Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

13. The Movement towards Romantic Comedy

We may now proceed with the main current of comedy. Between 1570 and 1590 the best plays are coloured by a distinctively romantic element; and this is noticeable, not only in the productions of the greater authors, Lyly, Peele, Greene, and the like, elsewhere discussed in this volume, but in those of minor writers too frequently ignored. As I have already said, the romantic in life appears to spring from a desire to assert one's independence and realize the possibilities of the resulting freedom. "Our pent wills fret And would the world subdue." But since the conditions of life are largely opposed to the complete fulfilment of our desires, it is the privilege and function of romance, and of romantic comedy according to its kind, to idealize the stubborn facts—the "limits we did not set" in favour of our ecstatic but still human urgency. This privilege the comedy of romance exercises sometimes with an eye to nature and probability, and sometimes with some respect for imaginative possibility, but quite frequently with no other guide than mere caprice. The subjects of such comedy may be briefly summarized as passion, heroism, and wonder. Of these the first is manifest in examples of ideal friendship, its devotion and self-sacrifice; and a play of such nature we have already considered in the Damon and Pithias. It also yields the furnishings of love, the resulting obstacles, and the issue; and a play of this kind we have considered in The Supposes, which is a domestic comedy of intrigue. Of heroism the possibilities are suggested by the words travel, adventure, chivalry, war, conquest; those of wonder are as various as the chances of birth, wealth and fortune, pomp and power, myth and fable: they are fostered by that which is remote, preternatural, supernatural.

To the romance of wonder, saints' plays, legends, and biblical stories had purveyed from early times. From 1570 on the narrative of chivalry and adventure, of which shadowy lineaments had already appeared in one or two miracle plays and in the interludes of Wit and Science, began to gather to itself kindred elements of romantic interest, and to occupy the stage with such plays as Common Conditions, written perhaps between 1572 and 1576, and Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, written perhaps as early,—dramas of love, fable, and adventure, absolutely free from didactic purpose. At the same time still another variety of romantic comedy, unhampered by the trammels of instructive intent, but dealing essentially in domestic intrigue, kept alive the method of The Supposes. This variety was represented by The Bugbears, between 1561 and 1584, and The Two Italian Gentlemen (S. R. 1584), which, based upon Italian models, availed themselves on the one hand of a burlesque parody of the magical, and on the other of genuine English mirth. The latter indeed added something of the 'humours' element soon to be exploited by Porter, Chapman, and Jonson. Beside these dramas, there sprang into notice a certain half-moral, half-romantic kind of play which, availing itself of the mould of the interlude, fused therein the materials of the chivalrous, the magical, and the passionate, and produced certain anomalous comedies of great popularity between the year 1580 and the end of the century. The best of these "pleasant and stately morals" are: The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, The Three Ladies of London, The Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London.

While Collier thinks that, in point of positive dramatic interest, the Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune requires but brief notice, Dr. Ward holds that the beginnings of romantic comedy were foreshadowed by the play.[87] It is, in fact, both dramatically and historically, one of the most important productions of its date. It was printed in 1589, but played, perhaps, as early as 1582. Mr. Fleay has assigned it to Kyd, but I do not see sufficient reason for the attribution; if we must find an author for it, Robert Wilson's claims might be urged. The Rare Triumphs affords an excellent instance of the fusion of moral and romance. In the Induction, Love and Fortune dispute concerning their respective influence in the affairs of mankind. By mutual agreement the debat seeks its solution in a practical demonstration of the issues involved. And so we find our intellectual as well as emotional interest enlisted in the chances of an Italian story of love, adventure, and magic. Within a moral interlude of classical and mythological origin we discover a romantic comedy. The influence of the supernatural not merely envelops, but permeates the whole; the Acts present the destinies of the mortals of the inner play, the inter-acts the continued intervention of the immortals of the outer. The spectacular effect is, moreover, heightened by the introduction of dumb shows, after the fashion of the masque. In dramatic interest proper few romantic fables of 1582 can compare with the inner story: the love of Hermione for Fidelia, the duel between Hermione and Fidelia's brother, the exile of the lover and his retirement to the cave of his unknown father, the hermit Bomelio; Bomelio's attempt to right matters by magic, the destruction of his necromantic books, his madness, his recovery, and the resolution of difficulties through the instrumentality of the heroine. Such a fable is anything but silly and meagre, as Collier would have it, especially when we consider its conjunction with the humorous and vivid. In the outer play the clown is Vulcan, at whose call Jupiter mediates, "like an honest man in the parish," between the disputatious goddesses. In the inner play Penulo the parasite and Lentulo the clown, though neither of them a Vice, supply the comic delectations of the rôle. The disguise of Bomelio as physician, his dialect, his misfortune and raving, are excellently contrived and conducted. In at least half a dozen particulars one may detect æsthetic possibilities later to be matured in more than one Shakespearian play: foreshadowings of plot and principal actors, as in The Tempest; foreshadowings of minor characters like Dr. Caius, or like the Francis of 1 Henry IV. The play is, in brief, refreshing; the humour, substantial and English; the language, conversational, dramatic, sometimes in prose and then excellent. The versification, however, is of that stiffer quality which warrants Mr. Fleay's conjecture of 1582, or thereabout, as the date of composition.

