SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
After "Richard II" and "King John," Shakespeare turned aside from tragedy, and within the next half-dozen years produced his masterpieces of romantic comedy and non-tragical history. With the exception of "Titus Andronicus" and "Romeo and Juliet," the first half of his dramatic career was devoted entirely to comedy and history. With "Julius Cæsar," about 1600, began the period of tragedies and bitter comedies, which lasted until about 1608, when he turned again to romantic comedy and tragicomedy. In these main divisions and turning-points of his dramatic activity there is a correspondence with the development of the contemporary drama which we are able to mark with an approach to definiteness. Both romantic comedy and chronicle history had their hey-day during the dozen years that he was devoting to those species. Then at the close of the century various influences produced an abandonment of those forms, a revival of tragedy, and an extensive production of satirical and domestic comedy. About 1608, again, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher led a return to romance. The Shakespearean period of tragedy may thus be separated from the Marlowean by an interval, during which few tragedies of importance appeared; and its beginning was coincident with new and important developments in the drama.
The leading force in initiating these changes was apparently Ben Jonson, whose prologue to "Every Man in His Humour" (acted 1598) avowed the principles which that play exemplified, and proclaimed the establishment of a comedy of humors. This change was heralded as the result of a more critical and conscious art, of a desire to free the drama from the absurdities and lawlessness of the past, and to supply it with literary standards and artistic aims. His practice, which during the next ten years was mostly in accord with his preaching, was followed or paralleled in many respects by most of the other dramatists. At the date of "Every Man in His Humour" Shakespeare was proclaiming in the choruses of "Henry V" his sense of the incongruities of the chronicle history play and bidding farewell to a form of drama that he had made preëminently his own; and Chapman and Middleton were forsaking romantic comedy for realistic comedies of London life. Perhaps a little earlier, the satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston had created considerable stir and doubtless had a share in turning literary endeavor from sentiment to satire. This satire and exposure of the follies and evils of society also received encouragement from the moral and social change that was working in England and especially in London. The healthy and aspiring national life that had found expression in the sound morality and the imaginative idealism of the earlier drama was now giving place to the moral corruption, social laxity, and lack of national pride that render the reign of James I notorious. At all events, whatever the causes, the comedy of the next seven or eight years was prevailingly realistic, domestic, or satirical.
In tragedy the changes were similar, though less distinct. The protest against the lawlessness of the early drama was manifested in the infrequency of chronicle plays and the appearance of tragedies presenting foreign, and especially Roman, history with due regard for both historical truth and tragic structure. Realism appeared just at the beginning of the century in a number of domestic tragedies that violated the established conventions by dealing with actual events, contemporary society, and humble persons. Satire of contemporary manners became frequent in tragedy, and satirical comedies often dealt with tragic events and exercised an influence on pure tragedy similar to that exercised by romantic comedy in the earlier period. Up to this time popular tragedy had hardly received critical consideration even from the dramatists themselves. Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, and others had been mainly concerned in telling stories on the stage without much consciousness of theory or of the types of drama which they were creating. In this period, however, the demarcation between tragedy and comedy and the definition of a conception of tragedy became positive both in occasional critical comment and in the practice of the dramatists. The old types, however, survived. Medleys of various kinds of tragedy and comedy, such as "Old Fortunatus" or "The Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," are not found much after the beginning of the century; but the revenge tragedy received a remarkable development by Marston, Chettle, Tourneur, Chapman, and Jonson, to say nothing of Shakespeare.
Practically synchronous with the period of Shakespeare's great tragedies are these several interesting developments: the domestic tragedies, and especially the allied work of Heywood; the Roman historical tragedies, especially the two by Jonson; the French historical tragedies by Chapman; and the various revenge plays, beginning with Marston's "Antonio and Mellida." These dramatists, however, were mainly occupied with comedy, and no one of them devoted himself as exclusively to tragedy as did Shakespeare. Nor did any of them equal him in immediate popularity. The imitative methods of his artistic apprenticeship had given place to a maturity and independence of art that at once won a supremacy in tragedy even greater than that already attained in comedy. Yet in themes and treatment there is no divorce from the practice of his fellow dramatists. His genius continued responsive to the demands of the stage of the day, and it felt the changes in dramatic conditions, of which we have been noticing some symptoms, and which made the tragedies of others as well as his own more satirical and realistic than those of Marlowe's time, more concerned with the problem of evil, more conscious and critical in their art, and in their style less lyrical and descriptive, more reflective and sententious.
Of the domestic tragedies, very much in fashion from 1597 to 1603, the few survivors show little advance over "Arden of Feversham." These presentations of hideous contemporary crimes maintain the protest initiated by that play against the conventionalities of "the ghost and revenge" drama, and echo its demand for realism. The satirical description of Tragedy in the induction to "A Warning for Fair Women" (1599) is particularly noteworthy as indicating the definiteness which the current conception of tragedy had assumed. The epilogue reiterates the cry of the realist in an era of romanticism:—
"Perhaps it may seem strange unto you all,
That one hath not avenged another's death
After the observation of such course:
The reason is that now of truth I sing."
A second of these plays, "Two Lamentable Tragedies" (1601), is a curious combination of the story of the babes in the wood and that of the recent murder of one Beech. A third, "A Yorkshire Tragedy," acted by Shakespeare's company about 1605, and published with his name (1608), is remarkable for its naked realism and the vividness and rapidity of some of its prose.
With these plays may be grouped Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" (1607, acted 1603), for, although it does not deal with real events, it lacks the usual accompaniments of tragedy, courts, kings, ghosts, and battles, and presents a story of current English life. Its themes are the common ones of adultery and revenge, but it gives them an entirely novel treatment, the husband refusing to take vengeance on his guilty wife, who dies repentant and forgiven. After a fashion soon to become general, there is an underplot which, like the main plot, presents a problem of social ethics, the question of the sacrifice of chastity to save a brother's honor. Similar problems are common in contemporary comedy, and the play might be classed indifferently as a domestic tragedy or a tearful comedy. It is Heywood's masterpiece and exemplifies the qualities that won him the affection of Lamb, "generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depth of passion, sweetness, in a word, and gentleness." The wife falls too easily and repents too sentimentally to be of much interest, but the character of Frankfort is finely conceived and, especially in the great scene of the discovery, executed with a power and truth of feeling rarely combined outside of Shakespeare. In a very similar play, "The English Traveller," written long afterwards, Heywood speaks of two hundred and twenty plays in which he had a main finger. Some of these lost plays must have further exemplified the method of "A Woman Killed with Kindness"; but his success failed to encourage other dramatists to attempt domestic themes and to abandon the tragic conventions. Such realism as his was left to comedy, and tragedy continued to seek its stories in romance or history.
Ben Jonson's two tragedies, "Sejanus" and "Catiline," reveal an effort to treat Roman history with accuracy and dignity, and to enforce on the public stage what he regarded as the essential rules of tragedy. Such representations of Roman history as "The Wounds of Civil War" or the still more incongruous medley of Heywood's "Lucrece" must have excited in him still greater condemnation than did the English chronicle plays. Even Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar" provoked a sneer, though its dramatization of Plutarch's portraits of the great conspirators apparently excited his emulation and suggested much in his treatment of Sejanus and Catiline. Incongruous spectacle and farce disappear from these plays, and the events are treated upon a well thought out theory of historical tragedy. Jonson strove to present the main events and characters with accurate fidelity to authorities, and even minor persons and deeds in constant harmony with the historical narrative. But the scholar overtopped the dramatist. "Sejanus" has a paraphernalia of notes like a doctor's dissertation; and "Catiline" long excerpts from Cicero's orations.