Tragedy Part 14

Fazio's wife, jealous because of his infatuation for a countess, betrays her husband, and then for the remainder of the play is wildly remorseful.

In spite of the extreme improbability of both the persons and the language, the story is told with dramatic directness and affords manifest opportunities for a great actress, seized upon by Miss O'Neill and later by Miss Cushman and, in an Italian adaptation, by Madame Ristori. A still greater theatrical success was won by Kean in "Brutus" (1818), a pastiche of the plays of Lee, c.u.mberland, and Downman composed by the American, John Howard Payne. Sheridan Knowles's "Virginius" (1820), followed by his "Caius Gracchus" (1823), and "William Tell" (1825), gave promise of a more permanent revival of the poetical drama. Knowles, an actor and a practical playwright, was also the friend and in a way the pupil of Lamb and Hazlitt, and he gained the cooperation of a great and ambitious actor, Macready. He united as no other writer of the generation had done, stage-craft and poetic ideals. "Virginius," the best of his tragedies, is still acted--excepting Bulwer-Lytton's "Richelieu," the only relic of early nineteenth century tragedy. The story, with its one great acting scene, is told after the Shakespearean model in very ornate and artificial verse. It mingles much scoffing at the rabble with romantic appeals for liberty, tricks Virginia out with a lover, and ends with the insanity of Virginius.

Knowles's tragedies at the time of their presentation were only moderately successful, far less so than his absurd comedy, "The Hunchback"; and several poetic dramas by other writers fared worse. Thomas Wade's "Woman's Love," based on the Patient Griselda story, obtained a hearing in 1808, but his Marlowesque "Jew of Aragon" was hooted off the stage in 1830. But Procter's "Mirandola" was acted sixteen times in 1821, and Miss Mitford's "Rienzi" (1828) and Byron's "Werner" (1830) gained veritable triumphs.

For about a decade longer poetic tragedy continued to contend for the theatre. Its main hope lay in Macready, and its hey-day was during his two periods of management of Drury Lane, 1837-39 and 1841-42. After the success of "Werner" ("Marino Faliero" had been earlier produced in 1821), "Sardanapalus" was brought out by Macready in 1833-34; and "The Two Foscari" later. Knowles's "Alfred the Great" and his "Bridal," an adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy," won considerable success; and "The Pledge," a version of Victor Hugo's "Hernani," in 1831 heralded new support for romantic poetry in the drama. In the years 1836-37 Macready introduced three new writers in the "Ion" of Talfourd, "Strafford"

of Browning, and the "d.u.c.h.ess de la Valliere" of Bulwer-Lytton. Talfourd's tragedies, including two, "The Athenian Captive" and "Glencoe," later acted by Macready, are stiff and wooden, contributing little to the drama.

Bulwer-Lytton's later plays, "The Lady of Lyons" (1838) and "Richelieu"

(1839), were extremely successful and surpa.s.sed any preceding efforts of the romanticists to adapt poetry to the stage. "Richelieu" is by no means a great poem or free from claptrap, but it has the merit of being written to be spoken and in having its characters designed as parts of the action. The interest is not in the poetry--it reads much better with the omissions made for acting--but in the development of the character of the cardinal through the incidents. The failure of "The Blot on the 'Scutcheon" in 1843 marks the end of Macready's management and the end of romantic tragedy on the stage.

Many of these acted plays gained what suitability they had for the stage by accident rather than design. Milman's "Fazio" was published several years before it was acted, and his later tragedies were decidedly closet dramas.

