A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 16

"Who would curry an a.s.s with an ivory comb? Give the beast thistles for provender. I do but yet angle with a silken fly, to see whether martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have worms for the nonce, and will give them line enough like a trout, till they swallow both hook and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I'll make you dance at the pole's end.

"I know Martin will with a trice bestride my shoulders. Well, if he ride me, let the fool sit fast, for my wit is very hickish: which if he spur with his copper reply, when it bleeds, it will all to besmear their consciences.

"If a martin can play at chess, as well as his nephew the ape, he shall know what it is for a scaddle p.a.w.n to cross a Bishop in his own walk. Such diedappers must be taken up, else they'll not stick to check the king. Rip up my life, discipher my name, fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toad, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared and my mind; and if ye chance to find any worse words than you brought, let them be put in your dad's dictionary. And so farewell, and be hanged, and I pray G.o.d ye fare no worse.

"Yours at an hour's warning,

"DOUBLE V."

[48] Well-known stage characters in Preston's _Cambyses_.

"By this time I think, good-man Puritan, that thou art persuaded, that I know as well as thy own conscience thee, namely Martin Makebate of England, to be a most scurvy and beggarly benefactor to obedience, and _per consequens_, to fear neither men, nor that G.o.d Who can cast both body and soul into unquenchable fire. In which respect I neither account you of the Church, nor esteem of your blood, otherwise than the blood of Infidels. Talk as long as you will of the joys of heaven, or pains of h.e.l.l, and turn from yourselves the terror of that judgment how you will, which shall bereave blus.h.i.+ng iniquity of the fig-leaves of hypocrisy, yet will the eye of immortality discern of your painted pollutions, as the ever-living food of perdition. The humours of my eyes are the habitations of fountains, and the circ.u.mference of my heart the enclosure of fearful contrition, when I think how many souls at that moment shall carry the name of Martin on their foreheads to the vale of confusion, in whose innocent blood thou swimming to h.e.l.l, shalt have the torments of ten thousand thousand sinners at once, inflicted upon thee. There will envy, malice, and dissimulation be ever calling for vengeance against thee, and incite whole legions of devils to thy deathless lamentation.

Mercy will say unto thee, I know thee not, and Repentance, what have I to do with thee? All hopes shall shake the head at thee, and say: there goes the poison of purity, the perfection of impiety, the serpentine seducer of simplicity. Zeal herself will cry out upon thee, and curse the time that ever she was mashed by thy malice, who like a blind leader of the blind, sufferedst her to stumble at every step in Religion, and madest her seek in the dimness of her sight, to murder her mother the Church, from whose paps thou like an envious dog but yesterday pluckedst her.

However, proud scorner, thy whorish impudency may happen hereafter to insist in the derision of these fearful denunciations, and sport thy jester's pen at the speech of my soul, yet take heed least despair be predominant in the day of thy death, and thou instead of calling for mercy to thy Jesus, repeat more oftener to thyself, _Sic morior d.a.m.natus ut Judas_!

And thus much, Martin, in the way of compa.s.sion, have I spoke for thy edification, moved thereto by a brotherly commiseration, which if thou be not too desperate in thy devilish attempts, may reform thy heart to remorse, and thy pamphlets to some more profitable theme of repentance."

If Martin Marprelate is compared with the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ earlier, or the _Satire Menippee_ very little later, the want of polish and directness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent.

At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. The divines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letters like Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception may be made for Nash, especially if _Pasquil's Apology_ be his. They out-Martin Martin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, in fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocritical abuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired over women. The germs of the unmatched pa.s.sages to this effect in _The Tale of a Tub_ may be found in the rough horseplay of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for a Parrot_. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact a spirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisian luxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishes or capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, which Dryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into English controversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethan literature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than in this department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that department is it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy.

Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedingly serious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably most readers who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise with the adjuration of _Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England_ (supposed to be Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely free from suspicion of concernment in the matter), "My masters, that strive for this supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-G.o.d's name." It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with Plain Percivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse on him in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the most peacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said that these jars at last _compacta quiesc.u.n.t_. For it is difficult to find any account of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later into strong language.

CHAPTER VII

THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD

I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of anonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last.

