The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

Resistance to the classic influence.

When the great and natural authority of the classic models is allowed for—when we remember how many writers for the stage, not only here but wherever the theatre nourished, were university wits—when the taste of the time for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive as it did. The predominance of the French drama of the seventeenth century must not lead us into overestimating the rarity of the independence required to reject the classic model in the time of the Renaissance. Corneille and Racine did indeed establish a “correct” form of tragedy, largely constructed on classic lines. But this was part of a general, and far from inexcusable, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in literature. During the Renaissance the influence of the classic drama was confined to producing a false dawn of the French tragedy. Italy achieved no considerable drama. The classics, both the great Greek and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in translations, and by scholarly critics, only to be rejected. The Nise Lastimosa of Gerónimo Bermudez, with here and there a tentative effort in early plays, is all that remains of the teaching of translators and men of learning. Among ourselves Gorboduc had little immediate following, and when Daniel in the very early seventeenth century tried to succeed where Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie of the Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else. Between the two there is Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Cornelia or so, and that is all.

Advantages of this.

For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful, and so have the Spaniards. Both nations had the spirit to be themselves on their stage, which is something; and then we have had a freer Shakespeare, a more spontaneous Lope, than would have been possible if the three unities and the complete separation of tragedy from comedy had been accepted in the two countries. Yet we may be thankful with more moderation than we commonly show. It is not to be taken for granted that the choice lay between freedom and a convention. It was rather between one convention and another. The Spanish stage is not unconventional. It has a different convention from the French—that is all. Ours made its own rules, less precise than the Spanish or the classical, but none the less real. “Tanto se pierde por carta de mas, como por carta de menos,” says the Spanish proverb. The card too much is a loss as much as the card too little; and a convention which says “You shall” is no less tyrannical than the convention which says “You shall not.” |And the limitations.| A drama which will allow no mixture of comedy with tragedy is unquestionably limited, and is condemned to give no full picture of life. But a drama which is forced to insert comic scenes is equally under an obligation. The clown who figures as porter in Macbeth is not necessarily more in place than the murder of a king would have been in The Taming of the Shrew. To say that you may fairly keep your comedy unmixed by tragedy, but must never allow your tragedy to be unrelieved by comic scenes, is as arbitrary a rule as any other. Undoubtedly the reaction from the strained emotion of tragedy to lighter feeling is natural—and that is the sufficient artistic justification for the jests of Hamlet. But this just observation does not excuse the insertion into a tragic action of independent comic scenes which have no necessary connection with the main personages and action.

The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history of the formation of an English dramatic convention. The questions are what it was, and what were its merits. These questions are not settled by the answer that Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That he would have been in any case. What is greatest in him—his universal sympathy with all nature and his unerring truth to life—was wholly personal. He shared it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, and a ring of men whom we are content to know wholly by “beauties,” which beauties, again, are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite superfluous to treat it as dramatic literature at all. The Bible does not belong to a class, and neither does Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him above all others. We must look at him as standing apart; and as for the others, if that for which they are worth studying is their lyric poetry, or their mighty line, or this or that touch of genuine pathos or fine interpretation of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to consider them as writers of plays. If there was an Elizabethan dramatic literature in any other sense than this, that many poets wrote for the stage and put noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic, it must be studied apart from what was purely Shakespeare. And that is not difficult to do. On his predecessors he could have no effect, and it is only necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or successor to see how little they shared with him in all that was not mere language and fashion of the time.

The dramatic quality.

I trust it will not be thought superfluous to attempt a definition of what we ought to look for in judging dramatic literature. Dryden, whose example cannot well be followed too closely in criticism, acknowledges the need for a definition of a play early in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Lisideius, one of the interlocutors in the conversation, gives this, with the proviso that it is rather a description than a definition: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Now this is neither definition nor description of a play. There is not a word in it which does not apply to Gil Blas. Dryden was himself well aware of its insufficiency, for he makes Crites raise “a logical objection against it”—that it is “only a genere et fine, and so not altogether perfect.” Yet he leaves the matter standing there. That he, who was himself a playwright, should have been content to do this when dealing with the drama is one proof how much English literature had lost “the sense of the theatre.” If Lisideius had not been thinking of literature, but of literature as adapted to the stage, he would have said (but in Dryden’s incomparably better way) something like this: “A play is an action, put before an audience by dialogue and representation, forming a coherent whole, in which all the parts subserve a general purpose, and are dramatically good only in so far as they do.” Lyric beauty, good moral reflection, vigorous deliveries of human nature, are, however good in themselves, as little able to make a good play as the most beautiful ornament is to make a fine building.

Classic, Spanish, and French drama.

It is the unity of the action which constitutes the good play, and it may be obtained by different methods. A dramatist may obtain unity by means of the passion or by the working out of a single situation. Of the great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert authority, but as far as they are visible in translations as in a glass darkly, they appear to have achieved unity in this way to the full. The chorus, which in inferior hands offers irresistible temptations for wandering talk, always carries on the action, while what we see is the outward and visible sign of some terrible force working behind. This ever-present sense of the something reserved driving before it what we are allowed to see, with an undeviating directness of aim, gives by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy. The Spanish dramatist gains his unity by artful construction of his story, and by subordinating passion and character to the mere action. The French stage in its great days aimed at using the same resources as the Greek, though with certain mechanical changes, such as the dropping of the chorus, and the division of its work among the personages, which in itself was no great gain.

Unity of the English play.