“Yes,” adds the clown, “and ginger shall be hot in the mouth, too.” And “wives may be merry and yet honest,” asserts Mistress Page.
It is not without astonishment that one finds Emerson writing, “To this antique heroism Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity . . . laying its chief stress on humility.” Milton had a zeal for righteousness, a noble purity and noble pride. But if you look for saintly humility, for the spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus, the spirit of charity and forgiveness, look for them in the Anglican Herbert, not in the Puritan Milton. Humility was no fruit of the system which Calvin begot and which begot John Knox. The Puritans were great invokers of the sword of the Lord and of Gideon—the sword of Gideon and the dagger of Ehud. There went a sword out of Milton’s mouth against the enemies of Israel, a sword of threatenings, the wrath of God upon the ungodly. The temper of his controversial writings is little short of ferocious. There was not much in him of that “sweet reasonableness” which Matthew Arnold thought the distinctive mark of Christian ethics. He was devout, but not with the Christian devoutness. I would not call him a Christian at all, except, of course, in his formal adherence to the creed of Christianity. Very significant is the inferiority of “Paradise Regained” to “Paradise Lost.” And in “Paradise Lost” itself, how weak and faint is the character of the Saviour! You feel that he is superfluous, that the poet did not need him. He is simply the second person of the Trinity, the executive arm of the Godhead; and Milton is at pains to invent things for him to do—to drive the rebellious angels out of heaven, to preside over the six days’ work of creation, etc. I believe it was Thomas Davidson who said that in “Paradise Lost” “Christ is God’s good boy.”
We are therefore not unprepared to discover, from Milton’s “Treatise of Christian Doctrine,” that he had laid aside the dogma of vicarious sacrifice and was, in his last years, a Unitarian. It was this Latin treatise, translated and published in 1824, which called out Macaulay’s essay, so urbanely demolished by Matthew Arnold, and which was triumphantly reviewed by Dr. Channing in the North American. It was lucky for Dr. Channing, by the way, that he lived in the nineteenth century and not in the seventeenth. Two Socinians, Leggatt and Wightman, were burned at the stake as late as James the First’s reign, one at Lichfield and the other at Smithfield.
Milton, then, does not belong with those broadly human, all tolerant, impartial artists, who reflect, with equal sympathy and infinite curiosity, every phase of life: with Shakespeare and Goethe or, on a lower level, with Chaucer and Montaigne; but with the intense, austere and lofty souls whose narrowness is likewise their strength. His place is beside Dante, the Catholic Puritan.
| [7] | Mr. Charles Francis Adams informs me that a letter of inquiry sent by him to the Evening Post has brought out three or four references to Milton in the “Magnalia,” besides other allusions to him in the publications of the period. Mr. Adams adds, however, that there is nothing to show that “Paradise Lost” was much read in New England prior to 1750. The “Magnalia” was published in 1702. |
SHAKESPEARE’S CONTEMPORARIES
THE one contribution of the Elizabethan stage to the literature of the world is the plays of Shakespeare. It seems unaccountable to us to-day that the almost infinite superiority of his work to that of all his contemporaries was not recognized in his own lifetime. There is frequent mention in the literature of his time, of “the excellent dramatic writer, Master Wm. Shakespeare” and usually in the way of praise, but in the same category with other excellent dramatic writers, like Jonson, Chapman, Webster, and Beaumont, and with no apparent suspicion that he is in a quite different class from these, and forms indeed a class by himself—is sui generis. In explanation of this blindness it should be said, first that time is required to give the proper perspective to literary values, and secondly that there is an absence of critical documents from the Elizabethan period. There were no reviews or book notices or literary biographies. A man in high place who was incidentally an author, a great philosopher and statesman like Bacon, a diplomatist and scholar like Sir Henry Wotton, a bishop or a learned divine, like Sanderson, Donne or Herbert, might be thought worthy to have his life recorded. But a mere man of letters—still more a mere playwriter—was not entitled to a biography. Nowadays every writer of fair pretensions has his literary portrait in the magazines. His work is criticized, assayed, analyzed; and as soon as he is dead, his life and letters appear in two volumes. We do not know what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought of him, except for a few complimentary verses, and a few brief notices scattered through the miscellaneous books and pamphlets of the time; and these in no wise characterize or distinguish him, or set him apart from the crowd of fellow playwrights, from among whom he has since so thoroughly emerged. Aside from the almost universal verdict of posterity that Shakespeare is one of the greatest, if not actually the greatest literary genius of all time, there are two testimonies to his continued vitality. One of these is the fact that his plays have never ceased to be played. At least twenty of his plays still belong to the acted drama. Several of the others, less popular, are revived from time to time. We do not often have a chance in England or America to see “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Measure for Measure,” or “Richard II”—all pieces of the highest intellectual interest—to see them behind the footlights. But all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays are given annually in Germany. Indeed, the Germans claim to have appropriated Shakespeare and to have made him their own.
