The Types of English Literature
EDITED BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON
TRAGEDY
BY
ASHLEY H. THORNDIKE
TRAGEDY
BY ASHLEY H. THORNDIKE
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF "THE INFLUENCE OF BEAUMONT
AND FLETCHER ON SHAKSPERE"
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT 1908 BY ASHLEY H. THORNDIKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
Published May 1908
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
PREFACE
This book attempts to trace the course of English tragedy from its beginnings to the middle of the nineteenth century, and to indicate the part which it has played in the history both of the theatre and of literature. All tragedies of the sixteenth century are noticed, because of their historical interest and their close relationship to Shakespeare, but after 1600 only representative plays have been considered. The aim of this series has been kept in view, and the discussion, whether of individual plays or of dramatic conditions, has been determined by their importance in the study of a literary type. Tragedy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has attracted very little critical attention, and in those fields the book is something of a pioneer. The Elizabethan drama, on the contrary, has been the subject of a vast amount of antiquarian, biographical, and literary research, without which such a treatment as I have attempted would be almost impossible. In order, however, to keep the main purpose in view, it has been necessary to omit nearly all notice of the processes of research or the debates of criticism, and to give only what seem to me the results. To indicate at every point my reliance on my own investigations or my indebtedness to the researches of others would, indeed, necessitate doubling the size of the book. Its readers will not require an apology for its brevity, but I regret that I can offer only this inadequate acknowledgment of the great assistance I have received not merely from the studies mentioned in the Bibliographical Notes, but also from many others that have directly or indirectly contributed to my discussion.
I am indebted to Dr. Ernest Bernbaum, who very kindly read chapters viii and ix, and made a number of suggestions. I have also the pleasure of expressing my great obligations to Professors Brander Matthews, Jefferson B. Fletcher, and William A. Neilson, who have read both the manuscript and the proof-sheets and given me the generous benefit of their most helpful criticism.
A. H. T.
New York, March, 1908.
CONTENTS
Chapter I. Definitions [1]
Chapter II. The Medieval and the Classical Influences [21]
Chapter III. The Beginnings of Tragedy [48]
Chapter IV. Marlowe and his Contemporaries [77]
Chapter V. Shakespeare and his Contemporaries [136]
Chapter VI. Shakespeare [181]
Chapter VII. The Later Elizabethans [196]
Chapter VIII. The Restoration [243]
Chapter IX. The Eighteenth Century [281]
Chapter X. The Romantic Movement [326]
Chapter XI. Conclusion [366]
Index [379]
TRAGEDY
CHAPTER I
DEFINITIONS
There is little difficulty in selecting the plays that should be included in a history of English tragedy. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there have always been plays commonly received as tragedies, and others so closely resembling these that they require consideration in any comprehensive study. How far these plays present the common characteristics of a type, how far they constitute a clearly defined form of the drama, and how far they may be connected from one period to another in a continuous development—are questions better answered at the book's end than at its beginning. Some questions of the definition of tragedy, however, may well be preliminary to a study of its history. The very term "English tragedy" involves two precarious abstractions. It separates tragedy from the drama of which it is a part, and it separates English tragedies from those of other languages to which they are related in character and origin. In attempting a definition, we may question the reality of these abstract separations by which our later discussions are to be conveniently limited; for a definition can be attained only through the distinction of tragedy from other forms of the drama, and through a consideration of the varying conceptions of tragedy in different periods and nations.
We may begin very empirically with an element common to all tragedies and roughly distinguishing them from other forms of drama; noticed, indeed, in all theoretical definitions, though its importance is often blurred and it receives only scant attention from Aristotle. He refers to the third part of the plot as "the tragic incident, a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like." If his meaning of "a destructive or painful action" is extended to include mental as well as physical suffering, we have a definition of an indispensable element in tragedy and a conspicuous distinction from comedy.
This definition has had ample recognition in practice and in popular opinion, as in the sixteenth-century idea of a tragedy as a play involving deaths, and in the present common conception of tragedy as requiring an unhappy ending. These uncritical opinions, however, introduce amendments that are not quite corollaries. The happy ending has never been completely excluded. Aristotle, while pronouncing in favor of the unhappy ending as best suited to producing tragic effect, recognized the possibility and popularity of a conclusion that limited punishment to the vicious. In modern times the salvation of the virtuous in tragedy has had warm defenders, including Racine and Dr. Johnson; and the essentiality of either an unhappy ending or of deaths has been generally denied. Evidently either is a natural but not inevitable accompaniment of suffering and disaster. A tragedy may permit of relief or even recovery for the good, or it may minimize the external and physical elements of suffering; but its action must be largely unhappy though its end is not, and destructive even if it does not lead to deaths.
Our working definition, however, does not attempt to indicate the qualities necessary to excellence in tragedy or to particularize in respect to the treatment of the action. It offers no distinction, where recent critics have been careful to make one, between tragedy and what we to-day call melodrama.[1] The relation between the two is similar to that between comedy and farce. Melodrama is more sensational, less serious; it attains its effects by spectacles, machines, externals, while tragedy deals with character and motive; it reaches its conclusions through accidents and surprises, while tragedy seeks to show the cause of every effect. But the distinction is general and relative rather than specific and absolute. The use of witches to foretell actions and characters would of itself be a melodramatic device, and so it is in Middleton's "Witch," but not in "Macbeth." Congreve's "Mourning Bride" is a melodrama, judged by our standards at present, but for many years it was considered one of the great tragedies in the language. A stage presentation, in fact, almost presupposes external, spectacular, and sensational effects, which must vary according to the theatrical conditions and the taste of the day, as well as in response to the artistic purpose and treatment. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy, in short, is hardly more than between bad tragedy and good, or between a lower and a higher type. So far as a separation of the two has been made, it has been the result of centuries of experience. It cannot readily be fixed by rule or definition; it requires historical treatment.
Our definition, again, affords a rough rather than an exact separation from comedy. The two species cannot, indeed, be absolutely distinguished. In the theatre to-day there are many plays which one hesitates to classify as either tragedy or comedy. And there have always been, even in the Greek theatre, classes of plays recognized as neither the one nor the other. Again, a play presenting various persons and incidents is necessarily complex in material and emotional effect, and may mingle suffering and ruin with happiness and success, so that whether its main effect is tragic or comic may depend on its point of view or its general tone. The divisions of tragedy and comedy are neither mutually exclusive, nor are they together inclusive of all drama. Theoretically, there is perhaps ground for doubting whether other divisions might not be established more essential and more comprehensive. Comedy in particular comprises plays differing so widely in every respect that almost no common characteristics can be found. Yet tragedy and comedy have long been, and still are, accepted as the main divisions of the drama. The very names of the other forms, "tragicomedy," "Schauspiel" "emotional drama," "social drama," "drame," or merely "play," by their lack of distinctiveness, testify to the significance of the division of dramatic action and effects into the two classes, tragic and comic. From merely a theoretical point of view, indeed, we may recognize that a dramatic action, through its brevity and its stage presentation, if for no other reasons, has a suitability for these effects not possessed by other forms of literature. But the importance and definition of the two forms, and especially that of tragedy, depend less on theory than on historical origins and development.
If we attempt to fortify our working definition so that it may more effectively separate tragedy on the one hand from melodrama and on the other from comedy and the more or less neutral species, we are driven to consider the numerous and shifting conceptions that have marked the progress of the classical tradition in modern Europe. Although some approach to the tragic may have been manifest from the beginnings of the drama in the mimetic ceremonies of primitive culture, our present distinction between tragedy and comedy traces back to Athens, where tragedy as a form of literature had its first great development and where it received its first critical definition. Nothing closely corresponding to the two forms, as there developed and defined, is to be found in the dramas of China, India, or medieval Europe. Tragedy is an inheritance from Greece and Rome, not received by Western Europe until the Renaissance. There was, to be sure, much that was tragical in the widespread religious drama of the Middle Ages; and there were a number of plays that in content and effect might claim a place with later tragedies; but it was not until the revival of the classics that the revelation of a highly developed form of drama led to the creation of a distinct species called tragedy, in the vernacular literatures of Spain, Italy, France, and England.
The classical tradition in the beginning was affected by the mistaken theories of medieval encyclopedists and by humanistic misinterpretations of the classics. In every nation it came into conflict with the traditions of the medieval drama, and underwent great modifications; in England an amalgamation of the two traditions resulting in a tragedy widely different from either. During four centuries the changing theatrical conditions, the changing social conditions, the diversity of national peculiarities, have resulted in ideas of tragedy at variance with one another and with the classics. Shakespeare's conception of tragedy was very different from Aristotle's, and very different from Brunetière's or Ibsen's. Indeed, the conceptions formed by various of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, and Fletcher, so far as we can determine, have pronounced differences though they have common resemblances. It would require a larger book than the present one to consider adequately the differences and agreements merely of critical theory and dogma in modern Europe. Yet the literary tradition, in spite of all these changes and variations, has remained continuous. Whether fixed in the form of rules, or discernible only in the general resemblances of current practices, or represented by the great models of Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Racine, it has influenced every playwright. He has striven to write more or less in accord with some critical theory, in imitation of some author, or in conformity to some fashion; or he has written in opposition to theory, example, or fashion.
