—non morunt haec monumenta mori."
After a time the greatness of the past masters proved rather an impediment than a stimulus. But in 1612 their work seemed to offer encouragement for even greater achievement in the immediate future.
For the historian this period offers less difficulties than the preceding ones. After 1610 comparatively few plays of importance are non-extant, and few of the extant plays are anonymous. The bulk of the important plays was produced by a few dramatists, who dominated the theatres and whose careers determined the drama's development. After examining the revenge plays which about 1612 gave a further extension to that species, and the heroic romances of the Beaumont-Fletcher collaboration, which were produced within a few years before that date, we may trace the succeeding developments of tragedy mainly in the work of Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton, Ford, and Shirley.
The main line of the development of the revenge tragedy is represented by Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," the anonymous "Second Maiden's Tragedy," and Webster's "White Devil" and "Duchess of Malfi." The four plays may be said to constitute a new species whose differences from the old type seem clearly unconnected with Shakespeare's "Hamlet" but directly traceable to Marston's plays, especially his "Malcontent."
Revenge is no longer the main motive but is a subsidiary element in complicated stories of revolting lust and depravity. Tragedy has become the representation of vice and sin, with a proneness for their foulest entanglements. In one play a brother plays the part of pandar to his sister; in another a father to his daughter; and in a third a mother to her daughter. Nor is revenge, even in its subordinate position, the simple blood-for-blood requital that it is in Kyd. It may be for various causes beside murder; it is born of malice rather than duty; it may share in the moral turpitude of the rest of the action. The ghost no longer directs the course of revenge, and may disappear entirely. In "The Revenger's Tragedy" the skull of the betrothed, as the skeleton in "Hoffman," takes the place of the apparition; and in other plays the duties of the ghost are minimized or farmed out among various supernatural agents, two female ghosts appearing. Hesitation on the part of the avenger does not appear. Indeed, his entire character has changed. He may be a villain, as in "Hoffman," or the villain's accomplice, or one of Marston's "malcontents," or a combination of these parts. The other leading elements in the Kydian type are preserved. Insanity of various forms, real and pretended, is prominent. Intrigue of a complicated kind abounds, but is often dependent, after the fashion of current comedy, largely on improbable disguises. Deaths are as frequent as ever and more horrible. Much of the old stage effect reappears, as in the masques, funerals, ghosts, and exhibition of dead bodies, but there is a great increase in the number and ingenuity of melodramatic sensations. Each play is a chamber of horrors. In one, a wife dies from kissing the poisoned portrait of her husband; in another, the lustful king sucks poison from the jaw of a skull; and in a third, from the painted lips of a corpse. Comets blaze, there are many portents, the time is ever midnight, the scene the graveyard, the air smells of corruption, skulls and corpses are the dramatis personae. Every means seems to be employed to make theatrically effective the horrors of death and decay. And once, at least, these means are used with tremendous power in the riot of madness, torture, and corruption that preludes the death of the Duchess of Malfi.
All or nearly all of the active characters are black with sin. The extraordinary exploitation of villany in Elizabethan tragedy here reaches its culmination. The arch-villain as ruthlessly devoted to crime as Hoffman, the accomplice assiduous in revolting baseness, the villain touched by remorse, the malcontent reviling human life,—all these appear—sometimes all combined in one person—and play their parts along with unshrinking prostitutes and lustful monarchs. The study of villany, however, has gained intensity and plausibility over the earlier plays. If none of the villains take to themselves much individuality, most of them have moments of dramatic impressiveness, and they are intended to be realistic. They are drawn with an accumulation of detail, a fondness for probing into depravity, with a sense of the dramatic value of devilry, and with a bitterness and cynicism that often seem sincere and searching. It is this cynicism which gives character to the reflective elements of these plays. The Kydian soliloquy on fate has given way to the prevailing satirical and bitter tone that finds its favorite themes in the sensuality of women and the hypocrisy and greed of courts, and its favorite means of expression in the connotation of the obscene and bestial.
