief thing; in _The Wild Goose Chase_, as in _Monsieur Thomas_, a whole bevy of lively characters, male and female, dispute the reader's attention and divide his preference. _A Wife for a Month_ sounds comic, but is not a little alloyed with tragedy; and despite the pathos of its central situation, is marred by some of Fletcher's ugliest characters--the characters which Shakespere in Pandarus and the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ took care to touch with his lightest finger. _The Lover's Progress_, a doubtful tragedy, and _The Pilgrim_, a good comedy (revived at the end of the century, as was _The Prophetess_ with certain help from Dryden), do not require any special notice. Between these two last comes _The Captain_, a comedy neither of the best nor yet of the worst. The tragi-comic _Queen of Corinth_ is a little heavy; but in _Bonduca_ we have one of the very best of the author's tragedies, the scenes with Caratach and his nephew, the boy Hengo, being full of touches not wholly unworthy of Shakespere. _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ (where Fletcher, forsaking his usual fantastic grounds of a France that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian, comes to simple pictures of London middle-class life, such as those of Jonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite the difficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesque knight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In _Love's Pilgrimage_, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, there is not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of _The Double Marriage_ do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting plays. But _The Maid in the Mill_ and _The Martial Maid_ are good farce, which almost deserves the name of comedy; and _The Knight of Malta_ is a romantic drama of merit. In _Women Pleased_ the humours of avarice and hungry servility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio's speeches is among the best-known passages of all the plays, while the anti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next four plays are less noticeable, and indeed for two volumes, of the edition referred to, we come to fewer plays that are specially good. _The Night Walker_; or, _The Little Thief_, though not very probable in its incidents, has a great deal of lively business, and is particularly noteworthy as supplying proof of the singular popularity of bell-ringing with all classes of the population in the seventeenth century,--a popularity which probably protected many old bells in the mania for church desecration. Not much can be said for _The Woman's Prize_, or, _The Tamer Tamed_, an avowed sequel, and so to speak, antidote to _The Taming of the Shrew_, which chiefly proves that it is wise to let Shakespere alone. The authors have drawn to some extent on the _Lysistrata_ to aid them, but have fallen as far short of the fun as of the indecency of that memorable play. With _The Island Princess_ we return to a fair, though not more than a fair level of romantic tragi-comedy, but _The Noble Gentleman_ is the worst play ever attributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectly uninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the means adopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, and successive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which he takes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. _The Coronation_ is much better, and _The Sea Voyage_, with a kind of Amazon story grafted upon a hint of _The Tempest_, is a capital play of its kind. Better still, despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is _The Coxcomb_, where the heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity of the traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case with our authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and pass trippingly. _Wit at Several Weapons_ deserves a somewhat similar description, and so does _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; while _Cupid's Revenge_, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play, has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to classical belief in its delineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly, however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting material of any except the first. Here is _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a play founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character. Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_, in which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neither squeamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, though somewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher's very virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is much superior to that of Aspatia in _The Maid's Tragedy_. _The Woman Hater_, said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or at least farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey in chase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him); and _The Nice Valour_ contains, in Chamont and his brother, the most successful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point of honour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for _An Honest Man's Fortune_, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in part beautiful, piece entitled _Four Plays in One_, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gone through that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit that such a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences in all its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names in English literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and most terrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont and Fletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men; for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear any competition.