It is the purpose of this book to trace the course of this tradition in the English drama, to appraise the inheritance of each age from the preceding ages, its borrowings from other national inheritances, and the profit and loss due to its own invention or industry. All that may be attempted here by way of preliminary definition is a glance at the main European course of the classical tradition to see what have been from time to time considered the essentials of tragedy and to ask how far there has been any agreement in regard to these essentials.
The basis for much of modern theorizing has been Aristotle's tentative yet searching analysis of Athenian tragedy. Many of the peculiarities of Athenian tragedy—its structure without acts but with a chorus, its limitation of three actors on the stage at once, its narrow range of mythological subjects—are evidently not essential to securing tragic effect. Even the unities, whether as observed in the Greek theatre or as defined by French and Italian critics, may, after generations of debate, be safely relegated as nonessential. Omitting, then, what no one would now insist upon as requisite, we may derive from the "Poetics" something like the following:—
Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression.
Much more than this has been derived from Aristotle by modern theorists, but this much of the classical conception has generally survived in modern tragedy. If the meaning of "a single and complete action" be stretched a little, this definition includes the plays of Shakespeare as well as those of Racine, and nearly all tragedies from the Renaissance to the present.
In one important respect, however, this definition falls short of describing Greek tragedy, and is still more inadequate for modern. Aristotle emphasized the action above the characterization, and devoted much attention to the requirements of the plot. He did not, moreover, recognize the importance of the element of conflict, whether between man and circumstance, or between men, or within the mind of man. The Greek tragedies themselves had not failed to exhibit such conflicts; the medieval drama, notably in the moralities, emphasized moral conflict; and Renaissance tragedy, wherever it showed any independence, particularly in England and Shakespeare, took for its theme the conflict of human will with other forces. The importance of this modification of the Aristotelian view received only slow critical recognition. But it was everywhere exemplified in practice, in French classical drama as well as in Shakespeare, in plays imitating the Greeks as well as in plays revolting from their models. After a time this modification of the classical tradition came to have a distinct place in literary theory. Hegel gave it philosophical elaboration, and, in the romantic movement, when dramatists in different languages turned to Shakespeare for a model, they naturally assumed what may be called the Shakespearean definition. This important amendment to the tragic tradition may be briefly stated:—
The action of a tragedy should represent a conflict of wills, or of will with circumstance, or will with itself, and should therefore be based on the characters of the persons involved. A typical tragedy is concerned with a great personality engaged in a struggle that ends disastrously.
In the Aristotelian tradition thus amended by the Shakespearean or modern conception we have a definition of tragedy that, in spite of differences of theorists and variations in practice, is extraordinarily comprehensive. This will appear if we consider briefly the separate elements of the definition. First: Though the range of emotions has been greatly widened in modern tragedy in comparison with classical, and though the importance given to love and the admission of comedy and even farce have complicated emotional effect in a way that Sophocles could hardly have conceived, yet "pity and fear" still serve as well as any other terms to describe the emotional appeal peculiar to tragedy. The word [Greek: phobos], however, hardly indicates the emotions of admiration, awe, hate, horror, terror, despair, and dismay, which belong to tragedy, and modern tragedy has appealed more largely than classical to pity and sympathy. Second: The reversal of fortune has been usually found in tragedy, though in the sense of a fall of the mighty, long the favorite theme, it cannot be regarded as the essential kernel of a tragic action. Third: Though the action of modern tragedies has usually been less simple than that of the Greeks, and though double plots and many complications have been common, yet, after the Elizabethans and the Romanticists, the tendency to-day seems to be toward a return to the simplicity that Aristotle had in mind. Only in rare instances, as in "The Doll's House," has a dramatist ventured to leave the action in a state that might be called incomplete. Fourth: Though themes have changed and widened in range, still the great majority have been confined to extraordinary events and illustrious persons. Renaissance and pseudo-classical theorists interpreted Aristotle to limit the persons of tragedy to princes or men of the highest rank; and tragedy, even in England, long adhered to this superficial restriction. But already in the sixteenth century there were authors who wrote tragedies of ordinary men and contemporary events; and realism has broken away from the literary tradition in every generation since. Fifth: Tragedy has generally been reserved for poetry, and often for poetry of the most embellished kind; but here again realism has resorted to a bare style, and, particularly in the last century, to prose.
On examination, then, the particulars of the classical tradition have shown extraordinary powers of survival, but not one of them has gone without protest and violation. The thousands of tragedies written during four centuries have all had marked resemblances, and all important developments have preserved relationships to the classical species; yet it is impossible to insist on any one quality of that species as essential, without encountering examples of great tragedies that lack it. The close relationships among these many plays forbid the separation of a few, distinguished by certain qualities, to be named as tragedies, and the rest as something else; and the great variations forbid the confident selection of any qualities as essential in the future development of tragedy. The modern amendments, though represented by nearly universal practice, have not saved the classical tradition, and are themselves coming under question. The plays of Ibsen, which seem to have instituted the most important development in tragedy for two centuries, return to something of the simplicity of action required by Aristotle, and present the struggle of individual wills as did Shakespeare, but are in prose and deal with contemporary bourgeois life,—a combination of relationships to the tradition wholly new. While idealization in some degree must be exercised in tragedy as in all forms of literature, it is impossible, in the light of realistic plays, to maintain that tragic effects can be secured only through the stories of exceptional persons. Tragic greatness, in the sense demanded by the theorists, is, indeed, scarcely more manifest in the persons of "Romeo and Juliet" than in those of "Hedda Gabler." While conflict of some kind is essential to a dramatic action, yet it may evidently be minimized without destroying the artistic impressiveness of suffering and disaster. Even the requirement that tragedy deal with the characters of individual men is being questioned. It is conceivable that plays in the future may, like Hauptmann's "The Weavers," turn from the emotions of the individual to those of a class, or may find their destructive and painful actions in the oppression, disaster, or mere unrest of the mass.
Any precise and compact definition is sure to lack in comprehensiveness and veracity. It cannot sum up the facts of the past and present, much less set rules for the future. We seem forced to reject the possibility of any exact limitations for the dramatic species, to include as tragedies all plays presenting painful or destructive actions, to accept the leading elements of a literary tradition derived from the Greeks as indicating the common bonds between such plays in the past, but to admit that this tradition, while still powerful, is variable, uncertain, and unauthoritative.
But besides this literary tradition there has been a hardly less powerful theatrical tradition. Tragedy has always owed a double allegiance, to literature and to the theatre. A tragedy is a play, not merely a dialogue in poetry or prose, but a play to be interpreted by actors before an audience in a theatre. To these three factors it has had first of all to suit itself. And these factors have constituted conditions and standards, different and not less variable and transient than those of the literary tradition. The plays of Æschylus, of Shakespeare, of Calderon, and of Racine, for example, were planned for widely different conditions, and for conditions also widely different from those now present in the theatres. Excepting Shakespeare's, no English tragedies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, or, one might almost say, nineteenth century, are acted in our theatres to-day. The effect of the acted drama is consequently not only different from that of the drama when read, it is also subject to other and variable artistic standards. It aims at some effects not at all literary and at some likely to be limited by its own day and theatre. A history of tragedy must take into account the differences of the theatre of one nation from that of another, and of one period from another period. It must remember that to those temporary conditions each dramatist necessarily conformed and that by them his achievement was directed. It may find some hostile to the best dramatic art, tending to promote melodramatic rather than tragic effects. It may find others that are divorced from any permanent meaning for the drama or literature. But the fact that such conditions are temporary should not breed contempt, for much great literature has been aimed not at the world or posterity but at the audience of the day. Out of temporary and varying theatrical conditions have arisen the permanent criteria for dramatic excellence.
In fact, the theatre has been a conservative influence, tending to oppose innovation and to maintain the integrity of the form of tragedy. The essentials of its literary form, its length conditioned by the time of the performance, the division into acts, scenes, or parts, and the growing importance of dialogue, have all been dependent on theatrical conditions. The characteristic qualities of national dramas have been in some measure the products of the national theatres, and only through the growing similarity of stage conditions are we likely to attain agreement in regard to the forms of drama. While there have been a multitude of tragedies that have never been acted, and some that have never been intended for acting, the attempt to write tragedy for the closet rather than for the stage has resulted either in adopting the supposed conditions of the Greek or some other foreign theatre, or in breaking away from the strict limits defined by the stage and writing lyrical medleys or dramatic monologues or imaginary conversations. As soon as tragedy has left the theatre, it has reverted to old forms or developed new and strange hybrids. Milton's "Samson Agonistes" and Swinburne's "Bothwell" are tragedies, if you will, but they have no place in the development of a national drama. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," Browning's "The Ring and the Book," and Landor's "Marcellus and Hannibal" are all dramatic, but they cannot be included in any definition of the species of tragedy. Object as tragedy rightly may at times to the limitations and trivialities of the theatre, it cannot safely leave its precincts without losing its own identity.
