of the antique forms had been attempted-with what feeble results all students of Italian tragedy are well aware. The instinct of the English, who were destined to resuscitate the Drama, rejected that tame formalism. They worked at first without or rule or method. Their earliest efforts were mere gropings, tentative endeavours, studies of untaught craftsmen seeking after style. But they adhered closely to the life before their eyes; and their ill-digested scenes brought nature piecemeal on the stage. The justice of this method was triumphantly demonstrated by Shakspere; as the justice of the method of Pisano and Giotto was demonstrated by Michelangelo and Raffaello. Neither Italian painting nor English poetry can be called a silver-age revival of antique art; because in neither of these products did the modern mind start from imitation, but initiated and completed a new process of its own. The Romantic Drama is of necessity deficient in statuesque repose and classic unity of design. It obeys specific laws of vehement activity and wayward beauty; while the discords and the imperfections of the type are such as only genius of the highest order can reduce to harmony. Aiming at the manifestation of human life as a complex whole, with all its multiformity of elements impartially considered and presented, our playwrights seized on every salient motive in the sphere of man's experience. They rifled the stores of history and learning with indiscriminate rapacity. The heterogeneous booty of their raids, the ore and dross of their discovery, passed through a furnace in their brains, took form from their invention. In no 1 See my Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. chap. ii. MATERIALS USED BY THE PLAYWRIGHTS. 39 sense can these men be arraigned for plagiarism or for imitation, although they made free use of all that had been published in the past.1 The Renaissance lent them, not its pedantic humanism, but the deep colouring, the pulse of energy, the pomp and pride and passion of its glowing youth. From Italy they drew romance and sensuous beauty-the names of Venice and Amalfi and Verona-the lust of lust, the concentrated malice of that Southern Circe. In Spain they delved a mine of murders, treasons, duels, intrigues, persecutions, and ancestral guilt. Plutarch taught them deeds of citizens, heroic lives, and civic virtues. The Elegists and Ovid were for them the fountain-head of mythic fables. From sagas of the North and annals of Old England they borrowed the substance of 'King Lear,'' Bonduca,' Hamlet.' From the chronicles of recent history they quarried tragedies of Tudors and Plantagenets. The law-courts gave them motives for domestic drama. The streets and taverns, homes and houses of debauch, in London furnished them with comic scenes. Nor did these materials, in spite of their incongruous variety, confuse the minds which they enriched. Our dramatists inspired with living energy each character of myth, romance, experience, or story. Anachronisms, ignorance, crudulity, abound upon their pages. Criticism had not yet begun its reign. Legend was still mistaken for fact. The 1 As early as 1580, Stephen Gosson wrote in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions: 'I may boldly say it because I have seen it, that the Palace of Pleasure, The Golden Ass, The Æthiopian History, Amadis of France, The Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London.' (Roxburgh Library, The English Drama and Stage, p. 188.) tale of Cymbeline' seemed to Shakspere almost as historical as that of Henry V.' Yet, feeling the reality of life exceedingly, grasping all shapes through which they could express their knowledge of themselves and of the world around them, piercing below the surface to the heart which throbbed within each image of the fancy, they converted all they touched to essential realism. Men and women rose beneath their wand of art from dusty stores of erudition, from mists of faery land and fiction. Heywood, here as elsewhere, finely conscious of the playwright's function, unfolds a map before us of the ground they traversed, in these lines: To give content to this most curious age, The gods themselves we've brought down to the stage, Deliver up the furies, by no spell Saving the Muse's rapture. Further we Have trafficked by their help: no history We've left unrifled: our pens have been dipped, Of fairy elves, nymphs of the sea and land, Nor scaped things intermediate, for your love. A noble boast; and not more nobly boasted than nobly executed; as they who have surveyed the English Drama from Lyly to Ford, will acknowledge. QUALITY OF THIS DRAMA. 41 VII. The variety of matter handled by the playwrights cannot be said to have affected their principles of treatment. All themes, however diverse, were subjected to the romantic style. The same exuberance of life, the same vehement passions, the same sacrifice of rule and method to salience of presentation, mark all the products of our stage and give our drama a real unity of tone. In the delineation of character, we find less of feebleness than of extravagance; in the texture of plots, there is rather superfluity of incident and incoherence of design than languor. The art of that epoch suffered from rapidity of execution, excess of fancy, inventive waywardness. To represent exciting scenes by energetic action, to clothe audacious ideas in vivid language, to imitate the broader aspects of emotion, to quicken the dullest apprehension by violent contrasts and sensational effects, was the aim which authors and actors pursued in common. Nor was the public so critical or so exacting as to refine the drama by a demand for careful workmanship. What the playwright hastily concocted, was greedily devoured and soon forgotten. The dramatists employed distinguished talents in pouring forth a dozen plays instead of perfecting one masterpiece. The audience amused themselves with Indicting and arraigning every day Thus it was only, as it were, by accident, by some lucky adjustment of a subject to the special ability of a writer, or by the emergence of a genius whose most careless work was masterly, that flawless specimens of the romantic style came into existence. The theatres were open at all seasons, competing with each other for a public bent on novelty. These conditions of the stage in London stimulated the fertility, but spoiled the quality of our drama. The ceremonial festivals at which the Attic poets twice a year produced their studied plays before a cultivated people, encouraged the production of pure monuments of meditated art. The audience of courtiers and academicians for whom Racine and Molière laboured, tolerated only ripe and polished handiwork. But English stage-wrights lacked these incentives to elaborate performance. Many dramas of their manufacture, though they have the glow of life, the stuff of excellence, must be reckoned among half-achievements. Many must be said to justify Ben Jonson's scornful invective: 'husks, draff to drink and swill '-'scraps, out of every dish thrown forth, and raked into the common tub.' The historian of English literature cannot afford, however, to neglect even 'things so prostitute.' Their very multitude impresses the imagination. Their mediocrity helps to explain the rhythm of dramatic art from a Shakspere's transcendent inspiration through the meritorious labours of a Massinger, down to the patchwork pieces of collaborating handicraftsmen. And in the sequel I shall hope to show that though the conditions of the London theatre were adverse to the highest perfection of art, they were helpful to its freedom. |