Chapter XXI: Part 21

"In one sense," says UPTON, "you are in Fairy-Land, yet in another you may be in the British dominions." And further, "where the _moral_ allusion is not apparent, you must look for an _historical_ allusion." Such are the fundamental positions of the allegorical theory, by which a conjectural historian designs to unveil the secret sense of a romantic epic; the poet, according to him, having frigidly descended into the historiographer of the court of Elizabeth, rather than of the court of the Faery Queen--to catch "the Cynthias of the minute," and to waste his colours on their evanescent portraits.

And amusing it is to watch the historical conjecturer of a romantic poem perilously creeping along the dark passages of secret history; but he is often at a stand. In "the palpable obscure," the historical reality, which he seems to be touching, suddenly disappears under his grasp. We have no golden key to open the occult chamber, where we are told so many knights and ladies lie entranced near two centuries in their magical sleep, and where, amid the shadowiness, the historical necromancer promptly furnishes us with their very names, recognising all these enchanted persons by their very attitudes.

One of his most felicitous conjectures regards "the gentle squire Timias" as the poet's honoured friend, Sir Walter Rawleigh. Sir Walter once incurred the disgrace of the Queen by a criminal amour with one of the maids of honour; he was for some time banished the court; but the injury to the lady was expiated by marriage. The private history we are to look for in the Allegory. Timias offends Belphoebe the patroness of Chastity, and the Queen of England, who surprised "the gentle squire" in a very suspicious attitude of tenderness with Amoret. This lady was suffering from violence, having been "rapt by greedie Lust," and the gentle squire himself had partaken of the mischance, in encountering that savage. Timias; the knight, is seen--

From her fair eyes wiping the dewy wet,
Which softly slid; and kissing them atween,
And handling soft the hurts which she did get.

Belphoebe on the sudden appears, and indignantly exclaims--

"Is this the Faith?" she said, and said no more;
But turn'd her face, and fled away for evermore.

In a romantic scene,[5] "the gentle squire" in banishment is wasted with grief, so as not to be recognised by his friends; his lone companion is a turtle-dove, a magical and sympathizing bird, who entices Belphoebe, that Sovereign Chastity, to pursue its playful flight, till it leads her to the cell of the miserable man from whom she had so long averted her face, and Timias recovers her favour.

In this extended scene we are to view the condition of Rawleigh during his disgrace; and the opening of the canto gives some countenance to the particular application. The aptitude of a resemblance, however, may only be a coincidence. The fatal error of our conjectural historian is that of spinning at his allegory long after he is left without a thread. In Amoret's calamitous adventure, "rapt by greedie Lust," Upton sees an adumbration of the lady of Sir Walter _before_ her marriage; and in another adventure, where another person, _Serena_, with "the gentle squire," are both carried to a hermit's cell, to be healed of the wounds inflicted by calumny and scandal, their condition _after_ marriage. Our diviner, as further evidence of "the double sense," discovers how remarkably appropriate was the name of Serena to the lady of Rawleigh.

In all these transmigrations of persons the enigmatical expounder acknowledges that the typical incidents suddenly diverge from their prototype. The parallels run crooked, and the fictions will not square with the facts; and he desperately exclaims that "the poet has designedly perplexed the story:" but he concludes with this hardy assumption, "If the reader cannot see through these disguises, he will see nothing but _the dead letter_." And what but "the dead letter," as this hierophant of mystic senses asperses the free inventions of genius, can now interest the readers of Spenser? For the honour of our poet we protest against the dark and broken dreams hovering about a commentator's desk. Who can credit that the courteous and courtly spirit of Spenser would thus lay bare to the public eye the delicate history of the lady of Sir Walter, even by a remote allusion? Yet this he does by connecting her name with Amoret carried away by "greedie Lust," and with Serena, who required to be healed of the wounds inflicted by scandal. Can we conceive that the poet would have thus deliberately re-opened the domestic wound, still tender, of his patron-friend, and distressed that "serene" lady, in a poem to be read by them, to be conned by malicious eyes, and to be consigned to posterity?

