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A History of Elizabethan Literature
I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often classed with, and to some extent belongs to the post-Reformation school, he is ours for other purposes than that of mere mention. His Shakespere travesties (in one of which he was assisted by a greater than he), and even the operas and "entertainments" with which he not only evaded the prohibition of stage plays under the Commonwealth, but helped to produce a remarkable change in the English drama, do not concern us. But it must be remembered that Davenant's earlier, most dramatic, and most original playmaking was done at a time far within our limits. When the tragedy of Albovine (Alboin) was produced, the Restoration was more than thirty years distant, and Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, and Marston – men in the strictest sense of the Elizabethan school – were still living, and, in the case of all but Marston, writing. The Cruel Brother, which, though printed after, was licensed before, dates three years earlier; and between this time and the closing of the theatres Davenant had ten plays acted and printed coincidently with the best work of Massinger, Shirley, and Ford. Nor, though his fame is far below theirs, is the actual merit of these pieces (the two above mentioned, The Wits, News from Plymouth, The Fair Favourite, The Unfortunate Lovers, etc.), so much inferior as the fame. The chief point in which Davenant fails is in the failing grasp of verse above noted. This is curious and so characteristic that it is worth while to give an example of it, which shall be a fair average specimen and not of the worst: —
"O noble maid, what expiation canMake fit this young and cruel soldier forSociety of man that hath defiledThe genius of triumphant glorious warWith such a rape upon thy liberty!Or what less hard than marble ofThe Parian rock can'st thou believe my heart,That nurst and bred him my disciple inThe camp, and yet could teach his valour noMore tenderness than injured Scytheans useWhen they are wroth to a revenge? But heHath mourned for it: and now Evandra thouArt strongly pitiful, that dost so longConceal an anger that would kill us both." Love and Honour, 1649.Here we have the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, the big manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble that stutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the poetical tongue.
In such a language as this poetry became impossible, and it is still a matter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made it tolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so, but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blank verse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, never seems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objected was execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, he wrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the best Elizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself in his earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do not remember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that he was consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenant and others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop.
One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatists of our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of the decadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase —
"Stumbled from aboveAnd reeled in slippery roads of alien art,"is represented in the English theatre by four plays, Aglaura, Brennoralt, The Sad One, and the comedy of The Goblins. Of the tragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are the best thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rather suggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty. His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, which have been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramatic verse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas – a combination of extravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence in short of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mere versification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may be perhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, which is not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, The Goblins. There are several good points about this play – an abundance of not altogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound gallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the Restoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly a clever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as the plot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at hell and devils in caverns close to a populous city, and brings into the action a series of the most absurd escapes, duels, chance-meetings, hidings, findings, and all manner of other devices for spinning out an unnatural story. Many who know nothing more of Suckling's plays know that Aglaura enjoys the eccentric possession of two fifth acts, so that it can be made a tragedy or a tragi-comedy at pleasure. The Sad One, which is unfinished, is much better. The tragedy of Brennoralt has some pathos, some pretty scenes, and some charming songs; but here again we meet with the most inconceivably bad verse, as here – a passage all the more striking because of its attempt, wilful or unconscious, to echo Shakespere: —
"Sleep is as nice as woman;The more I court it, the more it flies me.Thy elder brother will be kinder yet,Unsent-for death will come. To-morrow!Well, what can to-morrow do?'Twill cure the sense of honour lost;I and my discontents shall rest together,What hurt is there in this? But death againstThe will is but a slovenly kind of potion;And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs.So does it at fourscore too, when the soul'sMewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears.Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature.A certain clownish cowardice that stillWould stay at home and dares not ventureInto foreign countries, though better thanIts own. Ha! what countries? for we receiveDescriptions of th' other world from our divinesAs blind men take relations of this from us:My thoughts lead me into the dark, and thereThey'll leave me. I'll no more on it. Within!"Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if not at once of Hamlet and Othello, at any rate of Tamburlaine and Faustus.
To complete this sketch of the more famous and fortunate dramatists who have attained to separate presentation, we must give some account of lesser men and of those wholly anonymous works which are still to be found only in collections such as Dodsley's, or in single publications. As the years pass, the list of independently published authors increases. Mr. Bullen, who issued the works of Thomas Nabbes and of Davenport, has promised those of W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easy talent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy. Microcosmus (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality, and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. The Bride, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court, range with the already characterised work of Brome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interesting history of King John and Matilda, as well as the lively comedy of The City Nightcap, together with other work, deserved, and have now received, collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probably to be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, he collaborated with Middleton, with Massinger, with Webster, with Fletcher, with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It would appear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which he brought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-life humours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together with not a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect. But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed, and A Match at Midnight, he shows not merely this same vis comica and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramatic situations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty of knitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with a half namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in his chronicle play When you see Me you know Me, and his romantic drama of The Noble Spanish Soldier, has distinctly outstripped the ordinary dramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had a home in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of "Dramatists of the Restoration," though his dramatic fame was obtained many years before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of Cupid and Psyche, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which the best known is The Antiquary, are fair but not excessively favourable samples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy, which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from, either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy.
