This is no conventional portrait of the Founder of our faith. Nor are these solemn words, in which an injured husband absolves his penitent and dying wife, spoken from the lips. merely : As freely from the low depths of my soul As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death, Even as I hope for pardon at that day When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits, XII If the anguish of the world was painted forcibly in all its strength and ugliness by our old dramatists, the beauty and the peace, the calm of quiet places, the loveliness of nature and the dignity of soul which make man's life worth living, were no less faithfully delineated. If they doted upon the grave, spending night-hours in sombre contemplations, they could throw the windows of the heart wide open upon bright May mornings, hear the lark's song, and feel the freshness and the joy of simple things. It was the chief triumph of the Romantic style to make these transitions from grave to gay, from earnest to sprightly, without effort and without discord. The multiform existence men enjoy upon this planet received a full reflection in our theatre; nor was one of its many aspects neglected for another. Those artists verily believed that the world's a stage;' and they made their art a microcosm of the universe. It was given to all of them, in greater or less degree, to weave the wonder-web of human joys and pains, to sound the depths and search the heights of nature, modulating with unconscious felicity from key to key, blending bright hues and sad in harmony upon their arras-work. Shakspere's pre-eminence consists chiefly in this, that he did supremely well what all were doing. His touch on life was so unerringly true that the most diverse objects took shape and place together naturally in his atmosphere of art; even as in the full rich sunlight of a summer afternoon the many FEMALE CHARACTERS 47 moving crowds, the river, bridges, buildings, parks, and domes of a great city stand distinct but harmonised. No theatre is so rich in countless and contrasted types of womanhood. Shakspere's women have passed into a proverb, But I need not, nay seek not, to draw illustrations from his works. It is rather my object here as elsewhere, to show how the 'star-ypointing pyramid' on which the sovran poet dwells enthroned, was built by lesser men of like capacity. It has been said that the very names of Fletcher's ladies have a charm: Aspasia, Ordella, Amoret, Evadne, Viola, Euphrasia, Edith, Oriana; and their characters answer to the music of their names. They are sweet, true, gentle; enduring all things, believing all things; patient, meek, strong, innocent, unto the end. His Bonduca marks another type the Amazon, the Queen, rebellious against Rome. Such women the old playwrights loved; and they often interwove a thread of virile boldness or bravado with the portraiture. Marston's Sophonisba, the Carthaginian bride, who meets death with a dauntless countenance; Massinger's Domitia, the Roman empress, wooing an actor to her love in words that savour of habitual command; Ford's Annabella, guilty in her passion beyond thought or language, but sublime in her endurance of disgrace and death; Marston's Insatiate Countess; Dekker's Bellafront, are all of the same stamp, masculine for good or evil, and of indomitable will. The type reaches its climax in Vittoria Corombona, whose insolence and intellectual ascendency, when she stands up to defy her judges and confound them with her beauty, blaze still upon us with the splendour of an ominous star. That the same poets could draw the softer lines of female character is proved by Mellida, by Dorothea, by Isabella, in whom the tenderness of woman mingles with heroic constancy and strength in suffering. Nor was it only from the regions of romance and story that they borrowed types so varied. Contemporary English life supplied them with Alice Arden and Anne Frankford, with Winnifrede and Susan Carter, with Lady Ager and with Mrs. Wincott-mere names, perhaps, to the majority of those who meet them here; but women with whose passionate or pathetic histories I may perchance acquaint my readers. How could such characters-not to speak of Imogen or Cleopatra, Constance or Katharine-have been represented on the English stage? During the reigns of Elizabeth and James no women acted. Boys were trained to take their parts; and the youth who played Lady Macbeth or the Duchess of Malfi shaved his beard before he placed the coronet and curls upon his head. Here is indeed a mystery. With all the advantages offered to the modern dramatist by the greatest actresses, it is but rarely that he moulds a perfect woman for the stage. How could Shakspere have committed Desdemona to a boy? How had Fletcher the heart to shadow forth those half-tones and those evanescent hues in his Aspasia ? In consequence, perhaps, of this custom, great coarseness in the treatment of dramatic subjects was allowed. Boys uttered speeches which the English moral sense, even of that age, would scarcely have tolerated in the mouths of women. Much of the obscenity which defiles the comic drama may possibly be attributed to this practice. Yet it is certain that the boy-actors acquired considerable skill in rendering even the finer shades of character. Prince Arthur in 'King John' and Hengo in 'Bonduca' prove that some even of the male parts assigned to them involved a delicate perception of the subtlest sentiments. Often, too, when they appeared as women, they assumed a masculine disguise, and carried on a double part with innuendoes, hints, and half-betrayals of their simulated sex. The pages in Philaster' and 'The Lover's Melancholy,' Viola in Twelfth Night,' and Jonson's 'Silent Woman,' are instances of these epicene characters, which our ancestors delighted to contemplate. 