The readers of Upton's revelations may often be amused by his lettered ingenuity reasoning with eager perversity. In Book II. Canto i. a pathetic incident occurs in a forest, where we find a lady with her infant on her bosom, and her knight extended in death beside her. Her shriek is deadly as the blow she has given herself. Guyon the Knight of Temperance flies to her succour; dying, she tells how "her liefest lord" had been beguiled, "for he was flesh," by Acrasia, or sensual pleasure. The lady had recovered him from the fell embraces of that sorceress, who, in parting, seduces him to drink from a charmed cup her accursed _wine_. On his return homewards with his lady he would quench his thirst at a fountain, but

So soon as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke,

that is, the instant the pure water reaches his viny lips, he tastes, and he dies!

The Knight of Temperance takes the infant from the bleeding bosom of the mother to wash it in the fountain--but no water could cleanse its bloody hand; hence it was to be called "Ruddimane:" it was "a sacred symbol in the son's flesh, to tell of the mother's innocence." Upton had discovered that the great Irish insurrectionist O'Neal, as Camden records, "dwelt in all the pollutions of unchaste embraces, and had several children by O'Donnel's wife."

The badge of the O'Neals was "a bloody hand." In the ecstasy of divination he exclaims, "This lady with the bloody-handed babe is--the wife of O'Neal!" The dying lady had told her sad tale, but never had she hinted at the Irish origin. Her knight had fallen a victim to Acrasia; a suitable incident in the legend of temperance--a result of that "passion" at which the poet pointed, and described as one which

Robs Reason of her due regality.

And this simple incident is converted into the fate of the O'Neals, presenting an image of the miseries of the Irish rebellion!

We pass by the contemporary portraits inscribed by our speculative historian with real names. When fancy is busy, likenesses are often found; a single feature is sometimes taken for a whole physiognomy. Never surely did our conjecturer shoot wider of the mark than when he discovered in the two burlesque characters of the poltroon Braggadochio and his cheating squire Trompart, the Duke of Anjou and his envoy Simier. These were eminent characters known in the court of Elizabeth. To the French prince the Queen seemed partial, and once placed a ring on his finger, too sanguinely accepted as a plight of betrothment; and Simier was a discreet diplomatist, whom the Queen publicly commended for his conduct. To have degraded such distinguished men by such vulgar baseness would have been a discrepancy in the taste and decorum of our courtly poet which Spenser never betrayed.[6]

In regard to Spenser, after all these allusions problematical for a succeeding generation, the poet is no longer to be judged by the darkness which has hidden small and fugitive matters. We cannot know the degree which Spenser allowed himself in distant allusions to the court of Elizabeth, or, as the poet himself vaguely said, to "Fairy-land;" he may have promised far more than he would care to perform; for an epical poet must have found the descent into a chronicler of scandalous legends, a portrayer of so many nameless personages, incompatible with the flow and elevation of his themes. And for what was never ascertained in its own age we dare not confide to that mystical vaticinator of past events, a conjectural historian!

Our interpreter of allegory was honest as well as hardy; in truth, he is sometimes startled at the historical revelations which crowd on his mind. It required "the hound's fine footing," to borrow the beautiful figure of Spenser himself, for our conjecturer to course in this field of allegory. With great candour he says, "Let us take care we do not overrun our game, or start more game than we are able to catch." His occasional dilemmas are amusing. He perplexed himself by a discovery that Amoret, whom he had made the lady of Sir Walter Rawleigh, might also have served for Mary Queen of Scots. In this critical crucifixion, he cries in torture, "I will neither affirm nor deny that Amoret is the type of Mary Queen of Scots!" But he had his ecstasies; for on another occasion, having indulged a very extravagant fancy, he exclaims in joyous rapture, "This may show how far types and symbols may be carried!" Yet, with his accustomed candour, he lowers down. "If the reader should think my arguments too flimsy, and extended beyond their due limits, and should laugh

To see their thrids so thin as spiders frame,
And eke so short that seem'd their ends out shortly came,

let him consider the latitude of interpretation all types and symbolical writings admit."[7] Truly that latitude has been too often abused on graver subjects than "The Faery Queen;" but the honesty of our mystical interpreter of double senses may plead for the extravagance of his ingenuity whenever he needs our indulgence.

