INTRODUCTION. FOR half a century now the collection of Songs from the Dramatists, edited by Robert Bell, has been a favourite book with all lovers of the English lyric. It has been reprinted in the United States twice at least, — once with exquisite illustrations by Mr. John La Farge. It contains a careful selection of the best songs, scattered here and there in the plays of the British dramatists, from the Ralph Roister Doister of Nicholas Udall to the School for Scandal of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As the editor said in his Advertisement, "the want of such a collection has long been felt, and that it has never been supplied before must occasion surprise to all readers who are acquainted with the riches we possess in this branch of poetry.” The richness of English literature in this branch of poetry is indeed indisputable; and one may even go further and declare that it is incomparable. In no other literature, not even in Greek, is there the wealth of lyric which we find in profusion in the poetry of our own tongue. In fact, this lyrical abundance is evidence in behalf of the assertion that we who speak English belong to a race highly endowed with emotion, with energy, with imagination, and that it is in poetry we have done best rather than in prose. In spite of the fact that we are generally held to be a practical and hard-headed people, English prose as a whole is emphatically inferior to English poetry as a whole, just as French poetry as a whole is emphatically inferior to French prose as a whole. This possession of the poetic temperament is one reason why there are so many songs besprinkled through the pages of the English drama; but there is also another reason quite commonplace, and perhaps on that account not mentioned by Bell. In Tudor times the companies of actors were often recruited from choir-boys, who brought to the aid of the theatre their acquaintance with the art of song. Now, a writer of plays is prompt to utilize every advantage at his command; and the Elizabethan dramatist had not only the lyric gift of his race, he had also ready to his service actors trained to sing. No wonder is it, therefore, that the playwrights delighted to drop into song whenever the occasion came, certain that full justice would be done to their lilting lines. Thus they established a tradition which has endured almost down to the dawn of the twentieth century, a tradition which had authority even for the writers of the closet-drama, Browning and Tennyson and Swinburne. In the INTRODUCTION. French drama we find nothing of the sort, partly because the French poets are not so naturally lyric, and partly because a musical training had not been given to the French actors in the remote beginnings when Hardy was setting the pattern for the later and more literary drama. Even when a French dramatist is obviously lyrical, as Corneille is seen to be sometimes and Victor Hugo often, his lyricism takes the form not of the song, but of the set speech, the tirade. Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, the first fruits of English comedy in which we see the grafting of the classic tradition upon the hardy native stock, were written by scholars to be acted by students. Ralph Roister Doister may, indeed, be considered as the earliest college play; and it has many points of likeness to the rollicking college plays of our own time, with their robust and boisterous humour, their bold horse-play, their frank practical joking, and their jingling lyrics lending themselves to the vigorous singing of youthful, high spirits. Lyly's comedies were written, most of them at least, to be performed by the "children of Paul's," choir-boys trained already in the vocal art. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, although styled a comedy, is in fact a comic opera, of a rather modern type, in that it commingles a sentimental and semi-romantic upper-plot with the riotous fun-making of Bottom and his fellows. In this play, as in so many others, Shakespeare reveals his versatility, his mastery of many forms of the drama, a versatility in which his only rival is Molière, who has also left us more than one specimen of comic opera. In Othello Shakespeare gives us the purest type of tragedy, sweeping forward massively to its inevitable doom. In Henry V. he has preferred the looser form of the history, the mere chronicle-play of a single hero's achievements, a splendid panorama of one man's career. In the Comedy of Errors he wrought the ingenious. imbroglio of farce, dependent for its effect, not on character, but solely on the artfully contrived situations. In the Merchant of Venice and in Much Ado about Nothing he presents us with romantic comedies, in which the humorous theme, which is here his main concern, is sustained by an underplot of almost tragic import. And in the later scenes of the Merry Wives of Windsor, as in the Midsummer Night's Dream, he descends with ease to the lower level of comic opera, with its fantastic plot and its graceful lyrics. His songs are to be found also in his graver plays, not introduced by chance or for their own sake only, but with a subtle understanding of dramaturgic effect. The appealing pathos of the pale figures of Ophelia and Desdemona is heightened by the simple songs we hear them sing. It is unfortunate for the English drama that the |
