Chapter XXIII (1)

HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

ON THE ITALIAN AND SPANISH DRAMA.

_Character of the Italian Theatre in this Age--Bonarelli--The Spanish Theatre--Calderon--Appreciation of his merits as a Dramatic Poet._

|Decline of the Italian Theatre.|

1. The Italian theatre, if we should believe one of its historians, fell into total decay during the whole course of the seventeenth century, though the number of dramatic pieces of various kinds was by no means small. He makes a sort of apology for inserting in a copious list of dramatic performances any that appeared after 1600, and stops entirely with 1650.[511] But in this he seems hardly to have done justice to a few, which, if not of remarkable excellence, might be selected from the rest. Andreini is perhaps best known by name in England, and that for one only of his eighteen dramas, the Adamo, which has been supposed, on too precarious grounds, to have furnished the idea of Paradise Lost in the original form, as it was planned by its great author. The Adamo was first published in 1613, and afterwards with amplification in 1641. It is denominated “A Sacred Representation;” and, as Andreini was a player by profession, must be presumed to have been brought upon the stage. It is, however, asserted by Riccoboni, that those who wrote regular tragedies did not cause them to be represented; probably he might have scrupled to give that epithet to the Adamo. Hayley and Walker have reckoned it a composition of considerable beauty.

[511] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien, vol. i.

2. The majority of Italian tragedies in the seventeenth century were taken, like the Adamo, from sacred subjects, including such as ecclesiastical legends abundantly supplied. Few of these gave sufficient scope, either by action or character, for the diversity of excitement which the stage demands. Tragedies more truly deserving that name were the Solimano of Bonarelli, the Tancredi of Campeggio, the Demetrius of Rocco, which Salfi prefers to the rest, and the Aristodemo of Carlo de Dottori. A drama by Testi, L’Isola di Alcina, had some reputation; but in this, which the title betrays not to be a legitimate tragedy, he introduced musical airs, and thus trod on the boundaries of a rival art.[512] It has been suggested, with no inconsiderable probability, that in her passion for the melodrame Italy lost all relish for the graver tone of tragedy. Music, at least the music of the opera, conspired with many more important circumstances to spread an effeminacy over the public character.

[512] Salfi, Continuation de Ginguéné, vol. xii., chap. 9.
Besides this larger work, Salfi published, in 1829, a short essay
on the Italian stage, Saggio Storico-Critico della Commedia
Italiana.

|Filli di Sciro.|

3. The pastoral drama had always been allied to musical sentiment, even though it might be without accompaniment. The feeling it inspired was nearly that of the opera. In this style we find one imitation of Tasso and Guarini, inferior in most qualities, yet deserving some regard, and once popular even with the critics of Italy. This was the Filli di Sciro of Bonarelli, published at Ferrara, a city already fallen into the hands of priests, but round whose deserted palaces the traditions of poetical glory still lingered, in 1607, and represented by an academy in the same place soon afterwards. It passed through numerous editions, and was admired, even beyond the Alps, during the whole century, and perhaps still longer. It displays much of the bad taste and affectation of that period. Bonarelli is as strained in the construction of his story and in his characters, as he is in his style. Celia, the heroine of this pastoral, struggles with a double love, the original idea, as he might truly think, of his drama, which he wrote a long dissertation in order to justify. It is, however, far less conformable to the truth of nature than to the sophisticated society for which he wrote. A wanton capricious court lady might perhaps waver, with some warmth of inclination towards both, between two lovers, “Alme dell’alma mia,” as Celia calls them, and be very willing to possess either. But what is morbid in moral affection seldom creates sympathy, or is fit either for narrative poetry or the stage. Bonarelli’s diction is studied and polished to the highest degree; and though its false refinement and affected graces often displease us, the real elegance of insulated passages makes us pause to admire. In harmony and sweetness of sound he seems fully equal to his predecessors, Tasso and Guarini; but he has neither the pathos of the one, nor the fertility of the other. The language and turn of thought seems, more than in the Pastor Fido to be that of the opera, wanting indeed nothing but the intermixture of air to be perfectly adapted to music. Its great reputation, which even Crescimbeni does his utmost to keep up, proves the decline of good taste in Italy, and the lateness of its revival.[513]

[513] Istoria della volgar Poesia, iv. 147. He places the Filli
di Sciro next to the Aminta.

|Translations of Spanish dramas.|

4. A new fashion which sprang up about 1620, both marks the extinction of taste for genuine tragedy, and by furnishing a substitute, stood in the way of its revival. Translations from Spanish tragedies and tragi-comedies, those of Lope de Vega and his successors, replaced the native muse of Italy. These were in prose and in three acts, irregular of course, and with very different characteristics from those of the Italian school. “The very name of tragedy,” says Riccoboni, “became unknown in our country; the _monsters_ which usurped the place did not pretend to that glorious title. Tragi-comedies rendered from the Spanish, such as Life is a Dream (of Calderon), the Samson, the Guest of Stone, and others of the same class, were the popular ornaments of the Italian stage.”[514]

[514] Hist. du Théâtre Italien, i. 47. The extemporaneous comedy
was called commedia dell’arte. “It consisted,” says Salfi, “in a
mere sketch or plan of a dramatic composition, the parts in which
having been hardly shadowed out were assigned to different actors
who were to develop them in extemporaneous dialogue. Such a
sketch was called a scenario, containing the subject of each
scene, and those of Flaminio Scala were celebrated. Saggio
Storico-Critico, p. 38. The pantomime, as it exists among us, is
the descendant of this extemporaneous comedy, but with little of
the wit and spirit of its progenitor.