Miss Mitford's "Julian" made little impression on the stage, and her other tragedies, except "Rienzi," still less. Byron's tragedies, which succeeded largely no doubt because of his reputation, were acted against his wish or after his death. And the various poetic tragedies that were written at about the same time as Byron's and Sh.e.l.ley's were mostly composed without thought of stage presentation. The surpa.s.sing genius of the greater poets has thrown into obscurity the work of these other young men, who in the decade after Waterloo faced the world with thin volumes of verse. But there have been few times in our literary history when the Muses have been so alluring, and Melpomene had her share of devotees. In John Wilson's "City of the Plague" (1816) a young naval officer wanders about plague-stricken London, through its baccha.n.a.ls and horrors, buries his mother, discovers his betrothed, the ministering angel of the afflicted, and at last finds rest with her in the terrible crowded churchyard. The poem is grandly conceived and beautifully written in verse, occasionally Wordsworthian but without affectation or over-ornament. Two other closet dramatists offer rather less sincerity and impressiveness of conception but even more of poetic beauty. "Joseph and his Brethren" (1823), by Charles Wells, for a time the friend of Keats, was published when the author was twenty-three, and fifty years later revived and rewritten because of the appreciation of Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne. Like the plays of Thomas Wade, it shows the influence of Marlowe in verse and plan. Long drawn out and in the main undramatic, there is imagination everywhere, especially in the remarkable scenes that depict the pa.s.sion-inflamed Phraxanor, Potiphar's wife. Of the Elizabethans, too, was Beddoes, who studied Webster and Tourneur as well as Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, and whose verse at times fairly surpa.s.ses his masters.

His "Bride's Tragedy" (1821), written when he was nineteen, is a play only in name, but it is a poem that joins terror and fascination as scarcely another since Webster and Ford. Here, as in his incompleted dramas and his "Death's Jest Book," published much later, loveliness masks with madness and death, and mockery with pa.s.sion. It seems as if he were lavis.h.i.+ng over strange juxtapositions of beauty and decay all the sensuous fascination of Keats and the lingering suggestiveness of Sh.e.l.ley's lyrics. One's admiration for his genius is tempered only by the thought of the greater things he might have done.

Earlier than these poems was Landor's "Count Julian" (1812), which, like them, presents qualities suited for the closet and not for the stage. As in some of the "Imaginary Conversations," Landor takes it for granted that his audience understands the story and the motives of the actors as well as he himself. The reader gradually disentangles the situations and is stirred by the splendid poetry; but no audience could make out what it was all about.

His other poetical tragedies, written a quarter of a century later, show no improvement of these defects, nor do they present dramatic themes as interesting or as powerfully conceived as those in "Count Julian."

"Otho the Great," the tragedy which Keats hoped would lift him out of the mire,[49] was devised for Kean, and apparently accepted for Drury Lane.

Charles Brown furnished him "description of each scene entire, with the characters to be brought forward, the events, and everything connected with it"; and Keats merely wrote the verse up to the fifth act, when he took the entire management into his own hands. The result of this peculiar collaboration was what might have been expected. The plot and characterization follow old types; and the poetry, though not lacking in fine pa.s.sages, is inferior to nearly everything else that Keats wrote in his _annus mirabilis_, 1819.

Scott's dramas are somewhat out of place when grouped with these other closet tragedies, for they are varied in character, representing a number of the proclivities that we have noticed in the romantic drama.[50] "The House of Aspen," written in prose at about the time of "Goetz," was intended for the stage and considered by Kemble for representation. Based on a German tale and showing the influence of "Goetz," it offers no important deviations from the terroristic drama. "The Doom of Devorgoil,"

designed for Terry at the Adelphi, is a melodrama with many songs and a mixture of mimic goblins with supernatural machinery that was found to be so objectionable as to prevent its performance. It is interesting as one of the very few cases in which a man of literary reputation undertook to meet the requirements of the illegitimate drama. None of the other plays, which are in blank verse, was intended for the stage. "Macduff's Cross" is a mere sketch in one act; "Halidon Hill" a two-act dramatization of border warfare; "Auchindrane," in three acts, is a more fully developed tragedy.

"Halidon Hill" has a clearness and directness of characterization and a vigor of movement which suggest that had the auspices been more favorable, the historical drama might have had another great exponent. "Auchindrane,"

though retaining a little of the Radcliffian mystery and mystification which Scott never quite outgrew, also tells its domestic story with a directness and verisimilitude not usual among the romanticists. German translation, terroristic tragedy, spectral melodrama, dramatic sketches for the closet, and domestic tragedy are all ill.u.s.trated by these six plays; and their subjects and treatment also reflect the various attachments of Scott's literary career. They ill.u.s.trate also the inability of literary genius to aid the theatre in this period, but they differ from most of the literary drama in their absence of subjectivity or attachment to theory.

