Webster, Ford, and Others.
All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured; but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.
Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability; working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly—one time as “merchant tailor;” and there are other intimations that he may have held some church “clerkship;” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth century his name and fame[23] had slipped away from people’s knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings; a quarter of a century later Mr. Dyce[24] wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopædic writing in declaring this dramatist to be “hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world.”
Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known—the “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day—a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad offices, and
“do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.”
When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarating odors with it.
John Ford[25] was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days with that of Webster; he was indeed associated with him in some of his work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good family;—a little over-boastful of being above any “want for money;” showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never—to my mind—making head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of pathos—of quiet contemplative brooding—lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do not compensate—at least do not compensate me—for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.
Marston—another John[26]—if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his Image of Pygmalion had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson on Eastward Hoe! won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from What you Will; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning:
“I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept;
And still I held converse with Zabarell,
Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws
Of antique Donate:—still my spaniel slept.
Still on went I: first, an sit anima,
Then, an’ ’twere mortal. O hold, hold!
At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears
Amain [pell-mell] together—still my spaniel slept.
Then, whether ’twere corporeal, local, fixed,
Ex traduce; but whether’t had free will
Or no, hot philosophers
Stood banding factions, all so strongly propped,
I staggered, knew not which was firmer part;
But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pried,
Stuffed noting books,—and still my spaniel slept.
At length he waked, and yawned, and by yon sky,
For aught I know, he knew as much as I.”