A History of Elizabethan Literature

It has not been usual to put Thomas Middleton in the front rank among the dramatists immediately second to Shakespere; but I have myself no hesitation in doing so. If he is not such a poet as Webster, he is even a better, and certainly a more versatile, dramatist; and if his plays are inferior as plays to those of Fletcher and Massinger, he has a mastery of the very highest tragedy, which neither of them could attain. Except the best scenes of The White Devil, and The Duchess of Malfi, there is nothing out of Shakespere that can match the best scenes of The Changeling; while Middleton had a comic faculty, in which, to all appearance, Webster was entirely lacking. A little more is known about Middleton than about most of his fellows. He was the son of a gentleman, and was pretty certainly born in London about 1570. It does not appear that he was a university man, but he seems to have been at Gray's Inn. His earliest known work was not dramatic, and was exceedingly bad. In 1597 he published a verse paraphrase of the Wisdom of Solomon, which makes even that admirable book unreadable; and if, as seems pretty certain, the Microcynicon of two years later is his, he is responsible for one of the worst and feeblest exercises in the school – never a very strong one – of Hall and Marston. Some prose tracts of the usual kind are not better; but either at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, or in the very earliest years of the next, Middleton turned his attention to the then all absorbing drama, and for many years was (chiefly in collaboration) a busy playwright. We have some score of plays which are either his alone, or in greatest part his. The order of their composition is very uncertain, and as with most of the dramatists of the period, not a few of them never appeared in print till long after the author's death. He was frequently employed in composing pageants for the City of London, and in 1620 was appointed city chronologer. In 1624 Middleton got into trouble. His play, The Game of Chess, which was a direct attack on Spain and Rome, and a personal satire on Gondomar, was immensely popular, but its nine days' run was abruptly stopped on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador; the poet's son, it would seem, had to appear before the Council, and Middleton himself was (according to tradition) imprisoned for some time. In this same year he was living at Newington Butts. He died there in the summer of 1627, and was succeeded as chronologer by Ben Jonson. His widow, Magdalen, received a gratuity from the Common Council, but seems to have followed her husband in a little over a year.

Middleton's acknowledged, or at least accepted, habit of collaboration in most of the work usually attributed to him, and the strong suspicion, if not more than suspicion, that he collaborated in other plays, afford endless opportunity for the exercise of a certain kind of criticism. By employing another kind we can discern quite sufficiently a strong individuality in the work that is certainly, in part or in whole, his; and we need not go farther. He seems to have had three different kinds of dramatic aptitude, in all of which he excelled. The larger number of his plays consist of examples of the rattling comedy of intrigue and manners, often openly representing London life as it was, sometimes transplanting what is an evident picture of home manners to some foreign scene apparently for no other object than to make it more attractive to the spectators. To any one at all acquainted with the Elizabethan drama their very titles speak them. These titles are Blurt Master Constable, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Family of Love [a sharp satire on the Puritans], A Mad World, my Masters, No Wit no Help Like a Woman's, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Anything for a Quiet Life, More Dissemblers besides Women. As with all the humour-comedies of the time, the incidents are not unfrequently very improbable, and the action is conducted with such intricacy and want of clearly indicated lines, that it is sometimes very difficult to follow. At the same time, Middleton has a faculty almost peculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, the reader or spectator along, so that he has no time to stop and consider defects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldom lags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he is never heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined, – by which I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations and loose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; and Middleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in striking contrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poetical morality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known. He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; he makes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together very contentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like the post-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of these works of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusion of a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost always infuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once – in the charming comedy of The Spanish Gipsy, – and the result there is so agreeable that the reader only wishes he had done it oftener.