It has not been usual to put Thomas Middleton in the front rank among the dramatists immediately second to Shakespere; but I have myself no hesitation in doing so. If he is not such a poet as Webster, he is even a better, and certainly a more versatile, dramatist; and if his plays are inferior as plays to those of Fletcher and Massinger, he has a mastery of the very highest tragedy, which neither of them could attain. Except the best scenes of _The White Devil_, and _The Duchess of Malfi_, there is nothing out of Shakespere that can match the best scenes of _The Changeling_; while Middleton had a comic faculty, in which, to all appearance, Webster was entirely lacking. A little more is known about Middleton than about most of his fellows. He was the son of a gentleman, and was pretty certainly born in London about 1570. It does not appear that he was a university man, but he seems to have been at Gray's Inn. His earliest known work was not dramatic, and was exceedingly bad. In 1597 he published a verse paraphrase of the _Wisdom of Solomon_, which makes even that admirable book unreadable; and if, as seems pretty certain, the _Microcynicon_ of two years later is his, he is responsible for one of the worst and feeblest exercises in the school--never a very strong one--of Hall and Marston. Some prose tracts of the usual kind are not better; but either at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, or in the very earliest years of the next, Middleton turned his attention to the then all absorbing drama, and for many years was (chiefly in collaboration) a busy playwright. We have some score of plays which are either his alone, or in greatest part his. The order of their composition is very uncertain, and as with most of the dramatists of the period, not a few of them never appeared in print till long after the author's death. He was frequently employed in composing pageants for the City of London, and in 1620 was appointed city chronologer. In 1624 Middleton got into trouble. His play, _The Game of Chess_, which was a direct attack on Spain and Rome, and a personal satire on Gondomar, was immensely popular, but its nine days' run was abruptly stopped on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador; the poet's son, it would seem, had to appear before the Council, and Middleton himself was (according to tradition) imprisoned for some time. In this same year he was living at Newington Butts. He died there in the summer of 1627, and was succeeded as chronologer by Ben Jonson. His widow, Magdalen, received a gratuity from the Common Council, but seems to have followed her husband in a little over a year.

Middleton's acknowledged, or at least accepted, habit of collaboration in most of the work usually attributed to him, and the strong suspicion, if not more than suspicion, that he collaborated in other plays, afford endless opportunity for the exercise of a certain kind of criticism. By employing another kind we can discern quite sufficiently a strong individuality in the work that is certainly, in part or in whole, his; and we need not go farther. He seems to have had three different kinds of dramatic aptitude, in all of which he excelled. The larger number of his plays consist of examples of the rattling comedy of intrigue and manners, often openly representing London life as it was, sometimes transplanting what is an evident picture of home manners to some foreign scene apparently for no other object than to make it more attractive to the spectators. To any one at all acquainted with the Elizabethan drama their very titles speak them. These titles are _Blurt Master Constable_, _Michaelmas Term_, _A Trick to Catch the Old One_, _The Family of Love_ [a sharp satire on the Puritans], _A Mad World, my Masters_, _No Wit no Help Like a Woman's_, _A Chaste Maid in Cheapside_, _Anything for a Quiet Life_, _More Dissemblers besides Women_. As with all the humour-comedies of the time, the incidents are not unfrequently very improbable, and the action is conducted with such intricacy and want of clearly indicated lines, that it is sometimes very difficult to follow. At the same time, Middleton has a faculty almost peculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, the reader or spectator along, so that he has no time to stop and consider defects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldom lags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he is never heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined,--by which I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations and loose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; and Middleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in striking contrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poetical morality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known. He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; he makes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together very contentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like the post-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of these works of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusion of a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost always infuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once--in the charming comedy of _The Spanish Gipsy_,--and the result there is so agreeable that the reader only wishes he had done it oftener.