The attempt to enliven the "old moral" by an infusion of passion and intrigue, and to parade it in the trappings of romance, across the background of contemporary English life and manners, is what distinguishes Robert Wilson's "right excellent and famous Comœdy called the Three Ladies of London," printed 1584, and its sequel, The Pleasant and Stately Morall of the Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London, registered in 1588. Of these plays, the latter trades in pomp and chivalry; the earlier in something like the motives of romantic interest. "The acuteness and political subtlety evinced in several of the scenes of the Three Ladies" have been justly commended by Collier, who points with careful attention also to "the severity of the author's satirical touch, his amusing illustrations of manners, his exposure of the tricks of foreign merchants, and the humour and drollery which he has thrown into his principal comic personage." This is Simplicity, the fool or clown, droll, indifferent, honest, and by no means so simple as he appears: a descendant of the historical Will Summer, a forerunner of the Dogberrys and Malaprops, and the elder brother of an Honesty of another play, A Knack to Know a Knave, in which the same author probably had a hand. Standing over against three belated specimens of the Vice, Simplicity unites the shrewdness, manners, and humour of that personage—but in superior quality—with the prudence, the penetration, and the conception of honour peculiar to the professional jester. He also plays a vital part in the main action, and is worthy to be regarded as one of the best clowns, if not the best, in the history of the moral interlude. His forthright utterances in the Three Ladies and his easy and witty prose in the sequel mark him for a model likely to have influenced the younger dramatists of the day. The minor plot-interest of the honest Jew, Gerontus, the rascally Christian, Mercatore, and the Judge, is significant, not only as the reverse of the conception dramatized in the Jew of Malta and the Merchant of Venice, but as, with one exception, the earliest elaboration of the motif that was to become prominent in the drama of the next few years. Qualities romantic and real invest the career of the three Ladies; and the characterization of the numerous minor personages is both subtle and suitable to their different classes and interests.

Although the Three Lordes and Ladies, one of the earliest sequels in the history of English drama, is "more of a moral" than its predecessor and makes no improvement in plot-structure, it is of importance fully equal. For what it lacks in passion and romance is more than counterbalanced by technical qualities—the blank verse, the fluent prose, the wit of Simplicity and the pages, the scenic display, the variety of incidents, and the portrayal of manners. If we consider the definite transition from abstractions to social and individual traits of character in this play and the preceding,—the multi-fold impersonation of worldly wisdom, fraud, and shoddy, one might say the resolution of the rôle of Vice into its component specialties; the corresponding offset of all these by ensamples of virtuous living, but still human; and the attendant troupe of more obvious 'humours,' Simplicity and the pages, Painful Penury, Diligence, and the rest,—it will be evident that these plays of Robert Wilson are the merging of moral interlude in romantic and social comedy. On this account I cannot agree with Dr. Ward,[88] who says that in construction and conception they mark no advance whatever upon the older moralities. I think they mark a significant advance. In them the moral has arrived at a consciousness of the demands of art; and, attempting to fulfil its possibilities, it acquires body, spirit, and bouquet, even though, in the moment of fermentation, it bursts the bottle. Still we must remember that we have now reached a date, 1588-90, by which much of the best work of Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, and Greene had already been produced, and we must, therefore, not attribute to Wilson an importance greater than that of an industrious and inventive contemporary, hospitable to ideas, but essentially conservative in practice. He is at once "father of interludes," as interludes then were regarded, and an intermediary between the interlude of moral abstractions and the comedy of humours. He appears, also, to have played so lively a part in the dramatic history of his day that Mr. Fleay is justified in calling this period by his name; and, therefore, a few further words concerning him and other plays which he seems to have written might well be said here, but we must reserve them for another occasion.