Byron's plays, like other poetical tragedies of the time, were written in accord with the writer's theories and counter to the prevailing theatrical practices; but Byron prided himself on departing from the methods of the Elizabethans or of his fellow romanticists, and on following the guidance of eighteenth century models. "Marino Faliero," "The Two Foscari," and "Sardanapalus," all written 1820-21, attempt regularity of plot and observance of the unities, and profess Alfieri as a model. The two Venetian plays, however, recall Otway's "Venice Preserved," and their exaggeration of strange pa.s.sions is quite in accord with the general practice of the romanticists. The plots are improbable, though selected from history, and aloof from general interest, for the resentment of the old doge at the insult to his wife and the unyielding vengeance of Loredano and, indeed, all the major pa.s.sions are treated with an extravagance that becomes melodramatic and renders the persons all but unintelligible. With "Sardanapalus" the case is different. The dissolute, luxurious, but n.o.bly-aspiring hero and his better angel, Myrrha, derive from the characters of Byron and the Countess Guiccioli a truth of pa.s.sion that animates the rapid and spectacular action. A tragedy of palace intrigue, after the eighteenth century type, is thus reanimated by the romantic fervor of its pa.s.sion, philosophy, and poetry. Any time from "The Mourning Bride" to "Zen.o.bia" it might have triumphed on the stage, and so it did triumph when finally acted; but it summoned only a t.i.the of Byron's power.

Quite different from any of these three plays, his "Werner" was obviously suited to its own day. Based on one of Harriet Lee's novels, it forsakes cla.s.sical structure and exhibits all the paraphernalia and emotional horrors of the terrific drama. It was one of the greatest stage successes of the romantic drama, but it is no more deserving, either as a play or a poem, than a dozen of its rivals.

Byron's other dramas depart farther than any of these, not only from fitness for the stage, but from likeness to any definite dramatic species.

Of the four, however, all of which deal with a world of spirits, "Manfred"

and "Cain" have tragic themes and protagonists. "It was," wrote Byron, "the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else much more than Faustus that made me write Manfred." Nature, the ever-recurring theme of the romantic poets, is here given something akin to dramatic treatment. The impa.s.sioned descriptions create a presence, not one "that disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts," but "the wild comrade of Manfred's antipathy to men."[51] The mountains become sharers in the hero's tirades, though their nights' "dim and solitary loveliness" is the only power that curbs his fierce unrest. "Cain," less lyrical and far more distinct in its presentation of dramatic conflict, may rightly be claimed by romantic tragedy for its own. It is not merely Byron's own personality which finds expression here, but the revolt against convention and creed, so characteristic of the romantic movement. The demands of the individual man against society and providence make up the tragic theme. The tragedy of individual pa.s.sion, leaping the bounds of history, romance, or actuality, is here divorced from the theatre, divorced indeed from any semblance to the models of tragedy; but in its symbolistic and allegorical presentation of philosophical questionings still keeps close to the essentials of great dramatic art, the searching of the motives and conflicts of human pa.s.sion.

Cain is of the brotherhood of Marlowe's Faustus and Shakespeare's Hamlet and other tragic heroes who chafe against finite limitations, greatly seeking after knowledge and certainty, and finding the very curiosity of their discontent the weapon of their own destruction. The theme is an eternal one in tragedy, but it was left to the romanticists fully to realize its meaning, and to Byron to give it isolation and grandeur.

Sh.e.l.ley's "Cenci" in a different way mirrors this eternal defeat that human struggle after justice must encounter. Deeply impressed by the current tradition about Beatrice Cenci, he made this story of incest and parricide the expression of his view of life and history as a conflict between tyranny and downtrodden innocence. Nowhere else in Sh.e.l.ley, not even in "Prometheus Unbound," does this world drama come out of the clouds and reveal itself with such clarity and power. There is pa.s.sion in the persons, climax in the situations, and directness in the language such as the romantic drama had rarely shown. The philosophical conception and the tangle of human motives do not indeed quite harmonize. Beatrice's lie and her unworthy seeking after life are bits of the story which interfere with our acceptance of Beatrice the martyr, flaws that Browning would not have admitted. On the other hand, Sh.e.l.ley's philosophy overrides the story, as may be seen by a comparison of the tragedy with one of the earliest to show dawning romanticism. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother," which at this time Byron was praising as "the last tragedy," treats a more horrible story of incest with the interest mainly in the plot, holding in suspense the fearful solution until the end; "The Cenci" begins with the act of incest, and then tries to carry our interest solely to the two characters, one the embodiment of all inherited evil, the other, a pure and beautiful spirit striving madly and in vain to free herself from wrong that is might. The conquest of the stage, the writing of dramatic blank verse, and the endowment of this story of crime with representational truth were tasks too large to be accomplished in a single play; but, though faulty in the details of dramatic art, "The Cenci" is, for a first tragedy, without an equal in its mastery of the great essentials of tragic poetry. The poet who shrank from comedy as from a wicked thing and who thought a story of incest possible in a London theatre, had much to learn before he could master the stage. But "The Cenci" reveals the maturing Sh.e.l.ley, who was opening his mind to new impressions, admiring "Cain" and "Don Juan," profiting from aeschylus and Calderon as well as Shakespeare, and who was seeing his allegories clothed in human form, and no longer only in images of mist and flame. As one reads one wonders,--had the play not been the last as well as his first tragedy? had it come at the beginning instead of nearly at the close of the romantic movement?

