Chapter V: Part 5

Of Shakespeare's other plays the several groups exercised a more direct influence upon the general progress of our dramatic literature. His Roman tragedies, though following their authorities with much the same fidelity as that of the English _histories_, even more effectively taught the great lesson of free dramatic treatment of historic themes, and thus pre-eminently became the perennial models of the modern historic drama. His tragedies on other subjects, which necessarily admitted of a more absolute freedom of treatment, established themselves as the examples for all time of the highest kind of tragedy. Where else is exhibited with the same fulness the struggle between will and obstacle, character and circumstance? Where is mirrored with equal power and variety the working of those passions in the mastery of which over man lies his doom? Here, above all, Shakespeare as compared with his predecessors, as well as with his successors, "_is_ that nature which they paint and draw." He threw open to modern tragedy a range of hitherto unknown breadth and depth and height, and emancipated the national drama in its noblest forms from limits to which it could never again restrict itself without a consciousness of having renounced its enfranchisement. Happily for the variety of his creative genius on the English stage, no divorce had been proclaimed between the serious and the comic, and no division of species had been established such as he himself ridicules as pedantic when it professes to be exhaustive. The comedies of Shakespeare accordingly refuse to be tabulated in deference to any method of classification deserving to be called precise; and several of them are comedies only according to a purely technical use of the term. In those in which the instinct of reader or spectator recognizes the comic interest to be supreme, it is still of its nature incidental to the progress of the action; for the criticism seems just, as well as in agreement with what we can conclude as to Shakespeare's process of construction, that among all his comedies not more than a single one[185] is in both design and effect a comedy of character proper. Thus in this direction, while the unparalleled wealth of his invention renewed or created a whole gallery of types, he left much to be done by his successors; while the truest secrets of his comic art, which interweaves fancy with observation, draws wisdom from the lips of fools, and imbues with character what all other hands would have left shadowy, monstrous or trivial, are among the things inimitable belonging to the individuality of his poetic genius.

His style and its influence.

The influences of Shakespeare's diction and versification upon those of the English drama in general can hardly be overrated, though it would be next to impossible to state them definitely. In these points, Shakespeare's manner as a writer was progressive; and this progress has been deemed sufficiently well traceable in his plays to be used as an aid in seeking to determine their chronological sequence. The general laws of this progress accord with those of the natural advance of creative genius; artificiality gives way to freedom, and freedom in its turn submits to a greater degree of regularity and care. In versification as in diction the earliest and the latest period of Shakespeare's dramatic writing are more easily recognizable than what lies between and may be called the _normal_ period, the plays belonging to which in form most resemble one another, and are least affected by distinguishable peculiarities--such as the rhymes and intentionally euphuistic colouring of style which characterize the earliest, or the feminine endings of the lines and the more condensed manner of expression common to the latest of his plays. But, such distinctions apart, there can be no doubt but that in verse and in prose alike, Shakespeare's style, so far as it admitted of reproduction, is itself to be regarded as the _norm_ of that of the Elizabethan drama; that in it the prose form of English comedy possesses its first accepted model; and that in it the chosen metre of the English versified drama established itself as irremovable unless at the risk of an artificial experiment.

Influence of his method of construction.

The assertion may seem paradoxical, that it is by their construction that Shakespeare's plays exerted the most palpable influence upon the English drama, as well as upon the modern drama of the Germanic nations in general, and upon such forms of the Romance drama as have been in more recent times based upon it. For it was not in construction that his greatest strength lay, or that the individuality of his genius could raise him above the conditions under which he worked in common with his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Yet the fact that he accepted these conditions, while producing works of matchless strength and of unequalled fidelity to the demands of nature and art, established them as inseparable from the Shakespearian drama--to use a term which is perhaps unavoidable but has been often misapplied. The great and irresistible demand on the part of Shakespeare's public was for _incident_--a demand which of itself necessitated a method of construction different from that of the Greek drama, or of those modelled more or less closely upon it. To no other reason is to be ascribed the circumstance that Shakespeare so constantly combined two actions in the course of a single play, not merely supplementing the one by means of the other as a bye- or under-plot. In no respect is the progress of his technical skill as a dramatist more apparent,--a proposition which a comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life must be left to prove.

His characters.

Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in _characterization_--in the drawing of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art--that he remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and sinned.

Forms of the later Elizabethan drama.

