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

by Unknown

9. The Period of Transition: Farce and Romantic Interlude

The period of experimentation or transition, which may be said to extend from 1520 to 1553, is characterized especially by the gradual abandonment of allegorical machinery and abstract material. The forward movement is, of course, primarily due to the change from the mediæval attitude of mind to that of the renaissance, from artificial thought whose medium, the symbol, succeeded in concealing more than it expressed, to experience. Of the social and political conditions which prepared the way for the transition so far as English comedy is concerned or that shaped comedy once on its way, I cannot here speak, but the following would appear among purely literary antecedents: First, the French sotties and farces, the technical and satirical qualities of which were a stimulus to invention, not only in England, but in Italy and Germany; second, the disputations and debats, veritable whetstones of wit and a polish of words ad unguem; third, the collateral development of a farce interlude in England, composed in Latin and English, probably also in Norman French, but generally spontaneous, and wholly unforced; fourth, the adaptation to dramatic and satirical purposes of contes, fabliaux, novelle, and their English translations and congeners,—more especially the Chaucerian episode with its concrete characters and contemporary manners; fifth, the movement of native romance urged during the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries by contact with Spanish and Italian ideals and their fictions of character, adventure, and intrigue; sixth, the discipline of Plautine and Terentian models, and of the Latin and vernacular comedies which imitated them, as well as of the Latin school plays which flourished in Holland and Germany during the latter half of the fifteenth century; and seventh, the examples set by Kirchmayer and other German controversialists in the attempted adaptation of the moral play to historical or quasi-historical conditions with a view to satirical ends.

The plays that call for consideration in this section and the next may be classified roughly as farces, romantic interludes, school interludes, and controversial morals. Each of these kinds reaches a culmination conformable to its nature, within the limits that I have chosen for the period; and each has its own place in the history of comedy. For it must not be supposed that, because a pastoral farce like the Mak did not develop into independent existence, or because moral interludes gradually exhausted their career towards the end of the sixteenth century, such species had no influence in maturing English comedy. The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,—scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,—it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In Love's Labor's Lost, Two Angry Women, As You Like It, Old Wives' Tale, Every Man in His Humour, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils.

Of the indebtedness of comedy to the parody of religious festivals I have already spoken, and I have little doubt that at later periods English comedy continued to draw devices, if not inspiration, from performances whose occasion was a revolt against the straitness of religion. One, at least, of the interludes of John Heywood is closely similar to the French Farce de Pernet, and that such farces were, in motive, first a gloss upon the lessons of the divine service, then a diversion, and finally a factor in the extra-ecclesiastical Feast of Fools, any reader of Petit de Julleville will readily concede. It is impossible that the comic features and comic characters of the farces acted by the clercs de la Basoche, such as that of the immortal Maître Pathelin, should not have affected the dramatic invention of contemporary and succeeding Englishmen, conversant as many of them were with the literature and society of France. And a like effect might naturally be expected to have been exercised by the sotties of the contemporary enfants sans souci; for, through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, drama of that kind convulsed the sides of merrymakers south of the Channel. Such were the occasion and motive of farces and sotties. So far as they employed the plot of domestic intrigue for their purposes of satire, I have little doubt that they drew freely upon the Latin elegiac comedies of which I have already spoken as the favourite dramatic species of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Farce de Pernet has connection with more than one of those imitations of Terentian intrigue. It has, also, like many of its kind and of elegiac comedies as well, a kinship with one and another popular tale. The church, then, seems to have furnished the opportunity for these farces, and for some as an object of satire the motive; the contes and fabliaux of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries furnished much of the material; Latin comedy, its mediæval and renaissance successors, cannot have failed to influence the form.

It will be, of course, recalled that as early as the Mak of the Towneley plays, a farce which is not unworthy of comparison with Maître Pathelin, the English Interludium de Clerico et Puella, probably of the thirteenth century, also indicated an acquaintance with the technique of the farce species. Undoubtedly such interludes were a common feature at entertainments of various kinds, and had matured in the ordinary course into fixed form. But they were frequently extemporaneous, were written for fleeting occasions, and might readily be lost. I am inclined therefore, to look upon the dramatized anecdotes assigned to Heywood as lucky survivals of a form which, since it had been long cultivated both in England and France, may have attained to a degree of excellence before he took it up. The resemblance of these farces to the French is often such that, as M. Jusserand says, one cannot but question whether Heywood had not some of the old French dramas of the type in his hands. Since Mr. Pollard has discussed the question in this volume, it is unnecessary for me to pursue it farther. In any case, it is to the honour of Heywood that he brought to focus the characteristic qualities of the Chaucerian episode, the farce and the dramatic debate. "This I write," says he, "not to teach, but to touch." In his work, accordingly, we find narratives of single and independent interest, if not exactly plot, and an adaptation of that which is abstract to purposes of amusement. We find characters with motive, and sometimes personality, contemporary manners, witty dialogue, satire; and in at least the Play of Love, an adumbration of the sentimental, dare we say romantic, possibilities of comedy, to be realized when it should have thrown allegory and scholasticism to the winds. The Laundress in the Wether envisages fleetingly the straits of life and the recompense; and in the Play of Love, the personification of various phases of that passion is a kind of glass through which we darkly divine the motives of many later comedies. There is, however, with the single exception of the Vice's trick in Love, no action which can be called dramatic in Heywood's undoubted plays; for, as Mr. Pollard reminds us, the Pardoner and Johan, although they avail themselves of "business" in order to develop a plot, have not the significance of comedy proper.