Among the single plays comparatively few are of the latter kind. The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itself with the wholly tragical Yorkshire Tragedy, and is a kind of introduction to it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is A Warning to Fair Women) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem to have been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past and present. Their class is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, in one sense or another, very interesting class of the dramas attributed, and in general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to the fullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are Fair Em, The Merry Devil ofEdmonton, Edward III., The Birth of Merlin, The Troublesome Reign of King John, A Warning to Fair Women, The Arraignment of Paris, Arden of Feversham, Mucedorus, George a Green the Pinner of Wakefield, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street, The Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. Four of these, Edward III., The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, are in whole or parts very far superior to the rest. Of that rest The Yorkshire Tragedy, a violent and bloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruined gambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful, though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, not indeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In Edward III. and The Two Noble Kinsmen there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot, character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in both certain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonishingly Shakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing of them by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of critics declare for the part authorship of Shakespere in The Two Noble Kinsmen; I avow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he did not write any part of Edward III., and I should take it to be a case of a kind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not very original faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, and wrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death or diversion to non-literary employments, left no other monument of himself that can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with Arden of Feversham and The Merry Devil is different. We shall presently speak of the latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian about it, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant human sentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work of the time. But Arden of Feversham is a very different piece of work. It is a domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife, being led by her passion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at last carry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versification has much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him, but that the dramatic grasp of character both in principals and in secondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand. Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the play definitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibit themselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of his undoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which are both wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it could be admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown off while he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare. But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exact reproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. The Second Maiden's Tragedy, licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terror pieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, but which seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It is black enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. The Queen of Aragon, by Habington, though in a different key, has something of the starchness rather than strength which characterises Castara. A much higher level is reached in the fine anonymous tragedy of Nero, where at least one character, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse, if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. The strange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him The Distracted Emperor, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagne and Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. The Return from Parnassus (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and its contribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for the judgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere passages are only the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between the universities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chiefly on the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to provide for themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university and especially undergraduate life. The comedy of Wily Beguiled has also a strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and Lingua, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. The Dumb Knight, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical class; but in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the authorship of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great names have been put forward, a really delightful example of romantic comedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit, appears. The Merry Devil probably stands highest among all the anonymous plays of the period on the lighter side, as Arden of Feversham does on the darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, and a singularly exact picture of manners. With Ram Alley, attributed to the Irishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of the bustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connection with Middleton. To the same class belong Haughton's pleasant Englishmen for my Money, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite the father's favour, are ousted from the courtship of three fair sisters; Woman is a Weathercock, and Amends for Ladies (invective and palinode), by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eyasses who competed with regular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "Tu Quoque" or The City Gallant, attributed to the actor Cook, and deriving its odd first title from a well-known comedian of the time, and the catchword which he had to utter in the play itself; The Hog hath Lost his Pearl, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married against his will, by Taylor; The Heir and The Old Couple, by Thomas May, more famous still for his Latin versification; the rather overpraised Ordinary of Cartwright, Ben Jonson's most praised son; The City Match by Dr. Jasper Mayne. All these figure in the last, and most of them have figured in the earlier editions of Dodsley, with a few others hardly worth separate notice. Mr. Bullen's delightful volumes of Old Plays add the capital play of Dick of Devonshire (see ante), the strange Two Tragedies in One of Robert Yarington, three lively comedies deriving their names from originals of one kind or another, Captain Underwit, Sir Giles Goosecap, and Dr. Dodipoll, with one or two more. One single play remains to be mentioned, both because of its intrinsic merit, and because of the controversy which has arisen respecting the question of priority between it and Ben Jonson's Alchemist. This is Albumazar, attributed to one Thomas Tomkis, and in all probability a university play of about the middle of James's reign. There is nothing in it equal to the splendid bursts of Sir Epicure Mammon, or the all but first-rate comedy of Face, Dol, and Subtle, and of Abel Drugger; but Gifford, in particular, does injustice to it, and it is on the whole a very fair specimen of the work of the time. Nothing indeed is more astonishing than the average goodness of that work, even when all allowances are made; and unjust as such a mere enumeration as these last paragraphs have given must be, it would be still more unjust to pass over in silence work so varied and so full of talent.62
CHAPTER XII
MINOR CAROLINE PROSE
The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more leisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work. The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified if it had produced nothing but The Anatomy of Melancholy; though there is something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly have grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it.
The author of the Anatomy was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in Leicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He was educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch – the equivalent of a fellow – in 1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there, though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places he seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing inconsistent with that character in the Anatomy. The picture of him which Anthony à Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his epitaph (Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia), that having cast his nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed suicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death) at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of charity.
The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of men and books is The Anatomy of Melancholy, first printed in 1621, and enlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the Anatomy, giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very much wanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, old and new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history is rather curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from the date of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped out of notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it was revived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or five editions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thus circulated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have been followed without much alteration in some later issues.
The book itself has been very variously judged. Fuller, in one of his least worthy moments, called it "a book of philology." Anthony Wood, hitting on a notion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenient commonplace book of classical quotations, which, with all respect to Anthony's memory (whom I am more especially bound to honour as a Merton man), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected, appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his Illustrations of Sterne pointed out the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior. Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man," exhibited perhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which, after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton's contemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled. Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of a quarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers of English literature have loved him.
The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps no great wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by the bristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with full and careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaborate but apparently futile marshalling in "partitions" and "members," in "sections" and "subsections," and by the measureless license of digression which the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling some hundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the author calls himself, to the reader – an epistle which gives a true foretaste of the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not scholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and even the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" a curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature, effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw out a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass of the scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowest terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his notebook, but in developing his own thoughts, – a mine hardly less rich if less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to have been put at his disposal.