Usually, however, when his thoughts took a turn of less levity than in these careless humorous studies of contemporary life, he devoted himself not to the higher comedy, but to tragedy of a very serious class, and when he did this an odd phenomenon generally manifested itself. In Middleton's idea of tragedy, as in that of most of the playwrights, and probably all the playgoers of his day, a comic underplot was a necessity; and, as we have seen, he was himself undoubtedly able enough to furnish such a plot. But either because he disliked mixing his tragic and comic veins, or for some unknown reason, he seems usually to have called in on such occasions the aid of Rowley, a vigorous writer of farce, who had sometimes been joined with him even in his comic work. Now, not only was Rowley little more than a farce writer, but he seems to have been either unable to make, or quite careless of making, his farce connect itself in any tolerable fashion with the tragedy of which it formed a nominal part. The result is seen in its most perfect imperfection in the two plays of The Mayor of Queenborough and The Changeling, both named from their comic features, and yet containing tragic scenes, the first of a very high order, the second of an order only overtopped by Shakespere at his best. The humours of the cobbler Mayor of Queenborough in the one case, of the lunatic asylum and the courting of its keeper's wife in the other, are such very mean things that they can scarcely be criticised. But the desperate love of Vortiger for Rowena in The Mayor, and the villainous plots against his chaste wife, Castiza, are real tragedy. Even these, however, fall far below the terrible loves, if loves they are to be called, of Beatrice-Joanna, the heroine of The Changeling, and her servant, instrument, and murderer, De Flores. The plot of the tragic part of this play is intricate and not wholly savoury. It is sufficient to say that Beatrice having enticed De Flores to murder a lover whom she does not love, that so she may marry a lover whom she does love, is suddenly met by the murderer's demand of her honour as the price of his services. She submits, and afterwards has to purchase fresh aid of murder from him by a continuance of her favours that she may escape detection by her husband. Thus, roughly described, the theme may look like the undigested horrors of Lust's Dominion, of The Insatiate Countess, and of The Revenger's Tragedy. It is, however, poles asunder from them. The girl, with her southern recklessness of anything but her immediate desires, and her southern indifference to deceiving the very man she loves, is sufficiently remarkable, as she stands out of the canvas. But De Flores, – the broken gentleman, reduced to the position of a mere dependant, the libertine whose want of personal comeliness increases his mistress's contempt for him, the murderer double and treble dyed, as audacious as he is treacherous, and as cool and ready as he is fiery in passion, – is a study worthy to be classed at once with Iago, and inferior only to Iago in their class. The several touches with which these two characters and their situations are brought out are as Shakesperian as their conception, and the whole of that part of the play in which they figure is one of the most wonderful triumphs of English or of any drama. Even the change of manners and a bold word or two here and there, may not prevent me from giving the latter part of the central scene: —

Beat. "Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,To make his death the murderer of my honour!Thy language is so bold and vicious,I cannot see which way I can forgive itWith any modesty.De F. Pish!49 you forget yourself:A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty!Beat. O misery of sin! would I'd been boundPerpetually unto my living hateIn that Pisacquo, than to hear50 these words.Think but upon the distance that creationSet 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there.De F. Look but unto your conscience, read me there;'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal:Pish! fly not to your birth, but settle youIn what the act has made you; you're no more now.You must forget your parentage to me;You are the deed's creature;51 by that nameYou lost your first condition, and I shall urge52 youAs peace and innocency has turn'd you out,And made you one with me.Beat. With thee, foul villain!De F. Yes, my fair murderess: do you urge me?Though thou writ'st maid, thou whore in thine affection!'Twas changed from thy first love, and that's a kindOf whoredom in thy heart: and he's changed nowTo bring thy second on, thy Alsemero,Whom by all sweets that ever darkness tastedIf I enjoy thee not, thou ne'er enjoyest!I'll blast the hopes and joys of marriage,I'll confess all; my life I rate at nothing.Beat. De Flores!De F. I shall rest from all (lover's)53 plagues then,I live in pain now; that [love] shooting eyeWill burn my heart to cinders.Beat. O sir, hear me!De F. She that in life and love refuses me,In death and shame my partner she shall be.Beat. (kneeling). Stay, hear me once for all: I make thee masterOf all the wealth I have in gold and jewels;Let me go poor unto my bed with honourAnd I am rich in all things.De F. Let this silence thee;The wealth of all Valencia shall not buyMy pleasure from me.Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?So soon may you weep me.Beat. Vengeance begins;Murder, I see, is followed by more sins:Was my creation in the womb so curstIt must engender with a viper first?De F. (raising her). Come, rise and shroud your blushes in my bosom,Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts.Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding.'Las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anonWhat thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on."