The pastoral drama.

By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama, every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation, and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such an aftergrowth as the _auto_, and the confines of the religious drama were only now and then tentatively touched.[186] The direct imitations of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models, was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,[187] while experiments like W. Alexander's (afterwards earl of Stirling) _Monarchicke Tragedies_[188] (1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more exclusively so than Milton's imposing _Samson Agonistes_, which belongs to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the Englishman's festive digestion long continued robust, and he liked his amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many English dramatists found special opportunities for the exercise of their lyrical gifts and of their inventive powers. The former could never become other than an exotic, so long as it retained the artificial character of its origin. Shakespeare had accordingly only blended elements derived from it into the action of his romantic comedies. In more or less isolated works Jonson, Fletcher, Daniel, Randolph, and others sought to rival Tasso and Guarini--Jonson[189] coming nearest to nationalizing an essentially foreign growth by the fresh simplicity of his treatment, Fletcher[190] bearing away the palm for beauty of poetic execution; Daniel being distinguished by simpler beauties of style in both verse and prose.[191]

The mask.

The mask (or masque) was a more elastic kind of composition, mixing in varying proportions its constituent elements of declamation and dialogue, music and dancing, decoration and scenery. In its least elaborate literary form--which, of course, externally was the most elaborate--it closely approached the pageant; in other instances the distinctness of its characters or the fulness of the action introduced into its scheme, brought it nearer to the regular drama. A frequent ornament of Queen Elizabeth's progresses, it was cultivated with increased assiduity in the reign of James I., and in that of his successor outshone, by the favour it enjoyed with court and nobility, the attractions of the regular drama itself. Most of the later Elizabethan dramatists contributed to this species, upon which Shakespeare expended the resources of his fancy only incidentally in the course of his dramas; but by far the most successful writer of masks was Ben Jonson, of whose numerous compositions of this kind many hold a permanent place in English poetic literature, and "next" whom, in his own judgment, "only Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask." From a poetic point of view, however, they were at least rivalled by Dekker and Ford; in productivity and favour T. Campion, who was equally eminent as poet and as musician, seems for a time to have excelled. Inasmuch, however, as the history of the mask in England is to a great extent that of "painting and carpentry" and of Inigo Jones, and as, moreover, this kind of piece, while admitting dramatic elements, is of its nature occasional, it need not further be pursued here. The _Microcosmus_ of T. Nabbes (printed 1637), which is very like a morality, seems to have been the first mask brought upon the public stage. It was the performance of a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the invective of _Histrio-Mastix_ against the stage the occasion for disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great nobleman's castle that Milton--a Puritan of a very different cast--not long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of English poems. _Comus_ has been judged and condemned as a drama--unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask.

The later Elizabethan drama.

The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as they are, his tragic works[192] stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history,[193] always with vigour, and at times with genuine effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action. Mention has been made above of Ford's isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme--ranging as these plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance--of equally astonishing variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction, original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations--among others to Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And, in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of this kind;[194] but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class,[195] to which some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of _motives_ employed--at least as a rule--in the tragic drama of this period was comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled masculine passion--such are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion, which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,[196] master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,[197] surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by any of their contemporaries--a power seconded by a beauty of diction and softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked; but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.

In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of "humours" (which found the most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays[198]), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name into the Restoration age[199] and cannot be said to have ever died out. In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist's labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible _verve_ of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic versatility of Shirley--not to mention many later and not necessarily minor names[200]--mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness and correctness--the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the representation of the living realities of life--but in a lightness not incompatible with sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment resulting from accumulated experience, enabled them to advance from success to success. Thus the comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporaneous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its predecessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the _interregnum_ of the Revolution, and connected themselves more closely than is sometimes assumed with later growths of English comedy.

The later academical drama.