In the past nearly all tragedies of any effect on the drama's development have not only been planned for the stage but have succeeded when acted. This seems likely to be the case in the future. For the reader of a play is confronted by difficulties not found in other fiction; and, in general, only a play suited to presentation on the stage is likely to secure for a reader the visualization, the impersonations, the illusion of actuality, similar to those experienced in the theatre. The fact that the drama requires the services of theatre and actors as well as author need not lessen our recognition of the responsibility and opportunities of the one or the other. The stage affords the first test of a play's emotional appeal, and perhaps the best test of its dramatic power. The consummation of tragedy has been attained only when the dramatist has availed himself of all the aids that the theatre has offered.
Thus far our attempt at definition has had to do with what tragedy is or has been or is likely to be, rather than with what it ought to be. The more difficult question has not been shunned by criticism, and perhaps even our brief discussion ought not to omit a consideration of tragedy's function and opportunities. These certainly extend beyond the theatre and include whatever is possible for literature. As a form of literature, tragedy fulfills in general the same functions as other forms, especially as fiction, of which it is one division. It has similar opportunities and its effects are similar in kind. It must be judged by the same standards, by the nature and power of its emotional effect, and by the lasting meaning of its portrayal of life; and the census of the centuries will be necessary to establish its greatness.
Special qualities have, however, been assumed for the emotional effect of tragedy altogether apart from its peculiarities as drama or fiction. A peculiar function, a special effect, differing from other forms of literature, have been ascribed to it. Aristotle declared its effect to be the purging of the emotions, a somewhat obscure expression, surely incorrect if taken in the literal sense that Aristotle seems to have intended, but variously interpreted as referring to moral or æsthetic reactions. Modern theories have too often regarded tragedy as a sort of exposition of the moral law, illustrating the ways of providence. To-day we require of tragedy a probing into human motive, an especial devotion to the study of character under great emotional stress. But has it a special function? Tragedy deals with pain, yet seeks to give us pleasure:—this crux has been greatly emphasized by the false antithesis between pain and pleasure. As a matter of fact, though our knowledge of the æsthetic emotions is scanty, a description of the effect of tragedy is hardly more obscure than that of any other form of literature or of any other of the fine arts. In life we are enormously interested in grief and suffering and disaster, as we are also in joy, pleasure, and success. Our newspapers abound in narratives of both sorts, and so do our novels. We are stirred by the painful emotions of our fellows as readily as by their pleasurable ones. The tragic plays a large part in many forms of literature and in sculpture, music, and painting. And tragedy, dedicated to painful actions, also interests, fascinates, absorbs us. It is not diverting, amusing; it is not for daily food or recreation, but no less it ministers to an active normal human interest.
Does it carry an antidote to offset its demand upon our sympathies? Is there a katharsis that somehow transforms our pity and fear into relief and pleasure? There is something of the sort in the mere exercise of violent emotion, which in a measure carries its own relief and cure. There is something also of egotistical satisfaction, of self-congratulation that comes with the exercise of sympathy, a certain exaltation that virtue has gone out of us. There is something again of æsthetic delight in the artistic mastery which we feel in any great work of art. The harmony of the argument, the splendor of the verse, the grandeur of conception and expression may counterbalance the painfulness of the story. Yet more, tragedy may bring the inspiration of greatness and endurance, of purity and unselfishness of spirit. Its idealization of character, its revelation of beauty and power even in distress and downfall, may bring a reassurance that turns pity to exhilaration. In drama as in life there may come in moments of trial and ruin the visions of the eternities to console and exalt us.
But is it true that these elements of relief are always felt, or are always triumphant over our depression and dismay? May not the impressions of pain and destruction be unrelieved and overwhelming? What relief or exaltation is there in the first impression from "Œdipus," "Lear," or "Ghosts"? We are filled with confusion, dismay, and pity. We cannot separate ourselves from the misery. We feel the intolerable burden of the world's woe. Our sympathies struggle beneath it, vainly, despairingly. How far such emotions have any potency for actual accomplishment in deed may be doubtful to the psychologists; but surely our recognition of tragedy as one of the greatest imaginative achievements needs no other warrant than our faith that virtue lies in human sympathy, in the only atonement that we can offer, the vicarious response of our emotions to share in suffering and defeat.
From the nature of its subjects, tragedy may claim a certain preëminence in literature. If it be not truer, as is sometimes asserted, than comedy or other fiction, it has the opportunity to be more intense, more profound, more permeating in its emotional effect. As of all forms of literature, we ask for truth to life in incident, character, and word; of tragedy we ask for truth in regard to those things that affect us most deeply,—pain, disaster, failure, death. Like other forms, it may stimulate and excite, give pleasure and profit, convey new ideas and recall old, arouse questions of life and philosophy, excite multitudinous emotions; more exclusively than any other, it brings home to us the images of our own sorrows, and chastens the spirit through the outpouring of our sympathies, even our horror and despair, for the misfortunes of our fellows.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
The student of the theory of tragedy may extend his reading through most books dealing at all with the theatre or drama, works of literary history and criticism, treatments of æsthetics in psychology and philosophy, as well as the tragedies themselves. Only the briefest direction for such reading can be given here. Among recent works closely connected with the matter of the chapter, are: W. L. Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy in Ancient and Modern Drama (1900); Lewis Campbell, Tragic Drama in Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare (1904); Ferdinand Brunetière, L'évolution littéraire de la tragédie (1903) (in vol. 7 of Etudes critiques); and Melodrame ou Tragédie (Variétés Littéraires 1904); Elizabeth Woodbridge, The Drama, its Law and its Technique (1898), with bibliography. Several recent books on Shakespeare are concerned with dramatic theory: A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1905); T. R. Lounsbury, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1901); G. P. Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907). A book now out of date and never sound, but of wide influence still, is Freytag's Technik des Dramas (1881), translated as The Technique of the Drama, Chicago (3d ed. 1900). For a study of literary criticism in reference to dramatic theory, Saintsbury's History of Criticism, 3 vols. (1900-04), furnishes a compendious directory and discussion. An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, by C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott (1899), furnishes full bibliographical references with comment and direction. Of great value in their special fields are Butcher's edition of Aristotle's Poetics (3d ed. 1902); W. Cloetta's Beitrãge zur Litteraturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Halle (1890), vol. i; and J. E. Spingarn's Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899). English critical discussions of tragedy will be noted in the chapters on the various historical periods. For tragedy in relation to æsthetic theory, full references are given in Gayley and Scott; and Volkelt's Æsthetik des Tragischen, Munich (2d ed. 1906), supplies a valuable and comprehensive discussion and a directory and criticism of nearly all æsthetic theories since Kant. Especial mention should be made of A. W. Schlegel's Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1817), translated into English in the Bohn edition; and to Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Æsthetik, which closes with a discussion of dramatic poetry that has been suggestive of much later theorizing.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For a discussion of an earlier meaning of the term "melodrama" and the origin of its present use, see chap. x.
CHAPTER II
THE MEDIEVAL AND THE CLASSICAL INFLUENCES
English tragedy makes its appearance at the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign. In the Middle Ages nearly all knowledge of the drama of the Greeks and Romans was lost, and the medieval drama developed without aid from classical precedents or models. It resulted in various forms, of which the miracles and the moralities were the most important, but it produced nothing either in form or matter closely resembling classical tragedy or comedy, and manifested no evolution toward corresponding divisions of the drama. The Renaissance gave to the world the plays of Seneca, Plautus, and the Athenian dramatists, and, after a time, some knowledge of the classical theatre and dramatic art; then, through the imitation of these models and also through the innovations and experiments which they suggested, the influence of humanism came in conflict with that of medievalism throughout Europe, in the drama as in other fields of literature. In England this conflict was still active at the middle of the sixteenth century. Miracle plays were still performed after long established fashion, and moralities continued the most important and numerous species of drama; but in Latin imitations of the classical drama, in the theatrical activity of the schools and universities, and in the various developments of moralities, interludes, school-plays, and pageants, there were signs of a breaking away from old courses and of the adoption of new models, of the emergence of English comedy and tragedy as definite dramatic forms. Tragedy in England as elsewhere developed later and more slowly than comedy, but two years after Elizabeth's accession the first English tragedy that has been preserved was performed, and "Gorboduc" thus becomes the starting-point for a history of English tragedy.
Modern tragedy, born in the Renaissance, the product of the germinating conflict of medieval and humanistic ideas and models, has never altogether lost the marks of its heritage from both lines of ancestry. Elizabethan tragedy, in particular, reveals in every lineament, in its scenic presentation, its methods of acting, its themes, structure, characters, style, theory, and artistic impulses, the influences both of the long centuries of medieval drama and also of the inspiration of the classics and the freer opportunity for individual effort which resulted from humanism. At the beginning we must attempt to separate and define these dominant influences.
