Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their mutual celebrities.[12] Could we penetrate into the recesses of the theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous. Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated, subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so, till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of Dido, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an “invective” against proud “Ben,” and when Anthony Munday, a copious playwright, was hailed by a critic as “the best plotter,” Jonson, in his next play, ridiculed “the best plotter.” Can we forget that in Eastward Hoe, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence Hogarth borrowed the hint of his “Idle and Industrious Apprentices,” by Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed? It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.
Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were skilful Greek scholars.[13] How then did it happen, that not one of these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a sudden revolution in the dramatic art.
Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has delivered himself,—
| ————They would have GOOD PLAYS, and not produce Such musty fopperies of antiquity; Which do not suit the humorous age’s back, With clothes in fashion. |
It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors, for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, more suo, mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass away!
Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, “to avoid stuffing it with baggage-books;” but more particularly objected to “English Plays, as unlike those of other nations, which are esteemed for learning the languages; and many of them,” he adds, “are compiled by men of great wisdom and learning.”
The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On the principle Bodley rejected our English plays he also condemned our English philosophy; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a good-humoured menace of “a cogitation against Libraries,” which must have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with excellent truth described himself as “the carrier’s horse which cannot blench the beaten way in which I was trained.”
In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very “English plays,” would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes, their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and their religion; and what most would have astonished our great bibliophile, that collectors like himself, presuming on “their wisdom and learning,” would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to edit “these baggage-books of English plays,” and above all, that foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of these bold originals.
By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in “the Romantic” school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which would be less ambiguous if considered as “the Gothic.”[14] At the time when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe, without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.[15] This literary phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was occurring.