A more interesting and characteristic example of the "decadence" is Henry Glapthorne. When the enthusiasm excited by Lamb's specimens, Hazlitt's, and Coleridge's lectures for the Elizabethan drama, was fresh, and everybody was hunting for new examples of the style, Glapthorne had the doubtful luck to be made the subject of a very laudatory article in the Retrospective Review, and two of his plays were reprinted. He was not left in this honourable but comparatively safe seclusion, and many years later, in 1874, all his plays and poems as known were issued by themselves in Mr. Pearson's valuable series of reprints. Since then Glapthorne has become something of a butt; and Mr. Bullen, in conjecturally attributing to him a new play, The Lady Mother, takes occasion to speak rather unkindly of him. As usual it is a case of ni cet excès d'honneur ni cette indignité. Personally, Glapthorne has some of the interest that attaches to the unknown. Between 1639 and 1643, or for the brief space of four years, it is clear that he was a busy man of letters. He published five plays (six if we admit The Lady Mother), which had some vogue, and survived as an acted poet into the Restoration period; he produced a small but not despicable collection of poems of his own; he edited those of his friend Thomas Beedome; he was himself a friend of Cotton and of Lovelace. But of his antecedents and of the life that followed this short period of literary activity we know absolutely nothing. The guess that he was at St. Paul's School is a mere guess; and in the utter and total absence of the least scrap of biographical information about him, his editor has thought it worth while to print in full some not unamusing but perfectly irrelevant documents concerning the peccadillos of a certain George Glapthorne of Whittlesea, who was certainly a contemporary and perhaps a relation. Henry Glapthorne as a writer is certainly not great, but he is as certainly not contemptible. His tragedy of Albertus Wallenstein is not merely interesting as showing a reversion to the practice, almost dropped in his time (perhaps owing to censorship difficulties), of handling contemporary historical subjects, but contains passages of considerable poetical merit. His Argalus and Parthenia, a dramatisation of part of the Arcadia, caught the taste of his day, and, like the Wallenstein, is poetical if not dramatic. The two comedies, The Hollander and Wit in a Constable, are of the school which has been so frequently described, and not of its strongest, but at the same time not of its weakest specimens. Love's Privilege, sometimes held his best play, is a rather flabby tragi-comedy of the Fletcher-Shirley school. In short, Glapthorne, without being positively good, is good enough to have made it surprising that he is not better, if the explanation did not present itself pretty clearly. Though evidently not an old man at the time of writing (he has been guessed, probably enough, to have been a contemporary of Milton, and perhaps a little older or a little younger), his work has the clear defects of age. It is garrulous and given to self-repetition (so much so that one of Mr. Bullen's reasons for attributing The Lady Mother to Glapthorne is the occurrence in it of passages almost literally repeated in his known work); it testifies to a relish of, and a habituation to, the great school, coupled with powers insufficient to emulate the work of the great school itself; it is exactly in flavour and character the last not sprightly runnings of a generous liquor. There is nowhere in it the same absolute flatness that occurs in the lesser men of the Restoration school, like the Howards and Boyle; the ancient gust is still too strong for that. It does not show the vulgarity which even Davenant (who as a dramatist was ten years Glapthorne's senior) too often displays. But we feel in reading it that the good wine has gone, that we have come to that which is worse.
I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often classed with, and to some extent belongs to the post-Reformation school, he is ours for other purposes than that of mere mention. His Shakespere travesties (in one of which he was assisted by a greater than he), and even the operas and "entertainments" with which he not only evaded the prohibition of stage plays under the Commonwealth, but helped to produce a remarkable change in the English drama, do not concern us. But it must be remembered that Davenant's earlier, most dramatic, and most original playmaking was done at a time far within our limits. When the tragedy of Albovine (Alboin) was produced, the Restoration was more than thirty years distant, and Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, and Marston—men in the strictest sense of the Elizabethan school—were still living, and, in the case of all but Marston, writing. The Cruel Brother, which, though printed after, was licensed before, dates three years earlier; and between this time and the closing of the theatres Davenant had ten plays acted and printed coincidently with the best work of Massinger, Shirley, and Ford. Nor, though his fame is far below theirs, is the actual merit of these pieces (the two above mentioned, The Wits, News from Plymouth, The Fair Favourite, The Unfortunate Lovers, etc.), so much inferior as the fame. The chief point in which Davenant fails is in the failing grasp of verse above noted. This is curious and so characteristic that it is worth while to give an example of it, which shall be a fair average specimen and not of the worst:—
Here we have the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, the big manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble that stutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the poetical tongue.
In such a language as this poetry became impossible, and it is still a matter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made it tolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so, but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blank verse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, never seems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objected was execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, he wrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the best Elizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself in his earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do not remember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that he was consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenant and others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop.
One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatists of our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of the decadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase—
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"Stumbled from above And reeled in slippery roads of alien art," |
is represented in the English theatre by four plays, Aglaura, Brennoralt, The Sad One, and the comedy of The Goblins. Of the tragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are the best thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rather suggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty. His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, which have been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramatic verse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas—a combination of extravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence in short of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mere versification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may be perhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, which is not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, The Goblins. There are several good points about this play—an abundance of not altogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound gallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the Restoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly a clever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as the plot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at hell and devils in caverns close to a populous city, and brings into the action a series of the most absurd escapes, duels, chance-meetings, hidings, findings, and all manner of other devices for spinning out an unnatural story. Many who know nothing more of Suckling's plays know that Aglaura enjoys the eccentric possession of two fifth acts, so that it can be made a tragedy or a tragi-comedy at pleasure. The Sad One, which is unfinished, is much better. The tragedy of Brennoralt has some pathos, some pretty scenes, and some charming songs; but here again we meet with the most inconceivably bad verse, as here—a passage all the more striking because of its attempt, wilful or unconscious, to echo Shakespere:—
Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if not at once of Hamlet and Othello, at any rate of Tamburlaine and Faustus.