This our first tragedy attracted by its classical form the approval of some great moderns. Rymer, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on tragedy, was astonished to find “such a classical fable on this side the Alps,” which, he plainly tells us, “might have been a better direction to Shakspeare and Jonson than any which they had the luck to follow.” And Pope was not the less struck by the chaste style and the decorum of Sackville, who having several murders in his tragedy, veiled them from the public eye; conforming to the great Horatian canon, they are told, and not viewed in the representation. Pope in conversation declared, too, that Sackville wrote in a much purer style than Shakspeare in his first plays, without affectation and bombast! and he has delivered a more formal decision in print. “The writers of the succeeding age might have improved as much in other respects by copying from Sackville, from a propriety in the sentiments and dignity in the sentences, and an unaffected perspicuity of style, which all the succeeding poets, not excepting Shakspeare himself, either little understood or perpetually neglected.”
These are edicts from the school of classical antiquity. It was on the earnest recommendation of Pope that Spence published an edition of this tragedy, which had accidentally been put into the hands of Pope by the father of the Wartons. Our vernacular writers, even the greatest, were almost unknown in that day, and they only accidentally occurred.[4]
Spence, a feeble classical critic, was so overcome by the notion that “a privy-counsellor” must be more versant in the language and the feelings of royalty than a plebeian poet, that in his preface pointing out “the stately speeches,” he exclaimed in ecstasy—“’Tis no wonder if the language of kings and statesmen should be less happily imitated by a poet than a privy-counsellor.” To vindicate Shakspeare, at whom this unguarded blow seemed levelled, the historian of our poetry, seated in his professorial chair, flung his lightning on the impious critic. “Whatever merit there is in this play, and particularly in the speeches, it is more owing to the poet than the privy-counsellor. If a first minister was to write a tragedy, I believe the piece will be the better the less it has of the first minister. When a statesman turns poet, I should not wish him to fetch his ideas or his language from the cabinet. I know not why a king should be better qualified than a private man to make kings talk in blank verse.”
Literary history would have supplied the positive fact. Cardinal Richelieu, that great minister, wrote a memorable tragedy; and, in accordance with his own familiar notions, the minister called it Europe. It was written in the style of “a privy-counsellor,” and it was hissed! while Corneille, who wrote as a poet, for the national theatre, composed sentiments which statesmen got by heart.
Our literary antiquaries long doted on the first English comedy—Gammer Gurton’s Needle—being a regular comedy in five acts in rhyme. The rusticity of the materials is remarkable. A diligent crone, darning the lower habiliments of Hodge, loses her needle—
| A little thing, with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller (silver), Small, long, sharp at the point, and straight as any piller. |
Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is since Birmingham flourished, we had not had such a pointed and polished description. In fact, the loss of the Gammer’s needle sets the whole village in flames; the spark falling from the mischievous waggery of a Tom o’ Bedlam in an artful insinuation against a certain gossip notable for the luxuriance of her grotesque invectives. Dame Chat is a scold, whose curses and oaths neither the fish-market nor Shakspeare himself could have gone beyond. Brawls and battles involve the justice, the curate, and the devil himself, in their agency. The prime author of all the mischief produces the catastrophe; for he contrives to make Hodge extract from a part more tender than his heart the cause of so much discord, with great risk to its point and straightness; and the parties conclude—
For Gammer Gurton’s needle’s sake let us have a PLAUDITE!
The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest comedy in our language, the titlepage informs us was Mr. S——, Master of Arts; and, moreover, that it was acted at the University of Cambridge. When afterwards it was ascertained that Mr. S—— was no less a person than John Still, subsequently Bishop of Bath and Wells, it did not diminish the number of its admirers. The black-letter brotherhood were long enamoured of this most ancient comedy, as a genuine beauty of the infancy of the drama. Dodsley and Hawkins enshrined Gammer Gurton’s Needle in their “Reliquary;” and literary superstition