The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour to attempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one hand from their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. We must be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it is certain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance in the latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into the earliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period of flouris.h.i.+ng and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In some of them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others, as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour--a flavour not perceptible in Shakespere, much less in Marlowe--appears. But in none of them is that other flavour of p.r.o.nounced decadence, which appears in the work of men so great as Ma.s.singer and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in the creative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in a comparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustly said, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at on one side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenth century; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restoration dramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more than Shakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work of Beaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work of their, in some sense, successors Ma.s.singer and Ford.

It will have been observed that I cleave to the old-fas.h.i.+oned nomenclature, and speak of "Beaumont and Fletcher." Until very recently, when two new editions have made their appearance, there was for a time a certain tendency to bring Fletcher into greater prominence than his partner, but at the same time and on the whole to depreciate both. I am in all things but ill-disposed to admit innovation without the clearest and most cogent proofs; and although the comparatively short life of Beaumont makes it impossible that he should have taken part in some of the fifty-two plays traditionally a.s.signed to the partners.h.i.+p (we may perhaps add Mr. Bullen's remarkable discovery of _Sir John Barneveldt_, in which Ma.s.singer probably took Beaumont's place), I see no reason to dispute the well-established theory that Beaumont contributed at least criticism, and probably original work, to a large number of these plays; and that his influence probably survived himself in conditioning his partner's work. And I am also disposed to think that the plays attributed to the pair have scarcely had fair measure in comparison with the work of their contemporaries, which was so long neglected. Beaumont and Fletcher kept the stage--kept it constantly and triumphantly--till almost, if not quite, within living memory; while since the seventeenth century, and since its earlier part, I believe that very few plays of Dekker's or Middleton's, of Webster's or of Ford's, have been presented to an English audience. This of itself const.i.tuted at the great revival of interest in Elizabethan literature something of a prejudice in favour of _les...o...b..ies et les dedaignes_, and this prejudice has naturally grown stronger since all alike have been banished from the stage. The Copper Captain and the Humorous Lieutenant, Bessus and Monsieur Thomas, are no longer on the boards to plead for their authors. The comparative depreciation of Lamb and others is still on the shelves to support their rivals.

Although we still know but little about either Beaumont or Fletcher personally, they differ from most of their great contemporaries by having come of "kenned folk," and by having to all appearance, industrious as they were, had no inducement to write for money. Francis Beaumont was born at Gracedieu, in Leicesters.h.i.+re in 1584. He was the son of a chief-justice; his family had for generations been eminent, chiefly in the law; his brother, Sir John Beaumont, was not only a poet of some merit, but a man of position, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, married a Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletcher soon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than his friend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, and his uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of _Licia_), a dignitary of the Church. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thus cousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having been educated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as Corpus Christi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in 1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five years before him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and the other not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection of printed plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute has been indulged in as to their probable shares,--the most likely opinion being that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities in criticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical and revising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed to represent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the two finest, _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_; while as to the third play, which may be put on the same level, _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, early a.s.sertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority, maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator than Shakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Ma.s.singer (we know this for certain from Sir Aston c.o.kain), and with Rowley and others, while s.h.i.+rley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some modern criticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usually unprofitable tests of separation to the great ma.s.s of his work. With this we need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficient idiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one, except as a matter of amus.e.m.e.nt, to try to split it up.

Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both in defects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come upon Beaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defects. There is in the work of the pair, and especially in Fletcher's work when he wrought alone, a certain loose fluency, an ungirt and relaxed air, which contrasts very strongly with the strenuous ways of the elder playwrights. This exhibits itself not in plotting or playwork proper, but in style and in versification (the redundant syllable predominating, and every now and then the verse slipping away altogether into the strange medley between verse and prose, which we shall find so frequent in the next and last period), and also in the characters. We quit indeed the monstrous types of cruelty, of l.u.s.t, of revenge, in which many of the Elizabethans proper and of Fletcher's own contemporaries delighted. But at the same time we find a decidedly lowered standard of general morality--a distinct approach towards the _fay ce que voudras_ of the Restoration. We are also nearer to the region of the commonplace. Nowhere appears that attempt to grapple with the impossible, that wrestle with the hardest problems, which Marlowe began, and which he taught to some at least of his followers. And lastly--despite innumerable touches of tender and not a few of heroic poetry--the actual poetical value of the dramas at their best is below that of the best work of the preceding time, and of such contemporaries as Webster and Dekker.