To understand the nature of the movements that follow we must recur, though with the utmost brevity, to the history of later Latin comedy. The comic recitals of the twelfth century and thereabout were succeeded by the comedy of the Italian humanists, still in Latin, but dramatic in form and apparently in intent, which, though it availed itself, like the elegiac school, of the outworn situations and devices of scabrous amours, contributed considerably to the enrichment of the romantic strain by the passion with which it invested its material, sometimes, also, to the cause of realism by its unconscious, though often repulsive, accuracy of detail. Although Plautus is to some extent cultivated, the Terentian model was still the favourite with youthful imitators until study of the older poet was revived by the recovery of the twelve lost plays and their introduction to Roman circles in 1427. The Philologia of Petrarch's earlier years is accordingly fashioned in the style of Terence, and is even reported, for it is unfortunately lost, to have surpassed its classical forbears. Written about 1331, it was the first product of the new dramatic school, and was succeeded by a numerous train of ambitious effusions,—university plays we might call most of them,—a few witty, some sentimental, many libidinous, all very young, and still all, or nearly all, cleverly and regularly constructed. It concerns us here but to mention the Paulus of Vergerio, which Creizenach dates 1370, Aretino's Poliscene, about 1390, Alberti's Philodoxeos, 1418, Ugolino's Philogena, some time before 1437, and Piccolomini's Crisis, 1444.[64] Of these erotic comedies,—pornographic were perhaps a more fitting term,—the most popular seems to have been the Philogena; the most eminent, according to Creizenach (but I don't see why), the Crisis. The Paulus pretends to aim at the improvement of youth; one might for a moment imagine that it was intended to be a prodigal son play. But in none of these plays is there either punishment or repentance. In fact the unaffected verve with which they display the wantonness of life is not the least of their contributions to comedy. The Poliscene is notable for its modernity of manners and of morals. The sole instance among these plays, so far as I can ascertain, of noble sentiment and harmless plot is the Philodoxeos. The use of abstract names for the characters lends it, indeed, somewhat the appearance of a moral interlude.

Of much greater value, however, in the history of the acted drama, and of closer bearing upon the English comedy, were the representations of Plautus and Terence, first in the Latin and ultimately in the vernacular, which marked the last quarter of the fifteenth century in the courts of northern Italy. These in turn were but stepping-stones towards such dramatic dialogues as the Timone of Bojardo, 1494, and the still more significant experiments of Ariosto and Bibbiena—the first romantic comedies in prose and in the native tongue. The authors of the Suppositi (acted in 1509) and the Calandria (written in 1508, but not presented till six years later) derive much from Roman sources, but in general these comedies and their like were original. Their influence upon our own plays of romantic intrigue will presently appear. So, likewise, will that of a Spanish work, of even earlier date, the dramatic novel of Calisto and Melibœa; for this tragic production of Cota and De Rojas is the source of our first English romantic drama. The connection between other forms of Italian drama, the Commedia dell'arte, the pastoral drama, etc., and the later stage in western Europe has been ably discussed by Klein, Moland, Symonds, and Ward; and to them I must refer the reader of this more summary account.

The decade that saw the first of Heywood's virile plays was probably that which welcomed to England the ebullient, un-English passions of a dramatic species destined to develop the native stock in a far different manner. "A new commodye in englyshe, in maner of an enterlude," ordinarily called Calisto and Melibœa, is the earliest romantic play of intrigue in our language. It was "caused to be printed" by that excellent promoter of the dramatic art, John Rastell, about 1530, and was written—perhaps by him—not long before. The appellation "commodye" had been used during the same decade with reference to the English translation of the Andria (about 1520-29); it is here used for the first time on the title-page of an English play. And this interesting interlude may, indeed, well be called both English and comedy; for though it derives from romance sources (the Spanish dramatic composition by Fernando de Rojas, before 1500), and is affected by the Italian, it does not follow exactly the plot of its original; and though it is "reduced to the proportions of an interlude," it treats of an idea not farcical, but significant, and it develops the motives of real characters, by way of action, passion, and intrigue, to a happy conclusion within the realm of convention and common sense. It is, indeed, a comedy, perhaps our first well-rounded comedy, though in miniature. The Secunda Pastorum it excels in singleness of aim; the Pardoner and Frere and the Johan, in meaning for life. It excels all preceding interludes in the fulfilment of the purpose, now for the first time announced in English drama, "to shew and to describe as well the bewte and good propertes of women as theyr vyces and evyll condicions." For the first time since plays became secular, women are introduced, not as the objects of scurrility and ridicule, but as dramatic material of an æsthetic, moral, and intellectual value equal to that of men. What the author of Johan did for the amusing and real action desirable in a comedy, the author of this play did for vital characterization and passion. Melibœa is the first heroine of our romantic comedy; she is so fair that for her lover there is "no such sovereign in heaven, though she be in earth." She is, if the play was written before the Play of Love, our earliest heroine "loved, not loving." She is a woman and pitiful and to be wooed; frail and repentant; but then indignant and not to be won. Calisto is, likewise, our first lover in despair. This element of woman worship—not worship of the Blessed Virgin or traditional interest in the Magdalene or any other saint—is no slight contribution to the material of comedy. The intrigue of the play,—the foils of character and action, the go-betweens, the plot within plot introduced by Celestina, her realistic account of Sempronio's character, her device of the "girdle," the mysterious agency of the dream,—no better indication of romantic tendency can be detected until we reach Redford's play of Wit and Science, of which presently. But first, and that we may keep in mind the parallelism of dramatic tendencies in this momentous first half of the sixteenth century, let us turn to another stream, that of the school interludes and the classical influence.