Two other remarkable plays of Middleton's fall with some differences under the same second division of his works. These are The Witch and Women Beware Women. Except for the inevitable and rather attractive comparison with Macbeth, The Witch is hardly interesting. It consists of three different sets of scenes most inartistically blended, – an awkward and ineffective variation on the story of Alboin, Rosmunda and the skull for a serious main plot, some clumsy and rather unsavoury comic or tragi-comic interludes, and the witch scenes. The two first are very nearly worthless; the third is intrinsically, though far below Macbeth, interesting enough and indirectly more interesting because of the questions which have been started, as to the indebtedness of the two poets to each other. The best opinion seems to be that Shakespere most certainly did not copy Middleton, nor (a strange fancy of some) did he collaborate with Middleton, and that the most probable thing is that both borrowed their names, and some details from Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft. Women Beware Women on the other hand is one of Middleton's finest works, inferior only to The Changeling in parts, and far superior to it as a whole. The temptation of Bianca, the newly-married wife, by the duke's instrument, a cunning and shameless woman, is the title-theme, and in this part again Middleton's Shakesperian verisimilitude and certainty of touch appear. The end of the play is something marred by a slaughter more wholesale even than that of Hamlet, and by no means so well justified. Lastly, A Fair Quarrel must be mentioned, because of the very high praise which it has received from Lamb and others. This praise has been directed chiefly to the situation of the quarrel between Captain Ager and his friend, turning on a question (the point of family honour), finely but perhaps a little tediously argued. The comic scenes, however, which are probably Rowley's, are in his best vein of bustling swagger.

I have said that Middleton, as it seems to me, has not been fully estimated. It is fortunately impossible to say the same of Webster, and the reasons of the difference are instructive. Middleton's great fault is that he never took trouble enough about his work. A little trouble would have made The Changeling or Women Beware Women, or even The Spanish Gipsy, worthy to rank with all but Shakespere's very masterpieces. Webster also was a collaborator, apparently an industrious one; but he never seems to have taken his work lightly. He had, moreover, that incommunicable gift of the highest poetry in scattered phrases which, as far as we can see, Middleton had not. Next to nothing is known of him. He may have been parish clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn; but the authority is very late, and the commentators seemed to have jumped at it to explain Webster's fancy for details of death and burial – a cause and effect not sufficiently proportioned. Mr. Dyce has spent much trouble in proving that he could not have been the author of some Puritan tracts published a full generation after the date of his masterpieces. Heywood tells us that he was generally called "Jack," a not uncommon thing when men are christened John. He himself has left us a few very sententiously worded prefaces which do not argue great critical taste. We know from the usual sources (Henslowe's Diaries) that he was a working furnisher of plays, and from many rather dubious title-pages we suppose or know some of the plays he worked at. Northward Ho! Westward Ho! and Sir John Wyatt are pieces of dramatic journalism in which he seems to have helped Dekker. He adapted, with additions, Marston's Malcontent, which is, in a crude way, very much in his own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) some charming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recent editor) to A Cure for a Cuckold, one of Rowley's characteristic and not ungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and some miscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and his fame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or even hinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the first order of interest, if not invariably of the first order of merit. These are The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, The Devil's Law Case, and Appius and Virginia.