Usually, however, when his thoughts took a turn of less levity than in these careless humorous studies of contemporary life, he devoted himself not to the higher comedy, but to tragedy of a very serious class, and when he did this an odd phenomenon generally manifested itself. In Middleton's idea of tragedy, as in that of most of the playwrights, and probably all the playgoers of his day, a comic underplot was a necessity; and, as we have seen, he was himself undoubtedly able enough to furnish such a plot. But either because he disliked mixing his tragic and comic veins, or for some unknown reason, he seems usually to have called in on such occasions the aid of Rowley, a vigorous writer of farce, who had sometimes been joined with him even in his comic work. Now, not only was Rowley little more than a farce writer, but he seems to have been either unable to make, or quite careless of making, his farce connect itself in any tolerable fashion with the tragedy of which it formed a nominal part. The result is seen in its most perfect imperfection in the two plays of _The Mayor of Queenborough_ and _The Changeling_, both named from their comic features, and yet containing tragic scenes, the first of a very high order, the second of an order only overtopped by Shakespere at his best. The humours of the cobbler Mayor of Queenborough in the one case, of the lunatic asylum and the courting of its keeper's wife in the other, are such very mean things that they can scarcely be criticised. But the desperate love of Vortiger for Rowena in _The Mayor_, and the villainous plots against his chaste wife, Castiza, are real tragedy. Even these, however, fall far below the terrible loves, if loves they are to be called, of Beatrice-Joanna, the heroine of _The Changeling_, and her servant, instrument, and murderer, De Flores. The plot of the tragic part of this play is intricate and not wholly savoury. It is sufficient to say that Beatrice having enticed De Flores to murder a lover whom she does not love, that so she may marry a lover whom she does love, is suddenly met by the murderer's demand of her honour as the price of his services. She submits, and afterwards has to purchase fresh aid of murder from him by a continuance of her favours that she may escape detection by her husband. Thus, roughly described, the theme may look like the undigested horrors of _Lust's Dominion_, of _The Insatiate Countess_, and of _The Revenger's Tragedy_. It is, however, poles asunder from them. The girl, with her southern recklessness of anything but her immediate desires, and her southern indifference to deceiving the very man she loves, is sufficiently remarkable, as she stands out of the canvas. But De Flores,--the broken gentleman, reduced to the position of a mere dependant, the libertine whose want of personal comeliness increases his mistress's contempt for him, the murderer double and treble dyed, as audacious as he is treacherous, and as cool and ready as he is fiery in passion,--is a study worthy to be classed at once with Iago, and inferior only to Iago in their class. The several touches with which these two characters and their situations are brought out are as Shakesperian as their conception, and the whole of that part of the play in which they figure is one of the most wonderful triumphs of English or of any drama. Even the change of manners and a bold word or two here and there, may not prevent me from giving the latter part of the central scene:--

_Beat._ "Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
Thy language is so bold and vicious,
I cannot see which way I can forgive it
With any modesty.

_De F._ Pish![50] you forget yourself:
A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty!

_Beat._ O misery of sin! would I'd been bound
Perpetually unto my living hate
In that Pisacquo, than to hear[51] these words.
Think but upon the distance that creation
Set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there.

_De F._ Look but unto your conscience, read me _there_;
'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal:
Pish! fly not to your birth, but settle you
In what the act has made you; you're no more now.
You must forget your parentage to me;
You are the deed's creature;[52] by that name
You lost your first condition, and I shall urge[53] you
As peace and innocency has turn'd you out,
And made you one with me.

_Beat._ With thee, foul villain!

_De F._ Yes, my fair murderess: do _you_ urge _me_?
Though thou writ'st maid, thou whore in thine affection!
'Twas changed from thy first love, and that's a kind
Of whoredom in thy heart: and he's changed now
To bring thy second on, thy Alsemero,
Whom by all sweets that ever darkness tasted
If I enjoy thee not, thou ne'er enjoyest!
I'll blast the hopes and joys of marriage,
I'll confess all; my life I rate at nothing.

_Beat._ De Flores!

_De F._ I shall rest from all (lover's)[54] plagues then,
I live in pain now; that [love] shooting eye
Will burn my heart to cinders.

_Beat._ O sir, hear me!

_De F._ She that in life and love refuses me,
In death and shame my partner she shall be.

_Beat._ (_kneeling_). Stay, hear me once for all: I make thee master
Of all the wealth I have in gold and jewels;
Let me go poor unto my bed with honour
And I am rich in all things.

_De F._ Let this silence thee;
The wealth of all Valencia shall not buy
My pleasure from me.
Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?
So soon may you weep me.

_Beat._ Vengeance begins;
Murder, I see, is followed by more sins:
Was my creation in the womb so curst
It must engender with a viper first?

_De F._ (_raising her_). Come, rise and shroud your blushes in my
bosom,
Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts.
Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding.
'Las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anon
What thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on."

[50] In orig. "Push," cf. "Tush."

[51] Rather than hear.

[52] A trisyllable, as in strictness it ought to be.

[53] = "claim."

[54] This omission and the substitution in the next line are due to Dyce, and may be called _certissima emendatio_.