In "Prometheus Unbound" there is even greater achievement in the presentation of this world conflict; and there Cain triumphs and Beatrice is purified. But the achievement is lyrical rather than dramatic, and has no proper place in the history of tragedy.

In all these tragedies, whether acted or not, and whether works of genius or not, certain resemblances have been noted. They exhibit most of the elements that characterize the romantic movement as it stirred English poetry from the "Lyrical Ballads" to the first publications of Tennyson and Browning. Without realism in plot or language, and dealing always with what is unusual, improbable, and removed from the present, they made little effort to catch the interest of the average audience or to excite an interest common to ordinary experience. Their reaction against the frivolity of contemporary melodrama was as decided as their reaction against eighteenth century conventionality; but both impulses led to poetry, pa.s.sion, and Shakespeare, but not to drama. They did not succeed in working out cause and effect of character through incident; when they desired to gain stage effectiveness, they merely borrowed from current melodrama or from the Elizabethans.

Elizabethan influence is usually apparent in the choice of themes, in the devising of plot and situations, and particularly in the figurative and ornate phrasing. The revival of some Elizabethan plays on the stage, the vulgarization in the illegitimate drama of many of their incidents, and the general interest among readers at this time in the Elizabethan drama, all encouraged a fondness for madness, incest, battles, villany, and unrestrained pa.s.sion of various kinds. In phrasing, the Elizabethan influence appears in all degrees; in the sympathetic emulation of Keats, in the amazing reproductions of Beddoes, or in the starched artificiality of the poetic embellishments of Milman, Knowles, or Procter. In general the style is redundant and florid. In such plays as were adapted for the stage, it will almost always be found that the mere curtailing of the figures, soliloquies, and episodes causes a marked improvement in the dramatic quality of the dialogue. Byron and Sh.e.l.ley both attempted to free their dramatic blank verse from conceits and artificialities, and to give it directness and lack of ornamentation corresponding to natural speech. In consequence, Byron's blank verse often makes a slovenly approach to prose, and Sh.e.l.ley's loses something of the beauty of his non-dramatic masterpieces; but on the whole, "Sardanapalus" and still more "Cain" and "The Cenci" show their greatness in this as in other respects, in the dramatic quality of their verse.

Many of the tragedies also exhibit the influence of the school of terror.

The Radcliffian romances, the early German drama, and the spectral melodrama of the theatres all encouraged castles, dungeons, t.i.tans like Karl Moor, hallucinations, and ghosts. There is something of this in Beddoes's churchyards; "Bertram" is a full-fledged drama of terror by one of the masters of the school; Byron's "Werner," itself a dramatization of a tale of terror, conforms to all the stage requirements of the species.

After the tales of terror had gone out of fas.h.i.+on, the romanticists still found it easy on the stage to revert to haunted castles, inveterate villains, and in-dungeoned heroes. But in addition to the continuing influence of "The Robbers" and the plays of "Monk" Lewis, there was arising the influence of "Faust" and of Schiller's later plays. "Faust," which furnished hints for "Manfred" and "The Deformed Transformed," seems to have been regarded as a "tale of wonder," the story of the sale of a soul to the devil being a favorite with that cla.s.s of fiction; but its philosophy perhaps also had its suggestions for both Byron and Sh.e.l.ley. Schiller's "Wallenstein," translated by Coleridge, and "Mary Stuart" at least encouraged the prevailing fondness for historical themes and the study of pa.s.sion.