Of Appius and Virginia the best thing to be said is to borrow Sainte-Beuve's happy description of Molière's Don Garcie de Navarre, and to call it an essai pale et noble. Webster is sometimes very close to Shakespere; but to read Appius and Virginia, and then to read Julius Cæsar or Coriolanus, is to appreciate, in perhaps the most striking way possible, the universality which all good judges from Dryden downwards have recognised in the prince of literature. Webster, though he was evidently a good scholar, and even makes some parade of scholarship, was a Romantic to the core, and was all abroad in these classical measures. The Devil's Law Case sins in the opposite way, being hopelessly undigested, destitute of any central interest, and, despite fine passages, a mere "salmagundi." There remain the two famous plays of The White Devil or Vittoria Corombona and The Duchess of Malfi– plays which were rarely, if ever, acted after their author's days, and of which the earlier and, to my judgment, better was not a success even then, but which the judgment of three generations has placed at the very head of all their class, and which contain magnificent poetry.

I have said that in my judgment The White Devil is the better of the two; I shall add that it seems to me very far the better. Webster's plays are comparatively well known, and there is no space here to tell their rather intricate arguments. It need only be said that the contrast of the two is striking and unmistakable; and that Webster evidently meant in the one to indicate the punishment of female vice, in the other to draw pity and terror by the exhibition of the unprevented but not unavenged sufferings of female virtue. Certainly both are excellent subjects, and if the latter seem the harder, we have Imogen and Bellafront to show, in the most diverse material, and with the most diverse setting possible, how genius can manage it. With regard to The White Devil, it has been suggested with some plausibility that it wants expansion. Certainly the action is rather crowded, and the recourse to dumb show (which, however, Webster again permitted himself in The Duchess) looks like a kind of shorthand indication of scenes that might have been worked out. Even as it is, however, the sequence of events is intelligible, and the presentation of character is complete. Indeed, if there is any fault to find with it, it seems to me that Webster has sinned rather by too much detail than by too little. We could spare several of the minor characters, though none are perhaps quite so otiose as Delio, Julio, and others in The Duchess of Malfi. We feel (or at least I feel) that Vittoria's villainous brother Flamineo is not as Iago and Aaron and De Flores are each in his way, a thoroughly live creature. We ask ourselves (or I ask myself) what is the good of the repulsive and not in the least effective presentment of the Moor Zanche. Cardinal Monticelso is incontinent of tongue and singularly feeble in deed, – for no rational man would, after describing Vittoria as a kind of pest to mankind, have condemned her to a punishment which was apparently little more than residence in a rather disreputable but by no means constrained boarding-house, and no omnipotent pope would have let Ludivico loose with a clear inkling of his murderous designs. But when these criticisms and others are made, The White Devil remains one of the most glorious works of the period. Vittoria is perfect throughout; and in the justly-lauded trial scene she has no superior on any stage. Brachiano is a thoroughly lifelike portrait of the man who is completely besotted with an evil woman. Flamineo I have spoken of, and not favourably; yet in literature, if not in life, he is a triumph; and above all the absorbing tragic interest of the play, which it is impossible to take up without finishing, has to be counted in. But the real charm of The White Devil is the wholly miraculous poetry in phrases and short passages which it contains. Vittoria's dream of the yew-tree, almost all the speeches of the unfortunate Isabella, and most of her rival's, have this merit. But the most wonderful flashes of poetry are put in the mouth of the scoundrel Flamineo, where they have a singular effect. The famous dirge which Cornelia sings can hardly be spoken of now, except in Lamb's artfully simple phrase "I never saw anything like it," and the final speeches of Flamineo and his sister deserve the same endorsement. Nor is even the proud farewell of the Moor Zanche unworthy. It is impossible to describe the "whirl of spirits" (as the good old-fashioned phrase has it) into which the reading of this play sets the reader, except by saying that the cause of that whirl is the secret of the best Elizabethan writers, and that it is nowhere, out of Shakespere, better exemplified than in the scene partly extracted from Middleton, and in such passages of Vittoria Corombona as the following: —