The contribution from the Middle Ages came largely from the religious drama. The folk games and plays and the performances of entertainers of various sorts contributed to the development of the drama principally on the side of comedy, and only incidentally to tragedy. Nor need the early centuries of the religious drama detain us. Its origin in the church service, its early liturgical forms, its growth and service in the hands of the church, and its gradual secularization are of importance for us only as leading to its culmination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; in England notably in the great cycles of vernacular plays performed by the guilds. It should be remembered, however, that the miracle plays never felt the least influence from the drama of the Greeks and Romans. Knowledge of the classic drama was long confined mainly to the plays of Terence, and suggested even to the most learned no idea of relationship to the familiar miracle plays; and, on the other hand, the medieval stage gave no clue to a conception of the classical theatre. As late as Erasmus the curious notion survived that the classic plays were read by the author or a "recitator" from a pulpit above, while below the actors illustrated his lines by pantomime. Almost to the middle of the fifteenth century the miracle plays comprised all that was known of stage presentation in connection with serious drama. They were still performed through the sixteenth century; the boy Shakespeare may have been a spectator at a performance by the guilds; his father and grandfather and remoter forebears had seen them or perchance taken part in them. It was this abundant dramatic practice and ancient dramatic tradition that gave to Elizabethan England its fondness for play-acting, its recourse to the theatre for both amusement and edification, and the acceptance of the drama as an important factor in its daily life.
A glance at some of the most notable differences of the miracles from classical plays reveals traits that remained potent in later drama. The miracles took their material from the Bible or from some saint's life, and their purpose was to make this material significant and impressive. They were, in fact, essentially translations of prose narratives into dramatic dialogue. Renaissance drama sought different material, but it found classical authority for basing tragedies on history, and so gave support to the medieval method of translation. In the Elizabethan period, dramatists rarely attempted the invention of their plots, but adopted and adhered to narrative sources. While they never suffered from the narrow conventionality imposed upon the authors of the miracles by the authority of the holy writ, yet something of the medieval subjection to sources was long manifest both in form and content. It is necessary to view the dramas of Shakespeare and all his predecessors as translations into dramatic form of stories already told in verse or prose.
Because of their close adherence to sources and their distinctly expository purpose, the medieval dramatists made little or no distinction between what was suited for the stage and what was not. Their duty was primarily to present the narrative; and, though individual initiative might add something interesting or amusing, nothing in the Bible seemed unsuitable to presentation on the stage, and nothing that would aid its meaning seemed unsuitable for a drama. There was no thought of restricting a play to the presentation of one crisis or a single action, and there was consequently no possibility of an approach to anything like the structure of classical tragedy. The dramatist might take advantage of the dramatic value of a given situation like the sacrifice of Isaac, or he might make a series of plays lead up to the great events of the redemption, but he was blind to any opportunity to abstract from the narrative the events that dealt with an emotional crisis and to focus them upon that as the centre of a dramatic structure. There was no notion whatever of the difference between a narrative fable and a dramatic fable. Dramatic unity and values in a miracle play, on the tragic side at least, were usually the direct results of the narrative; unity on a larger scale in the cycle was the unity of history or of exposition, not of the drama. Such was the form which the Elizabethan drama inherited, and to the end the form of Elizabethan tragedy continued a development from medieval tradition and practice, not only in its failure to adopt the unities, the chorus, and other peculiarities of classical structure, but, more essentially, in its continued inability to restrict the story provided by a narrative source to the limits of a dramatic fable. Its final attainment of an organic structure, though promoted in part by the regularizing influence of classical theory and example, was in the main conditioned by the absence of dramaturgical restrictions, permitting an epic variety of events, the lack of which Aristotle had lamented in Greek tragedy, and by the consequent opportunity for a free and characteristic development.
From the medieval drama the Elizabethans inherited not only dramatic form, but an entire method of stage presentation different from the classical. The typical medieval stage, whether in the form of the procession of pageants or the inclosed place with the stations for the various actors, had, indeed, given way to something much more like the modern platform, even before the production of "Gorboduc"; but in most particulars, in the importance placed upon costume, the historical anachronisms, the crudity but frequency of spectacle, and especially in the entire liberty as to what should be presented, medieval ideas still prevailed. In the miracle plays, heaven, hell, God, the devil, Noah's flood, the fall of Lucifer, and the Maries at the cross were all acted. The Elizabethan theatre showed scarcely less temerity.
Another far-reaching inheritance from the miracle plays was derived from their treatment of tragic themes and situations and from their pervading seriousness of purpose. Their purpose was ethical and religious edification; their theme the tragedy of sin; their situations were derived from the stories of Cain, Lucifer, Judas, John the Baptist, the Slaughter of the Innocents, and the Crucifixion. If no formal tragedy resulted, and if in inculcating the triumph of righteousness the stories of the worthies and the martyrdoms of the saints took rather the cast of tragicomedy, it was nevertheless of great significance for later tragedy that, generations before Seneca became known with his bloody stories and sententious philosophy, the drama had been the vehicle for ethical instruction and for the presentation of the most terrible and pitiful events. The miracle plays had long familiarized men with tragic action, tragic conceptions in the drama, and tragic power in the treatment of situation.
The tragic was often mingled with the comic. The dramatists mixed edification with amusement. The restraints of the sacred narrative were thrown aside for a moment, and in Herod, or Noah's wife, or the shepherds awaiting the announcement of the birth of the Messiah, opportunities were taken for the introduction of realistic portraiture of contemporary life. Horse-play and buffoonery or racy comedy often contrasted incongruously with events of momentous importance. This mixture of the comic and tragic survived in the popular drama despite the opposition of the humanists. It was indeed characteristic of medieval and Elizabethan manners and taste, and marks another important departure from classical precedent. We to-day are perhaps as near to the Athenians as to the Elizabethans in this respect. At all events, for the appreciation of Elizabethan tragedy, we sometimes need to reassert a childish and uncultivated disregard for the rapid changes of emotional tone, a liking for tears and laughter close together; or, perhaps there is ground for saying, we need to recognize the validity of the medieval taste for a comic contrast and relief in tragedy, and to accept in art the incongruities and grotesqueness of actual life.
To the moralities, the second important species of drama in the later Middle Ages, the debt of English tragedy is more explicit than to the miracles, but not more essential. It is not more essential, because the moralities were in a way the successors and the substitutes for the miracles and contributed largely to the same effects. They were devoted to a serious purpose and presented tragic situations with a free admixture of comedy, and they continued many of the older traditions of stage performance and undramatic form. They differed from the miracles chiefly in that, like so much of medieval literature, they offered not a direct but a symbolic presentation of life. Instead of the Bible narrative, they presented the strife of vices and virtues; instead of real persons, personified abstractions. This change from individual characters to abstract qualities has usually been regarded as a retrogression by modern students, who deem the study of the motives of individual men and women as essential to the drama. But we have lately been reminded that on the stage it makes little difference whether an actor is called William or Everyman; and the attempt at the symbolization of life offered an opportunity for freedom of invention and freshness of emotional effect that in the miracles had been smothered by the stereotyped repetition of the Bible narrative. The temptation and suffering of the good, the temporary triumph of the evil, and the punishment that overtakes even the mighty were themes which the miracle had confused with many others. The morality gave them dramatic isolation and emphasis.
Moreover, in substituting for a translation of the Bible narrative the symbolization of life as a conflict between folly and wisdom, or the vices and virtues, or the body and the soul, the moralities gave importance to one of the most essential elements in tragedy, that of moral strife. The world is a battlefield, the soul is beleaguered, the play is a conflict; and with this element of conflict there arises the opportunity for dramatic structure. If the story is of strife, there is likely to be a moment when the victory hangs in the balance; a reversal of fortune is implied; there is a chance for a rise and fall, a definite beginning, middle, and end. The moral conflict, moreover, encourages a study of human motive, of cause and effect in human action. In some of these plays, as "The Pride of Life," "Everyman," "The Nice Wanton," the consequences of evil are clearly traced, and the action is representative not only of the conflict of good and evil in the universe, but of the battle of will in the individual. Evidently such plays are near relations of tragedy. They at least made plain to their successors the importance of the conflict of good and evil as a dramatic theme. Their text, the wages of sin are death, has continued to be an essential part of the conception of tragedy.
The moralities, however, on the whole, made little advance, either in escape from conventionality, or in creation of structure, or in dramatic expression of the conflicts of will. They clung in the main to the dominant and already conventionalized allegory of the Middle Ages, the presentation of life as a conflict of body and soul, although they made interesting excursions into the fields of pedagogy and religious controversy. This allegory they treated with intense didacticism, sacrificing all dramatic interest to enforce the lesson, though in their later days the sermons were very generously mixed with farce. Their importance and explicit contribution to English tragedy arose from their historical position just at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. They then served as a transition species, conforming, by a reduction in length and in the number of actors, to the conditions of performance which marked the change from the medieval stage to the Elizabethan theatre; amalgamating under humanistic influence now with this type of play, now with that; and imposing for a time their distinctive form and methods on the emerging types of comedy and tragedy. Some of the earliest tragedies, as we shall see, were direct developments from the moralities, and the influence of the peculiarities of the morality was for a while definite and considerable. But it soon disappeared under the demands of a new theatre and the innovations of a new art.