Two other remarkable plays of Middleton's fall with some differences under the same second division of his works. These are _The Witch_ and _Women Beware Women_. Except for the inevitable and rather attractive comparison with _Macbeth_, _The Witch_ is hardly interesting. It consists of three different sets of scenes most inartistically blended,--an awkward and ineffective variation on the story of Alboin, Rosmunda and the skull for a serious main plot, some clumsy and rather unsavoury comic or tragi-comic interludes, and the witch scenes. The two first are very nearly worthless; the third is intrinsically, though far below _Macbeth_, interesting enough and indirectly more interesting because of the questions which have been started, as to the indebtedness of the two poets to each other. The best opinion seems to be that Shakespere most certainly did not copy Middleton, nor (a strange fancy of some) did he collaborate with Middleton, and that the most probable thing is that both borrowed their names, and some details from Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_. _Women Beware Women_ on the other hand is one of Middleton's finest works, inferior only to _The Changeling_ in parts, and far superior to it as a whole. The temptation of Bianca, the newly-married wife, by the duke's instrument, a cunning and shameless woman, is the title-theme, and in this part again Middleton's Shakesperian verisimilitude and certainty of touch appear. The end of the play is something marred by a slaughter more wholesale even than that of _Hamlet_, and by no means so well justified. Lastly, _A Fair Quarrel_ must be mentioned, because of the very high praise which it has received from Lamb and others. This praise has been directed chiefly to the situation of the quarrel between Captain Ager and his friend, turning on a question (the point of family honour), finely but perhaps a little tediously argued. The comic scenes, however, which are probably Rowley's, are in his best vein of bustling swagger.

I have said that Middleton, as it seems to me, has not been fully estimated. It is fortunately impossible to say the same of Webster, and the reasons of the difference are instructive. Middleton's great fault is that he never took trouble enough about his work. A little trouble would have made _The Changeling_ or _Women Beware Women_, or even _The Spanish Gipsy_, worthy to rank with all but Shakespere's very masterpieces. Webster also was a collaborator, apparently an industrious one; but he never seems to have taken his work lightly. He had, moreover, that incommunicable gift of the highest poetry in scattered phrases which, as far as we can see, Middleton had not. Next to nothing is known of him. He may have been parish clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn; but the authority is very late, and the commentators seemed to have jumped at it to explain Webster's fancy for details of death and burial--a cause and effect not sufficiently proportioned. Mr. Dyce has spent much trouble in proving that he could not have been the author of some Puritan tracts published a full generation after the date of his masterpieces. Heywood tells us that he was generally called "Jack," a not uncommon thing when men are christened John. He himself has left us a few very sententiously worded prefaces which do not argue great critical taste. We know from the usual sources (Henslowe's Diaries) that he was a working furnisher of plays, and from many rather dubious title-pages we suppose or know some of the plays he worked at. _Northward Ho! Westward Ho!_ and _Sir John Wyatt_ are pieces of dramatic journalism in which he seems to have helped Dekker. He adapted, with additions, Marston's _Malcontent_, which is, in a crude way, very much in his own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) some charming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recent editor) to _A Cure for a Cuckold_, one of Rowley's characteristic and not ungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and some miscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and his fame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or even hinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the first order of interest, if not invariably of the first order of merit. These are _The Duchess of Malfi_, _The White Devil_, _The Devil's Law Case_, and _Appius and Virginia_.

Of _Appius and Virginia_ the best thing to be said is to borrow Sainte-Beuve's happy description of Moliere's _Don Garcie de Navarre_, and to call it an _essai pale et noble_. Webster is sometimes very close to Shakespere; but to read _Appius and Virginia_, and then to read _Julius Caesar_ or _Coriolanus_, is to appreciate, in perhaps the most striking way possible, the universality which all good judges from Dryden downwards have recognised in the prince of literature. Webster, though he was evidently a good scholar, and even makes some parade of scholarship, was a Romantic to the core, and was all abroad in these classical measures. _The Devil's Law Case_ sins in the opposite way, being hopelessly undigested, destitute of any central interest, and, despite fine passages, a mere "salmagundi." There remain the two famous plays of _The White Devil_ or _Vittoria Corombona_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_--plays which were rarely, if ever, acted after their author's days, and of which the earlier and, to my judgment, better was not a success even then, but which the judgment of three generations has placed at the very head of all their class, and which contain magnificent poetry.