Such was also the case with a special growth which had continued side by side, but in growing frequency of contact, with the progress of the national drama. The academical drama of the later Elizabethan period and of the first two Stuart reigns by no means fell off either in activity or in variety from that of the preceding generations. At Oxford, after an apparent break of several years--though in the course of these one or two new plays, including a _Tancred_ by Sir Henry Wotton at Queen's, seem to have been produced--a long succession of English plays, some in Latin doubtless from time to time intervening, were performed, from the early years of the 17th century onwards to the dark days of the national theatre and beyond. The production of these plays was distributed among several colleges, among which the most conspicuously active were Christ Church and St John's, where a whole series of festal performances took place under the collective title of _The Christmas Prince_ (i.e. master of the Christmas revels). They included a wide variety of pieces, from the treatment by an author unnamed of the story of "Ovid's owne Narcissus" (1602) and S. Daniel's _Queen's Arcadia_ (1606) to Barten Holiday's _Technogamia_ (1618), a complicated allegory on the relations between the arts and sciences quite in the manner of the moralities; interspersed by romantic dramas of the ordinary contemporary type by T. Goffe (1591-1629), W. Cartwright, J. Maine (1604-1672) and others. At Cambridge the list of Latin and English academical plays, performed in the latter half of Elizabeth's reign at Trinity, St John's, Queen's and a few other colleges, contains several examples in each language which for one reason or another possess a special interest. Thus E. Forsett's _Pedantius_, probably acted at Trinity in 1581, ridicules a personage who lived very near the rose--the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey;[201] a _Laelia_, acted at Queen's in 1590 and again in 1598, resembles _Twelfth Night_ in part of its plot; while in _Silvanus_, performed in 1596, probably at St John's, there are certain striking similarities to _As You Like It_. These are in Latin, as are the comedies _Hispanus_ (containing some curious allusions to the Armada, Drake and Dr Lopez) and _Machiavellus_, acted at St John's in 1597.[202] By far the most interesting of the English plays of the later Cambridge series, and, it may be averred, of the remains of the English academical drama as a whole, are the Parnassus Plays (q.v.), successively produced at St John's in 1598-1602, which illustrate with much truthfulness as well as fancy the relations between university life and the outside world, including the world of letters and of the stage. Upon a different, but also a very notable, aspect of English university life--the relations between town and gown--a partisan light is thrown by _Club-Law_, acted at Clare in 1599--and in G. Ruggle's celebrated Latin comedy of _Ignoramus_, twice acted by members of Clare at Trinity in 1615 before King James I. On one of these occasions were also produced in English T. Tomkis' comedy _Albumazar_ (a play absurdly attributed to Shakespeare), and Phineas Fletcher's _Sicelides_, a "piscatory" (i.e. a pastoral drama in which the place of the shepherds is taken by fishermen). Latin and English plays continued to be brought out in Cambridge till the year of the outbreak of the Civil War, T. Randolph and A. Cowley[203] being among the authors of some of the latest so produced; and with the Restoration the usage recommenced, the _Adelphi_ of Terence and other Latin comedies being performed as they had been a century earlier. A complete survey and classification of the English academical drama, for which the materials are at last being collected and compared, will prove of an importance which is only beginning to be recognized to the future historian of the English drama.

The stage.

To return to the general current of that drama. The rivals against which it had to contend in the times with which its greatest epoch came to an end have in their turn been noticed. From the masks and triumphs at court and at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the city pageants and shows by land and water--from the tilts and tournaments at Whitehall to the more philosophical devices at the Inns of Court and the academical plays at the universities--down even to the brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the "Ninevitical motions" of the puppets--in all these ways the various sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign performers--French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses--paid visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of acting maintained itself at least on the level to which it had been brought by Shakespeare's associates and contemporaries, Burbage and Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others "of the older sort." The profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field) occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation of the artistic merit of actors who valued the dignity of their own profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the old school of clowns. Women's parts were still acted by boys, many of whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus continued which must assuredly have placed the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never obtained), and which may, while it has been held to have facilitated freedom of fancy, more certainly encouraged the extreme licence of expression cherished by the dramatists. The arrangement of the stage, which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for their being organically connected with one another, remained essentially what it had been in Shakespeare's days; though the primitive expedients for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was apparently cultivated with much greater care; and the English stage of this period had probably gone a not inconsiderable way in a direction to which it is obviously in the interests of the dramatic art to set some bounds, if it is to depend for its popular success upon its qualities as such, and upon the interpretation of its agents upon the stage. At the same time, the drama had begun largely to avail itself of adventitious aids to favour. The system of prologues and epilogues, and of dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their chief patron, the public.

The drama and Puritanism.

Closing of the theatres.

Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued to enjoy the favour or good-will of the court, although a close supervision was exercised over all attempts to make the stage the vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent of this supervision was the master of the revels; but under James I. a special ordinance, in harmony with the king's ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was passed "against representing any modern Christian king in plays on the stage." The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state denied to the public at large; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less decisive repression and punishment.[204] But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court that the real difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the population, well represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the representation of stage-plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and-death kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger,[205] though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions,[206] rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the masterpieces of Ben Jonson;[207] and the comedies of his contemporaries and successors[208] abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and consecrated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the diversions of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature of the age, intensified the Puritan opposition to all and any stage plays. A patient endeavour to reform instead of suppressing the drama was not to be looked for from such adversaries, should they ever possess the means of carrying out their views; and whenever Puritanism should victoriously assert itself in the state, the stage was doomed. Among the attacks directed against it in its careless heyday of prosperity Prynne's _Histrio-Mastix_ (1632), while it involved its author in shamefully cruel persecution, did not remain wholly without effect upon the tone of the dramatic literature of the subsequent period; but the quarrel between Puritanism and the theatre was too old and too deep to end in any but one way, so soon as the latter was deprived of its protectors. The Civil War began in August 1642; and early in the following month was published the ordinance of the Lords and Commons, which, after a brief and solemn preamble, commanded "that while these sad causes and set-times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne." Many actors and playwrights followed the fortunes of the royal cause in the field; some may have gone into a more or less voluntary exile; upon those who lingered on in the familiar haunts the hand of power lay heavy; and, though there seems reason to believe that dramatic entertainments of one kind or another continued to be occasionally presented, stringent ordinances gave summary powers to magistrates against any players found engaged in such proceedings (1647), and bade them treat all stage-players as rogues, and pull down all stage galleries, seats and boxes (1648). A few dramatic works were published in this period;[209] while at fairs about the country were acted farces called "drolls," consisting of the most vulgar scenes to be found in popular plays. Thus, the life of the drama was not absolutely extinguished; and its darkest day proved briefer than perhaps either its friends or its foes could have supposed.

Revival of the drama.

Already "in Oliver's time" private performances took place from time to time at noblemen's houses and (though not undisturbed) in the old haunt of the drama, the Red Bull. In 1656 the ingenuity of Sir William Davenant whose name (though not really so significant in the dramatic as in another field of English literature) is memorable as connecting together two distinct periods in it, ventured on a bolder step in the production of a quasi-dramatic entertainment "of declamation and music"; and in the following year he brought out with scenery and music a piece which was afterwards in an enlarged form acted and printed as the first part of his opera, _The Siege of Rhodes_. This entertainment he afterwards removed from the private house where it had been produced to the Cockpit, where he soon ventured upon the performance of regular plays written by himself. Thus, under the cover of two sister arts, whose aid was in the sequel to prove by no means altogether beneficial to its progress, the English drama had boldly anticipated the Restoration, and was no longer hiding its head when that much-desired event was actually brought about. Soon after Charles II.'s entry into London, two theatrical companies are known to have been acting in the capital. For these companies patents were soon granted, under the names of "the Duke (of York)'s" and "the King's Servants," to Davenant and one of the brothers Killigrew respectively--the former from 1662 acting at Lincoln's Inn Fields, then at Dorset Garden in Salisbury Court, the latter from 1663 at the Theatre Royal near Drury Lane. These companies were united from 1682, a royal licence being granted in 1695 to a rival company which performed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and which migrated to Covent Garden in 1733. Meanwhile, Vanbrugh had in 1705 built the theatre in the Haymarket; and a theatre in Goodman's Fields--afterwards rendered famous by the first appearance of Garrick--led a fitful existence from 1729 to 1733. The act of 1737 deprived the crown of the power of licensing any more theatres; so that the history of the English stage for a long period was confined to a restricted area. The rule which prevailed after the Restoration, that neither of the rival companies should ever attempt a play produced by the other, operated beneficially both upon the activity of dramatic authorship and upon the progress of the art of acting, which was not exposed to the full effects of that deplorable spirit of personal rivalry which too often leads even most intelligent actors to attempt parts for which they have no special qualification. There can be little doubt that the actor's art has rarely flourished more in England than in the days of T. Betterton and his contemporaries, among whose names those of Hart, Mohun, Kynaston, Nokes, Mrs Barry, Mrs Betterton, Mrs Bracegirdle and Mrs Eleanor Gwyn have, together with many others, survived in various connexions among the memories of the Restoration age. No higher praise has ever been given to an actor than that which Addison bestowed upon Betterton, in describing his performance of _Othello_ as a proof that Shakespeare could not have written the most striking passages of the character otherwise than he has done.

