Chapter XI: The Fourth Dramatic Period (2)

I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often classed with, and to some extent belongs to the post-Reformation school, he is ours for other purposes than that of mere mention. His Shakespere travesties (in one of which he was assisted by a greater than he), and even the operas and "entertainments" with which he not only evaded the prohibition of stage plays under the Commonwealth, but helped to produce a remarkable change in the English drama, do not concern us. But it must be remembered that Davenant's earlier, most dramatic, and most original playmaking was done at a time far within our limits. When the tragedy of _Albovine_ (Alboin) was produced, the Restoration was more than thirty years distant, and Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, and Marston--men in the strictest sense of the Elizabethan school--were still living, and, in the case of all but Marston, writing. _The Cruel Brother_, which, though printed after, was licensed before, dates three years earlier; and between this time and the closing of the theatres Davenant had ten plays acted and printed coincidently with the best work of Massinger, Shirley, and Ford. Nor, though his fame is far below theirs, is the actual merit of these pieces (the two above mentioned, _The Wits_, _News from Plymouth_, _The Fair Favourite_, _The Unfortunate Lovers_, etc.), so much inferior as the fame. The chief point in which Davenant fails is in the failing grasp of verse above noted. This is curious and so characteristic that it is worth while to give an example of it, which shall be a fair average specimen and not of the worst:--

"O noble maid, what expiation can
Make fit this young and cruel soldier for
Society of man that hath defiled
The genius of triumphant glorious war
With such a rape upon thy liberty!
Or what less hard than marble of
The Parian rock can'st thou believe my heart,
That nurst and bred him my disciple in
The camp, and yet could teach his valour no
More tenderness than injured Scytheans use
When they are wroth to a revenge? But he
Hath mourned for it: and now Evandra thou
Art strongly pitiful, that dost so long
Conceal an anger that would kill us both."

_Love and Honour_, 1649.

Here we have the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, the big manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble that stutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the poetical tongue.

In such a language as this poetry became impossible, and it is still a matter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made it tolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so, but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blank verse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, never seems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objected was execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, he wrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the best Elizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself in his earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do not remember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that he was consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenant and others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop.

One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatists of our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of the decadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase--

"Stumbled from above
And reeled in slippery roads of alien art,"

is represented in the English theatre by four plays, _Aglaura_, _Brennoralt_, _The Sad One_, and the comedy of _The Goblins_. Of the tragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are the best thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rather suggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty. His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, which have been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramatic verse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas--a combination of extravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence in short of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mere versification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may be perhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, which is not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, _The Goblins_. There are several good points about this play--an abundance of not altogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound gallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the Restoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly a clever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as the plot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at hell and devils in caverns close to a populous city, and brings into the action a series of the most absurd escapes, duels, chance-meetings, hidings, findings, and all manner of other devices for spinning out an unnatural story. Many who know nothing more of Suckling's plays know that _Aglaura_ enjoys the eccentric possession of two fifth acts, so that it can be made a tragedy or a tragi-comedy at pleasure. _The Sad One_, which is unfinished, is much better. The tragedy of _Brennoralt_ has some pathos, some pretty scenes, and some charming songs; but here again we meet with the most inconceivably bad verse, as here--a passage all the more striking because of its attempt, wilful or unconscious, to echo Shakespere:--

"Sleep is as nice as woman;
The more I court it, the more it flies me.
Thy elder brother will be kinder yet,
Unsent-for death will come. To-morrow!
Well, what can to-morrow do?
'Twill cure the sense of honour lost;
I and my discontents shall rest together,
What hurt is there in this? But death against
The will is but a slovenly kind of potion;
And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs.
So does it at fourscore too, when the soul's
Mewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears.
Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature.
A certain clownish cowardice that still
Would stay at home and dares not venture
Into foreign countries, though better than
Its own. Ha! what countries? for we receive
Descriptions of th' other world from our divines
As blind men take relations of this from us:
My thoughts lead me into the dark, and there
They'll leave me. I'll no more on it. Within!"

Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if not at once of _Hamlet_ and _Othello_, at any rate of _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_.

To complete this sketch of the more famous and fortunate dramatists who have attained to separate presentation, we must give some account of lesser men and of those wholly anonymous works which are still to be found only in collections such as Dodsley's, or in single publications. As the years pass, the list of independently published authors increases. Mr. Bullen, who issued the works of Thomas Nabbes and of Davenport, has promised those of W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easy talent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy. _Microcosmus_ (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality, and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. _The Bride_, _Covent Garden_, _Tottenham Court_, range with the already characterised work of Brome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interesting history of _King John and Matilda_, as well as the lively comedy of _The City Nightcap_, together with other work, deserved, and have now received, collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probably to be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, he collaborated with Middleton, with Massinger, with Webster, with Fletcher, with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It would appear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which he brought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-life humours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together with not a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect. But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as _A New Wonder_, _a Woman Never Vexed_, and _A Match at Midnight_, he shows not merely this same _vis comica_ and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramatic situations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty of knitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with a half namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in his chronicle play _When you see Me you know Me_, and his romantic drama of _The Noble Spanish Soldier_, has distinctly outstripped the ordinary dramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had a home in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of "Dramatists of the Restoration," though his dramatic fame was obtained many years before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of _Cupid and Psyche_, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which the best known is _The Antiquary_, are fair but not excessively favourable samples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy, which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from, either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy.

