These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an artless mode, which, however, long continued to be the practice of our comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in his periodical paper, “The Lover,” condemned it as no better a device than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in this identical paper an old bachelor is called “Wildgoose,” and the presumed author of “The Lover” is Marmaduke “Myrtle.” Anstey has made the most happy use of characteristic names in the “Bath Guide,” which is an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever an author’s judgment equals the felicity of his invention.
Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity:—so true it is that the familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read or chanted is a metre which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined to have been within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries, whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has, therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also that the very measure of this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the decasyllabic measure have called it “a long hobbling metre,” has been actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with the design of reviving rhymed comedy.[7]
The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men. This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer’s name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College, was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle prepared by a scrivener’s hand, for our gay amourists then could not always compose, if they could write their billets-doux, being maliciously read to the lady, by purposely neglecting the punctuation, turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson, in his “Art of Logic,” gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we may have “a double sense and contrary meaning.” He fortunately added that his example was “taken out of an interlude made by Nicholas Udall.”
This was the learned Udall, the Master of Eton School; and this very comedy had been so universally admired, that “Roister-Doister” became a proverbial phrase to designate a hair-brained coxcomb. We now possess two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English people in rural and in city life by two contemporaries, who wanted not the art of “holding the mirror up to nature.”
[1] “A Moral and Pitiful Comedie,” entitled, “All for Money,” &c., by T. Lupton, 1578. In the prologue the author calls it “A Pleasant Tragedy.”
[2] The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley’s “Old Plays.”
[3] Warton has analysed this drama in his “History of English Poetry,” vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and Hawkins.
[4] This our first tragedy, Ferrex and Porrex, offers a striking evidence of our literary knowledge. Dryden, alluding to it, refers to a spurious copy published under the title of Gorboduc but he could not have seen it, for he calls it Queen Gorboduc, whereas he is King; and he appears to think that it was written in rhyme; and notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope requested Spence to reprint Gorboduc, they were so little cognisant of these matters, that the spurious and defective Gorboduc was printed instead of the genuine Ferrex and Porrex. This ignorance of our ancient writers lasted to a later period.