The inheritance of tragedy from the Middle Ages includes an important legacy from literature entirely apart from the drama. In the separation of the medieval world from the classic, the terms tragedy and comedy ceased to be connected with scenic presentation, and were extended to cover all forms of narrative, whether in dialogue or not. The distinction between the two, though varying somewhat in the different lexicographers and encyclopedists, gradually arrived at an agreement which continued to affect ideas throughout the Renaissance. There was some insistence on the restrictions that tragedy dealt with history, and comedy with fiction; tragedy with exiles, murders, important and horrible deeds, and comedy with more domestic themes or with love and seduction. There was more general agreement that tragedy dealt with persons of rank and importance, kings or great leaders, and comedy with persons of low or middle rank, and that tragedy required a more elevated and ornamented style than comedy. The most important difference, however, was held to lie in the distinction that comedy begins unhappily and proceeds to a happy conclusion, while tragedy begins prosperously and ends miserably and terribly. Thus Dante's poem was a Divine Comedy, and Chaucer in the Monk's Prologue summed up the accepted opinion of the scholarship of his day.
"Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."
These criteria for tragedy were fixed in the consciousness of the sixteenth century; and, though gradually correlated and amalgamated with criticism based on the newly found "Poetics," they continued to influence the theory and practice of the drama. Fitting these definitions and greatly increasing their importance and vogue, collections of tragedies attained wide popularity during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Boccaccio's "De Casibus Illustrium Virorum et Feminarum," Chaucer's "Monk's Tale," and Lydgate's "Falls of Princes" are examples, and, far the most influential on English tragedy, "The Mirror for Magistrates." This collection, first printed in 1559 and later frequently re-edited and enlarged, suggested many themes for the historical drama. Elizabethan playwrights seeking for tragic stories turned naturally to this most famous collection of "tragedies" in the medieval sense. Consequently, the very idea of tragedy continued to carry the connotation of a sudden reversal of fortune, the fall of princes. Tragedy, indeed, has always remained very largely devoted to themes "de casibus illustrium virorum et feminarum."
Turning now from the influence of medievalism to that of humanism, we may remember that in the drama even more than elsewhere humanism denotes a revolution in the spirit of the age, an emancipation of the individual mind from the fetters that had bound intellect and imagination through the Middle Ages. But we must deal first with one of the factors in accomplishing this emancipation, the reawakened knowledge of classical literature. There was some slight acquaintance with the Attic drama from the time that Greek was first taught at Oxford; the doughty Roger Ascham learned from his master Sir John Cheke to prefer Euripides to Seneca; and at the time when the study of Sophocles and Euripides was occupying the Italian dramatists, there must have been some similar response in England. Specific instances of this, however, are few and uncertain. The Greek dramatists seem to have exercised no appreciable direct influence on English tragedy of the sixteenth century; nor can their influence at any time during the seventeenth be said to have been considerable. For England, even more exclusively than for the Continent, the classical influence on the origin and early development of tragedy was confined to the ten plays which Renaissance scholarship attributed to the philosopher Seneca.
Seneca's plays, probably not intended for stage presentation, were literary exercises following the models of Greek tragedy and more especially of Euripides. By the humanist, after he had acquired some slight knowledge of the classical theatre, they were naturally accepted as plays actually performed, and their artificial and elaborate diction, which is their most conscious departure from Attic standards, was eagerly appraised as a merit. Their themes, with the exception of that of the pseudo-Senecan "Octavia," are borrowed from Greek mythology, with a strong preference for the most sensational and bloody stories of adultery, incest, the murder of parents by their children or of children by their parents. Whatever the revolting and bloody details, crime and its retribution make up the burden of each story. The plays present only the last phase of an action, and consequently open with lengthy exposition of preceding events. Much happens behind the scenes, little on the stage; there are many narrative and lyrical scenes, comparatively few dramatic. In comparison with the Athenian tragedies, they seem like prolonged rhetorical discussions of the familiar legends. Their structure involves a division into five acts, which had probably been earlier adopted in Latin tragedy and is noted in the "Ars Poetica," and the exclusion of the chorus from any participation in the action. It appears usually after each of the first four acts and indulges in philosophical reflections, hymns in praise of some deity, or lamentations. In each play a chief person or hero can be distinguished in conflict with one or more chief opponents; and each of the leading persons is accompanied by an adviser or confidant, usually a faithful friend for a hero and a nurse for the heroine. In addition to mortals, supernatural visitants, furies, gods, and especially ghosts, have a prominence that stirred Elizabethans to imitation. Though the presentation of character is not humanly vital, the long speeches and soliloquies display an elaborate analysis of moods of passion, with an absence of Athenian religion, a pagan cosmopolitanism, and an almost modern introspection. The style and philosophy were the chief recommendation of the plays to the Renaissance taste. Artificial, with constant use of antithesis, stichomythia, and hyperbole, oratorical, sonorous, bombastic, and thickly sprinkled with aphorisms and sentiments, the style seemed to the humanists to reach the height of tragic elevation and philosophic sententiousness.
The reasons for the almost exclusive adoption of Seneca as a model seem to have been not only the comparative ignorance of Greek, but also the preference of Renaissance taste for the qualities just enumerated. Moreover, these lifeless and undramatic mixtures of rhetorical verbiage, melodramatic situations, and endless declamations had the advantage of being easy to imitate. In their encouragement to imitation and their absorption of interest away from the models of Greek tragedy, there was a danger of humanistic endeavor resulting in mere copying, a danger not altogether escaped in Italy and France, but happily averted in England.
When, on the other hand, the characteristics of these unpromising models are considered in comparison with the conventionality of the miracles and moralities, they clearly offered much provocative of literary endeavor and the development of the genre of tragedy. Through them secular stories, real persons, and dramatic plots took the place of the allegories and the abstractions. While they encouraged the selection of such stories as resembled the sensational myths favored by Seneca, they opened the door to history, romance, and the whole world of classical fable. Though their particular structure proved in the end impossible on the English stage, they enforced the division into acts already familiarized in comedy, and suggested the possibility of a dramatic fable in distinction from the miracles' adherence to a narrative one. Again, their presentation of character brought new persons, new motives, and new methods, calling attention to drama not as an exposition of events or as an allegory of life, but as a field for the study of human emotion. Their brilliant if bombastic rhetoric aroused enthusiasm for the drama as literature and poetry; and their reflective and aphoristic style encouraged an effort to elevate tragedy above its too familiar converse with comedy into the realm of austere philosophy. These influences, however, were general. Every particular of Seneca's plays had its sixteenth century imitators.
The first signs of an intelligent interest in these plays appeared almost simultaneously at the very beginning of the fourteenth century in the commentary of the English Dominican, Nicholas Treveth, and in the study of the circle gathered about Lovato di Lovati at Padua. One of this school, Albertino Mussato, about 1314, wrote his "Eccerinis" on the fate of the Paduan tyrant, Ezzelino, of the preceding century. This first of the Latin tragedies of modern times aroused the admiration of scholars, and was followed by many other neo-Latin imitations of Seneca. These, while keeping to the Senecan form, often went beyond the stories of classical mythology and chose their subjects from the Bible or from ancient or modern history. Meanwhile neo-Latin comedy had had a beginning and was largely stimulated by the discovery, in 1427, of twelve hitherto unknown comedies of Plautus. All these neo-Latin plays were read and not acted; and the actual acting, either of the classical plays or their humanistic imitations, was not established until the close of the fifteenth century.
The knowledge of the classical drama spread after a time across the Alps, and Terentian comedy in particular exercised a wide influence upon the drama. Of especial interest in relation to tragedy is the new school of neo-Latin comedy which arose about 1530 in Holland and spread over Germany and into France. It applied Terentian style and structure to many of the stories in the Old Testament and to the parable of the prodigal son. To its original purpose of substituting for Terentian immorality themes edifying for youth, it soon added a Protestant tone, and in Kirchmayer's "Pammachius" (1538) entered the field of violent religious controversy. As the number of these plays rapidly increased, there resulted a secularization of treatment and the admission of Senecan as well as Terentian influence. The stories of Judith, Susannah, Goliath, and others gave opportunities for recourse to Senecan imitation; and in the "Jephthes" and "Baptistes," which about 1540 George Buchanan wrote at Bordeaux for his students to act, we have the first tragedies north of the Alps written in distinctly classical form,—a form, it should be said, derived from his study and translation of Euripides as well as from Seneca.
Seneca's preëminence as a model for tragedy, however, was in general not contested, but rather increased by the growing knowledge of Euripides and Sophocles. By the end of the fifteenth century there had been many translations of his plays in Italy; they were studied in the schools, and some had been given stage presentation. But the idea of a vernacular tragedy on the Senecan model was not put into effect until Trissino's "Sophonisba," written in 1515. This was followed by others, until by the time of "Gorboduc" Senecan tragedy in Italian was an established form, and Jodelle's "Cléopatre Captive" (1552) had marked the beginning of the Senecan genre in France. The Italian tragedy had also introduced some departures, in the choice of romantic material and in the innovation of "tragicomedy," which supplied the Senecan model with a happy ending. But all these writers of tragedy worked with a common purpose, to revive Senecan drama in their own day, and their plays adapted their themes and methods to the Senecan model with the faithfulness of disciples. These Senecan imitations, it should be noted, were designed for special performances under academic or courtly auspices, and not for the popular theatre.
