Our own drama adopted neither device. It neither concentrated its attention on the one situation or passion, nor did it subordinate all to the march of an action. There remained to it to do this—to secure unity by giving to the play the unity of life itself—by showing us human nature working in all its manifestations, of love and hate, heroism and cowardice, laughter and tears. Every rule suffers exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our dramatic literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least a strong leaning to accept the unnecessary unities of time and place in order to attain more effectually the indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing feature of our great dramatic literature on its constructive side is that it threw tragedy and comedy together, and that it relied for its unity on an inner binding force of life. This is the greatest skill of all, but it is for that very reason the most difficult of attainment. It presupposes in the dramatist a sympathy with all humanity from Lear to Parolles, and with that a power of creation and construction incomparably greater than is needed to build by the classic rules, or to put together an artful story worked out by stock-figures on the Spanish model. Its dangers are obvious. When the dramatist had no natural tragic power he would be in constant peril of falling into fustian. When he was deficient in a sense of humour, he would be tempted to fall back for his comedy on mere grossness. His action, being free to wander in time and space, would have a constant tendency to straggle, and the play would become a mere succession of scenes following one another “like geese on a common.” The strict following of the classic rules, which work for concentration, helps to preserve the dramatist from these errors, at the cost of limiting his freedom. To Shakespeare they would have been a slavery, but it is not certain that they would not have been a support to Marlowe or Middleton, who stood much less in need of freedom than of discipline and direction. So while feeling duly thankful for that resistance to the authority of the classics which helped to give us Shakespeare, we may remember that it also helped to give us many comic scenes which it is hardly possible to read without feeling ashamed for the men who wrote them, and many so-called plays which are only shapeless combinations of scenes, bound together by no other nexus than thread and paper.
Ralph Roister Doister.
Ralph Roister Doister, the earliest known English comedy, was written apparently about 1530, and printed some fifteen or sixteen years later. The date of the printing of a play is notoriously no test of its date of composition or acting, but only of the time when the actors had no further motive for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript—that is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. Ralph Roister Doister was the work of Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster, and is full of reminiscences of Plautus. Ralph Roister Doister himself is our old friend the miles gloriosus adapted to the conditions of London life in the time of Edward VI. Matthew Merrygreek, described as a “needy humorist,” is our no less familiar friend the parasite. Merrygreek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ralph Roister Doister, who is made up of conceit, bluster, and cowardice—who thinks that every woman who sees him falls in love with him, and is of course baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in sufficiently brisk lines of no great regularity; and there are much duller plays. Ralph’s courtship of Dame Christian Custance, who will have none of him, is lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression that Udall was more than a mere imitator of Plautus, but it is only the school exercise of a clever man.[70]
Gammer Gurton’s Needle.
“The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, entitled Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” is believed, on good evidence, to have been written by John Still (1543?-1608), a churchman, who died Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was played at his college, Christ’s, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have been written three years earlier. However that may be, it was certainly written in his youth. Nothing could well be less academic or clerical. Though divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike much mediæval French comedy. The plot is one of a familiar class which will always hold the stage under new forms, and the working out is of the simplest. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it, just where she ought to have looked for it, after upsetting the house by searching in unlikely places, and disturbing the village by unjustly suspecting her neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long, but it is very far from dull. There is a directness of purpose in Still which is decidedly dramatic, and with it a power of characterisation by no means contemptible. All the personages, and notably the wandering beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to humble human nature. They are coarse, but not wilfully and unnecessarily coarse. There are none of those strings of mere nasty words and images which serve as foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan comedy. Still is honestly naturalistic, neither toning down the truth of the rough talk of rude people, nor lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to startle. If he had not entered the Church, which made it indecent for him to work for the stage, he might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic comedies. As it is, Gammer Gurton’s Needle stands alone. The facts that it contains the capital drinking-song, “Back and side go bare, go bare,” and that it is written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are all that connect it with the later comedy.[71]
Gorboduc.
We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to do with Ralph Roister Doister. The Latin tragedy is directly responsible for a much more ambitious effort, the play variously named Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, generally attributed to Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, though a claim is made for the part-authorship at least of Thomas Norton. If it had been the intention of the author to establish a prejudice against the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience, he could hardly have done better than write this painfully dull play. The very metre, which is the heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of the same length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by any means all. Gorboduc has all the faults and none of the possible merits of its kind. The “regular” tragedy on the classic model needs the concentration of the interest on one strong situation. But Gorboduc is a long story of how the king of that name divides his kingdom between his sons; how they quarrel, and one kills the other; how the mother slays the slayer; how the people kill her and her husband, and are then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches of cruel length, and is necessarily full of repetitions. A very curious feature of the play is the insertion between the acts of dumb shows intended to enforce the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of anarchy, which have a decided flavour of the morality. The Induction to The Mirror of Magistrates and The Complaint of Buckingham remain to show that Sir T. Sackville was a poet; but Gorboduc is the very ample proof that he was no dramatist. The play, which one thinks must have bored her extremely, was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1561.[72]
Formation of the theatre.
The suspension—not, indeed, of activity but of growth—in literature which marks the first years of the queen’s reign was as marked in drama as in pure poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no following to speak of, and it was not until a new generation had grown up that the first signs of the real Elizabethan drama became visible. The production of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they belong to the past not to the coming time. The taste for shows was strong, and it was served. But the pieces of this interval are the descendants of the morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare’s drama. We can leave them aside, for they had no following. There is no Auto Sacramental in English literature. Before that could come it was first necessary to have a theatre, in the sense of a place of public amusement, managed by professional actors, and not only an occasional stage on which corporations and societies performed from time to time. The formation of the theatre in the material sense was the work of these earlier years; but this, which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong properly to the history of literature. It is enough to note that a body of men working together did here what Lope de Rueda did in Spain. A class of actors was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves. In both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular, which was not, it may be, altogether an advantage. At least the fact that the same man might be manager of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden—as Alleyn was—points to the existence of influences which did not visibly work for the production of good literature in the theatre. In England, as in Spain, much was inevitably written to please what may be called the bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this tended to separate itself into the pasos, mojigangas, entremeses, dances, and so forth, which were given between the three jornadas of the comedia. With us all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this difference in mechanical arrangement was not without its influence on literary form.
The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from the middle years of the queen’s reign. By this time the theatre was formed, and the taste for it was strong. It naturally attracted many writers, if only because it was the most direct and effective way in which they could make themselves heard, to say nothing of the fact that it was by far the most certainly lucrative of all forms of literature, and therefore had an intelligible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among them it was inevitable that there should be not a few who had no natural faculty for dramatic literature—Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both lived much about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets of the time. But they wrote for it only by necessity or accident, and their dramatic work is altogether subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of John Lyly; but his plays are so curious, and held so considerable a place in the estimation of his time, that he cannot be put wholly aside.