Beaumont and Fletcher constantly delight, but they do not very often transport, and even when they do, it is with a less strange rapture than that which communicates itself to the reader of Shakespere _pa.s.sim_, and to the readers of many of Shakespere's fellows here and there.

This, I think, is a fair allowance. But, when it is made, a goodly capital whereon to draw still remains to our poets. In the first place, no sound criticism can possibly overlook the astonis.h.i.+ng volume and variety of their work. No doubt they did not often (if they ever did) invent their fables.

But they have never failed to treat them in such a way as to make them original, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention and const.i.tutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all the more pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughly workmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity for endless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of the finest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their dramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, in its absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are always interesting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always more or less attractive. It used to be fas.h.i.+onable to praise their "young men,"

probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with the brutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy.

They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (let it be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of _Philaster_. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection of Imogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But for portraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid of love-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed a.s.sertion of the mythologists that jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted, affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me to Fletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence of their comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than that of _A King and no King_, of the _Humorous Lieutenant_, of _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, their charming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonic virtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good, solid, pleasant, and plentiful subst.i.tutes for it.

It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many times fifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. The play which usually opens the series, _The Maid's Tragedy_, is perhaps the finest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a little improbable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked it much; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchical tone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place, the authors' greatest dramatic weakness--a weakness common indeed to all their tribe except Shakespere--the representation of sudden and quite insufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault of theirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtue punished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. The Aspatia of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and the Bellario of _Philaster_, pathetic as they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pathos is great, and the quarrel or threatened quarrel of the friends Amintor and Melantius, the horrible trial put upon Amintor by his sovereign and the abandoned Evadne, as well as the whole part of Evadne herself when she has once been (rather improbably) converted, are excellent. A pa.s.sage of some length from the latter part of the play may supply as well as another the sufficient requirement of an ill.u.s.trative extract:--

_Evad._ "O my lord!

_Amin._ How now?

_Evad._ My much abused Lord! (_Kneels._)

_Amin._ This cannot be.

_Evad._ I do not kneel to live, I dare not hope it; The wrongs I did are greater: look upon me Though I appear with all my faults.

_Amin._ Stand up.

This is a new way to beget more sorrow.

Heav'n knows, I have too many; do not mock me; Though I am tame and bred up with my wrongs Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap Like a hand-wolf into my natural wildness And do an outrage: pray thee, do not mock me.

_Evad._ My whole life is so leprous, it infects All my repentance: I would buy your pardon Though at the highest set, even with my life: That slight contrition, that's no sacrifice For what I have committed.

_Amin._ Sure I dazzle.

There cannot be a Faith in that foul woman That knows no G.o.d more mighty than her mischiefs: Thou dost still worse, still number on thy faults To press my poor heart thus. Can I believe There's any seed of virtue in that woman Left to shoot up, that dares go on in sin Known, and so known as thine is? O Evadne!

'Would, there were any safety in thy s.e.x, That I might put a thousand sorrows off, And credit thy repentance! But I must not; Thou'st brought me to that dull calamity, To that strange misbelief of all the world And all things that are in it; that, I fear I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave, Only remembering that I grieve.

_Evad._ My lord, Give me your griefs: you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heav'n. Let not my sins Perish your n.o.ble youth: I do not fall here To shadows by dissembling with my tears (As, all say, women can) or to make less What my hot will hath done, which Heav'n and you Knows to be tougher than the hand of time Can cut from man's remembrance; no, I do not; I do appear the same, the same Evadne Drest in the shames I liv'd in; the same monster: But these are names of honour, to what I am; I do present myself the foulest creature Most pois'nous, dang'rous, and despis'd of men, Lerna e'er bred, or Nilus: I am h.e.l.l, Till you, my dear lord, shoot your light into me The beams of your forgiveness: I am soul-sick; And wither with the fear of one condemn'd, Till I have got your pardon.

_Amin._ Rise, Evadne.

Those heavenly Powers, that put this good into thee, Grant a continuance of it: I forgive thee; Make thyself worthy of it, and take heed, Take heed, Evadne, this be serious; Mock not the Pow'rs above, that can and dare Give thee a great example of their justice To all ensuing eyes, if that thou playest With thy repentance, the best sacrifice.