In England during the first half of the sixteenth century there was a repetition of the inter-influence between the still flourishing forms of medieval drama and the new classical models which we have noted on the Continent. The early Renaissance in the reign of Henry VIII awakened an interest in Seneca; and the fragment of an English play introducing Lucrece has suggested to Mr. Chambers the possibility of an essay at Senecan tragedy thirty years before "Gorboduc." The main force of the humanistic influence seems, however, to have been in the direction of comedy. The drama was no longer confined to popular open-air presentations, but found a place at court, in the halls of noblemen, and especially at the schools and universities, where the comedies of Plautus and Terence and imitations both in Latin and English were frequently acted. The influence of the classical plays themselves and of the neo-Latin school and the controversial dramas of the Continent upon English moralities and interludes was extensive and distinct. This led to a multiplication and confusion of dramatic types out of which comedy emerged in such plays as "Gammer Gurton's Needle" and "Ralph Roister Doister." In Latin, but not in English, we can trace a similar movement toward tragedy. We hear of a "Dido" written by Ritwyse, master of St. Paul's, and performed by his pupils some time in the decade preceding 1532. "Absalon," written by Thomas Watson probably in the following decade, was highly praised by Roger Ascham, and, if it be identical with the play now in manuscript in the British Museum, is an example of biblical drama along Senecan lines. A non-extant "Jephthes" by Christopherson (1546), the "Archipropheta," with a romantic love episode and a clown, written by Grimald and acted at Oxford in 1547, and his "Christus Redivivus" published in 1543 as a "comœdia tragica," all belong to the same mixed species. A representative of the controversial drama appears in John Foxe's "Christus Triumphans" about 1550, which drew much from the famous "Pammachius," already translated by Bale and acted at Oxford to the great scandal of Gardiner. Of plays in the vernacular we hear of a few called tragedies, but the term was used without any exactness, and no extant play has any just claim to the title. Ten tragedies and comedies are attributed by Bale to Ralph Radcliffe, a pedagogue, who in 1538 opened a theatre in his schoolhouse and gave plays before the 'plebs.' Some of these were certainly in Latin, but some may have been in English, and the titles are interesting as emphasizing again the prevailing humanistic influences. Of the tragedies, two, "The Burning of Sodom" and "The Delivery of Susannah," are on biblical themes evidently chosen for the purpose of edification; the third, "The Condemnation of John Huss," suggests the controversial type. Of the comedies, four have biblical themes, while three, "Patient Griselda," "Melibœus," and "Titus and Gisippus," indicate the growing search for secular and even romantic themes. In this confusion of many species of drama, created by a mixture of medieval and humanistic influences, there is at least no clear evidence of any English tragedy on Senecan lines before "Gorboduc." Of the development of the moralities toward tragedy, of which signs are not lacking, we get the clearest examples in plays a little later, which will be treated in the next chapter.
Special notice, however, must here be paid to one morality and the dramatic activity of its author. John Bale, born 1495, a converted Carmelite who became bishop under Edward VI and an exile during the reign of Mary, and who died not long after the accession of Elizabeth, was one of the most vigorous of Protestant controversialists and apparently the leader of what may be called the Protestant drama. His forty-six plays "in idiomate materno" seem to have been intended for presentation, and, while exhibiting classical influence, doubtless in the main followed medieval models. Of the five extant, written presumably about 1538, three, "God's Promises," "John the Baptist," and "The Temptation of our Lord," are miracle plays; one, "The Three Laws," is a morality. The fifth, "King John," inspired in its satirical and Protestant elements by "Pammachius" and perhaps also by Lindsay's "Three Estates," is the first example of a morality showing an approach to the later historical drama. It is in form a controversial morality, divided into two long parts or acts, but it follows roughly a chronological outline, and among its abstractions presents the king himself as the champion of Protestantism against the pope and Pandulph. Although the direct influence of the play on later drama cannot be traced, it is a notable advance, of which there were perhaps other examples, toward the treatment of English history and of individual persons rather than abstractions in the popular drama.
The humanistic activities of the sixty years before "Gorboduc" thus resulted in a breaking away of allegiance to medieval models and the introduction of new types, rather than in any direct contribution to the form or matter of tragedy. The vernacular play approaching nearest to the field of tragedy is still a controversial morality exhibiting all the traits of medieval drama, and in its innovations pointing not toward classical models, but rather to a new extension of the morality toward the presentation of national history and real persons. During this time, however, the influence of Seneca's plays had been constantly extending and had been augmented by that of the imitations in Latin, French, and Italian. The interest of Seneca in the universities seems to have increased during the reigns of Edward and Mary and to have supplanted in a measure that in Latin comedy. In 1559 the appearance of the first English translation, that of the "Troades" by Jasper Heywood, opened the way to a wider interest and to the possibility of domiciling the Senecan drama on the English stage. By 1561 translations of four other plays had been published; and, before the collected edition of 1581, all of the ten had appeared and attained a greater popularity with the reading public than they have ever since experienced.
The first English tragedy was not a modification of current forms, but a direct imitation of Seneca. The production of "Gorboduc," however, only marked another stage in that conflict between medievalism and humanism which we have been tracing. In the next chapter we shall consider the conflict between Senecan imitations and popular tragedies that still kept to the morality form, a conflict that resulted in the discarding of both Senecan and morality incumbrances and the attainment in Marlowe and his followers of a form of tragedy very different from either, though inheriting bountifully from both.
One source of classical influence other than Seneca's plays and their imitations was of enough importance to require special mention, that of Aristotle's "Poetics." First printed in 1508, it reinforced the dogmas derived from the "Ars Poetica," and became the basis of a rapidly increasing amount of dramatic criticism. This criticism, mostly Italian, interpreted Aristotle by means of the Senecan tragedies and so reinforced their influence; but it was also greatly modified by the medieval ideas of tragedy which we have already noticed. The resultant theory of tragedy, with special regard to its misinterpretations of Aristotle, may be briefly summarized. His dictum that tragedy is the imitation of a serious action was interpreted to mean an action illustrious because the actors are persons of the highest rank, thus adopting the medieval restriction of tragedy to princes. There was less agreement in the restriction of tragedy to history rather than fiction; and over the question of the propriety of a happy ending there was considerable debate. Tragi-comedies were written and defended, but critics in general recognized tragedy as restricted to an unhappy ending, which was universally interpreted to mean deaths. In regard to the function of tragedy there was great difference of opinion over the meaning of [Greek: katharsis], the weight of opinion inclining to emphasize the ethical aim of tragedy, that is, the reward of virtue and punishment of vice and the inculcation of morality by means of frequent precepts. From Aristotle's discussion of character there was derived the curious idea of "decorum," so important in later theories of the drama, that every character should represent a class and should always have the same characteristics,—the kings all acting after one prescribed fashion, the soldiers after another, the old men after another, and so on. From Aristotle's mention of the restriction of time to one revolution of the sun came the unities of time and place, confining the action to one city and twenty-four hours, which were soon made predominant over the third unity of action. These distinctions became fixed in Italian criticism and were given their first full expression in English in Sidney's "Apology for Poetry," written about 1580; but before that they were more or less comprehended by most English students of Seneca. Although even a scholar in 1561 would have been unable to define the unities or decorum, he would have had some confused notion of them. The scope and function of tragedy were by that time assuming in the general literary consciousness a definition approved by both medieval and classical theory and later formulated by Puttenham: "Tragedy deals with doleful falls of unfortunate and afflicted princes, for the purpose of reminding men of the mutability of fortune and of God's just punishment of a vicious life."
Such definition of medieval and classical influences as we have been attempting necessitates a somewhat unreal separation of the two forces. Evidently, in the mind of any playwright, the two combined in a confusion of impulses, of the sources of many of which he must have been unaware. Absolute restriction to the old tradition or to the new inspiration is hardly to be expected in any English dramatist attempting tragedy in the neighborhood of 1562. Such an author would have open for his choice a wealth of stories, classical, medieval, or Italian, as yet untouched by drama; and, though he might choose a story whose events paralleled some Senecan plot, he would be likely to adhere closely to his narrative source after the medieval fashion. Even if he strove loyally after the Senecan form, his knowledge would be hardly sufficient to prevent departures from strict classical standards. Seneca does not always clearly observe the unities or remove violent action from the stage, and his Elizabethan follower would naturally err on the side in accord with popular dramatic tradition. Of the chorus, reduced in importance by Seneca, he would find it difficult to make much use. On the other hand, the adapter of the morality structure to tragic purpose would perhaps fail to derive anything from Seneca except his bombast and sensationalism. For whatever audience the dramatist was writing, he would have many spectators demanding the fun, horse-play, and crude horror of medieval tradition, while his own literary aspirations might lead him to prefer lofty declamation and aphoristic phrasing. But, whether his knowledge was large or small, he was likely to combine in his conception of tragedy, as did Puttenham, both the Christian idea of evil, thwarting good and meeting punishment, and the Senecan idea of a crime followed by retribution or revenge. And, whether he catered to popular taste or to literary ambition, he must have contemplated the presentation of a reversal of fortune, persons of royal or distinguished rank, and a catastrophe involving deaths.