Among the single plays comparatively few are of the latter kind. _The Miseries of Enforced Marriage_, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itself with the wholly tragical _Yorkshire Tragedy_, and is a kind of introduction to it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is _A Warning to Fair Women_) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem to have been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past and present. Their class is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, in one sense or another, very interesting class of the dramas attributed, and in general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to the fullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are _Fair Em_, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Edward III._, _The Birth of Merlin_, _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, _A Warning to Fair Women_, _The Arraignment of Paris_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Mucedorus_, _George a Green the Pinner of Wakefield_, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, _The London Prodigal_, _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Sir John Oldcastle_, _The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street_, _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _Locrine_. Four of these, _Edward III._, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Arden of Feversham_, and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, are in whole or parts very far superior to the rest. Of that rest _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, a violent and bloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruined gambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful, though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, not indeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In _Edward III._ and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot, character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in both certain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonishingly Shakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing of them by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of critics declare for the part authorship of Shakespere in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_; I avow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he did not write any part of _Edward III._, and I should take it to be a case of a kind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not very original faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, and wrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death or diversion to non-literary employments, left no other monument of himself that can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with _Arden of Feversham_ and _The Merry Devil_ is different. We shall presently speak of the latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian about it, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant human sentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work of the time. But _Arden of Feversham_ is a very different piece of work. It is a domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife, being led by her passion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at last carry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versification has much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him, but that the dramatic grasp of character both in principals and in secondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand. Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the play definitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibit themselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of his undoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which are both wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it could be admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown off while he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare. But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exact reproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_, licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terror pieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, but which seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It is black enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. _The Queen of Aragon_, by Habington, though in a different key, has something of the starchness rather than strength which characterises _Castara_. A much higher level is reached in the fine anonymous tragedy of _Nero_, where at least one character, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse, if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. The strange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him _The Distracted Emperor_, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagne and Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. _The Return from Parnassus_ (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and its contribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for the judgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere passages are only the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between the universities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chiefly on the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to provide for themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university and especially undergraduate life. The comedy of _Wily Beguiled_ has also a strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and _Lingua_, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. _The Dumb Knight_, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical class; but in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, the authorship of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great names have been put forward, a really delightful example of romantic comedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit, appears. _The Merry Devil_ probably stands highest among all the anonymous plays of the period on the lighter side, as _Arden of Feversham_ does on the darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's _Two Angry Women of Abingdon_ (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, and a singularly exact picture of manners. With _Ram Alley_, attributed to the Irishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of the bustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connection with Middleton. To the same class belong Haughton's pleasant _Englishmen for my Money_, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite the father's favour, are ousted from the courtship of three fair sisters; _Woman is a Weathercock_, and _Amends for Ladies_ (invective and palinode), by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eyasses who competed with regular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "_Tu Quoque_" or _The City Gallant_, attributed to the actor Cook, and deriving its odd first title from a well-known comedian of the time, and the catchword which he had to utter in the play itself; _The Hog hath Lost his Pearl_, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married against his will, by Taylor; _The Heir_ and _The Old Couple_, by Thomas May, more famous still for his Latin versification; the rather overpraised _Ordinary_ of Cartwright, Ben Jonson's most praised son; _The City Match_ by Dr. Jasper Mayne. All these figure in the last, and most of them have figured in the earlier editions of Dodsley, with a few others hardly worth separate notice. Mr. Bullen's delightful volumes of _Old Plays_ add the capital play of _Dick of Devonshire_ (see _ante_), the strange _Two Tragedies in One_ of Robert Yarington, three lively comedies deriving their names from originals of one kind or another, _Captain Underwit_, _Sir Giles Goosecap_, and _Dr. Dodipoll_, with one or two more. One single play remains to be mentioned, both because of its intrinsic merit, and because of the controversy which has arisen respecting the question of priority between it and Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_. This is _Albumazar_, attributed to one Thomas Tomkis, and in all probability a university play of about the middle of James's reign. There is nothing in it equal to the splendid bursts of Sir Epicure Mammon, or the all but first-rate comedy of Face, Dol, and Subtle, and of Abel Drugger; but Gifford, in particular, does injustice to it, and it is on the whole a very fair specimen of the work of the time. Nothing indeed is more astonishing than the average goodness of that work, even when all allowances are made; and unjust as such a mere enumeration as these last paragraphs have given must be, it would be still more unjust to pass over in silence work so varied and so full of talent.[63]

[63] A note may best serve for the plays of Thomas Goff (1591-1629), acted at his own college, Christ Church, but not published till after his death. The three most noteworthy, _The Raging Turk_, _The Courageous Turk_, and the _Tragedy of Orestes_, were republished together in 1656, and a comedy, _The Careless Shepherdess_, appeared in the same year. The tragedies, and especially _The Raging Turk_, have been a byword for extravagant frigidity, though, as they have never been printed in modern times, and as the originals are rare, they have not been widely known at first hand. A perusal justifies the worst that has been said of them: though Goff wrote early enough to escape the Caroline dry-rot in dramatic versification. His lines are stiff, but they usually scan.