The Irish stage.

It may here be noticed that the fortunes of the Irish theatre in general followed those of the English, of which of course it was merely a branch. Of native dramatic compositions in earlier times not a trace remains in Ireland; and the drama was introduced into that country as an English exotic--apparently already in the reign of Henry VIII., and more largely in that of Elizabeth. The first theatre in Dublin was built in 1635; but in 1641 it was closed, and even after the Restoration the Irish stage continued in a precarious condition till near the end of the century. About that time an extraordinarily strong taste for the theatre took possession of Irish society, and during the greater part of the 18th century the Dublin stage rivalled the English in the brilliancy of its stars. Betterton's rival, R. Wilks, Garrick's predecessor in the homage paid to Shakespeare, Macklin, and his competitor for favour, the "silver-tongued" Barry, were alike products of the Irish stage, as were Mrs Woffington and other well-known actresses. Nor should it be forgotten that three of the foremost English writers of comedy in its later days, Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, were Irish, the first by education, and the latter two by birth also.

The later Stuart drama.

Already in the period preceding the outbreak of the Civil War the English drama had perceptibly sunk from the height to which it had been raised by the great Elizabethans. When it had once more recovered possession of that arena with which no living drama can dispense, it would have been futile to demand that the dramatists should return altogether into the ancient paths, unaffected by the influences, native or foreign, in operation around them. But there was no reason why the new drama should not, like the Elizabethan, have been true in spirit to the higher purposes of the dramatic art, to the nobler tendencies of the national life, and to the demands of moral law. Because the later Stuart drama as a whole proved untrue to these, and, while following its own courses, never more than partially returned from the aberrations to which it condemned itself, its history is that of a decay which the indisputable brilliancy, borrowed or original, of many of its productions is incapable of concealing.

Tragedy.

Owing in part to the influence of the French theatre, which by this time had taken the place of the Spanish as the ruling drama of Europe, the separation between tragedy and comedy is clearly marked in post-Restoration plays. Comic scenes are still occasionally introduced into tragedies by some dramatists who adhered more closely to the Elizabethan models (such as Otway and Crowne), but the practice fell into disuse; while the endeavour to elevate comedy by pathetic scenes and motives is one of the characteristic marks of the beginning of another period in English dramatic literature. The successive phases through which English tragedy passed in the later Stuart times cannot be always kept distinct from one another; and the guidance offered by the theories put forth by some of the dramatists in support of their practice is often delusive. Following the example of Corneille, Dryden and his contemporaries and successors were fond of proclaiming their adherence to this or that principle of dramatic construction or form, and of upholding, with much show of dialectical acumen, maxims derived by them from French or other sources, or elaborated with modifications and variations of their own, but usually amounting to little more than what Scott calls "certain romantic whimsical imitations of the dramatic art." Students of the drama will find much entertainment and much instruction in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues and treatises. They will acknowledge that Dryden's incomparable vigour does not desert him either in the exposing or in the upholding of fallacies, while _le bon sens_, which he hardly ever fails to exhibit, and which is a more eclectic gift than common-sense, serves as a sure guide to the best intelligence of his age. Even Rymer,[210] usually regarded as having touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, will be found to be not wholly without grains of salt. But Restoration tragedy itself must not be studied by the light of Restoration criticism. So long as any dramatic power remained in the tragic poets--and it is absent from none of the chief among them from Dryden to Rowe--the struggle between fashion (disguised as theory) and instinct (tending in the direction of the Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of the former.