It is, after all, the main contribution of humanism that through the study of the classics there had come new impetus and authority for individual effort. Art was to be based on classic precedents, but it was forbidden by the spirit of the new age to remain after medieval fashion satisfied with repetitions and translations. For the dramatist there were not only new models, but a circulation of ideas, free opportunity, and the incentive of fame. For him, too, there was a public long habituated to the drama and now well tutored in novelties and variations of the old forms, a public that no longer expected a conventionalized stage, but was possessed of what the apostle Paul deemed the chief characteristic of the classical spirit, the desire to hear some new thing.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
The authorities on their respective subjects are: W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neuren Dramas, Halle, 1893-1903 (3 vols. and index, extending to 1570, have appeared); A. W. Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 1899, new and revised edition, 3 vols.; E. K. Chambers, The Mediæval Stage, Oxford, 1903. These all cover the matter of the present chapter and contain bibliographies. Ward gives full bibliographical notes to editions and monographs; Creizenach's index is substantially complete for all European plays; Chambers's Appendix X contains references to editions and descriptions of all English plays up to Elizabeth's accession. Klein, Geschichte des Dramas, 13 vols., 1865-76, and Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry, new edition, 1879, are both somewhat out of date, though the latter contains much useful material. R. Pröloss, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1881-83), and K. Mantzius, The History of Theatric Art, 3 vols. (1904), are slighter. The only rapid and readable survey of European drama is by Brander Matthews, The Development of the Drama (1906). For France, the authority for medieval drama is L. Petit de Julleville, Histoire du Théâtre en France au Moyen Age, 1880-86, 4 vols.; for Germany, R. Froning, Das Drama des Mittelalters, 1891; for Italy, A. Ancona, Origini del Teatro italiano, 1891, 2d edition. J. J. Jusserand, Le Théâtre en Angleterre (1881, 2d ed.); J. A. Symonds, Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884); G. Gregory Smith, The Transition Period (1900, in Periods of European Literature); Gayley, Plays of Our Forefathers (1907), are of value. Dealing more specifically with matters discussed in this chapter are the volumes of Cloetta and Spingarn cited in the last chapter, C. H. Herford's The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 1886, J. W. Cunliffe's The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, Manchester, 1893, and R. Fischer's Zur Kunstentwickelung der Englischen Tragödie von ihren ersten Anfangen bis zu Shakespeare, 1893. The Elizabethan translations of Seneca have been reprinted by the Spenser Society (1887). Within the last few years three new translations have appeared: by Watson Bradshaw, in prose (1902); by Miss E. A. Harris, in verse, two tragedies 1899, the remaining eight 1904; by F. J. Miller, in verse, with introduction on Seneca's Influence on English Drama by J. M. Manly (Chicago, 1907). Text and discussions of plays are presented by A. W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Oxford, 4th ed., 1904; A. Brandl, Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England, 1898; J. M. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, 1897 (2 vols., the third to contain notes and discussion). Dodsley's Old Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 15 vols., 1874-76, also contains texts. The matter of this and subsequent chapters also receives treatment in the general histories of literature. J. J. Jusserand, Literary History of the English People, 2 vols., 1895-, is especially valuable in its account of the drama. The new Cambridge History of English Literature (now in progress) will contain valuable monographs on the matter of this and subsequent chapters. The Dictionary of National Biography is, of course, most valuable for individual writers. F. E. Schelling's Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642, which appears as this volume is passing the press, is a general history of the drama of the period stated, with special reference to the development of dramatic species. It contains an extremely useful Bibliographical Essay and "A List of Plays" written, acted, or published in England, 1558-1642.
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNINGS OF TRAGEDY
In this chapter the development of tragedy is to be traced from 1562, the year of the production of "Gorboduc," to about 1587, the beginning of Marlowe's career. Our knowledge of the drama during this period is scanty, and there are few extant tragedies or plays resembling tragedy. Before examining these plays with the detail which their historical position demands, it will be necessary first to glance at the theatrical conditions. Reference has been made to some of the changes that had been working a transformation from the conditions of the popular performance of the religious drama in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through these, the drama had already to a large extent passed from the control of the guilds to that of small companies of amateur or professional actors; from the open air into the halls of noblemen or of the schools; from the large stage with its fixed stations for the different actors or the procession of pageants, to the small and perhaps improvised platform. Long plays with hosts of actors had given place to short plays with few parts, or many parts divisible among few actors, and constructed with a clear distinction between "on the stage" and "off the stage." Performances indoors, no specially prepared stage, few actors, and short plays represent the prevailing theatrical practice of the early sixteenth century.
From 1562 on, however, theatrical conditions were various and shifting, and not always easily discernible by the modern student. While miracles were still performed after the old popular fashion, the traveling professional companies were growing in importance and tending to monopolize the acting of interludes. Amateur actors, however, at court, school, university, inns of court, or, indeed, among the Bottoms and mechanics of the villages, still contended with the professional for the control and maintenance of the drama. So far as tragedy is concerned, it will be convenient to keep in mind at least four distinct kinds of performance. First, the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court, who throughout the Elizabethan period showed themselves liberal patrons of the drama, occasionally gave plays, usually in connection with special festivities. Second, there were performances at the schools and universities which continued to exert an important dramatic influence, as they had for the preceding sixty years. Plays at the universities were generally in Latin, but there were English plays at both schools and universities, and companies from the Merchant Tailors and Westminster schools acted at court; these last performances falling properly in the third group. Third, companies of children were trained for performance at court; and these were in the course of time restricted to the choir boys of St. Paul's and of the Queen's chapel. Fourth, the traveling professional companies, numerous at the beginning of the period, acted in the inn-yards of London, at court, in the halls of noblemen, on the village greens, in the guild halls, even in the churches of the towns, or wherever else they could obtain an opportunity, until the most important of them found homes in the London theatres. On all four of these classes of actors the influence of the court was considerable, for it was the highest gratification of either amateur or professional to be engaged in a court performance, and performances at court were subject to greater preparation than those in public.
Such were the conditions governing the presentation of tragedies in this period, but in the course of its twenty-five years the professional companies constantly grew in importance and in the end practically monopolized the business of giving plays. Schools, universities, and companies of amateurs became of decreasing moment in the development of the drama, while the choir boys were permitted to act plays publicly in their own theatres and thus became formidable professional rivals of the men's companies. In 1572 the statute compelling the common players to obtain the license of some nobleman reduced the number of the adult companies, but strengthened those that survived, which now became known as Lord Leicester's men, Lord Howard's men, and so on. In London they were able with the assistance of the court to establish and maintain themselves despite the active and constant opposition of the city authorities. The Theatre, built outside the city proper in 1576, was soon followed by other playhouses, and in 1583 a company was licensed under the Queen's personal patronage. Henceforth the history of the Elizabethan drama is in the main confined to four or five companies of men and one or two of children, acting regularly in their established theatres and occasionally in the provinces, or at court, or elsewhere.
The character of a tragedy naturally varied with the circumstances of its presentation. A Latin play at one of the universities was much more dignified and scholarly than the performance of a few traveling actors for the delectation of a provincial audience; and a play by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple was given with an elaborateness not to be expected in those by the choir boys, which were likely to be brief and to include a good deal of singing. The extant tragedies can consequently be best classified according to their methods of presentation. Before all audiences, it should be remembered, moralities of divers sorts were performed, but we are now concerned only with those that most closely approach tragedy. All the extant Latin plays were presented at the universities. Of English plays, "Gorboduc," "Tancred and Gismunda," "Jocasta," and "The Misfortunes of Arthur" were acted by gentlemen of the Inner Temple or Gray's Inn, and are all Senecan tragedies. "Damon and Pithias" and "Appius and Virginia" were acted at court by children, and show little Senecan influence, but are medleys of tragedy, comedy, and music. No performance by an adult company of any extant tragedy is recorded, but "Horestes" and "Cambyses," both of which may have originally been intended for children, bear some evident marks of popular presentation, and both are mixtures of morality, farce, and tragedy. These plays, with the exception of "The Misfortunes of Arthur," acted in 1588 at the very end of the period, were all written and performed in the sixties. With the addition of "Promus and Cassandra" (1578), apparently not acted, they comprise all extant plays acted before 1586-87 which can be classed as tragedies or tragicomedies. Our knowledge of the professional drama may be supplemented from the titles of non-extant plays and from the Revels Accounts of performances at court; but it should be observed that our information in regard to the development of popular tragedy is very meagre, especially for the important period after 1570, and that the group of Senecan plays, which we are to examine first, owed their existence to no popular favor, but to amateur performances under special conditions.