Medievalism continued its sway but with some new developments. The Waverley novels, the growing cosmopolitanism of literature, the Italian residences of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, in fact innumerable causes led to an expansion of the interest in the Middle Ages into an interest in the past. Literature, whether in Scott or Keats, was carrying its search for story and ideals, for picturesqueness and beauty, into past ages and remote climes. The treatment of history, which had formed no part of the plans of Miss Baillie, Wordsworth, or Coleridge, now became essential to tragedy; and we find Byron keeping carefully to the historical sources of his tragedies of the doges, and Sh.e.l.ley adhering to a narrative of the Cenci murder, which he deemed authentic, though since proved legendary. Italian history seems to have exercised a general fascination. Miss Mitford wrote a tragedy on the Foscari independently of Byron's, as well as her "Rienzi"; and "Fazio"

and "Mirandola" dealt with Italian stories. The choice, however, was mainly for grandiose historical events, as "Sardanapalus," "Virginius," "Lucius Junius Brutus," "Richelieu," and Milman's "Fall of Jerusalem." Some of these attracted by the opportunity to praise liberty, meaning Catholic emanc.i.p.ation and electoral reform, and the denunciation of tyranny; but they seem to have been especially welcomed because of their opportunities for rhetorical fervors.

In nearly all the plays the main interest is not in plot, as in the eighteenth century, and not primarily in story, as in the Elizabethan period, but in the delineation of individual pa.s.sion. "Lear," "Oth.e.l.lo,"

"Hamlet," and "Macbeth" are the models; but the pa.s.sions are more distempered, more isolated, more abstracted from reason or sense than in Shakespeare. As in the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the influence of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans is most unmistakable in the prominence given to insanity and villany. But this prominence is also a natural result of the romanticists' prepossession with pa.s.sion. In tragedy, they felt that some pa.s.sions must be very evil and some ruinous; hence they devoted themselves to a study of malice and madness. Their villains are more vigorous than those of the eighteenth century, but they, too, imitate Iago; and the mad scenes always recall either Lear or Ophelia. The romanticists can realize pa.s.sion for the moment, or display its variable moods; but they rarely succeed in making its extended portrayal convincing.

They clung to the idea that the only way to depict pa.s.sion was to eliminate all else. Even in the great writers pa.s.sion absorbs the interest; in the minor plays it tears itself to tatters. Tragedy after tragedy represents pa.s.sions, not conflicting but alternating, until one or the other turns to madness. As Lewis's prologue declared, Romance "raves away the hours." The conception of tragedy seems to be the burning up of the soul in pa.s.sion, and the poets' main concern to describe the conflagration. The romanticists needed Lyttleton's advice, to read Shakespeare, but to study Racine.

The conception of tragedy that requires the expression of pa.s.sion working in individual men, and seeks in history or legend for examples of isolated effects of the great emotions, clearly involves something different from a veracious representation of life as we all see it, and something more than the confusion of pa.s.sions run wild. According to contemporary philosophical criticism, as that of Schiller and Sch.e.l.ling, or that of Coleridge and Sh.e.l.ley, tragedy should take part in the search for universal truth; not universal in the eighteenth-century conception of typical characters and aphoristic generalizations, but universal in the sense that, in the words of Carlyle, it seeks the "interpretation of the divine idea in the world."

Tragedy should investigate, as Lamb declared, "the grounds of the pa.s.sion, its correspondence to a great and heroic nature," and should also seek to find in the riots of evil or the storms of pa.s.sion symptoms of the struggle of Nature to rid itself of disease and fever, the presage of a higher unity for both man and the universe. Something of this is discernible in "Remorse" or elsewhere; there is a pa.s.sionate demand for ethical realities in "Cain"; but the only positive presentation of an idealistic theory of tragedy is "The Cenci."

Though tragedy thus reflects the changes working in the ideas and forms of literature, these changes are, of course, more distinctly indicated elsewhere. If we had no knowledge of other literature, and only tragedy to judge from, we could not clearly discern the far-reaching changes wrought by the romantic revival. Tragedy from 1800 to 1830 could be described as marking a return to the Elizabethans and Shakespeare, an absorption in the depiction of pa.s.sion, a revival of poetic imagination in expression, an appeal to terror rather than to pity, and to the strange and mysterious rather than the reasonable; but it could not be said that the summation of these changes resulted in an extensive or enduring development.