|Extemporaneous comedy.|

5. The extemporaneous comedy had always been the amusement of the Italian populace, not to say of all who wished to unbend their minds. An epoch in this art was made in 1611 by Flaminio Scala, who first published the outline or canvas of a series of these pieces, the dialogue being of course reserved for the ingenious performers.[515] This outline was not quite so short as that sometimes given in Italian play bills; it explained the drift of each actor’s part in the scene, but without any distinct hint of what he was to say. The construction of these fables is censured by Riccoboni as both weak and licentious; but it would not be reasonable to expect that it should be otherwise. The talent of the actors supplied the deficiency of writers. A certain quickness of wit, and tact in catching the shades of manner, comparatively rare among us, are widely diffused in Italy. It would be, we may well suspect, impossible to establish an extemporaneous theatre in England which should not be stupidly vulgar.[516] But Bergamo sent out many Harlequins, and Venice many Pantaloons. They were respected, as brilliant wit ought to be. The emperor Mathias ennobled Cecchini, a famous Harlequin, who was, however, a man of letters. These actors sometimes took the plot of old comedies as their outline, and disfigured them, so as hardly to be known, by their extemporaneous dialogue.[517]

[515] Salfi, p. 40.

[516] This is only meant as to dialogue and as to the public
stage. The talent of a single actor, like the late Charles
Mathews, is not an exception; but even the power of strictly
extemporaneous comedy, with the agreeable poignancy that the
minor theatre requires, is not wanting among some whose station
and habits of life restrain its exercise to the most private
circles.

[517] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien. Salfi, xii., 518. An
elaborate disquisition on the extemporaneous comedy by Mr.
Panizzi, in the Foreign Review for 1829 (not the Foreign
Quarterly, but one early extinguished), derives it from the mimes
and Atellanian comedies of ancient Italy, tracing them through
the middle ages. The point seems sufficiently proved. The last
company of performers in this old, though plebeian, family
existed within about thirty years in Lombardy; a friend of mine
at that time witnessed the last of the Harlequins. I need hardly
say that this character was not a mere skipper over the stage, as
we have seen him, but a very honest and lively young Bergamasque.
The plays of Gasparo Gozzi, if plays they are, are mere hints to
guide the wit of extemporaneous actors.

|Spanish stage.|

|Calderon. Number of his pieces.|

6. Lope de Vega was at the height of his glory at the beginning of this century. Perhaps the majority of his dramas fall within it; but enough has been said on the subject in the last volume. His contemporaries and immediate successors were exceedingly numerous; the effulgence of dramatic literature in Spain corresponding exactly in time to that of England. Several are named by Bouterwek and Velasquez; but one only, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, must be permitted to arrest us. This celebrated man was born in 1600 and died 1683. From an early age till after the middle of the century when he entered the church, he contributed, with a fertility only eclipsed by that of Lope, a long list of tragic, historic, comic, and tragi-comic dramas to the Spanish stage. In the latter period of his life, he confined himself to the religious pieces, called Autos Sacramentales. Of these, 97 are published in the collective edition of 1726, besides 127 of his regular plays. In one year, 1635, it is said that twelve of his comedies appeared. But the authenticity of so large a number has been questioned; he is said to have given a list of his sacred plays, at the age of eighty, consisting of only 68. No collection was published by himself. Some of his comedies, in the Spanish sense, it may be observed, turn more or less on religious subjects, as their titles show: El Purgatorio de San Patricio--La Devocion de la Cruz--Judas Maccabeus--La Cisma de Inghilterra. He did not dislike contemporary subjects. In El Sitio de Breda, we have Spinola, Nassau, and others then living on the scene. Calderon’s metre is generally trochaic, of eight or seven syllables, not always rhyming; but verses de arte mayor, as they are called, or anapæstic lines of eleven or twelve syllables, and also hendecasyllables frequently occur.

|His comedies.|

7. The comedies, those properly so called, _de capa y espada_, which represent manners, are full of incident, but not perhaps crowded so as to produce any confusion; the characters have nothing very salient, but express the sentiments of gentlemen with frankness and spirit. We find in every one a picture of Spain: gallantry, jealousy, quick resentment of insult, sometimes deep revenge. The language of Calderon is not unfrequently poetical, even in these lighter dramas, but hyperbolical figures and insipid conceits deform its beauty. The gracioso, or witty servant, is an unfailing personage; but I do not know (my reading, however, being extremely limited) that Calderon displays much brilliancy or liveliness in his sallies.

8. The plays of Calderon required a good deal of theatrical apparatus, unless the good nature of the audience dispensed with it. But this kind of comedy must have led to scenical improvements. They seem to contain no indecency, nor do the intrigues ever become criminal, at least in effect; most of the ladies indeed are unmarried. Yet they have been severely censured by later critics on the score of their morality, which is, no doubt, that of the stage, but considerably purified in comparison with the Italian and French of the sixteenth century. Calderon seems to bear no resemblance to any English writer of his age, except, in a certain degree, to Beaumont and Fletcher. And as he wants their fertility of wit and humour, we cannot, I presume, place the best of his comedies on a level with even the second class of theirs. But I should speak, perhaps, with more reserve of an author, very few of whose plays I have read, and with whose language I am very imperfectly acquainted; nor should I have ventured so far, if the opinion of many European critics had not seemed to warrant my frigid character of one who has sometimes been so much applauded.