Lord Orrery, in deference, as he declares, to the expressed tastes of his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the standard of _heroic plays_.[211] This new species of tragedy (for such it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a large extent supplied by recent French romance--the _romans de longue haleine_ of the Scuderys and their contemporaries--and by French plays treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences; and the form, in the application which it was more or less sought to enforce for it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his brother-in-law Sir R. Howard,[212] and afterwards more confidently by himself,[213] Dryden threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his genius into the scale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign acquisitions.[214] Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of _The Rehearsal_ (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between them and such other materials for ridicule as the contemporary drama supplied to its facetious authors, but returned[215] to the defence of a species which he was himself in the end to abandon.[216] The desire for change proved stronger than the love of consistency--which in Dryden was never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera--with whose birth its own revival was as a matter of fact simultaneous--he came to recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of the Elizabethan drama,[217] and after audaciously, but in one instance not altogether unhappily, essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own ground,[218] produced under the influence of the same views at least one work of striking merit.[219] But he was already growing weary of the stage itself as well as of the rhymed heroic drama; and, though he put an end to the species to which he had given temporary vitality, he failed effectively to point the way to a more legitimate development of English tragedy. Among the other tragic poets of this period, N. Lee, in the outward form of his dramas, accommodated his practice to that of Dryden, with whom he occasionally co-operated as a dramatist, and like whom he allowed political partisanship to intrude upon the stage.[220] His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway, the most gifted tragic poet of the younger generation contemporary with Dryden, inherited something of the spirit of the Elizabethan drama; he possessed a real gift of tragic pathos and melting tenderness; but his genius had a worse alloy than stageyness, and, though he was often happy in his novel choice of themes, his most successful efforts fail to satisfy tests supplementary to that of the stage.[221] Among dramatists who contributed to the vogue of the "heroic" play may be mentioned J. Bankes, J. Weston, C. Hopkins, E. Cooke, R. Gould, S. Pordage, T. Rymer and Elkanah Settle. The productivity of J. Crowne (d. c. 1703)[222] covers part of the earlier period as well as of the later, to which properly belong T. Southerne, a writer gifted with much pathetic power, but probably chiefly indebted for his long-lived popularity to his skill in the discovery of "sensational" plots; and Lord Lansdowne ("Granville the polite") (c. 1667-1735). Congreve, by virtue of a single long celebrated but not really remarkable tragedy,[223] and N. Rowe, may be further singled out from the list of the tragic dramatists of this period, many of whom were, like their comic contemporaries, mere translators or adapters from the French. The tragedies of Rowe, whose direct services to the study of Shakespeare deserve remembrance, indicate with singular distinctness the transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and thinner manner of Addison.[224] In tragedy (as to a more marked degree in comedy) the excesses (both of style and subject) of the past period of the English drama had produced an inevitable reaction; decorum was asserting its claims on the stage as in society; and French tragedy had set the example of sacrificing what passion--and what vigour--it retained in favour of qualities more acceptable to the "reformed" court of Louis XIV. Addison, in allowing his _Cato_ to take its chance upon the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured to it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds, except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar quotations, unconsciously sealed the doom of English national tragedy. The "first reasonable English tragedy," as Voltaire called it, had been produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration were at an end.

Comedy.

