The persons are the Prophet, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabuz, and Amital; the Jewish Queens and Nebuchadnezzar’s Queen; a Duenna and a Provost; and the frequently appearing Chorus. Two other main persons, Zedekiah and the High Priest, appear first in IV; the Prophet, only in I and V. As in the earlier tragedies, I is a monologue of lamentation on the Captivity plus a chorus, that is, an expository prelude; and V, reporting the slaughter of the children, is an epilogue urging submission to the will of God and the hope of deliverance by Cyrus. Though the groups are somewhat better combined, there is little change in the habit of composition.
Such effectiveness as this tragedy has beyond spectacle is mainly lyric. The abundant choruses and responses are both expert as verse and inspired by Psalms and Prophets to eloquence: Adieu, native land (II. v); How shall we sing in a strange land? (III. iii); Wretched daughters of Sion (IV. i). Though there is some interaction of plea and refusal, some suspense, all the decisions have been made beforehand. There remain to animate a play the sight and sound of communal fortitude. Les Juifves is a noble poem; its literary type is still clear in the nobler Samson Agonistes of Milton.
That Garnier’s classicism is thoroughly of his time is vouched by forty editions in less than thirty years. He was classical superficially in following the custom of mythological ornament. He was classical further in imitations on classical themes with classical persons, and still further in going from Seneca to Euripides and even to Sophocles. But his classicism kept sixteenth-century limits in looking away from composition to style. As to the Middle Age, dramatic meant to his time not a distinctive movement, but a certain style. Though he was intelligent and serious enough to use Seneca in his own way, less than the Elizabethans for melodrama, more for moral urgency, he did not see beyond the Senecan conception of drama as oratory plus lyric. He found his own oratory, his own lyric; but his progress was rather in tragic diction than in tragedy.[46]
3. HISTORY PLAYS
The most distinctive Elizabethan stage experiments of the waning sixteenth century were the “histories.” Generally lacking focus, series rather than sequence, often made over, sometimes nationalistic propaganda, they still keep some of their Elizabethan stir. For the putting of great men on the stage not only satisfied a story appetite growing too fast for print; it showed prowess, as no story can quite show, in action. Thus a history play, though it might be tragedy only in the medieval sense of the fall of a prince, though it might be Senecan enough in style, might teach stage values beyond Seneca. Widening the field of tragedy beyond Greek legend to the opening East and to national history, it also opened other methods of characterization and other dramatic forms than were taught by either the Greek or the Latin tradition.
The story play, then, should not be ruled out as a priori undramatic. Aristotelian theory and classical experience exhibit dramatic movement as typically distinct from narrative, not the telling of the story, but the compelling of its crisis to an emotional issue. In this aspect the Greek tragic theater exhibits sharp contrasts to the Elizabethan: the one vast, open, removing the audience so far as to compel orotund delivery and preclude facial expression, the other small, closed, bringing the audience so near as to invite facial play and even aside; the one limited to a few persons, the other inviting many; the one unifying plot for the sake of unbroken, cumulative sequence to an inevitable issue, the other dispersing it over time and space for narrative values and for individualizing characterization; the one crisis play, the other story play. But the contrast is not absolute, nor does it establish exclusive superiority. Greek tragedy is too great in its kind to need any cult of it as the beau idéal. The sixteenth century might have progressed faster for understanding that dramaturgy; but Shakspere came before Corneille and by another road. Elizabethan drama, often bungling, sometimes sprawling at first, and slow to master the essentially dramatic method of interaction, was yet a school of various experience. Though the experience of the “histories” was valuable mainly as preparatory, it also vindicated the dramatic validity of a story play.
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) is poetry not only in what the Middle Age called high style, but in dramatic conception. Though his sequel failed to make it a tragedy, it is history brought home in heroic action. The fourth act, indeed, lapses into spectacle; the fifth pushes the ruthlessness beyond credibility, and the close is a formal gesture; but for three acts we are in the thick. Not sustained as a sequence, this activity is nevertheless dramatic to the extent of being typically distinct from Seneca. For all its oratory, Tamburlaine is story in action. Thus was opened the way for Shakspere’s “histories” of the 90’s. We shall do his revolting Richard III more justice if we neither excuse it as carrying over an earlier appeal of blood, nor blame it for failing to focus the monster in a tragedy. Richard III is not tragedy dulled by dispersion; it is dramatic story, dramatic in the interactions of that princely world poisoned by treachery, story in cumulative damnation. Shakspere had written the Merchant of Venice and was writing As You Like It, when he put on another “history” in Henry V (1599).
4. PASTORAL AND RUSTIC COMEDY
Before the dramatic experience of the “histories” bore its best fruit in a widening of tragedy, another sort of story enriched comedy. Dramatic training through Latin comedy had been continuous from the Middle Age through the Renaissance. As Ariosto had begun with I suppositi in 1509, so Shakspere wrote the Comedy of Errors in 1591. In Latin and in vernacular, in translation and in imitation, the quick, smart formula of Plautus and Terence[47] continued its lessons. But the abundant Renaissance pageantry of solemn entries, the court shows, and the vogue of pastoral, had yielded here and there some dramatic experience. This is evident as early as Poliziano,[48] whose Orfeo is classical in its pagan gods and demigods, specifically pastoral in its shepherds. It is also myth, both in the original story of Orpheus and Eurydice and in Poliziano’s shaping. His myth is effective spectacle; his dialogue more than conventional responses. He has action enough to conclude upon vociferous melodrama. Orfeo is a play so far as it goes; but it is too brief to make its dramatic sequence convincing. Mythological drama is rather opened than established. In 1573 Tasso, fulfilling a similar commission for a court show at Urbino, conformed his Aminta[49] strictly to unity of place and time. But its sequence, though uninterrupted, is hardly dramatic. It proceeds oftener by musical recitative than by action. Lovely to see and hear, it gives more hints for opera than for drama. Battista Guarini (1538-1612), professor of rhetoric and poetic at Ferrara, and chief court poet after the withdrawal of Tasso, spent years on his pastoral drama Il pastor fido.
Begun in 1580, finished in 1583, read aloud, revised, it was finally published at Venice 1589/90. Apparently it was first staged in 1595. The Venice edition of 1602 is the twentieth. Called tragicomedy, tragedy in its crisis of life and death, comedy in its satyr and in its happy issue, it is above all, in its persons, its scene, its mythology, consistently pastoral. A prologue celebrating Arcadia as a blest retreat of peace, and Caterina d’Este as worthy of her illustrious house, is spoken by the river Alfeo. Besides this personification, and four choruses, there are eighteen personae. Of these the majority are servants or companions serving merely as interlocutors. Three, the temple officiant Nicander, Corisca’s lover Corydon, and a messenger, are quite superfluous. No person is characterized except as a type: the hero Mirtillo as a devotedly faithful lover, the heroine Amaryllis as virtuous, Corisca as a plotter. All are duly paganized.