'What an odd double confusion it must have made,' says Charles Lamb, 1 The female actors of Italy and France, where comedy was certainly more grossly indecent, warn us to be cautious on this point. But, taking the greater soundness of English moral feeling into account, I think that the attempt to introduce women into the theatrical profession would probably have ended in an earlier suppression of the stage. 'to see a boy play a woman playing a man: we cannot disentangle the perplexity without some violence to the imagination.' Yet there is no violence in the presentation. When the boy who played Euphrasia, under the disguise of Bellario, is wounded, and breathes out these words to Philaster— My life is not a thing Worthy your noble thoughts! 't is not a life, "T is but a piece of childhood thrown away!— who but feels the woman speaking? The poet heard her speak; and what he heard, he has conveyed to us. XIII While Tragedy reveals the deeper qualities of an epochthe essential passions, aspirations, intuitions of a peopleComedy displays the humours, habits, foibles, superficial aspects of society. It is not easy to make an exhaustive classification of the many forms of Comedy exhibited by our Romantic Drama. Yet these may be broadly divided into two main species: Comedies of Life and Comedies of Imagination. The Comedies of Life subdivide into Comedies of Character, exemplified in the best work of Jonson and Massinger; and Comedies of Manners, abundantly illustrated by all the minor playwrights. Shakspere can hardly be said to have produced a Comedy of Character, in the sense in which we give this name to Jonson's 'Alchemist' or Molière's 'Tartufe;' for though no dramatist peopled the comic stage with a greater number of finely discriminated and perfectly realised types of character, yet we cannot say that any of his so-called comedies were written to exemplify a leading moral quality. Nor again, with the single exception of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor,' did he give the world a Comedy of Manners in the strict sense of that phrase. Where Shakspere ruled supreme was, in the Comedy of the Imagination. This, in truth, was his invention; as it is the rarest and most characteristic flower of the Romantic Drama. E To call The Merchant of Venice,' 'The Tempest,' 'As You Like It,' and Measure for Measure' by the name we give to plays of Terence, Molière, Jonson, is clearly a mistake in criticism. The Shaksperian Comedies of the Imagination carry us into a world of pure Romance, where men and women move in the ethereal atmosphere of fancy. They have lost none of their reality as human beings. But their vices and their follies exact a milder censure than in actual life; their actions and their passions have a grace and charm beyond the lot of common mortals. Strictly speaking, the Romantic Tragedy and the Romantic Comedy of Shakspere present the same material, the same philosophy, the same conception of existence, under different lights and with a different tone of sympathy. How Shakspere meant his Comedies to be interpreted may be gathered from the induction to The Taming of the Shrew,' from the title of A Midsummer Night's Dream,' from the magic of Prospero, and from the woodland solitudes of Arden. In these creations he avoids the ordinary ways of social life, chooses fantastic fables, or touches tales of Italy with an enchanter's wand. Lyly in his Court Comedies had preceded Shakspere on this path of art, and Fletcher followed him, although at a wide interval. After defining Shakspere's Comedy as the Comedy of pure Imagination and Romantic incident, in which the master's unrivalled character-drawing was displayed with no less strength, but to less awful purpose, than in his Tragedy; we may divide the comedies of Fletcher into two main classes, describing the one class by the name of Romantic Lustspiel, or Play of Fanciful Amusement, the other by that of Romantic Comedy of Intrigue. In the former of these species, represented by The Pilgrim,' 'The Sea Voyage,' and The Island Princess,' Fletcher handles romantic incident with something of Shaksperian grace. In the latter, includ Mercutio, for example, in Romeo and Juliet is a comic character, and Angelo in Measure for Measure is deeply tragic. The part of Shylock is a tragic episode within a comedy; the part of Imogen is hardly less tragic than that of Cordelia, except in the conclusion of the plot. See Professor Ward's History for some excellent critical observations upon this point. |