|La Vida es Sueno.|

9. La Vida es Sueno rises, in its subject as well as style, above the ordinary comedies of Calderon. Basilius, king of Poland, a deep philosopher, has, by consulting the stars, had the misfortune of ascertaining that his unborn son, Sigismund, would be under some extraordinary influences of evil passion. He resolves in consequence to conceal his birth, and to bring him up in a horrible solitude, where, it hardly appears why, he is laden with chains, and covered with skins of beasts, receiving meantime an excellent education, and becoming able to converse on every subject, though destitute of all society but that of his keeper Clotaldo. The inheritance of the crown of Poland is supposed to have devolved on Astolfo, duke of Moscovy, or on his cousin Estrella, who, as daughter of an elder branch, contests it with him. The play opens by a scene, in which Rosaura, a Moscovite lady, who, having been betrayed by Astolfo, has fled to Poland in man’s attire, descends the almost impassable precipices which overhang the small castle wherein Sigismund is confined. This scene and that in which he first appears, are impressive and full of beauty, even now that we are are become accustomed in excess to these theatrical wonders. Clotaldo discovers the prince in conversation with a stranger, who, by the king’s general order must be detained, and probably for death. A circumstance leads him to believe that this stranger is his son; but the Castilian loyalty transferred to Poland forbids him to hesitate in obeying his instructions. The king, however, who has fortunately determined to release his son, and try an experiment upon the force of the stars, coming in at this time, sets Rosaura at liberty.

10. In the next act Sigismund, who, by the help of a sleeping potion, has been conveyed to the palace, wakes in a bed of down, and in the midst of royal splendour. He has little difficulty in understanding his new condition, but preserves a not unnatural resentment of his former treatment. The malign stars prevail; he treats Astolfo with the utmost arrogance, reviles and threatens his father, throws one of his servants out of the window, attempts the life of Clotaldo and the honour of Rosaura. The king, more convinced than ever of the truth of astrology, directs another soporific draught to be administered; and in the next scene we find the prince again in his prison. Clotaldo, once more at his side, persuades him that his late royalty has passed in a dream, wisely observing, however, that asleep or awake, we should always do what is right.

11. Sigismund, after some philosophical reflections, prepares to submit to the sad reality which has displaced his vision. But in the third act, an unforeseen event recalls him to the world. The army, become acquainted with his rights, and indignant that the king should transfer them to Astolfo, break into his prison, and place him at their head. Clotaldo expects nothing but death. A new revolution, however, has taken place. Sigismund, corrected by the dismal consequences of giving way to passion in his former dream, and apprehending a similar waking once more, has suddenly overthrown the sway of the sinister constellations that had enslaved him; he becomes generous, mild, and master of himself; and the only pretext for his disinheritance being removed, it is easy that he should be reconciled to his father, that Astolfo, abandoning a kingdom he can no longer claim, should espouse the injured Rosaura, and that the reformed prince should become the husband of Estrella. The incidents which chiefly relate to these latter characters, have been omitted in this slight analysis.

12. This tragi-comedy presents a moral not so contemptible in the age of Calderon, as it may now appear; that the stars may influence our will, but do not oblige it. If we could extract an allegorical meaning from the chimeras of astrology, and deem the stars but names for the circumstances of birth and fortune which affect the character as well as condition of every man, but yield to the persevering energy of self-correction, we might see in this fable the shadow of a permanent and valuable truth. As a play, it deserves considerable praise; the events are surprising without excessive improbability, and succeed each other without confusion; the thoughts are natural and poetically expressed; and it requires, on the whole, less allowance for the different standard of national taste than is usual in the Spanish drama.

|A Secreto agravio secreta vengança.|

13. A Secreto agravio secreta vengança is a domestic tragedy which turns on a common story--a husband’s revenge on one whom he erroneously believes to be still a favoured, and who had been once an accepted lover. It is something like Tancred and Sigismunda, except that the lover is killed instead of the husband. The latter puts him to death secretly, which gives name to the play. He afterwards sets fire to his own house, and in the confusion designedly kills his wife. A friend communicates the facts to his sovereign, Sebastian, king of Portugal, who applauds what has been done. It is an atrocious play, and speaks terrible things as to the state of public sentiment in Spain, but abounds with interesting and touching passages.

|Style of Calderon.|

14. It has been objected to Calderon, and the following defence of Bouterwek seems very insufficient, that his servants converse in a poetical style like their masters. “The spirit, on these particular occasions,” says that judicious but lenient critic, “must not be misunderstood. The servants in Calderon’s comedies always imitate the language of their masters. In most cases they express themselves like the latter, in the natural language of real life, and often divested of that colouring of the ideas, without which a dramatic work ceases to be a poem. But whenever romantic gallantry speaks in the language of tenderness, admiration, or flattery, then, according to Spanish custom, every idea becomes a metaphor; and Calderon, who was a thorough Spaniard, seized these opportunities to give the reins to his fancy, and to suffer it to take a bold lyric flight beyond the boundaries of nature. On such occasions the most extravagant metaphoric language, in the style of the Italian Marinists, did not appear unnatural to a Spanish audience; and even Calderon himself had for that style a particular fondness, to the gratification of which he sacrificed a chaster taste. It was his ambition to become a more refined Lope de Vega, or a Spanish Marini. Thus, in his play, Bien vengas mal, si vengas solo, a waiting-maid, addressing her young mistress who has risen in a gay humour, says--“Aurora would not have done wrong had she slumbered that morning in her snowy crystal, for that the sight of her mistress’s charms would suffice to draw aside the curtains from the couch of Sol.” She adds that, using a Spanish idea, “it might then indeed be said that the sun had risen in her lady’s eyes.” Valets, on the like occasion, speak in the same style; and when lovers address compliments to their mistresses, and these reply in the same strain, the play of far-fetched metaphors is aggravated by antitheses to a degree which is intolerable to any but a Spanish-formed taste. But it must not be forgotten that this language of gallantry was in Calderon’s time spoken by the fashionable world, and that it was a vernacular property of the ancient national poetry.”[518] What is this but to confess that Calderon had not genius to raise himself above his age, and that he can be read only as a “Triton of the minnows;” one who is great but in comparison with his neighbours? It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author’s position, and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper of his nation. All this is true, relatively to the author himself, and may be pleaded against a condemnation of his talents; but the excuse of the man is not that of the work.