_Evad._ I have done nothing good to win belief, My life hath been so faithless; all the creatures Made for Heav'n's honours, have their ends, and good ones, All but the cozening crocodiles, false women; They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores, Men pray against; and when they die, like tales Ill told, and unbeliev'd they pa.s.s away And go to dust forgotten: But, my lord, Those short days I shall number to my rest, (As many must not see me) shall, though late (Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,) Since I can do no good, because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it; I will redeem one minute of my age, Or, like another Niobe, I'll weep Till I am water.

_Amin._ I am now dissolv'd.

My frozen soul melts: may each sin thou hast Find a new mercy! rise, I am at peace: Hadst thou been thus, thus excellently good, Before that devil king tempted thy frailty, Sure, thou hadst made a star. Give me thy hand; From this time I will know thee, and as far As honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor.

When we meet next, I will salute thee fairly And pray the G.o.ds to give thee happy days.

My charity shall go along with thee Though my embraces must be far from thee.

I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentance Locks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee, The last kiss we must take."

The beautiful play of _Philaster_ has already been glanced at; it is sufficient to add that its detached pa.s.sages are deservedly the most famous of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy, has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the chronological order of these plays is. .h.i.therto unsolved) that Fletcher's singular _vis comica_ appears. _A King and no King_ has a very serious plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, and pa.s.sionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is fresh and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is perhaps more generally interesting. As for _The Scornful Lady_ it is comedy pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the younger Loveless--an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners--injures it a little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most Molieresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minor touches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow [49] are all comical and mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of _The Custom of the Country_, bring it under the ban of a rather unfair condemnation of Dryden's, p.r.o.nounced when he was quite unsuccessfully trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's d.a.m.ning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. _The Elder Brother_ is one of those many variations on _cedant arma togae_ which men of letters have always been somewhat p.r.o.ne to overvalue; but the excellent comedy of _The Spanish Curate_ is not impaired by the fact that Dryden chose to adapt it after his own fas.h.i.+on in The _Spanish Friar_. In _Wit Without Money_, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a "roaring boy," a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps a little too strongly. _The Beggar's Bush_ is interesting because of its early indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's _Jovial Crew_, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and the merits of Fletcher have scarcely found better expression anywhere than in _The Humorous Lieutenant_. Celia is his masterpiece in the delineation of the type of girl outlined above, and awkward as her double courts.h.i.+p by Demetrius and his father Antigonus is, one somehow forgives it, despite the nauseous crew of go-betweens of both s.e.xes whom Fletcher here as elsewhere seems to take a pleasure in introducing. As for the Lieutenant he is quite charming; and even the ultra-farcical episode of his falling in love with the king owing to a philtre is well carried off. Then follows the delightful pastoral of _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which ranks with Jonson's _Sad Shepherd_ and with _Comus_, as the three chiefs of its style in English. _The Loyal Subject_ falls a little behind, as also does _The Mad Lover_; but _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_ again rises to the first cla.s.s. Inferior to Shakespere in the power of transcending without travestying human affairs, to Jonson in sharply presented humours, to Congreve and Sheridan in rattling fire of dialogue, our authors have no superior in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy of a certain kind, and they have perhaps nowhere shown their power better than in the picture of the Copper Captain and his Wife. The flagrant absurdity of _The Laws of Candy_ (which put the penalty of death on ingrat.i.tude, and apparently fix no criterion of what ingrat.i.tude is, except the decision of the person who thinks himself ungratefully treated), spoils a play which is not worse written than the rest. But in _The False One_, based on Egyptian history just after Pompey's death, and _Valentinian_, which follows with a little poetical license the crimes and punishment of that Emperor, a return is made to pure tragedy--in both cases with great success. The magnificent pa.s.sage which Hazlitt singled out from _The False One_ is perhaps the author's or authors' highest attempt in tragic declamation, and may be considered to have stopped not far short of the highest tragic poetry.

[49] It may perhaps be well to mention that the references to "volumes" are to the ten-volume edition of 1750, by Theobald, Seward, and others.

"'Oh thou conqueror, Thou glory of the world once, now the pity: Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus?

What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian?

The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger, That honourable war ne'er taught a n.o.bleness Nor worthy circ.u.mstance show'd what a man was?

That never heard thy name sung but in banquets And loose lascivious pleasures? to a boy That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness No study of thy life to know thy goodness?...

