In "Prometheus Unbound" there is even greater achievement in the presentation of this world conflict; and there Cain triumphs and Beatrice is purified. But the achievement is lyrical rather than dramatic, and has no proper place in the history of tragedy.
In all these tragedies, whether acted or not, and whether works of genius or not, certain resemblances have been noted. They exhibit most of the elements that characterize the romantic movement as it stirred English poetry from the "Lyrical Ballads" to the first publications of Tennyson and Browning. Without realism in plot or language, and dealing always with what is unusual, improbable, and removed from the present, they made little effort to catch the interest of the average audience or to excite an interest common to ordinary experience. Their reaction against the frivolity of contemporary melodrama was as decided as their reaction against eighteenth century conventionality; but both impulses led to poetry, passion, and Shakespeare, but not to drama. They did not succeed in working out cause and effect of character through incident; when they desired to gain stage effectiveness, they merely borrowed from current melodrama or from the Elizabethans.
Elizabethan influence is usually apparent in the choice of themes, in the devising of plot and situations, and particularly in the figurative and ornate phrasing. The revival of some Elizabethan plays on the stage, the vulgarization in the illegitimate drama of many of their incidents, and the general interest among readers at this time in the Elizabethan drama, all encouraged a fondness for madness, incest, battles, villany, and unrestrained passion of various kinds. In phrasing, the Elizabethan influence appears in all degrees; in the sympathetic emulation of Keats, in the amazing reproductions of Beddoes, or in the starched artificiality of the poetic embellishments of Milman, Knowles, or Procter. In general the style is redundant and florid. In such plays as were adapted for the stage, it will almost always be found that the mere curtailing of the figures, soliloquies, and episodes causes a marked improvement in the dramatic quality of the dialogue. Byron and Shelley both attempted to free their dramatic blank verse from conceits and artificialities, and to give it directness and lack of ornamentation corresponding to natural speech. In consequence, Byron's blank verse often makes a slovenly approach to prose, and Shelley's loses something of the beauty of his non-dramatic masterpieces; but on the whole, "Sardanapalus" and still more "Cain" and "The Cenci" show their greatness in this as in other respects, in the dramatic quality of their verse.
Many of the tragedies also exhibit the influence of the school of terror. The Radcliffian romances, the early German drama, and the spectral melodrama of the theatres all encouraged castles, dungeons, titans like Karl Moor, hallucinations, and ghosts. There is something of this in Beddoes's churchyards; "Bertram" is a full-fledged drama of terror by one of the masters of the school; Byron's "Werner," itself a dramatization of a tale of terror, conforms to all the stage requirements of the species. After the tales of terror had gone out of fashion, the romanticists still found it easy on the stage to revert to haunted castles, inveterate villains, and in-dungeoned heroes. But in addition to the continuing influence of "The Robbers" and the plays of "Monk" Lewis, there was arising the influence of "Faust" and of Schiller's later plays. "Faust," which furnished hints for "Manfred" and "The Deformed Transformed," seems to have been regarded as a "tale of wonder," the story of the sale of a soul to the devil being a favorite with that class of fiction; but its philosophy perhaps also had its suggestions for both Byron and Shelley. Schiller's "Wallenstein," translated by Coleridge, and "Mary Stuart" at least encouraged the prevailing fondness for historical themes and the study of passion.
Medievalism continued its sway but with some new developments. The Waverley novels, the growing cosmopolitanism of literature, the Italian residences of Byron and Shelley, in fact innumerable causes led to an expansion of the interest in the Middle Ages into an interest in the past. Literature, whether in Scott or Keats, was carrying its search for story and ideals, for picturesqueness and beauty, into past ages and remote climes. The treatment of history, which had formed no part of the plans of Miss Baillie, Wordsworth, or Coleridge, now became essential to tragedy; and we find Byron keeping carefully to the historical sources of his tragedies of the doges, and Shelley adhering to a narrative of the Cenci murder, which he deemed authentic, though since proved legendary. Italian history seems to have exercised a general fascination. Miss Mitford wrote a tragedy on the Foscari independently of Byron's, as well as her "Rienzi"; and "Fazio" and "Mirandola" dealt with Italian stories. The choice, however, was mainly for grandiose historical events, as "Sardanapalus," "Virginius," "Lucius Junius Brutus," "Richelieu," and Milman's "Fall of Jerusalem." Some of these attracted by the opportunity to praise liberty, meaning Catholic emancipation and electoral reform, and the denunciation of tyranny; but they seem to have been especially welcomed because of their opportunities for rhetorical fervors.