[518] P. 507. It has been ingeniously hinted in the Quarterly
Review, vol. xxv., that the high-flown language of servants in
Spanish dramas, is a parody on that of their masters, and
designed to make it ridiculous. But this is probably too refined
an excuse.

|His merits sometimes over-rated.|

15. The fame of Calderon has been latterly revived in Europe through the praise of some German critics, but especially the unbounded panegyric of one of their greatest men, William Schlegel. The passage is well known for its brilliant eloquence. Every one must differ with reluctance and respect from this accomplished writer; and an Englishman, acknowledging with gratitude and admiration what Schlegel has done for the glory of Shakspeare, ought not to grudge the laurels he showers upon another head. It is, however, rather as a poet than a dramatist that Calderon has received this homage; and in his poetry it seems to be rather bestowed on the mysticism, which finds a responsive chord in so many German hearts, than on what we should consider a more universal excellence, a sympathy with, and a power over all that is true and beautiful in nature and in man. Sismondi (but the distance between Weimar and Geneva in matters of taste is incomparably greater than by the public road), dissenting from this eulogy of Schlegel, which he fairly lays before the reader, stigmatizes Calderon as eminently the poet of the age wherein he lived, the age of Philip IV. Salfi goes so far as to say we can hardly read Calderon without indignation; since he seems to have had no view but to make his genius subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his country.[519] In the 25th volume of the Quarterly Review an elaborate and able critique on the plays of Calderon seems to have estimated him without prejudice on either side. “His boundless and inexhaustible fertility of invention, his quick power of seizing and prosecuting everything with dramatic effect, the unfailing animal spirits of his dramas, if we may venture on the expression, the general loftiness and purity of his sentiments, the rich facility of his verse, the abundance of his language, and the clearness and precision with which he embodies his thoughts in words and figures, entitle him to a high rank as to the imagination and creative faculty of a poet, but we cannot consent to enrol him among the mighty masters of the human breast.”[520] His total want of truth to nature, even the ideal nature which poetry embodies, justifies, at least, this sentence. “The wildest flights of Biron and Romeo,” it is observed, “are tame to the heroes of Calderon; the Asiatic pomp of expression, the exuberance of metaphor, the perpetual recurrence of the same figures, which the poetry of Spain derived from its intercourse with the Arabian conquerors of the peninsula, are lavished by him in all their fulness. Every address of a lover to a mistress is thickly studded with stars and flowers; her looks are always nets of gold, her lips rubies, and her heart a rock, which the rivers of his tears attempt in vain to melt. In short, the language of the heart is entirely abandoned for that of the fancy; the brilliant but false concetti which have infected the poetical literature of every country, and which have been universally exploded by pure taste, glitter in every page, and intrude into every speech.”[521]

[519] Hist. Litt. de Ginguéné, vol. xii., p. 499.

[520] P. 24.

[521] P. 14.

SECT. II.

ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.

_Early French Dramatists of this Period--Corneille--His principal Tragedies--Rotrou._

|Plays of Hardy.|

16. Among the company who performed at the second theatre of Paris, that established in the Marais, was Hardy, who, like Shakspeare, uniting both arts, was himself the author of 600, or, as some say, 800 dramatic pieces. It is said that forty-one of these are extant in the collection of his works which I have never seen. Several of them were written, learned by heart, and represented within a week. His own inventions are the worst of all; his tragedies and tragi-comedies are borrowed with as close an adherence to the original text as possible, from Homer or Plutarch or Cervantes. They have more incident than those of his predecessors, and are somewhat less absurd; but Hardy is a writer of little talent. The Marianne is the most tolerable of his tragedies. In these he frequently abandoned the chorus, and even where he introduces it, does not regularly close the act with an ode.”[522]

[522] Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français (in Œuvres de
Fontenelle, iii., 72). Suard, Mélanges de Littérature, vol. iv.

