[1298] Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury, 1598, has a passage of some value in determining the age of Shakspeare’s plays, both by what it contains, and by what it omits. “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour Lost, his Love’s Labour Won [the original appellation of All’s Well that Ends Well], his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II., his Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.” Drake, ii. 287.
As You Like It. 51. The sweet and sportive temper of Shakspeare, though it never deserted him, gave way to advancing years, and to the mastering force of serious thought. What he read we know but very imperfectly; yet, in the last years of this century, when five and thirty summers had ripened his genius, it seems that he must have transfused much of the wisdom of past ages into his own all-combining mind. In several of the historical plays, in the Merchant of Venice, and especially in As You Like It, the philosophic eye, turned inward on the mysteries of human nature, is more and more characteristic; and we might apply to the last comedy the bold figure that Coleridge has less appropriately employed as to the early poems, that “the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace.” In no other play, at least, do we find the bright imagination and fascinating grace of Shakspeare’s youth so mingled with the thoughtfulness of his maturer age. This play is referred with reasonable probability to the year 1600. Few comedies of Shakspeare are more generally pleasing, and its manifold improbabilities do not much affect us in perusal. The brave injured Orlando, the sprightly but modest Rosalind, the faithful Adam, the reflecting Jaques, the serene and magnanimous Duke, interest us by turns, though the play is not so well managed as to condense our sympathy, and direct it to the conclusion.
Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. 52. The comic scenes of Shakspeare had generally been drawn from novels, and laid in foreign lands. But several of our earliest plays, as has been partly seen, delineate the prevailing manners of English life. None had acquired a reputation which endured beyond their own time till Ben Jonson in 1596 produced, at the age of twenty-two, his first comedy, Every Man in His Humour; an extraordinary monument of early genius, in what is seldom the possession of youth, a clear and unerring description of human character, various, and not extravagant beyond the necessities of the stage. He had learned the principles of comedy no doubt, from Plautus and Terence; for they were not to be derived from the moderns at home or abroad; but he could not draw from them the application of living passions and manners; and it would be no less unfair, as Gifford has justly observed, to make Bobadil a copy of Thraso, than to deny the dramatic originality of Kitely.
53. Every Man in his Humour is perhaps the earliest of European domestic comedies that deserves to be remembered; for the Mandragola of Machiavel shrinks to a mere farce in comparison.[1299] A much greater master of comic powers than Jonson was indeed his contemporary, and, as he perhaps fancied, his rival; but for some reason, Shakspeare had never yet drawn his story from the domestic life of his countrymen. Jonson avoided the common defect of the Italian and Spanish theatre, the sacrifice of all other dramatic objects to one only, a rapid and amusing succession of incidents; his plot is slight and of no great complexity; but his excellence is to be found in the variety of his characters, and in their individuality very clearly defined with little extravagance.
[1299] This would not have been approved by a modern literary historian. Quelle etait, avant que Molière parût et même de son temps, la comedie moderne comparable à la Calandria, à la Mandragore, aux meilleures pieces de l’Arioste, à celles de l’Aretin, du Cecchi, du Lasca, du Bentivoglio, de Francesco D’Ambra, et de tant d’autres? Ginguéné,vi. 316. This comes of deciding before we know anything of the facts. Ginguéné might possibly be able to read English, but certainly had no sort of acquaintance with the English theatre. I should have no hesitation in replying that we could produce at least forty comedies, before the age of Molière, superior to the best of those he has mentioned, and perhaps three times that number as good as the worst.
CHAPTER XVI.
HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE FROM 1550 TO 1600.
Sect. I.
Style of best Italian Writers—Those of France—England.