In nearly all the plays the main interest is not in plot, as in the eighteenth century, and not primarily in story, as in the Elizabethan period, but in the delineation of individual passion. "Lear," "Othello," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth" are the models; but the passions are more distempered, more isolated, more abstracted from reason or sense than in Shakespeare. As in the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the influence of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans is most unmistakable in the prominence given to insanity and villany. But this prominence is also a natural result of the romanticists' prepossession with passion. In tragedy, they felt that some passions must be very evil and some ruinous; hence they devoted themselves to a study of malice and madness. Their villains are more vigorous than those of the eighteenth century, but they, too, imitate Iago; and the mad scenes always recall either Lear or Ophelia. The romanticists can realize passion for the moment, or display its variable moods; but they rarely succeed in making its extended portrayal convincing. They clung to the idea that the only way to depict passion was to eliminate all else. Even in the great writers passion absorbs the interest; in the minor plays it tears itself to tatters. Tragedy after tragedy represents passions, not conflicting but alternating, until one or the other turns to madness. As Lewis's prologue declared, Romance "raves away the hours." The conception of tragedy seems to be the burning up of the soul in passion, and the poets' main concern to describe the conflagration. The romanticists needed Lyttleton's advice, to read Shakespeare, but to study Racine.
The conception of tragedy that requires the expression of passion working in individual men, and seeks in history or legend for examples of isolated effects of the great emotions, clearly involves something different from a veracious representation of life as we all see it, and something more than the confusion of passions run wild. According to contemporary philosophical criticism, as that of Schiller and Schelling, or that of Coleridge and Shelley, tragedy should take part in the search for universal truth; not universal in the eighteenth-century conception of typical characters and aphoristic generalizations, but universal in the sense that, in the words of Carlyle, it seeks the "interpretation of the divine idea in the world." Tragedy should investigate, as Lamb declared, "the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great and heroic nature," and should also seek to find in the riots of evil or the storms of passion symptoms of the struggle of Nature to rid itself of disease and fever, the presage of a higher unity for both man and the universe. Something of this is discernible in "Remorse" or elsewhere; there is a passionate demand for ethical realities in "Cain"; but the only positive presentation of an idealistic theory of tragedy is "The Cenci."
Though tragedy thus reflects the changes working in the ideas and forms of literature, these changes are, of course, more distinctly indicated elsewhere. If we had no knowledge of other literature, and only tragedy to judge from, we could not clearly discern the far-reaching changes wrought by the romantic revival. Tragedy from 1800 to 1830 could be described as marking a return to the Elizabethans and Shakespeare, an absorption in the depiction of passion, a revival of poetic imagination in expression, an appeal to terror rather than to pity, and to the strange and mysterious rather than the reasonable; but it could not be said that the summation of these changes resulted in an extensive or enduring development.
It is not easy to find a stopping-place for a history of English tragedy. In the case of the acted drama the close of Macready's management offers a definite end, for the ensuing twenty-five years are nearly a blank as far as acted tragedy is concerned. In the case of the unacted drama, however, there is no point of marked change. The deaths of Scott and Goethe mark a stage in European literature; and the Victorian era introduces new poets and novelists, new social and political conditions, and a new foreign influence in the French romanticists. But the closet dramas after 1830 are in many ways closely related to those of the generation before. Closet tragedy in the plays of Browning, Sir Henry Taylor, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and others, was largely the outcome of the theatrical and literary conditions which we have been tracing. Separated from the theatre, it offers, one must fear, little that is vital in the development of the drama, however impressive it may be as poetry. The appearance of new semi-dramatic species was a natural accompaniment of the continued departure of drama from the stage. Miss Mitford and Bulwer-Lytton had written "dramatic scenes." Later Landor's genius found its truest opportunity not in poetic plays, but in prose imaginary conversations, at their best splendidly dramatic. Browning turned from the theatre to dramatic lyrics, romances, and monologues. In fact, in the work of all the romantic dramatists, including Browning and Swinburne, dramatic power reveals itself in scenes and passages rather than in whole plays. Tragedy as a literary form, it may be repeated, is dependent for its life upon the theatre. Removed from the theatre, its integrity is gone, it develops strange and varied forms. Instead of tragedy, we have "My Last Duchess," "The Ring and the Book," and the Mary Stuart trilogy.
It is this separation from the theatre that seems to have been the main cause for the failure of the romantic movement in tragedy. We may, to be sure, find other causes in plenty. The genius of its great poets was lyrical rather than dramatic. Lyrical and narrative poetry and, above all, the novel absorbed both public interest and imaginative genius. Again, there was no free play for a revolution in tragedy, because there had been no tyranny. Classicism had never dominated the drama as in other European nations. In English tragedy of the eighteenth century, blank verse, however tainted by affectation, had kept the Elizabethan fondness for figure; structure, though following after French models, had maintained the traditions of English freedom; the subjects had kept open a wide range and had not neglected the medieval field; and sentiment, if not passion, had reigned. While the German and French romanticists found in Shakespeare an incentive to something new, the English romanticists could only elevate to omnipotence one who had long been the idol of the theatres. He was for them no innovator, but rather the unrecognized tyrant who held them back from real innovation. As Beddoes recognized in theory though not in practice, "the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold tramping fellow,—no reviver, even however good."