The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

§ 10

The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature movement of scholarship, a product of classical study and reflection, yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More's Utopia. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind passion of normal life,[1086] and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an age in which blind passion was still plenipotent. More's mind had ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly instructive than any Hamlet. The serene spirit that dreamed and planned the Utopia grew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic fanaticism on a level with the normal passions of the time.[1087] It is matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English life,[1088] a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and enveloped by a temperament kept passionate by the shocks of an animal environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and passion and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away through portrait after portrait to puberty and death, the victim of some secret malady.

Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the national culture proceed. It went on naïvely, being for long neither Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit; the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters than of organised class oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort, books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists. No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new lines.

The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay. Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest, bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the power and passion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no progress complementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace. That was essentially a late rebirth of the classic or bookish culture of the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as the élite of the previous generation had digested classicism; and the Protestant principle led the Protestant peoples in the mass into the very attitude needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar. Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests. Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the Protestant nobles identified the new Church with upper-class selfishness as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549 avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out in massacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of Presbyterian theory among the educated class which the ecclesiastical conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity shifted towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and worship were not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other grounds.

The decadence of English poetic drama after the death of Shakespeare is one of the themes which elicit illustrations of the snares of empirical sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He pronounces that by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an enthusiastic patriotism, ennobling human life, so far at least as Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (Francis Beaumont, 1883, p. 187).

Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy as Ralph Roister Doister, and by the stilted tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his powers, not in patriotic plays, but in Tamburlaine, followed by The Jew of Malta, and Faustus. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on English history was Marlowe's Edward II, in which there was and could be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode in Edward III stands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose best complete play, James IV, turns on fictitious Scottish history, and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele's Edward I is inferior as a whole to his David and Bethsabe. Kyd made his successes, literary or theatrical, with The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Feversham, and the original Hamlet. Shakespeare's best work, from the start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, from Romeo and Juliet onwards. These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. And Henry V, which had, is not a great play.

The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by noblemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and playwrights, and of profit for entrepreneurs. Greene and Peele, and Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw." The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all imitated him. Orlando Furioso, Selimus, Alphonsus King of Arragon, David and Bethsabe, and even The Battle of Alcazar, have nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play on the Armada.

It is pure supererogation, then, to argue that "everything had been done by the first Stuart king to cool down patriotism, and to diminish the self-respect and pride of Englishmen; while at the same time, by his insolent hitherto unheard-of (?) divine-right pretensions, he alarmed them for their political liberties, and by his ecclesiastical policy he exasperated theological controversy; thus contriving, both in politics and in religion, to destroy unity and foster party spirit to an extent which had been unknown for nearly half-a-century. The condition of things," adds Mr. Macaulay, "was unfavourable to everything national, and above all things to the national drama, which became rather the amusement of the idle than the embodiment of a popular enthusiasm." Need it be pointed out that all of Shakespeare's greatest work, after Hamlet, which was anything but "national," was produced after the accession of James? What had popular enthusiasm to do with Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale?

The really explanatory factors are (1) the economic, (2) the trend of popular culture. Shakespeare alone of the dramatists of his day made anything like a good income; and he did so in virtue of being an actor and a prudent partner in the proprietorship of his theatre. Kyd, Greene, and Peele all died in misery; and Marlowe must have lived his short life from hand to mouth. Jonson subsisted chiefly by his masques and by the gifts of patrons, and by his own avowal was always poor. Chapman can have fared no better. The concurrence of the abnormal genius of Shakespeare with his gift of commercial management is one of the rarest things in literary history: take that away, and the problem of the "decadence" is seen to be merely part of the statement of the "rise." When men of superior power, taught by the past, ceased to defy poverty by writing for the theatre—and even the vogue of Fletcher and Massinger represented no solid monetary success—plays could less than ever appeal to the "serious" and sectarian sections of the London public. Popular culture ran on the sterile lines of pietism, Puritanism, and the strifes engendered between these and sacerdotalism. All this had begun long before James, though he may have promoted the evolution. Literary art perforce turned to other forms. A successful national war could no more have regenerated the drama than the wars of Henry V could generate it. There was plenty of "national enthusiasm" later, in the periods of Marlborough and Chatham: there was no great drama; and the new fiction had as little to do with patriotism as had Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was not inspired by his politics.

It is well to recognise, finally, that in the nature of things æsthetic, every artistic convention must in time be "played out," the law of variation involving deviations or recoils. Blank-verse drama is a specially limited convention, which only great genius can vitalise. Even in this connection, however, there is danger in a priori theorising. Mr. Macaulay quotes from Schlegel the generalisation that "in the commencement of a degeneracy in the dramatic art, the spectators first lose the capability of judging of a play as a whole"; hence "the harmony of the composition, and the due proportion between all the various parts is apt to be neglected, and the flagging interest is stimulated by scenes of horror or strange and startling incidents." The implication is that the Jacobean drama degenerated in this way. Again the facts are opposed to the thesis. If we are to believe Shakespeare and Jonson and Beaumont, the audiences never appreciated plays as wholes. Scenes of "comic relief," utterly alien to the action, come in as early as Locrine. Scenes of physical and moral horror, again, abound in the pre-Shakespearean drama: in The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham, in David and Bethsabe, in Titus Andronicus (a pre-Shakespearean atrocity), in Selimus and Tancred and Gismunda, and Alphonsus Emperor of Germany (a Greene-Peele play wrongly ascribed to Chapman), they are multiplied ad nauseam. Rapes, assassinations, incest, tearing-out of eyes and cutting-off of hands, the kissing of a husband's excised heart by his wife, the unwitting eating of her children's flesh by a mother, the dashing out of a child's brains by its grandfather—such are among the flowers of the Elizabethan time. On Schlegel's theory, there was degeneration before there was success. Webster's "horrors" do not seem to have won him great vogue; and Ford's neurotic products had no great popularity. Doubtless weak performers tend to resort to violent devices; but they did so before Shakespeare; and Shakespeare did not stick at trifles in Lear and Othello.