Now the only seventeenth century play outside of Shakespeare which still keeps the stage is Massinger’s comedy, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” This has frequently been given in America, with artists like Edwin Booth and E. L. Davenport in the leading rôle, Sir Giles Overreach. A number of the plays of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and perhaps other Elizabethan dramatists continued to be played down to the middle of the eighteenth century, and a few of them as late as 1788. Fletcher’s comedy, “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,” was acted in 1829; and Dekker’s “Old Fortunatus”[[8]] enjoyed a run of twelve performances in 1819. But these were sporadic revivals. Professor Gayley concludes that of the two hundred and fifty comedies, exclusive of Shakespeare’s, produced between 1600 and 1625, “only twenty-six survived upon the stage in the middle of the eighteenth century: in 1825, five; and after 1850, but one,—‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts,’—while at the present-day no fewer than sixteen out of Shakespeare’s seventeen comedies are fixtures upon the stage.” Now and then a favorite Elizabethan play like Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” or Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” or Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” is presented by amateurs before a college audience or a dramatic club, or some other semi-private bunch of spectators. Middleton’s “Spanish Gipsy” was thus presented in 1898 before the Elizabethan Stage Society and was rather roughly handled by the newspaper critics. But these are literary curiosities and mean something very different from the retention of a play on the repertoire of the professional public theatres. It is a case of revival, not of survival.
But even if Shakespeare’s plays should cease to be shown,—a thing by no means impossible, since theatrical conditions change,—they would never cease to be read. Already he has a hundred readers for one spectator. And one proof of this eternity of fame is the extent to which his language has taken possession of the English tongue. In Bartlett’s “Dictionary of Quotations” there are over one hundred and twenty pages of citations from Shakespeare, including hundreds of expressions which are in daily use and are as familiar as household words. These include not merely maxims and sentences universally current, such as “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “The course of true love never did run smooth,” “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” but detached phrases: “wise saws and modern instances,” “a woman’s reason,” “the sere, the yellow leaf,” “damnable iteration,” “sighing like a furnace,” “the funeral baked meats,” “the primrose path of dalliance,” “a bright, particular star,” “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily,” “the bubble reputation,” “Richard’s himself again,” “Such stuff as dreams are made on.” There is only one other book—the English Bible—which has so wrought itself into the very tissue of our speech. This is not true of the work of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists. I cannot, at the moment, recall any words of theirs that have this stamp of universal currency except Christopher Marlowe’s “Love me little, so you love me long.” Coleridge prophesied that the works of the other Elizabethan playwrights would in time be reduced to notes on Shakespeare: i.e., they would be used simply to illustrate or explain difficult passages in Shakespeare’s text. This is an extreme statement and I cannot believe it true. For the dramas of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, and many others will never lack readers, though they will find them not among general readers, but among scholars, men of letters, and those persons, not so very few in number, who have a strong appetite for plays of all kinds. Moreover, vast as is the distance between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, historically he was one of them. The stage was his occasion, his opportunity. Without the Elizabethan theatre there would have been no Shakespeare. Let us seek to get some idea, then, of what this Elizabethan drama was, which formed the Shakespearean background and environment. Of course, in the short space at my disposal, I cannot take up individual authors, still less individual plays. I shall have to give a very general outline of the matter as a whole.