17. In the comedies of Hardy, and in the many burlesque farces represented under Henry IV. and Louis XIII., no regard was paid to decency, either in the language or the circumstances. Few persons of rank, especially ladies, attended the theatres.[523] These were first attracted by pastoral representations, of which Racan gave a successful example in his Artenice. It is hardly, however, to be called a drama.[524] But the stage, being no longer abandoned to the populace, and a more critical judgment in French literature gaining ground, encouraged by Richelieu, who built a large room in his palace for the representation of Mirame, an indifferent tragedy, part of which was suspected to be his own,[525] the ancient theatre began to be studied, rules were laid down and partially observed, a perfect decorum replaced the licentiousness and gross language of the old writers. Mairet and Rotrou, though without rising, in their first plays, much above Hardy, just served to prepare the way for the father and founder of the national theatre.[526]

[523] Suard, p. 134. Rotrou boasts that since he wrote for the
theatre, it had become so well-regulated that respectable women
might go to it with as little scruple as to the Luxembourg
garden. Corneille, however, has, in general, the credit of having
purified the stage; after his second piece, Clitandre, he
admitted nothing licentious in his comedies. The only remain of
grossness, Fontenelle observes, was that the lovers _se
tutoyoient_; but, as he gravely goes on to remark, le tutoiement
ne choque pas les bonnes mœurs; il ne choque que la politesse et
la vraie galanterie, p. 91. But the last instance of this heinous
offence is in Le Menteur.

[524] Suard, ubi suprà.

[525] Fontenelle, p. 84, 96.

[526] Id. p. 78. It is difficult in France, as it is with us, to
ascertain the date of plays, because they were often represented
for years before they came from the press. It is conjectured by
Fontenelle, that one or two pieces of Mairet and Rotrou may have
preceded any by Corneille.

18. The Melite of Corneille, his first production, was represented in 1629, when he was twenty-three years of age. This is only distinguished, as some say, from those of Hardy by a greater vigour of style; but Fontenelle gives a very different opinion. It had, at least, a success which caused a new troop of actors to be established in the Marais. His next, Clitandre, it is agreed, is not so good. But La Veuve is much better; irregular in action, but with spirit, character, and well-invented situations, it is the first model of the higher comedy.[527] These early comedies must, in fact, have been relatively of considerable merit, since they raised Corneille to high reputation, and connected him with the literary men of his time. The Medea, though much borrowed from Seneca, gave a tone of grandeur and dignity unknown before to French tragedy. This appeared in 1635, and was followed by the Cid next year.

[527] Suard, Fontenelle, La Harpe.

|The Cid.|

19. Notwithstanding the defence made by La Harpe, I cannot but agree with the French Academy, in their criticism on this play, that the subject is essentially ill-chosen. No circumstances can be imagined, no skill can be employed, that will reconcile the mind to the marriage of a daughter with one that has shed her father’s blood. And the law of unity of time, which crowds every event of the drama within a few hours, renders the promised consent of Chimène (for such it is) to this union still more revolting and improbable.[528] The knowledge of this termination re-acts on the reader during a second perusal, so as to give an irresistible impression of her insincerity in her previous solicitations for his death. She seems, indeed, in several passages, little else than a tragic coquette, and one of the most odious kind.[529] The English stage at that time was not exempt from great violations of nature and decorum; yet, had the subject of the Cid fallen into the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is one which they would have willingly selected for the sake of the effective situations and contrasts of passion it affords, the part of Chimène would have been managed by them with great warmth and spirit, though probably not less incongruity and extravagance; but I can scarcely believe that the conclusion would have been so much in the style of comedy. Her death, or retirement into a monastery, would have seemed more consonant to her own dignity and to that of a tragic subject. Corneille was, however, borne out by the tradition of Spain, and by the authority of Guillen de Castro, whom he imitated.

[528] La Harpe has said that Chimène does not promise at last to
marry Rodrigue, though the spectator perceives that she will do
so. He forgets that she has commissioned her lover’s sword in the
duel with Don Sancho:--

Sors vainqueur d’un combat dont Chimène est le prix.--Act v.,
sc. 1.

[529] In these lines, for example, of the third act,
scene 4th:--

Malgré les feux si beaux qui rompent ma colère,
Je ferai mon possible à bien venger mon père;,
Mais malgré la rigueur d’un si cruel devoir,
Mon unique souhait est de ne rien pouvoir.

It is true that he found this in his Spanish original, but that
does not render the imitation judicious, or the sentiment either
moral, or even theatrically specious.

|Style of Corneille.|

20. The language of Corneille is elevated, his sentiments, if sometimes hyperbolical, generally noble, when he has not to deal with the passion of love; conscious of the nature of his own powers, he has avoided subjects wherein this must entirely predominate; it was to be, as he thought, an accessory but never a principal source of dramatic interest. In this, however, as a general law of tragedy, he was mistaken; love is by no means unfit for the chief source of tragic distress, but comes in generally with a cold and feeble effect as a subordinate emotion. In those Roman stories he most affected, its expression could hardly be otherwise than insipid and incongruous. Corneille probably would have dispensed with it like Shakspeare in Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar; but the taste of his contemporaries, formed in the pedantic school of romance, has imposed fetters on his genius in almost every drama. In the Cid, where the subject left him no choice, he has perhaps succeeded better in the delineation of love than on any other occasion; yet even here we often find the cold exaggerations of complimentary verse, instead of the voice of nature. But other scenes of this play, especially in the first act, which bring forward the proud Castilian characters of the two fathers of Rodrigo and Chimène, are full of the nervous eloquence of Corneille; and the general style, though it may not have borne the fastidious criticism either of the Academy or of Voltaire, is so far above anything which had been heard on the French stage, that it was but a very frigid eulogy in the former to say that it “had acquired a considerable reputation among works of the kind.” It had at that time astonished Paris; but the prejudices of Cardinal Richelieu and the envy of inferior authors, joined perhaps to the proverbial unwillingness of critical bodies to commit themselves by warmth of praise, had some degree of influence on the judgment which the Academy pronounced on the Cid, though I do not think it was altogether so unjust and uncandid as has sometimes been supposed.