Cor. "Will you make me such a fool? here's a white hand:Can blood so soon be wash'd out? let me see;When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-topsAnd the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops,When yellow spots do on your hands appear,Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! 'h'as handled a toad, sure.Cowslip-water is good for the memory:Pray, buy me three ounces of 't.Flam. I would I were from hence.Cor. Do you hear, sir?I'll give you a saying which my grand-motherWas wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'erUnto her lute.Flam. Do, an' you will, do.Cor. 'Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,[Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction.Since o'er shady groves they hover,And with leaves and flowers do coverThe friendless bodies of unburied men.Call unto his funeral doleThe ant, the field mouse, and the mole,To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warmAnd (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel;But I have an answer for them:'Let holy Church receive him dulySince he paid the church-tithes truly.'His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store.This poor men get, and great men get no more.Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.Bless you, all good people.[Exeunt Cornelia, Zanche, and Ladies.Flam. I have a strange thing in me, to the whichI cannot give a name, without it beCompassion. I pray, leave me.[Exit Francisco de Medicis.This night I'll know the utmost of my fate;I'll be resolved what my rich sister meansTo assign me for my service. I have liv'dRiotously ill, like some that live in court,And sometimes when my face was full of smilesHave felt the maze of conscience in my breast.Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try:We think cag'd birds sing when indeed they cry.[Enter Brachiano's ghost, in his leather cassock and breeches, and boots; with a cowl; in his hand a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't.Ha! I can stand thee: nearer, nearer it.What a mockery hath death made thee! thou look'st sad.In what place art thou? in yon starry gallery?Or in the cursèd dungeon? – No? not speak?Pray, sir, resolve me, what religion's bestFor a man to die in? or is it in your knowledgeTo answer me how long I have to live?That's the most necessary question.Not answer? are you still like some great menThat only walk like shadows up and down,And to no purpose? Say: —[The Ghost throws earth upon him and shows him the skull.What's that? O, fatal! he throws earth upon me!A dead man's skull beneath the roots of flowers! —I pray [you], speak, sir: our Italian Church-menMake us believe dead men hold conferenceWith their familiars, and many timesWill come to bed to them, and eat with them.[Exit Ghost.He's gone; and see, the skull and earth are vanished.This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fateTo do its worst. Now to my sister's lodgingAnd sum up all these horrors: the disgraceThe prince threw on me; next the piteous sightOf my dead brother; and my mother's dotage;And last this terrible vision: all theseShall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good,Or I will drown this weapon in her blood."[Exit.

The Duchess of Malfi is to my thinking very inferior – full of beauties as it is. In the first place, we cannot sympathise with the duchess, despite her misfortunes, as we do with the "White Devil." She is neither quite a virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much concealment) nor a frank professor of "All for Love." Antonio, her so-called husband, is an unromantic and even questionable figure. Many of the minor characters, as already hinted, would be much better away. Of the two brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee and murderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonable excuse. Ferdinand, the other, is no doubt mad enough, but not interestingly mad, and no attempt is made to account in any way satisfactorily for the delay of his vengeance. By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck on without art or reason. But the extraordinary force and beauty of the scene where the duchess is murdered; the touches of poetry, pure and simple, which, as in the The White Devil, are scattered all over the play; the fantastic accumulation of terrors before the climax; and the remarkable character of Bosola, – justify the high place generally assigned to the work. True, Bosola wants the last touches, the touches which Shakespere would have given. He is not wholly conceivable as he is. But as a "Plain Dealer" gone wrong, a "Malcontent" (Webster's work on that play very likely suggested him), turned villain, a man whom ill-luck and fruitless following of courts have changed from a cynic to a scoundrel, he is a strangely original and successful study. The dramatic flashes in the play would of themselves save it. "I am Duchess of Malfi still," and the other famous one "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," often as they have been quoted, can only be quoted again. They are of the first order of their kind, and, except the "already my De Flores!" of The Changeling, there is nothing in the Elizabethan drama out of Shakespere to match them.