Egyptians, dare you think your high pyramides Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose, Where your unworthy kings lie rak'd in ashes, Are monuments fit for him! No, brood of Nilus, Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven; No pyramid set off his memories, But the eternal substance of his greatness, To which I leave him.'"

The chief fault of _Valentinian_ is that the character of Maximus is very indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, _The Little French Lawyer_ and _Monsieur Thomas_, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friends.h.i.+p of Clerimont and Dinant; while no play has so many of Fletcher's agreeable young women as _Monsieur Thomas_. _The b.l.o.o.d.y Brother_, which its t.i.tle speaks as sufficiently tragical, comes between two excellent comedies, _The Chances_ and _The Wild Goose Chase_, which might serve as well as any others for samples of the whole work on its comic side. In _The Chances_ the portrait of the hare-brained Don John is the chief thing; in _The Wild Goose Chase_, as in _Monsieur Thomas_, a whole bevy of lively characters, male and female, dispute the reader's attention and divide his preference.

_A Wife for a Month_ sounds comic, but is not a little alloyed with tragedy; and despite the pathos of its central situation, is marred by some of Fletcher's ugliest characters--the characters which Shakespere in Pandarus and the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ took care to touch with his lightest finger. _The Lover's Progress_, a doubtful tragedy, and _The Pilgrim_, a good comedy (revived at the end of the century, as was _The Prophetess_ with certain help from Dryden), do not require any special notice. Between these two last comes _The Captain_, a comedy neither of the best nor yet of the worst. The tragi-comic _Queen of Corinth_ is a little heavy; but in _Bonduca_ we have one of the very best of the author's tragedies, the scenes with Caratach and his nephew, the boy Hengo, being full of touches not wholly unworthy of Shakespere. _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ (where Fletcher, forsaking his usual fantastic grounds of a France that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian, comes to simple pictures of London middle-cla.s.s life, such as those of Jonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite the difficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesque knight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In _Love's Pilgrimage_, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, there is not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of _The Double Marriage_ do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting plays.

But _The Maid in the Mill_ and _The Martial Maid_ are good farce, which almost deserves the name of comedy; and _The Knight of Malta_ is a romantic drama of merit. In _Women Pleased_ the humours of avarice and hungry servility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio's speeches is among the best-known pa.s.sages of all the plays, while the anti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next four plays are less noticeable, and indeed for two volumes, of the edition referred to, we come to fewer plays that are specially good. _The Night Walker_; or, _The Little Thief_, though not very probable in its incidents, has a great deal of lively business, and is particularly noteworthy as supplying proof of the singular popularity of bell-ringing with all cla.s.ses of the population in the seventeenth century,--a popularity which probably protected many old bells in the mania for church desecration. Not much can be said for _The Woman's Prize_, or, _The Tamer Tamed_, an avowed sequel, and so to speak, antidote to _The Taming of the Shrew_, which chiefly proves that it is wise to let Shakespere alone. The authors have drawn to some extent on the _Lysistrata_ to aid them, but have fallen as far short of the fun as of the indecency of that memorable play. With _The Island Princess_ we return to a fair, though not more than a fair level of romantic tragi-comedy, but _The n.o.ble Gentleman_ is the worst play ever attributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectly uninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the means adopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, and successive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which he takes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. _The Coronation_ is much better, and _The Sea Voyage_, with a kind of Amazon story grafted upon a hint of _The Tempest_, is a capital play of its kind. Better still, despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is _The c.o.xcomb_, where the heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity of the traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case with our authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and pa.s.s trippingly. _Wit at Several Weapons_ deserves a somewhat similar description, and so does _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; while _Cupid's Revenge_, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play, has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to cla.s.sical belief in its delineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly, however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting material of any except the first. Here is _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_, a play founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character.

Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_, in which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neither squeamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, though somewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher's very virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is much superior to that of Aspatia in _The Maid's Tragedy_. _The Woman Hater_, said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or at least farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey in chase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him); and _The Nice Valour_ contains, in Chamont and his brother, the most successful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point of honour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for _An Honest Man's Fortune_, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in part beautiful, piece ent.i.tled _Four Plays in One_, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gone through that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit that such a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences in all its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names in English literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and most terrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont and Fletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men; for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear any compet.i.tion.

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 Ma.s.singer, 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 amba.s.sador; 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 b.u.t.ts. 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.