|Les Horaces.|

21. The next tragedy of Corneille, Les Horaces, is hardly open to less objection than the Cid; not so much because there is, as the French critics have discovered, a want of unity in the subject, which I do not quite perceive, nor because the fifth act is tedious and uninteresting, as from the repulsiveness of the story, and the jarring of the sentiments with our natural sympathies. Corneille has complicated the legend in Livy with the marriage of the younger Horatius to the sister of the Curiatii, and thus placed his two female personages in a nearly similar situation, which he has taken little pains to diversify by any contrast in their characters. They speak on the contrary, nearly in the same tone, and we see no reason why the hero of the tragedy should not, as he seems half disposed, have followed up the murder of his sister by that of his wife. More skill is displayed in the opposition of character between the combatants themselves; but the mild, though not less courageous or patriotic, Curiatius attaches the spectator, who cares nothing for the triumph of Rome, or the glory of the Horatian name. It must be confessed that the elder Horatius is nobly conceived; the Roman energy, of which we find but a caricature in his brutish son, shines out in him with an admirable dramatic spirit. I shall be accused, nevertheless, of want of taste, when I confess that his celebrated _Qu’il mourût_, has always seemed to me less eminently sublime than the general suffrage of France has declared it. There is nothing very novel or striking in the proposition, that a soldier’s duty is to die in the field rather than desert his post by flight; and in a tragedy full of the hyperboles of Roman patriotism, it appears strange that we should be astonished at that which is the principle of all military honour. The words are emphatic in their position, and calculated to draw forth the actor’s energy; but this is an artifice of no great skill; and one can hardly help thinking, that a spectator in the pit would spontaneously have anticipated the answer of a warlike father to the feminine question,

Que vouliez-vous qu’il fît contre trois?

The style of this tragedy is reckoned by the critics superior to that of the Cid; the nervousness and warmth of Corneille is more displayed; and it is more free from incorrect and trivial expression.

|Cinna.|

22. Cinna, the next in order of time, is probably that tragedy of Corneille which would be placed at the head by a majority of suffrages. His eloquence reached here its highest point; the speeches are longer, more vivid in narration, more philosophical in argument, more abundant in that strain of Roman energy, which he had derived chiefly from Lucan, more emphatic and condensed in their language and versification. But, as a drama, this is deserving of little praise; the characters of Cinna and Maximus are contemptible, that of Emilia is treacherous and ungrateful. She is indeed the type of a numerous class who have followed her in works of fiction, and sometimes, unhappily, in real life; the female patriot, theoretically, at least, an assassin, but commonly compelled, by the iniquity of the times, to console herself in practice with safer transgressions. We have had some specimens; and other nations, to their shame and sorrow, have had more. But even the magnanimity of Augustus, whom we have not seen exposed to instant danger, is uninteresting, nor do we perceive why he should bestow his friendship as well as his forgiveness on the detected traitor that cowers before him. It is one of those subjects, which might, by the invention of a more complex plot than history furnishes, have better excited the spectator’s attention, but not his sympathy.

|Polyeucte.|

23. A deeper interest belongs to Polyeucte; and this is the only tragedy of Corneille wherein he affects the heart. There is indeed a certain incongruity which we cannot overcome between the sanctity of Christian martyrdom and the language of love, especially when the latter is rather the more prominent of the two in the conduct of the drama.[530] But the beautiful character of Pauline would redeem much greater defects than can be ascribed to this tragedy. It is the noblest, perhaps, on the French stage, and conceived with admirable delicacy and dignity.[531] In the style, however, of Polyeucte, there seems to be some return towards the languid tone of common-place which had been wholly thrown off in Cinna.[532]

[530] The coterie at the Hôtel Rambouillet thought that Polyeucte
would not succeed, on account of its religious character.
Corneille, it is said, was about to withdraw his tragedy, but was
dissuaded by an actor of so little reputation that he did not
even bear a part in the performance. Fontenelle, p. 101.

[531] Fontenelle thinks that it shows “un grand attachement à son
devoir, et un grand caractère” in Pauline to desire that Severus
should save her husband’s life, instead of procuring the latter
to be executed that she might marry her lover. Réflexions sur la
Poétique, sect. 16. This is rather an odd notion of what is
sufficient to constitute an heroic character. It is not the
conduct of Pauline, which in every Christian or virtuous woman
must naturally be the same, but the fine sentiments and language
which accompany it, that render her part so noble.

[532] In the second scene of the second act, between Severus and
Pauline, two characters of the most elevated class, the former
quits the stage with this line: Adieu trop vertueux objet, et
trop charmant. The latter replies: Adieu, trop malheureux, et
trop parfait amant.

|Rodogune.|

24. Rodogune is said to have been a favourite with the author. It can hardly be so with the generality of his readers. The story has all the atrocity of the older school, from which Corneille had emancipated the stage. It borders even on ridicule. Two princes, kept by their mother, one of those furies whom our own Webster or Marston would have delighted to draw, in ignorance which is the elder, and consequently entitled to the throne, are enamoured of Rodogune. Their mothers make it a condition of declaring the succession, that they shall shed the blood of this princess. Struck with horror at such a proposition, they refer their passion to the choice of Rodogune, who, in her turn, demands the death of their mother. The embarrassment of these amiable youths may be conceived. La Harpe extols the fifth act of this tragedy, and it may perhaps be effective in representation.