I have said that in my judgment _The White Devil_ is the better of the two; I shall add that it seems to me very far the better. Webster's plays are comparatively well known, and there is no space here to tell their rather intricate arguments. It need only be said that the contrast of the two is striking and unmistakable; and that Webster evidently meant in the one to indicate the punishment of female vice, in the other to draw pity and terror by the exhibition of the unprevented but not unavenged sufferings of female virtue. Certainly both are excellent subjects, and if the latter seem the harder, we have Imogen and Bellafront to show, in the most diverse material, and with the most diverse setting possible, how genius can manage it. With regard to _The White Devil_, it has been suggested with some plausibility that it wants expansion. Certainly the action is rather crowded, and the recourse to dumb show (which, however, Webster again permitted himself in _The Duchess_) looks like a kind of shorthand indication of scenes that might have been worked out. Even as it is, however, the sequence of events is intelligible, and the presentation of character is complete. Indeed, if there is any fault to find with it, it seems to me that Webster has sinned rather by too much detail than by too little. We could spare several of the minor characters, though none are perhaps quite so otiose as Delio, Julio, and others in _The Duchess of Malfi_. We feel (or at least I feel) that Vittoria's villainous brother Flamineo is not as Iago and Aaron and De Flores are each in his way, a thoroughly live creature. We ask ourselves (or I ask myself) what is the good of the repulsive and not in the least effective presentment of the Moor Zanche. Cardinal Monticelso is incontinent of tongue and singularly feeble in deed,--for no rational man would, after describing Vittoria as a kind of pest to mankind, have condemned her to a punishment which was apparently little more than residence in a rather disreputable but by no means constrained boarding-house, and no omnipotent pope would have let Ludivico loose with a clear inkling of his murderous designs. But when these criticisms and others are made, _The White Devil_ remains one of the most glorious works of the period. Vittoria is perfect throughout; and in the justly-lauded trial scene she has no superior on any stage. Brachiano is a thoroughly lifelike portrait of the man who is completely besotted with an evil woman. Flamineo I have spoken of, and not favourably; yet in literature, if not in life, he is a triumph; and above all the absorbing tragic interest of the play, which it is impossible to take up without finishing, has to be counted in. But the real charm of _The White Devil_ is the wholly miraculous poetry in phrases and short passages which it contains. Vittoria's dream of the yew-tree, almost all the speeches of the unfortunate Isabella, and most of her rival's, have this merit. But the most wonderful flashes of poetry are put in the mouth of the scoundrel Flamineo, where they have a singular effect. The famous dirge which Cornelia sings can hardly be spoken of now, except in Lamb's artfully simple phrase "I never saw anything like it," and the final speeches of Flamineo and his sister deserve the same endorsement. Nor is even the proud farewell of the Moor Zanche unworthy. It is impossible to describe the "whirl of spirits" (as the good old-fashioned phrase has it) into which the reading of this play sets the reader, except by saying that the cause of that whirl is the secret of the best Elizabethan writers, and that it is nowhere, out of Shakespere, better exemplified than in the scene partly extracted from Middleton, and in such passages of _Vittoria Corombona_ as the following:--

_Cor._ "Will you make me such a fool? here's a white hand:
Can blood so soon be wash'd out? let me see;
When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops
And the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops,
When yellow spots do on your hands appear,
Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.
Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! 'h'as handled a toad, sure.
Cowslip-water is good for the memory:
Pray, buy me three ounces of 't.

_Flam._ I would I were from hence.

_Cor._ Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grand-mother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute.

_Flam._ Do, an' you will, do.

_Cor._ 'Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,

[_Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction._

Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'
They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel;
But I have an answer for them:
'Let holy Church receive him duly
Since he paid the church-tithes truly.'
His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store.
This poor men get, and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you, all good people.

[_Exeunt_ CORNELIA, ZANCHE, _and_ LADIES.

_Flam._ I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray, leave me.

[_Exit_ FRANCISCO DE MEDICIS.

This night I'll know the utmost of my fate;
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
To assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try:
We think cag'd birds sing when indeed they cry.

[_Enter Brachiano's ghost, in his leather cassock and_
_breeches, and boots; with a cowl; in his hand a pot_
_of lily flowers, with a skull in't._