Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most popular as 1596-1600. he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons, dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of Henry IV., and its interlude or offshoot, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant, diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, “dying in his excellence and flower,” is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the “middle comedies,” As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the note; and Shakespeare’s prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it.
Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The energy which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they were not 1601-1608. out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and The White Devil, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Maid’s Tragedy, and A Woman Killed with Kindness. But, in spite of Shakespeare’s affinities with these authors at many points, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not together), and the two quasi-antique plays Troilus and Cressida, and Timon of Athens, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North’s Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest scope; and Florio’s translation (1603) of Montaigne’s Essays, coming out between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, counted probably for more than any other book. The Sonnets (published 1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations of the stranger dramas like Troilus and Measure for Measure. But whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of a great poet’s suffering and friendship.
Shakespeare’s last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608 with his contributions to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. For unknown reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record, as though in justice Last period. to the world, the happy turns by which tragic disaster is at times averted. Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest all move, after a series of crimes, calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty, where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the faint and desperate last partings—of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and Horatio—which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere of the roman d’aventure, which had already been adapted by Beaumont and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his handiwork. In The Tempest this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy music. Even if it be true that in Prospero’s words the poet bids farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the composition of Henry VIII.; and not improbably also in The Two Noble Kinsmen. His share in two early pieces, Arden of Feversham (1592) and Edward III., has been urged, never established, and of many other dramas he was once idly accused.
Shakespeare’s throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare’s conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind, but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich, harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through discord. He is also many persons in one; in his Sonnets he is even, it may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality not of his own fancying—with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry and of Cleopatra—that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare’s mastery of this art is approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him eternally actable—the skill of raising, straining and relieving the suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will tolerate—he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his fanfare over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified England, as in Cymbeline, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly. Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.
Shakespeare’s method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in poetical intuition, Jonson. was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples even after 1660. He had “the devouring eye and the portraying hand”; he could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine, drawn from the Poetics and Horace, which moulded his creative practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does this by beginning with the “humour,” or abstract idiosyncrasy or quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy, Every Man in his Humour (acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson’s monumental pieces, Volpone or the Fox (acted 1605) and The Alchemist (acted 1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given for an instant by The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614), or The Staple of News, still less by topical plays like Cynthia’s Revels, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged with contempt. The erudite tragedies, Sejanus (acted 1603) and Catiline, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson’s finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary Sad Shepherd, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose is of the best, especially in his Discoveries, a series of ethical essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and various, those of Dryden. The “sons” of Jonson, Randolph and Browne, Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of “humours,” his learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his architectural power, or his relieving graces.
As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine and recesses of poisoned Romantic drama. darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has “poetry enough for anything”; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and artistic conscience lay partly in the conditions of the stage. Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The performances of each play were few. There was no authors’ copyright, and dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.
The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity of his romantic Chapman. love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies on Bussy d’Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624), honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman’s life. Their virtues are only partially Homer’s, but the general epic nobility and the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer’s limpidity and continuity and the translator’s imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same strain spoils Marston’s plays, and obscures his genuine command of the language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.
It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be provisionally grouped as follows. (a) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatises Dekker and Heywood. and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in Old Fortunatus (1600) and The Honest Whore, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in his English Traveller and Woman killed with Kindness (acted 1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (b) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator Middleton and Webster. of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those in The Changeling and Women beware Women. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (whose “pity,” when it came, was “nothing akin to him”). In Webster’s other principal play, Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil (produced about 1616), the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare’s ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, is even more of a poet than Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province, (c) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with his vein of Cervantesque Beaumont and Fletcher. mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like Bonduca, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic; but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare’s heroines. These faults are present also in Philip Massinger. Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare’s, and one of the best. Massinger’s interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as in The Bondman and The Roman Actor, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline, (d) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, The Many. baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such as Arden of Feversham; scions of the vindictive drama, like The Second Maiden’s Tragedy; historic or half-historic tragedies like Nero. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin to The Merry Wives, like Porter’s refreshing Two Angry Women of Abingdon; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field’s and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (e) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, like The Return from Parnassus and Lingua, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or entertainments in the Italian style, like The Faithful Shepherdess; versified character-sketches, of which Day’s Parliament of Bees, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in his Comus, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel’s and Fulke Greville’s; and Latin comedies, like Ignoramus. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.
There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in 1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated power (reflected Ford and Shirley. in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest of Annabella in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or the high crazed heroism of Calantha in The Broken Heart, is beyond the pale, if only he can dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.
Prose from 1579 to 1660.—With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550. In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary, sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover, prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long unset; that is, the parts of speech—noun and verb, epithet and adverb—were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.