|Pompey.|

25. Pompey, sometimes inaccurately called the Death of Pompey, is more defective in construction than even any other tragedy of Corneille. The hero, if Pompey is such, never appears on the stage, and his death being recounted at the beginning of the second act, the real subject of the piece, so far as it can be said to have one, is the punishment of his assassins; a retribution demanded by the moral sense of the spectator, but hardly important enough for dramatic interest. The character of Cæsar is somewhat weakened by his passion for Cleopatra, which assumes more the tone of devoted gallantry than truth or probability warrant; but Cornelia, though with some Lucanic extravagance, is full of a Roman nobleness of spirit, which renders her, after Pauline, but at a long interval, the finest among the female characters of Corneille. The language is not beneath that of his earlier tragedies.

|Heraclius.|

26. In Heraclius we begin to find an inferiority of style. Few passages, especially after the first act, are written with much vigour; and the plot, instead of the faults we may ascribe to some of the former dramas, a too great simplicity and want of action, offends by the perplexity of its situations, and still more by their nature; since they are wholly among the proper resources of comedy. The true and the false Heraclius, each uncertain of his paternity, each afraid to espouse one who may or may not be his sister, the embarrassment of Phocas, equally irritated by both, but aware that in putting either to death, he may punish his own son, the art of Leontine who produces this confusion, not by silence but by a series of inconsistent falsehoods, all these are in themselves ludicrous, and such as in comedy could produce no other effect than laughter.

|Nicomède.|

27. Nicomède is generally placed by the critics below Heraclius, an opinion in which I should hardly concur. The plot is feeble and improbable, but more tolerable than the strange entanglements of Heraclius; and the spirit of Corneille shines out more in the characters and sentiments. None of his later tragedies deserve much notice, except that we find one of his celebrated scenes in Sertorius, a drama of little general merit. Nicomède and Sertorius were both first represented after the middle of the century.

|Faults and beauties of Corneille.|

28. Voltaire has well distinguished the fine scenes of Corneille, and the fine tragedies of Racine. It can perhaps hardly be said that, with the exception of Polyeucte, the former has produced a single play which, taken as a whole, we can commend. The keys of the passions were not given to his custody. But in that which he introduced upon the French stage, and which long continued to be its boast, impressive energetic declamation, thoughts masculine, bold, and sometimes sublime, conveyed in a style for the most part clear, condensed, and noble, and in a rhythm sonorous and satisfactory to the ear, he has not since been equalled. Lucan, it has always been said, was the favourite study of Corneille. No one indeed can admire one who has not a strong relish for the other. That the tragedian has ever surpassed the highest flights of his Roman prototype, it might be difficult to prove; but if his fire is not more intense, it is accompanied by less smoke; his hyperboles, for such he has, are less frequent and less turgid; his taste is more judicious, he knows better, especially in description, what to chuse and where to stop. Lucan, however, would have disdained the politeness of the amorous heroes of Corneille, and though often tedious, often offensive to good taste, is never languid or ignoble.

|Le Menteur.|

29. The first French comedy written in polite language without low wit or indecency, is due to Corneille, or rather, in some degree, to the Spanish author whom he copied in Le Menteur. This has been improved a little by Goldoni, and our own well-known farce, The Liar, is borrowed from both. The incidents are diverting, but it belongs to the subordinate class of comedy, and a better moral would have been shown in the disgrace of the principal character. Another comedy about the same time, Le Pedant Joué, by Cyrano de Bergerac, had much success. It has been called the first comedy in prose, and the first wherein a provincial dialect is introduced; the remark, as to the former circumstances, shows a forgetfulness of Larivey. Molière has borrowed freely from this play.

|Other French tragedies.|

30. The only tragedies, after those of Corneille, anterior to 1650, which the French themselves hold worthy of remembrance, are the Sophonisbe of Mairet; in which some characters, and some passages are vigorously conceived, but the style is debased by low and ludicrous thoughts, which later critics never fail to point out with severity;[533] the Scevole of Duryer, the best of several good tragedies, full of lines of great simplicity in expression, but which seem to gain force by their simplicity, by one who, though never sublime, adopted with success the severe reasoning style of Corneille;[534] the Marianne of Tristan, which, at its appearance in 1637, passed for a rival of the Cid, and remained for a century on the stage, but is now ridiculed for a style alternately turgid and ludicrous; and the Wenceslas of Rotrou, which had not ceased thirty years since to be represented, and perhaps is so still.

[533] Suard, ubi supra.

[534] Suard, p. 196.

|Wenceslas of Rotrou.|

31. This tragedy, the best work of a fertile dramatist, who did himself honour by a ready acknowledgment of the superiority of Corneille, instead of canvassing the suffrages of those who always envy genius, is by no means so much below that great master, as, in the unfortunate efforts of his later years, he was below himself. Wenceslas was represented in 1647. It may be admitted that Rotrou had conceived his plot, which is wholly original, in the spirit of Corneille; the masculine energy of the sentiments, the delineation of bold and fierce passions, of noble and heroic love, the attempt even at political philosophy, are copies of that model. It seems indeed that in several scenes Rotrou must, out of mere generosity to Corneille, have determined to out-do one of his most exceptionable passages, the consent of Chimène to espouse the Cid. His own curtain drops on the vanishing reluctance of his heroine to accept the hand of a monster whom she hated, and who had just murdered her lover in his own brother. It is the Lady Anne of Shakspeare; but Lady Anne is not a heroine. Wenceslas is not unworthy of comparison with the second class of Corneille’s tragedies. But the ridiculous tone of language and sentiment, which the heroic romance had rendered popular, and from which Corneille did not wholly emancipate himself, often appears in this piece of Rotrou; the intrigue is rather too complex, in the Spanish style, for tragedy; the diction seems frequently obnoxious to the most indulgent criticism; but above all, the story is essentially ill contrived, ending in the grossest violation of poetical justice ever witnessed on the stage, the impunity and even the triumph of one of the worst characters that was ever drawn.

