Not curious of incertain chances now.
There is thus no meaning in the story. The rival leaders are equally responsible for the Wounds of Civil War, but end as happily as though they had been benefactors of society. And this is by no means presented as an example of tragic irony, in which case something might be said for it, but as the natural, fitting, and satisfactory conclusion. Yet Plutarch tells of Marius’ sleeplessness, drunkenness, and perturbation, and of Sylla‘s debaucheries and disease. These were hints, one might have thought, that would have suited the temper of an Elizabethan dramatist; but Lodge passes them over.
It is the same with the public story. If Rome is left in quiet it is only because Sylla’s ruthlessness has been ‘fortunate’; it is not represented as the rational outcome of what went before, nor is there any suggestion of what was to follow after.
The merit of the play, such as it is, lies in its succession of stirring scenes—but not the most stirring that might have been selected—from the career of two famous personalities in the history of a famous State. It is almost incredible that in barely more than half a dozen years after its publication London playgoers were listening to Julius Caesar with its suggestive episodes, its noble characterisation, and full realisation of what the story meant.
Yet Lodge’s play is probably as good as any of those based on Roman History till Shakespeare turned his attention to such subjects. The titles of a number of others have come down to us. Some of these are of early date and may have approximated to the type of Apius and Virginia. Others would attempt the style of Seneca, either after the crude fashion of Gorboduc or subsequently under the better guidance of the French practitioners; and among these later Senecans were distinguished men like Lord Brooke, who destroyed a tragedy on Antony and Cleopatra in 1601, and Brandon, whose Vertuous Octavia, written in 1598, still survives.[71] In others again there may have been an anticipation or imitation of the more popular manner of Lodge. But the fact that they were never published, or have been lost, or, in one or two cases where isolated copies are extant, have not been thought worth reprinting, affords a presumption that their claims are inferior, and that in them no very characteristic note is struck. It is pretty safe to suppose that they did not contain much instruction for Shakespeare, and that none of them would bridge the gap between Lodge’s medley and Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
The progress made since the middle of the century was, of course, considerable. A pioneer performance, like Apius and Virginia, had the merit of pushing beyond the landmarks of the old Morality, and of bringing Roman story within the ken of English playgoers, but it did nothing more. It treated this precisely as it might have treated any other subject, and looked merely to the lesson, though, no doubt, it sought to make the lesson palatable with such dramatic condiments as the art of the day supplied. The Senecans, inspired by the Octavia, make a disinterested effort to detach and set forth the conception of old Roman greatness, as it was given that age to understand it, and these productions show no impropriety and much literary skill, but the outlines and colours are too vague to admit of reality or life. Lodge is realistic enough in his way, but it is by sacrificing what is significant and characteristic, and submerging the majesty of ancient Rome in the banalities and trivialities of his own time. No dramatist had been able at once to rise to the grandeur of the theme and keep a foothold on solid earth, to reconcile the claims of the ideal and the real, the past and the present. That was left for Shakespeare to do.
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF HISTORY
The turn of the centuries roughly bisects the dramatic career of Shakespeare. In the first half he had written many comedies and a few tragedies; in the second he was to write many tragedies with a few plays which, on account of the happy ending and other traits, may be assigned to the opposite class. But beyond these recognised and legitimate subdivisions of the Romantic Drama, he had also before 1600 busied himself with that characteristic product of the Elizabethan Age, the Historical Play dealing with the national annals. In this kind, indeed, he had been hardly less abundant than in comedy, the proportions being nine of the one to eleven of the other. Then suddenly he leaves it aside, and returns to it only at the close in Henry VIII., which moreover is but partially his handiwork.
Thus, while the tragic note is not inaudible in the earlier period of his activity nor the comic note in the later, the third, that sounded so loud in the sixteenth century, utterly or all but utterly dies away in the seventeenth.
Why this should be so it is impossible to say. It may be that the patriotic self-consciousness stirred by the defeat of the Armada and the triumph of England waned with the growing sense of internal grievances and the loss of external prestige, and that the national story no longer inspired such curiosity and delight. It may be that Shakespeare had exhausted the episodes which had a special attraction for contemporaries and himself. It may be that he found in the records of other lands themes that gave his genius freer scope and more fully satisfied the requirements of his art. Or all these considerations may have co-operated.