Ziph. O hear mine too. If e’er I fail in aught
That love requires in strictest, nicest kind;
May I not only be proclaim’d a coward,
But be indeed that most detested thing.
May I, in this most glorious war I make,
Be beaten basely, ev’n by Glabrio’s slaves,
And for a punishment lose both these eyes;
Yet live and never more behold Semandra. [Trumpets.
Arch. Come, no more wishing; hark, the trumpets call.
Sem. Preserve him, Gods, preserve his innocence;
The noblest image of your perfect selves:
Farewell; I’m lost in tears. Where are you, Sir?
Arch. He’s gone. Away, my lord, you’ll never part.
Ziph. I go; but must turn back for one last look:
Remember, O remember, dear Semandra,
That on thy virtue all my fortune hangs;
Semandra is the business of the war,
Semandra makes the fight, draws every sword;
Semandra sounds the trumpets; gives the word.
So the moon charms her watery world below;
Wakes the still seas, and makes ’em ebb and flow.’
John Crowne (1640-1703?).
The remaining dramatists of the Restoration, with the exception of the brilliant group of comic authors near the end of the century, who demand a separate notice, undoubtedly belong to the class of playwrights. The most characteristic playwright of all, taking the term in the sense of a steady competent workman destitute of originality, was perhaps John Crowne. Crowne was the man to supply the playhouses with a regular output of respectable work, and, as he had no other object than to suit his market, we perhaps learn better from him and his like than from writers of genius what the public of the day required. It seems rather extraordinary that such heavy tragedies as Crowne’s should have been marketable in any age; but it must be considered that the tragic stage had to be kept going for the sake of the actors, and that if people would not have Shakespeare they must take what they could get. Indifferent plays, moreover, may make fine spectacles; and Crowne’s Julianas, Reguluses, and Caligulas served the purpose of habitual playgoers, that is, of playgoers from the force of habit, as well as better pieces.[7] The success of Crowne’s comedies is less difficult to understand. Here he really gave the public a fair reflection of itself, and exhibited contemporary manners with truth, if with no great brilliancy. On one occasion he soared higher, and (1685) created a real type in the exquisite coxcomb, Sir Courtly Nice. The rest of the play is partly imitated from the Spanish, but the character of Nice is Crowne’s own. The humour is considerably overdone, but is still a genuine piece of comedy, which culminates at the end, when the infuriated fop rushes from the stage, vowing to be avenged, ‘as far as my sword and my wit can go.’ The English Friar (1689), a satire on the Tartufes of the Roman Catholic persuasion, is also a remarkable piece, the parent of a long line of imitations. In City Politics (1673), Crowne’s first comedy, the Whig party in the City is held up to obloquy in the transparent disguise of a Neapolitan rabble, and the satire is keen and vivid. The Married Beau (1694) is remarkable as a reversion towards the style of Fletcher and Shirley. Calisto is an interesting attempt to revive the ancient masque. The only one of Crowne’s serious dramas entitled to much attention is Darius, where the poetry is frequently fine, but the characters are tame. Not much is known of his life. He appears to have been taken in youth to America, and to have returned by 1665, when he published a romance entitled Pandion and Amphigenia. His connection with the stage commenced in 1671 with Juliana, and terminated with Caligula in 1698. He would seem to have been a precise and matter-of-fact man, and is ridiculed by Rochester as ‘Little starch Johnny Crowne with his ironed cravat.’ He was fond of accompanying his plays with long prefaces and dedications, which throw some light on his opinions and private history, and, so far as they go, exhibit his disposition in an advantageous light. From one of them it appears that he suffered in his latter days from ‘a distemper seated in my head.’ His tantalizing gleams of talent as a lyrist have been already mentioned.
Thomas Southern (1660-1746).
Thomas Southern undoubtedly belonged to the genus playwright, and has none of the flashes of poetry which occasionally seem to exalt Crowne to a higher rank. His distinction rather arises from the financial success of his pieces, which was such that he died ‘the richest of all our poets, a very few excepted.’ For this, however, he is said to have been indebted not so much to the actual vogue of his pieces as to his assiduity in soliciting tickets. It is to be wished that he had been equally assiduous in collecting facts about Shakespeare, if, as is somewhat doubtfully asserted, his father came from Stratford-on-Avon. He was born at Dublin in 1660, and is said to have been a servitor at Oxford and a student at the Middle Temple. This he forsook for the army, but his service cannot have been of long duration. His first play, The Loyal Brother (1682), was designed to compliment the Duke of York upon the failure of the Exclusion Bill. He was not a very industrious writer, producing only ten plays down to 1726, and of these only two, The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroonoko (1696), had any considerable reputation even in his own day. Both, however, kept the stage until an advanced period of the nineteenth century. The diction of both pieces, though never rising into poetry, and interlarded with dull scenes intended to be comic, is by no means contemptible; the main strength, however, consists in the situations, which are really powerful, and in the writer’s art in arousing an interest both in his innocent and his mixed characters. Respected as a relic of the past, a decorous church-goer with silver hair, Southern lived far into the eighteenth century, and came sufficiently under its influence to repent of his mingling of tragic and comic action in the same piece; which indeed he had reason to regret, not because he had done it, but because he had not done it better.
Thomas Shadwell (1640-1692).