Evelyn is a literary man, whose judgment has its value; and assuredly, he records the taste of the court-circle. In 1661 he saw “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played; but now, the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty has been so long abroad.” Pepys, his contemporary, was a play-haunter: and how he relished The Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all its beautiful fancy, appears by his firm opinion, that “it was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.” Macbeth, though “a deep tragedy, had a strange perfection in a divertisement;” that is, Macbeth was Davenant’s opera, with music and dancing. But Pepys read Othello, and we have his deliberate notion; “but having lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, Othello seemed a mean thing!” It is clear from these, and there are other as remarkable instances, that their ideas of the drama had wholly changed; that Nature and Fancy had retired from the stage to give precedence to what are called “Heroic Tragedy,” and comedies of Intrigue.
Shakespeare’s plays, in a great measure, were banished the stage; but we may presume that Shakespeare still preserved some readers, though not critical ones, for four years after the Restoration the third edition of Shakespeare in 1664, with seven additional dramas, one of which, The Yorkshire Tragedy, had been printed with his name in his lifetime, was given to the world.
Leaving the theatre, and its moody humours of the populace, let us turn to those who think in their closet. How did such critics arbitrate? We can have no judge more able than the learned author of “Hudibras,”—“The quickest apprehensions, and aptest geniuses to anything they undertake, do not always prove the greatest masters in it, for there is more patience and phlegm required in those that attain to any degree of perfection, than is commonly found in the temper of active and ready wits that soon tire, and will not hold out.” Butler instances Virgil, who wanting much of that natural easiness of wit that Ovid had, “did, nevertheless, with hard labour and long study, arrive at a higher perfection, than the other, with all his dexterity of wit, but less industry, could attain to. The same we may observe of Jonson and Shakespeare, for he that is able to think long and judge well, will be sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly, though of more quick and ready parts; which is commonly but CHANCE, and the other wit and judgment.”[16]
After this long extract, it is quite evident that with a predilection for Shakespeare, alive at times to his true touches of nature, Butler could not at that day take a comprehensive view of the faculties of the great bard. What we deem his intuitive faculty seemed but “chance” that could only “hit suddenly;” that prodigality of genius, the marvels which modern criticism has revealed to its initiated—was an advent—the day had not yet come! Butler perceived the electrical strokes of Shakespeare; but the mental shadowings—and the oneness—which rose together in the creation of a Macbeth, a Hamlet, a Lear, was a philosophical result, which probably no one had yet dreamed of.
If the genius of Shakespeare were neglected, it was also destined to be arraigned and condemned.
Critical learning was yet new in our literature; it had taken its birth in Italy, among a crowd of philosophers, rhetoricians and philologists, busied in developing the true principles of every species of literary composition. The academy Della Crusca was a tribunal, and the “Poetic of Aristotle,” commented on by the renowned Castelvetro, was a code, which was chiefly directed to the dramatic art. Our airy neighbours, whose national theatre at its beginning had much resembled our own in its freedom and originality, at the erection of the famous French Academy, evidently in imitation of the Cruscan, with the great cardinal at its head, surrendered to the Greeks and to Aristotle. Everything now was to be as it had been, and every work, whatever might be its genius, was to be strictly modelled by certain arbitrary decisions; and all tragedies were to be written according to the humour of that ancient people, the Greeks, with their choruses,—and regulated by the severe unities of time and place and action! Bossu set down his prescriptions to compound an Epic, and Père Rapin, in his “Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry,” dictated “Universal Rules” for all sorts of poetry. Rymer, the collector of our Fœdera, in his earlier days, was an excellent scholar, and cultivated elegant literature. He translated this very work of Père Rapin, to which he prefixed an ingenious critical preface on comparative poetry. Enraptured by Grecian tragedy, and vivacious with French criticism, and moreover sanguine with an elevated conception of a certain forthcoming tragedy, which was to appear “a faultless piece” among our own monstrous dramas, Rymer grasped the new and formidable weapon of modern criticism. Armed at all points with a Grecian helmet and a Gallic lance, this literary Quixote sallied forth to attack all the giants, or the windmills, of the English theatre.
Now appeared “The Tragedies of the Last Age examined by the Practice of the Ancients. 1678.” This explosion entirely fell on three of Fletcher’s plays.[17] This critical bomb was learned and lively. The court, and consequently the popular, tastes were classical or Gallic; Rymer haunted St. James’s, and soon became one of “their majesties’ servants.” He had formed the most elevated conception of the dramatic art, and that tragedy was a poem for kings; and he tells, that the poets who first brought tragedy to perfection were made viceroys.
“The poetry of the last age,” the age of Elizabeth, he considered was “rude as our architecture,” and he detected the cause in our utter “neglect of the Poetic of Aristotle, on which all the great men in Italy had commented, before on this side of the Alps we knew of the existence of such a book.”
This critic-poet,—for unluckily for Aristotle, Rymer resolved on being both,—had a notion that “though it be not necessary that all heroes should be kings, yet undoubtedly all crowned heads should be heroes;” this was a prerogative of the crown never to be invaded by any parliament of poets. This passive obedience in the critical art was perfume in “the royalty” of a dedication to Charles the Second, preparatory of the writer’s own legitimate tragedy of Edgar, or the English Monarch, in rhymed verse; and the first inroad of his critical demolition was to expose “the barbarisms” of Milton’s blank! Rymer was as intrepid as he was enterprising. He composed his tragedy on the principles which he advocated, and the result was precisely what happened to the Abbé d’Aubignac, who wrote on the same system. Undoubtedly, he congratulated himself on the perfection of the clockwork machinery of his legitimate drama, where he had inviolably preserved the unities, for the action begins about one o’clock at noon, and the catastrophe closes at ten at night! He would have been right by “Shrewsbury clock.” To the audience, however, the “long hour” might have seemed much longer than the delightful Winter’s Tale of Shakespeare, which includes the events of twenty years!