SECT. III.

ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

_London Theatres--Shakspeare--Jonson--Beaumont and Fletcher--Massinger-- Other English Dramatists._

|Popularity of the stage under Elizabeth.|

32. The English drama had been encouraged through the reign of Elizabeth by increasing popularity, notwithstanding the strenuous opposition of a party sufficiently powerful to enlist the magistracy, and, in a certain measure, the government on its side. A progressive improvement in dramatic writing, possibly also, though we know less of this, in the skill of the actors, ennobled, while it kept alive, the public taste; the crude and insipid compositions of an Edwards or a Whetstone, among numbers more whose very names are lost, gave way to the real genius of Greene and Marlowe, and after them, to Shakspeare.

|Number of theatres.|

33. At the beginning of this century, not less than eleven regular play-houses had been erected in London and its suburbs; several of which, it appears, were still in use, an order of the privy council in 1600, restraining the number to two being little regarded. Of these, the most important was that of the Black Friars, with which another, called the Globe, on the opposite side of the river, was connected; the same company performing at the former in winter, at the latter in summer. This was the company of which Burbage, the best actor of the day, was chief, and to which Shakspeare, who was also a proprietor, belonged. Their names appear in letters patent, and other legal instruments.[535]

[535] Shakspeare probably retired from the stage, as a performer,
soon after 1603; his name appears among the actors of Sejanus in
1603, but not among those of Volpone in 1605. There is a
tradition that James I. wrote a letter thanking Shakspeare for
the compliment paid to him in Macbeth. Malone, it seems, believed
this: Mr. Collier does not, and probably most people will be
equally sceptical. Collier, i. 370.

|Encouraged by James.|

34. James was fond of these amusements, and had encouraged them in Scotland. The Puritan influence, which had been sometimes felt in the council of Elizabeth, came speedily to an end; though the representation of plays on Sundays, a constant theme of complaint, but never wholly put down, was now abandoned, and is not even tolerated by the declaration of sports. The several companies of players, who, in her reign, had been under the nominal protection of some men of rank, were now denominated the servants of the king, the queen, or other royal personages.[536] They were relieved from some of the vexatious control they had experienced, and subjected only to the gentle sway of the Master of the Revels. It was his duty to revise all dramatic works before they were represented, to exclude profane and unbecoming language, and specially to take care that there should be no interference with matters of state. The former of these functions must have been rather laxly exercised; but there are instances in which a licence was refused on account of very recent history being touched in a play.

[536] Id. p. 347. But the privilege of peers to grant licences to
itinerant players, given by statute 14 Eliz., c. 5, and 39 Eliz.,
c. 4, was taken away by 1 Jac. I., c. 7, so that they became
liable to be treated as vagrants. Accordingly there were no
established theatres in any provincial city, and strollers,
though dear to the lovers of the buskin, were always obnoxious to
grave magistrates. The licence, however, granted to Burbage,
Shakspeare, Hemmings, and others in 1603 authorizes them to act
plays not only at the usual house, but in any other part of the
kingdom. Burbage was reckoned the best actor of his time, and
excelled as Richard III.

|General taste for the stage.|

35. The reigns of James and Charles were the glory of our theatre. Public applause, and the favour of princes, were well bestowed on those bright stars of our literature who then appeared. In 1623, when Sir Henry Herbert became Master of the Revels, there were five companies of actors in London. This indeed is something less than at the accession of James, and the latest historian of the drama suggests the increase of puritanical sentiments as a likely cause of this apparent decline. But we find little reason to believe that there was any decline in the public taste for the theatre; and it may be as probable an hypothesis, that the excess of competition, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, had rendered some undertakings unprofitable; the greater fishes, as usual in such cases, swallowing up the less. We learn from Howes, the continuator of Stow, that within sixty years before 1631 seventeen play-houses had been built in the metropolis. These were now larger and more convenient than before. They were divided into public and private; not that the former epithet was inapplicable to both; but those styled public were not completely roofed, nor well provided with seats, nor were the performances by candlelight; they resembled more the rude booths we still see at fairs, or the constructions in which interludes are represented by day in Italy; while private theatres, such as that of the Black Friars, were built in nearly the present form. It seems to be the more probable opinion that moveable scenery was unknown on these theatres. “It is a fortunate circumstance,” Mr. Collier has observed, “for the poetry of our old plays that it was so; the imagination of the auditor only was appealed to: and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages in Shakspeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.” In this remark, which seems as original as just, I entirely concur. Even in this age the prodigality of our theatre in its peculiar boast, scene-painting, can hardly keep pace with the creative powers of Shakspeare; it is well that he did not live when a manager was to estimate his descriptions by the cost of realizing them on canvas, or we might never have stood with Lear on the cliffs of Dover, or amidst the palaces of Venice with Shylock and Antonio. The scene is perpetually changed in our old drama, precisely because it was not changed at all. A powerful argument might otherwise have been discovered in favour of the unity of place, that it is very cheap.

|Theatres closed by the parliament.|