It is not easy to find a stopping-place for a history of English tragedy.

In the case of the acted drama the close of Macready's management offers a definite end, for the ensuing twenty-five years are nearly a blank as far as acted tragedy is concerned. In the case of the unacted drama, however, there is no point of marked change. The deaths of Scott and Goethe mark a stage in European literature; and the Victorian era introduces new poets and novelists, new social and political conditions, and a new foreign influence in the French romanticists. But the closet dramas after 1830 are in many ways closely related to those of the generation before. Closet tragedy in the plays of Browning, Sir Henry Taylor, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and others, was largely the outcome of the theatrical and literary conditions which we have been tracing. Separated from the theatre, it offers, one must fear, little that is vital in the development of the drama, however impressive it may be as poetry. The appearance of new semi-dramatic species was a natural accompaniment of the continued departure of drama from the stage. Miss Mitford and Bulwer-Lytton had written "dramatic scenes." Later Landor's genius found its truest opportunity not in poetic plays, but in prose imaginary conversations, at their best splendidly dramatic. Browning turned from the theatre to dramatic lyrics, romances, and monologues. In fact, in the work of all the romantic dramatists, including Browning and Swinburne, dramatic power reveals itself in scenes and pa.s.sages rather than in whole plays. Tragedy as a literary form, it may be repeated, is dependent for its life upon the theatre. Removed from the theatre, its integrity is gone, it develops strange and varied forms. Instead of tragedy, we have "My Last d.u.c.h.ess,"

"The Ring and the Book," and the Mary Stuart trilogy.

It is this separation from the theatre that seems to have been the main cause for the failure of the romantic movement in tragedy. We may, to be sure, find other causes in plenty. The genius of its great poets was lyrical rather than dramatic. Lyrical and narrative poetry and, above all, the novel absorbed both public interest and imaginative genius. Again, there was no free play for a revolution in tragedy, because there had been no tyranny. Cla.s.sicism had never dominated the drama as in other European nations. In English tragedy of the eighteenth century, blank verse, however tainted by affectation, had kept the Elizabethan fondness for figure; structure, though following after French models, had maintained the traditions of English freedom; the subjects had kept open a wide range and had not neglected the medieval field; and sentiment, if not pa.s.sion, had reigned. While the German and French romanticists found in Shakespeare an incentive to something new, the English romanticists could only elevate to omnipotence one who had long been the idol of the theatres. He was for them no innovator, but rather the unrecognized tyrant who held them back from real innovation. As Beddoes recognized in theory though not in practice, "the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold tramping fellow,--no reviver, even however good."

But if we still ask why Coleridge or Beddoes should not have written tragedy as well as Schiller or Victor Hugo, why the tragedy of pa.s.sion, revolt, and idealism, applied to history or legend, did not flourish in the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon, of Kemble and Kean, of Byron and Browning, the best answer must be found in the fact that theatrical conditions offered no encouragement to tragic drama, but almost forbade a serious attempt to learn the ways of the theatre or to deal in its debased wares.

If theatrical conditions had been favorable, if the union of Macready and Browning could have continued, one fancies that the romantic drama might yet have succeeded. The chronicle of English tragedy finds its climax in the first act, with Shakespeare as its protagonist; henceforth, directed by his ghost, its action goes haltingly, vainly awaiting another climax and another protagonist. In Browning, it was, perhaps, nearer than ever before to finding both. Since the Restoration, no poet had come to the theatre so gifted with dramatic genius, no poet so concerned with the study of the vicissitudes of human motive, so alive to the dramatic values of crucial moments, so curious as to the meaning of pa.s.sion and pain, suffering and evil, in the drama of life. "Strafford" and "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon" have the weaknesses of youth and experiment, but they are the plays of a pioneer who is not content with returning to the Elizabethans or the Greeks, but is seeking to convey through his stories and persons the truth that is in him.