Enough on this curious subject of allegory--this child of darkness among the luminous progeny of fancy. We have shown its changeable nature, and how frequently it fails in unity and clearness; we have demonstrated that "the double sense"--this system of types and symbols--has served as an imposture, since allegories have been deduced from works which were not allegorical, and forced interpretations of an ambiguous sense have led to fallacies which have fatally been introduced into history, into politics, and into theology.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We have a collection of these "Allegoricae Homericae." 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.

[2] Berni'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_.

[3] The "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.

[5] Book III. canto viii.

[6] It 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 Damoetas
and his ugly daughter Mopsa.

[7] Upton's note at the close of the fifth book of "The Faery Queen."

THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY.

In the 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."[1] This 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 as _The Nativity_, _The Adoration of the Kings_, and _The 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 Sueno 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 in _Hamlet_ both 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 his poem 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 first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who planned _The Mirror for Magistrates_, and left as its model _The 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 in _The Mirror for Magistrates_ Sackville had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of _Ferrex 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 in THOMAS 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 his _Induction_; 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 doctrine of passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition, were silently removed from the later ones.[2] It 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,[3] that 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 by _The Mirror for Magistrates_, the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of _Gorboduc_ are 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 on _the first tragedy_ by 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."

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 of _kings_ and _statesmen_ should be less happily imitated by a _poet_ than a _privy-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."

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 it _Europe_. 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.

Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is since Birmingham flourished, we had not had 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 a PLAUDITE!

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 than JOHN 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 enshrined _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ in 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 "STILL had displayed the true genius of comedy, and the choice of his _subject_ only 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 of _language_." Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the grossness of the "Gammer."--"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, styled _Ralph Roister Doister_, was discovered;[5] a 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."

GAMMER GURTON is a representation of sordid rusticity. ROISTER DOISTER opens 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.

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.

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 "The Lover" 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 purposely neglecting 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 by NICHOLAS UDALL."

This was the learned UDALL, 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."

FOOTNOTES:

[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."

[2] The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley's
"Old Plays."

[3] Warton has analysed this drama in his "History of English
Poetry," vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and
Hawkins.

[4] This 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 of _Gorboduc_ but he could
not have seen it, for he calls it _Queen Gorboduc_, whereas he is
_King_; and he appears to think that it was written in _rhyme_; and
notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope
requested Spence to reprint _Gorboduc_, they were so little cognisant
of these matters, that the spurious and defective _Gorboduc_ was
printed instead of the genuine _Ferrex and Porrex_. This ignorance of
our ancient writers lasted to a later period.

[5] Reprinted 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.]

[6] This 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 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!

[7] Hayley.

THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.

The establishment 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 Leicester[1] "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, rose up; 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 a _lieutenant 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 of PUBLIC PLAYS in the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.[2] There 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, the drop 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;[3] and 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 collegiate life 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]

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 their incessant 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 minute"--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; and _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, which was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has been held to be authentic; and surely _The Yorkshire Tragedy_ at least possessed an equal claim with the monstrous _Titus Andronicus_[5] not 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 in PAINTER'S "Palace of Pleasure," these dramatists ransacked for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a combination of 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.[6] We 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.[7] We may judge of the prolific production of these authors by THOMAS HEYWOOD, a fluent and natural writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and who has casually informed us that "he had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays."

The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to us.[8] It 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;[9] are 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 among them--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, when _high 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 the _thronged theaters_ that presse,
I in _the circuit_ for the Lawrell strove,
Where the _full praise_, I freely must confesse,
In heate of blood and modest minde might move;
_With_ SHOWTS _and_ CLAPS _at every little_ PAWSE
When the _prowd_ ROUND _on 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 ingenious JOHN LYLY; nothing of the searching and cynical MARSTON; nothing of the inventive and flowing DEKKER; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile HEYWOOD; nor of the pathetic WEBSTER; nor of MIDDLETON, from whose "Witch" Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of ROWLEY, whom Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave MASSINGER; nor of the lonely and melancholy FORD.

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 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,[11] or 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 have tainted 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 often _rifacimentos_ of 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.