Out of such entertainments there soon developt a kind of comedy, at first the peculiar property of the children of the royal choirs who performed at court, but soon adapting itself to the adult companies and public theaters. This comedy availed itself of any stories that might come to hand, so they were strange, unusual, marvelous, impossible enough, and accompanied them with music, dancing, and spectacle, and with lively jests in the mouth of the smallest boys, dressed as pages.
Endymion in love with the moon, the judgment of Paris, Pandora and her varied actions under the seven planets, the rival magic of Friars Bacon and Bungay, Jack the Giant Killer, Alexander the Great in love with Campaspe who preferred Apelles—these are some of the themes. Astrologers, Amazons, fairies, sirens, witches, ghosts, are some of the personages who appear along with the singing pages and Olympian deities. Of course, these persons and these marvels are impossible on any stage, most of all by daylight in the roofless public theaters of Shakspere’s London. But neither audience nor dramatist thought of impossibility. They tried everything on their stage, even their wonderlands.
When Shakspere began to write plays, the stage was well used to romance. It was the comedies of Lyly and Greene, with their beautiful and unselfish maidens, their wonders and shows, their witty dialogs and jesters, their lovers’ crosses and final happiness, their Utopias and fairies, which prepared the way for Shakspere’s ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost,’ and for his great series of romantic plays from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to ‘Twelfth Night.’ But by 1600, both dramatists and audiences had become somewhat sophisticated and tired of romance, and the theaters turned to plays of a different fashion, to tragedies that searched the ways of crime and punishment, and to comedies that treated contemporary folly and vice with realism and satire. From the date of ‘Twelfth Night,’ 1601, to that of ‘Cymbeline,’ 1609, it is difficult to find a romantic-comedy on the London stage. There are no more marvels and magic, no charming princesses disguised as pages, no moonlit forests and terraces, no rescues and reconciliations, not much sentiment and no fun except what may be found on the seamy side of reality. Shakspere seems to have had little taste for satire and he wrote no satirical and realistic plays of the sort temporarily in fashion. But during these eight years, his comedies, like ‘Measure for Measure,’ have no romantic charm, and his energies are given to tragedy. He is occupied with the pomp and majesty of human hope and with the inevitable waste and failure of human achievement; but for his Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus and the rest, there were no forests of Arden and no enchanted islands. Like his associates, he seems to have forsaken romance.
What turned his imagination from tragedy back to romance? In my opinion it was the success of two brilliant young dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, who, in a series of remarkable dramas made romance again popular on the London stage. Their romantic plays employ many of the old incidents and personages, but in general character differ strikingly from the plays of a decade or two earlier. They are hardly comedies at all, tho they have their humorous passages, but tragedies and tragi-comedies dealing with more thrilling circumstances and less naive wonderments than the earlier plays. Instead of a combination of romance and comedy, they aim at a contrast of the tragic and idyllic. They oppose a story of sexual passion with one of idealized sentiment, and delight in a succession of thrills as by clever stagecraft they hurry us from one suspense into another surprise. Until the very end you can scarcely guess whether it will be tragic or happy. Their land of romance is somewhat artificial and theatrical; but yet it has as of old its adventures, dangers, escapes, rescues, jealousies, suspicions, reconciliations and re-unions. And it has its idyls of forests, and fountains of love-lorn maidens and enraptured princes. It is a land of thrills and surprises, but also of idealization and poetry. For in all that choir of poets who wrote for the London theaters there was no one except Shakspere who could excel these young dramatists in their power to turn the affairs and emotions of mankind into copious verse, now tumultuous, now placid, but always bubbling with fancy and flowing melodiously.
If Shakspere’s mind was directed again to romantic themes and situations by the success of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, the clearest evidence of his indebtedness to them is to be found in his ‘Cymbeline’, which has many marked similarities to their ‘Philaster’. In his two plays which follow, the ‘Winter’s Tale’ and the ‘Tempest’, there is no detailed resemblance to the romantic tragic-comedies of the younger men. Shakspere, as well as they, had the whole tradition of romantic drama to draw from, and in particular he had his own past practice. He did not need to be shown how to depict romantic love, or charming heroines, or ardent suitors. For drinking scenes, like those of Trinculo and Stephano, or for dialog like that not very witty one of Gonzalo and the courtiers, he had many passages in his own plays that served as guides. Moreover, if ‘Cymbeline’ is an example of only partially successful experimentation with new methods, the ‘Winter’s Tale,’ and still more, the ‘Tempest,’ seem to me triumphant and unguided excursions of his own in the new field. But I think that Shakspere was attracted to this field by contemporary stage-successes, and that in seeking for novel and invented plots, in the contrast of tragic and idyllic elements, in the unusual and rapidly shifting situations, in the loose and parenthetical style, and in the elaboration of the dénouement, he was adapting himself to the new formulas and fashions in which Beaumont and Fletcher were the leaders.
Still another suggestion came from the theater, but this time from the court. The court shows of the sort which we have noticed as characteristic of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign had given place to a better ordered and more sumptuous spectacle, the Court Masque. Under James I, with the great architect Inigo Jones to devise the machines and setting, and with Ben Jonson to write the librettos, one of these masques was a magnificent affair. It was given on festal occasions at court and often cost thousands of pounds. It had but a single or at most two performances, always at night, and it came to follow a distinct formula. The kernel of the show was the masked dance in which members of the court, even King and Queen, took part. This dance or “masque proper,” often elaborated into several measures, came near the end of the show. As accompaniments there were (1) music, instrumental and vocal, (2) a play of some length, usually with mythological or allegorical motive, (3) various grotesque dances by professional performers, preceding the main masque and often integrated with the play, and (4) a spectacular stage-setting.
These shows were given in great halls, brilliantly lighted. The stage was splendidly decorated. Gods and goddesses floated among the clouds, and elaborate machines and scenes were devised. In one masque, a few years before the ‘Tempest,’ “an artificial sea was seen to shoot forth over the stage as it flowed to land, [this was the main machine—a great stage four feet high on trestles] on which was a great concave shell like mother of pearl” containing the masquers and conveyed by many sea-monsters hidden by the torch-bearers. The costumes of the masquers were in brilliant colors and heavily jeweled. These were often bizarre; but Inigo Jones knew the monuments of classical antiquity and the artistic achievements of Renaissance Italy as well as Jonson knew classical and humanistic literature. The living pictures were often in richness and color no unworthy rivals of the frescoes with which Rubens had decorated the ceiling of the Masquing Hall.
Such expensive spectacles were beyond the reach of the professional theaters, but contemporary dramatists frequently found something that could be adapted or imitated for the public stage. So the antick dance of satyrs in a ‘Winter’s Tale’ (three of whom are announced as having already appeared before the King) seems borrowed from an anti-masque in Ben Jonson’s ‘Masque of Oberon.’ In two plays of nearly the same date there is a well defined effort to combine the masque and the regular drama into a distinctive and novel dramatic entertainment, in the ‘Four Plays in One’ of Beaumont and Fletcher and the ‘Tempest’ of Shakspere. The ‘Tempest’ has always been a spectacular play on the stage, and so it must have appeared to him—and as a spectacle having many of the features of the court masque.
There is music and song. Ariel, Prospero, and even Caliban are proper figures for a court show. The “masque proper” is used to celebrate the betrothal in the fourth act. This is a simplified form of such a masque as would be given at court. There is evidently some machinery—it is the insubstantial pageant that calls forth Prospero’s famous lines. Ariel, Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear, Juno descending from the heavens. There is music and a song, and Ferdinand cries:
This is a most majestic vision, and
Harmonious charmingly. May I be bold
To think these spirits?