The study of Strafford is almost the first independent and acute study of an Englishman of history in all the historical tragedies since "Henry V"; "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon" one of the few plays to realize individual pa.s.sions since Otway. And the dramatic defects--the failure to meet his audience half-way, the awkwardness and garrulity of expression, the lack of repression in form, while defects that continue in Browning's later poetry--are the very faults for which a severe apprentices.h.i.+p to the theatre might have been the best discipline. An apprentices.h.i.+p such as Shakespeare served might have turned Browning's monologues and lyrics into dramas; but the age was incapable of furnis.h.i.+ng such a training, and the fiasco with Macready was the end of the period and the defeat of the poetical drama.

What comes after in the nineteenth century may best be left to the future historian, who will be able to interpret its plays in the light of a succeeding development. The plays of Tennyson, reverting again to Shakespeare, and the poems of Swinburne may, after all, be the forerunners of a new revival of poetical tragedy. Or the great development in technic that has proceeded, first under the guidance of the French dramatists, and then of Ibsen, and the serious essays of dramatists of the pa.s.sing generation may be the pioneers of a national drama of first-rate importance in the generation to come. Certainly Ibsen, with his revolution in both the content and the form of the tragic drama, has been the great force in later nineteenth century tragedy. His work as it affects England and America, however neglected, postponed, or modified, must be the text of a succeeding chapter on English tragedy, which cannot yet be written.

NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Genest's _Account of the English Stage_ stops at 1830. A continuation of this work down to the present time is much to be desired. There is no thorough history or bibliography of the drama of this period. In addition to the histories of the theatre already mentioned, W. C. Oulton's _History of the Theatres of London_, 1795-1817, may be consulted. Memoirs of the Kembles are useful for this period, and also Macready's _Reminiscences_, ed. Sir F. Pollock (1875), Moore's _Life of Sheridan_ (1825), Molloy's _Life of Edmund Kean_ (1888), William Archer's admirable life of Macready (_Eminent Actors Series_), are all valuable. _Random Recollections_ by Colman the younger, and memoirs of Kelly, O'Keefe, and Reynolds supply information in regard to the theatre and illegitimate drama. John c.u.mberland's collections, _British Theatre_ (41 vols., 1829) and the _Minor Theatre_ (15 vols.), are printed from acting copies, and the second comprises many illegitimate plays.

Dramatic criticism of the period includes Coleridge (see criticism of Maturin's _Bertram_ in _Biographia Literaria_), Hazlitt, _A View of the English Stage_ (1818); Leigh Hunt, _Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres_ (1807) (selections from same, ed. W. Archer and R. W.

Lowe, 1894); Lamb (see _Lamb's Dramatic Essays_, ed. Brander Matthews, 1893). See, also, R. H. Horne's _New Spirit of the Age_ (1844), containing criticism of Knowles, Macready, Bulwer-Lytton, and Browning.

The dramatic work of the chief poets has been studied in connection with their other poetry by many editors and critics, but rarely in its relation to the drama of the period. Professor Beers's two volumes, _English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_ (1899), and _English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century_ (1901), deal with the German influence; C. H.

Herford has an excellent though brief account of the drama of the period in his _Age of Wordsworth_; Watson Nicholson's _The Struggle for a Free Stage in London_ (1906) is full and valuable. Ernest Bates's monograph on _The Cenci_ (1908) discusses that tragedy and its relations to contemporary drama.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] See _The Haunted Tower_, an opera (1789), acted eighty times in two seasons.

[46] Its borrowings are noted by Genest, viii, 603. The scene is quoted in Archer's _Life of Macready_ (Eminent Actors Series), p. 40.

[47] _The Fall of Robespierre_ (1794), by Southey and Coleridge, and Southey's _Wat Tyler_ (1817), written in 1794, hardly require even mention as tragedies.

[48] In this and the two following paragraphs the bracketed dates are those of the first performances in London. Some of the plays were first acted elsewhere.

[49] "I mean the mire of a bad reputation which is continually rising against me. My name with the literary fas.h.i.+onables is vulgar. I am a weaver-boy to them. A tragedy would lift me out of this mess." Letter to his sister, December, 1819.

[50] The translation of Goethe's _Goetz von Berlichingen_ (1799), _The House of Aspen_ (1830), _Halidon Hill_ (1822), _Macduff's Cross_ (1823), _The Doom of Devorgoil_ (1830), _Auchindrane_ (1830).

[51] Herford, _Age of Wordsworth_, p. 227.

CHAPTER XI