It is remarkable that Boccaccio has entitled his pastoral of “Ameto” a “Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine.” It is difficult to imagine that the almost contemporaneous commentator would have misused the word; we might presume he attached the idea of a drama to this disputed term.
While these indistinct notions of tragedy and comedy were prevalent with us, even long after we had a public theatre, we really possessed tragedy and comedy in their more classical form; Tragedy, which soared to the sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and Terence.
We owe this first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who planned The Mirror for Magistrates, and left as its model The Induction. Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he anticipated the grave melodious stanza and the picturing invention of Spenser. But called away from the land of the muses to the political cabinet, this fine genius seems repeatedly to have consigned his works to the hands of others; even his lighter productions are still concealed from us in their anonymous condition. As in The Mirror for Magistrates Sackville had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, or, as it was sometimes entitled, The Tragedy of Gorboduc, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet the titlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor in Thomas Norton, who, as much as we know of him in other things, was a worthy partner of Sternhold and Hopkins.
In this first tragedy in our language, cast in the mould of classical antiquity, we find a division of scenes and a progressive plot carried on, though somewhat heavily, through five acts; the ancient ethical choruses are preserved, changing their metres with rhyme. And here, for the first time, blank verse was recited on the stage. Notwithstanding these novel refinements, our first tragedy bears a strong impress of ancient simplicity. Every act was preceded by “a dumb show,” prefiguring the incidents of the opening act; these scenical displays of something considered to be analogous to the matter were remains of the pageants.
Blank verse, which the Earl of Surrey had first invented for his version of Virgil, the Earl of Dorset now happily applied to the dramatic dialogue. To both these noblemen our poets owe their emancipation from rhyme; but the rhythmical artifices of blank verse were not discovered in the monotonous, uncadenced lines of its inventors. The happiest inventor does not overcome all difficulties.
Sackville, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his Induction; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable; his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by those not versed in ancient lore. The political part of the tragedy is not destitute of interest; developing the misery of fraternal wars, the division of sovereign power, each contending for dominion, and closing in the dissolution of all government, by the despair of a people. We have ourselves witnessed in these times a similar scene of the enmity of brothers and monarchs.
A political anecdote confining this tragedy is worth recording. In the discussions of the dangers and mischiefs of such a state of insubordination, the poet, adopting the prevalent notions of the divine right and the authority of “the absolute king,” inculcates the doctrine of passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition, were silently removed from the later ones.[2] It is an evidence that these dreary principles, which in the following reigns of James and Charles produced such fatal misunderstandings, even at this time began to be questioned. Our poet, however, under the reckless councils of a court minion, had covered the severest satire on those monarchs who rage with “the lust of kingdoms,” and “subject to no law,” and who hold their enormous will to be the privilege of regal power. Sackville seems to have adopted the principle which Machiavel had artfully managed in his “Prince,” in the spirit of damning irony.
There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this drama,[3] that it has given rise to a suspicion that the work could only be the composition of one mind and one ear. It is not in the constitution of the human intellect that Norton could emulate Sackville, or that Sackville could bring himself down to Norton. This internal evidence struck Warton; and tracing it by The Mirror for Magistrates, the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of Gorboduc are visibly marked with the greater poet’s characteristics, “in a perspicuity of style and a command of numbers superior to the tone of his times.” The name of Norton affixed to the titlepage might only indicate his management of the pageants! and possibly, being a licenser of books and a puritan, even his name might be a recommendation of this drama, for certain persons. Few things in those days were more loosely conducted than the business and the artifices of printers, who generally procured their copies surreptitiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their own free management and deceptive titlepages.
We must not decide on the first tragedy by a comparison with the more attractive and impassioned ones which soon afterwards inundated our theatres. The court-circle had never before listened to such an amazing novelty; and the poetic critic of that day pronounced that “those stately speeches and well-sounding phrases were full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach.” Sir Philip Sidney only grieved that this tragedy might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies, being “faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions.” Sidney did not live to witness the code of Aristotle impugned, and his unities set at defiance, by a swarm of dramatic bees, whose wild music and native sweetness were in their own humming and their own honey.