English comedy in this period displayed no similar desire to cut itself off from the native soil, though it freely borrowed the materials for its plots and many of its figures from Spanish, and afterwards more generally from French, originals. The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. Political and religious partisanship, generally in accordance with the dominant reaction against Puritanism, were allowed to find expression in the directest and coarsest forms upon the stage, and to hasten the necessity for a more systematic control than even the times before the Revolution had found requisite. At the same time the unblushing indecency which the Restoration had spread through court and capital had established its dominion over the comic stage, corrupting the manners, and with them the morals, of its dramatists, and forbidding them, at the risk of seeming dull, to be anything but improper. Much of this found its way even into the epilogues, which, together with the prologues, proved so important an adjunct of the Restoration drama. These influences determine the general character of what is with a more than chronological meaning termed the comedy of the Restoration. In construction, the national love of fulness and solidity of dramatic treatment induced its authors to alter what they borrowed from foreign sources, adding to complicated Spanish plots characters of native English directness, and supplementing single French plots by the addition of others.[225] At the same time, the higher efforts of French comedy of character, as well as the refinement of expression in the list of their models, notably in Moliere, were alike seasoned to suit the coarser appetites and grosser palates of English patrons. The English comic writers often succeeded in strengthening the borrowed texture of their plays, but they never added comic humour without at the same time adding coarseness of their own. Such were the productions of Sir George Etheredge, Sir Charles Sedley, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease"; nor was there any signal difference between their productions and those of a playwright-actor such as J. Lacy (d. 1681), and a professional dramatist of undoubted ability such as J. Crowne. Such, though often displaying the brilliancy of a genius which even where it sank could never wholly abandon its prerogative, were, it must be confessed, the comedies of Dryden himself. On the other hand, the lowest literary deeps of the Restoration drama were sounded by T. D'Urfey, while of its moral degradation the "divine Astraea," the "unspeakable" Mrs Aphra Behn, has an indefeasible title to be considered the most faithful representative. T. Shadwell, fated, like the tragic poet Elkanah Settle, to be chiefly remembered as a victim of Dryden's satire, deserves more honourable mention. Like J. Wilson, whose plays seem to class him with the pre-Restoration dramatists, Shadwell had caught something not only of the art, but also of the spirit, of Ben Jonson; but in most of his works he was, like the rest of his earlier contemporaries, and like the brilliant group which succeeded them, content to take his moral tone from the reckless society for which, or in deference to the tastes of which, he wrote.[226] The absence of a moral sense, which, together with a grossness of expression often defying exaggeration, characterizes English comic dramatists from the days of Dryden to those of Congreve, is the main cause of their failure to satisfy the demands which are legitimately to be made upon their art. They essayed to draw character as well as to paint manners, but they rarely proved equal to the former and higher task; and, while choosing the means which most readily commended their plays to the favour of their immediate public, they achieved but little as interpreters of those essential distinctions which their art is capable of illustrating.[227] Within these limits, though occasionally passing beyond them, and always with the same deference to the immoral tone which seemed to have become an indispensable adjunct of the comic style, even the greatest comic authors of this age moved. W. Wycherley was a comic dramatist of real power, who drew his characters with vigour and distinctness, and constructed his plots and chose his language with natural ease. He lacks gaiety of spirit, and his wit is of a cynical turn. But, while he ruthlessly uncloaks the vices of his age, his own moral tone is affected by their influence in as marked a degree as that of the most light-hearted of his contemporaries.[228] The most brilliant of these was indisputably W. Congreve, who is not only one of the very wittiest of English writers, but equally excels in the graceful ease of his dialogue, and draws his characters and constructs his plots with the same masterly skill. His chief fault as a dramatist is one of excess--the brilliancy of the dialogue, whoever be the speaker, overpowers the distinction between the "humours" of his personages. Though he is less brutal in expression than "manly" Wycherley, and less coarse than the lively Sir J. Vanbrugh, licentiousness in him as in them corrupts the spirit of his comic art; but of his best though not most successful play[229] it must be allowed that the issue of the main plot is on the side of virtue. G. Farquhar, whose morality is on a par with that of the other members of this group, is inferior to them in brilliancy; but as pictures of manners in a wider sphere of life than that which contemporary comedy usually chose to illustrate, two of his plays deserve to be noticed, in which we already seem to be entering the atmosphere of the 18th-century novel.[230] His influence upon Lessing is a remarkable fact in the international history of dramatic literature.

Sentimental comedy.

The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction against the reaction of the Restoration, partly to the punishment which the excesses of the comic stage had brought upon it in the invective of Jeremy Collier[231] (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had to undergo the best-founded, and that which produced the most perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less conscious of their sins, and had at all events not defended them by the ingenious sophistries which it has pleased later literary criticism to suggest on their behalf, now began with uneasy merriment to allude in their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the town. Writers like Mrs Centlivre became anxious to reclaim their offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber--whose _Apology for his Life_ furnishes a useful view of this and the subsequent period of the history of the stage, with which he was connected as author, manager and actor (excelling in this capacity as representative of those fools with which he peopled the comic stage)[232]--may be credited with having first deliberately made the pathetic treatment of a moral sentiment the basis of the action of a comic drama. But he cannot be said to have consistently pursued the vein which in his _Careless Husband_ (1704) he had essayed. His _Non-Juror_ is a political adaptation of _Tartuffe_; and his almost equally celebrated _Provoked Husband_ only supplied a happy ending to Vanbrugh's unfinished play. Sir R. Steele, in accordance with his general tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in his comedies; but his genius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of pathos. From partial[233] he passed to more complete[234] experiment; and thus these two writers, who transplanted to the comic stage a tendency towards the treatment of domestic themes noticeable in such writers of Restoration tragedy as Southerne and Rowe, became the founders of _sentimental comedy_, a species which exercised a most depressing influence upon the progress of English drama, and helped to hasten the decline of its comic branch. With _Cato_ English tragedy committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with _The Conscious Lovers_ English comedy sank for long into the tearful embraces of artificiality and weakness.

The drama and stage in the period before Garrick.

Garrick.