The qualities attributed to these four plays recall "Hoffman" and "The Atheist's Tragedy," and still more Marston's plays, and the satirical comedy of the preceding decade as well as the tragedy. Though the four plays are thus classed together, their differences are marked. "The Second Maiden's Tragedy" manifests more than the others the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher. Tourneur's "Revenger's Tragedy," far superior to his earlier "Atheist's Tragedy," surpasses Marston and reveals brilliant dramatic talent. Full of thrills and unspeakable juxtapositions, it is governed by a sheer delight in horror and unrelieved by any moral standard. Webster, on the contrary, made his horrors impressive in both poetry and moral. Dependent at every step on the work of predecessors, he succeeded as did no other poet except Shakespeare in transforming the revenge play into a work of art and truth. Chapman was, perhaps, his chief model, but the processes of his transforming art, though not its results, bear resemblances to Shakespeare's. He was possessed by an interest in the effects of crime upon character, and had the power to realize these momentarily with amazing truth. Hence his great portraits of Vittoria, the Cardinal, and the Duchess, and the ingeniously and vividly though not very consistently drawn figure of Bosola. As Shakespeare in "Macbeth" and "Lear," fascinated by the wickedness of the world, reveled in images of blackness, corruption, and despair, so Webster, more laboriously and inquisitively, was ever seeking fantastic expression for the old truth that all is vanity. In his masterpiece, "The Duchess of Malfi," and in a lesser degree in "The White Devil," his recognition of moral values again recalls Shakespeare. We are moved by the pitifulness of the suffering as well as by the horror of the evil. There is no confusion of good and bad; and if the prevailing view of life is cynical, it is not unrelieved by respect for fortitude and conscience. The tragedy of revenge reached a new altitude in this play, which, though poorly constructed, tells a story of criminal and horrible revenge with a vivid delineation of character, a pervading moral sense, and with flashes of speech that attain both poetic and dramatic sublimity.[23]
The collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher was finished by the time that Webster published his acknowledgment of their mastership. Gentlemen by birth and breeding, they began writing for the stage apparently as pupils of Jonson, entered into collaboration by 1607, and in the next five years, by the time that Beaumont was twenty-seven and Fletcher thirty-three, produced some ten plays that gained them a popularity surpassing that of Shakespeare's later years, and extending well through the Restoration. So far as tragedy is concerned, the main result of their collaboration was the formation of a new species of heroic romances, some tragedies and some tragicomedies. Six plays serve to define the type, though other plays of the collaboration have resemblances to it and, after Beaumont's retirement, the type was continued in the work of Fletcher and others. These six plays, "Four Plays in One," "Thierry and Theodoret," "Cupid's Revenge," "Philaster," "A King and No King," and "The Maid's Tragedy," probably owe more to Beaumont than to Fletcher. "The Maid's Tragedy" and the two tragicomedies, "Philaster" and "A King and No King," are the masterpieces, but the six plays resemble one another so closely that one analysis will answer for all.
Beaumont and Fletcher did not, like most of their predecessors, turn to English or Roman history for their plots, and they preserved but few traces of the Marlowean tragedy with its central protagonist and dominating passion, or of the revenge type in any of its amplifications. Their plots, largely of their own invention, are highly ingenious and complicated. They deal with heroic actions in imaginary foreign realms. The conquests, usurpations, and passions that ruin kingdoms are their themes, but there are no battles or armies, and the action is usually confined to the rooms of the palace or a neighboring forest. Usually contrasting a story of gross sensual passion with one of idyllic love, they introduce a great variety of incidents, and aim at a constant but varied excitement. Love of one sort or another, honor also of many kinds, and friendship, which is somewhat more steadfast, are ever in conflict. We are given seats in an anteroom of the palace, and at once the flow of events engrosses us,—conspiracies, imprisonments, insurrections, wars, adultery, seduction, murder, the talk of courtiers, gossip of women, banquets of the monarch, and the laments of the love-lorn. Or, after a tumultuous hour, we may retire to the adjoining forest, where the lovers wander to forget their misfortunes, and by its fountains weave their laments into lyrical garlands. A few hours, and kingdoms have trembled in the balance; the heroine has been proved guilty and innocent again; and the lover has been ecstatic, frantic, jealous, cowardly, implacable, and forgiving, and finally wins or dies with his honor secure.
The tragedies differ from those preceding in structure as well as in material. Their main purpose is theatrical effectiveness; their means of securing it the constant use of surprise. Beaumont and Fletcher did not follow their narrative sources closely; they invented their own stories or used old ones as the frame for their favorite situations and characters. The tragic, idyllic, and sensational matter is skillfully constructed into a number of theatrically telling situations which lead by a series of suspenses and surprises to very effective climaxes or catastrophes. All signs of the epic methods of construction found in the early drama have disappeared, and the interest in the action is maintained at fever heat. In "The Maid's Tragedy," the climax of the play comes at the end of the fourth act with the murder of the king by his mistress, Evadne, the wife of Amintor. But in the fifth act the main action absorbs the sub-plot and continues its course of thrills and surprises until the very end. In "A King and No King," the love of Arbaces for his supposed sister furnishes many entanglements, and it is not until the end of Act V that we know that the princess is not his sister, and the tragedy of incest is resolved into romance. There is no inevitableness in the action of these plays. Usually, until the last moment there is a chance for either a happy or an unhappy ending, and in every case the dénouement or catastrophe is elaborately planned and complicated.