"Gorboduc," or "Ferrex and Porrex," printed surreptitiously in 1565 and with an authoritative text about 1570, was written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, the author of "The Complaint of Buckingham" and "The Induction" in "The Mirror for Magistrates," and afterwards Lord Buckhurst, Lord High Treasurer. It was performed before the Queen as a part of the elaborate Christmas entertainment of the Inner Temple in 1561-62. The plot is taken from a British legend that was introduced into literature by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and relates the division of the kingdom by Gorboduc between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, the murder of the elder by the younger, the murder of the younger by his mother, the murder of both father and mother by their subjects, the slaughter of the people by the nobles, and the resulting civil wars. The story, evidently chosen because of its likeness to Seneca's "Thebais," is treated in Senecan manner, each of the first four acts being followed by a chorus of "Foure auncient and sage men of Brittaine." The murders are not enacted but are related by messengers, but the unities of time and place are violated, as Sir Philip Sidney noted with disapproval. There is little characterization, much political moralizing, which delighted Sidney, and an abundance of long declamations, about eight hundred lines, nearly half of the play, being comprised in ten speeches. The play is written in blank verse, already used in Surrey's translation from the Æneid, and perhaps adopted in imitation of the unrhymed verse of the Italian tragedies. After the Italian fashion, each act is preceded by a dumb show, symbolizing the following action, and these dumb shows seem to have been utilized to provide the spectacle that was entirely wanting in the play proper. Supernatural visitants appear in the three furies before act iv; and before the last act the dumb show consists of a battle-scene, similar to those which later became the invariable accompaniments of the chronicle history play: "there came forth upon the stage a company of hargabusiers and of armed men all in order of battaile," who discharged their pieces and marched three times about the stage.
In spite of the close adherence to the Senecan model, there is little direct borrowing from Seneca, and medieval elements are not lacking. The debates between the good and bad counselors are very like those of the moralities, and the structure is essentially that of a chronicle of a whole story rather than that of a classical tragedy. The first two acts are occupied by the interminable debates, and the last three by the catastrophe, or rather the succession of catastrophes, though the final scene of the fifth act is a sort of epilogue after Senecan fashion. The play has little literary value, though Marcella's recital is not without power and the disquisitions on discord and disloyalty in the state have the merit of earnestness; but it is clearly the beginning of a new species. It abandons current dramatic forms, and endeavors to depict the fall of English princes in accordance with the models of classical tragedy.
"Jocasta," by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarsh, acted 1566 by the Gentlemen of Gray's Inn, demands little attention. It is a translation in blank verse of Lodovico Dolce's "Giocasta," itself an adaptation of the "Phœnissæ" of Euripides. It thus furnishes additional evidence of the influence of Italian tragedy on English. The chorus numbers four, as in "Gorboduc," and the dumb shows, apparently of Gascoigne's invention, are notably elaborate and spectacular.[2]
"Tancred and Gismunda," acted before the queen at the Inner Temple in 1568, under the title "Gismond of Salerne," was written in rhymed quatrains by five gentlemen of the Temple, and afterwards revised and put into blank verse by the author of the fifth act, Robert Wilmot, and first published in 1591.[3] In both versions Cupid appears before the first and third acts as the director of the action, and Magæra comes on before the fourth act to superintend the revenge and murder. The play is based on Painter's version of Boccaccio's novella, which is followed closely, but the base-born lover becomes a count according to the prevailing theory of tragedy. The story itself has an obvious dramatic power and a certain dramatic structure which it imposes on the play. Gismunda's passion for the Count Palurin runs counter to her father's wishes; at the end of the third act love is triumphant, but in the fourth is defeated, and the gruesome catastrophe follows, Tancred and Gismunda dying on the stage. This is the earliest extant English play based on an Italian novella, and the first tragedy to adopt a romantic love story and to make the passion of love its central motive; and the authors accomplished their experiment with evident enthusiasm and some gracefulness and force of diction. They were, however, very conscious of their models. Seneca's "Thyestes," and "Phædra," itself presenting a story of passionate love, were perhaps their chief inspirations; but Buchanan's "Jephthes" and Beza's "Abraham," translated into English in 1577, are mentioned in Wilmot's dedication, and, together with other plays, supplied precedents for the treatment of the favorite tragic theme, the sacrifice of a child by a father. Moreover, Italian tragedies had, since Giraldi's "Orbecche," been turning to romantic fiction for their subjects instead of to history and mythology; and some of these, "Orbecche" itself, and, as Professor Creizenach notes,[4] Dolce's "Dido," doubtless influenced the young templars. There had, indeed, already been Italian tragedies based on Boccaccio's novella, and one by Frederigo Asinari (1576) had added an Œdipean horror by making Tancred put out his eyes before killing himself, an augmentation adopted by Wilmot in his revision. The play was thus not only thoroughly Senecan, but the result of a tangle of derivative Senecan influences. The authors were probably unconscious of the incongruity so obvious to us between the classical form and the romantic material. They were interested in their story and were eager to give it all the advantages that erudition could discover; their intentions were doubtless perfectly reflected in the praise which William Webbe gave them for a play that "all men generally desired, as a work, either in stateliness of show, depth of conceit, or true ornaments of poetical art, inferior to none of the best in that kind: no, were the Roman Seneca the censurer."
"The Misfortunes of Arthur," by Thomas Hughes, was acted and published in 1588. The story from "The Morte D'Arthur" was suggested by its likeness to Senecan plots; and the play was an ambitious attempt to use British legend as Seneca had treated classical myth. The strife between father and son, with its accompaniments of adultery and incest, is viewed as constituting a Nemesis for the crimes of Arthur's father, Pendragon; and the ghost of the wronged Gorlois appears in the first scene to promise revenge, and in the final scene to triumph over its fulfillment. The author knew his models by heart, borrowed much, availed himself of all the particulars of the Senecan technic, and imitated everywhere with a good deal of spirit and success. The play has dramatic and poetic merits beyond its predecessors, but its late date makes it of small importance in our effort to trace the beginnings of English tragedy. Acted twenty-six years after "Gorboduc," it testifies less to the progress of dramatic art than to the conventionalizing effect of Senecan models. Though perhaps the most successful of English imitations of Seneca, it marks the failure of amateur actors and courtly audiences to revive the classical drama on the English stage. On the occasion of its performance before the Queen at Greenwich, its actors and authors may very likely have thought it full of significance for the future of the drama; but "Tamburlaine" had already been acted, and poetry had taken up its abode in the despised public theatres. The chief interest for us in "The Misfortunes of Arthur" is that it furnishes further illustration of the use of English history and of stories of revenge.
To understand the full importance of the attempt to domicile Seneca in England, we must turn to the universities. Two English plays, which would be of interest, have not been preserved, "Ezechias," a tragedy by Udall, acted in 1564 at Cambridge, and "Palamon and Arcyte" by Edwards, the author of "Damon and Pithias," acted 1566. These are the only English plays at all tragical that are recorded; but the practice of giving Latin plays continued and grew in popularity.[5] We hear of "Dido" and an "Ajax Flagellifer," apparently a translation of Sophocles, both in 1564, and a "Progne" in 1566. The extant Latin tragedies are of a later date. Gager's "Meleager," "Œdipus," and "Dido," all acted in the early eighties, are modeled strictly on Seneca, the first two showing direct borrowings. In the fragment which we possess of the third, the ghost of Sichæus appears to warn Dido, and is followed by the storm, represented, we learn, by sugar for snow, sweetmeats for hail, and rose-water for rain. Gager's "Ulysses Redux," acted in 1591, a little beyond the limits of our period, presents a somewhat freer treatment of the Senecan form, the number of characters and of scenes being larger than in the earlier plays. Of uncertain date are a "Herodes," which takes the form of a revenge play introduced by the ghost of Mariemma, and "Solymannidæ" and "Tonumbeius," which apply Senecan methods to Eastern instead of to classical atrocities. "Roxana" (1632), acted before 1592, is a translation of "La Dalida" of Luigi Groto, and won some contemporary distinction and the praise of Dr. Johnson two centuries later. It is a revenge play with a ghost, combining Senecan gruesomeness with the motives of romantic comedy.
More famous than any of these in its own day was "Richardus Tertius," a tragedy in three parts, each part acted on a separate night in 1579 at St. John's, Cambridge, the work of Thomas Legge, Master of Caius and afterwards Vice-Chancellor of the university. Legge seems to have felt the incongruity between the material of the chronicles, which he followed closely, and a strict Senecan form, and to have striven to overcome this by the mechanical expedient of prolonging the action over three plays. But the problem of presenting on the stage the events of a whole reign could not be solved in the terms of the Senecan formula. Legge copied the Senecan rhetoric, interpreted historical events and persons under the guidance of the formula, and retained much of its technic, the narration of deaths instead of their presentation, counsel scenes between hero and advisers, frequent use of the nuntius, and a vestige of a chorus. But the play departs as widely as popular dramas from the unities of time and place, contains many scenes with more than three speakers, is full of dramatic action, and presents processions, pageants, and battle scenes after the fashion of later chronicle plays in the public theatres. Its influence on popular drama may well have been considerable; though, on the other hand, its adherence to sources and its looseness of structure may have been reflections from the public stage. Whether the first chronicle play or not, it is the earliest extant play to indicate the result of the inevitable conflict between a narrow and stereotyped dramatic form and the wide range of material which the chronicles afforded.[6]
In these university Latin plays there is evident a development similar to that traced in the English Senecan drama. Biblical themes disappear; close imitations of Seneca on classical themes give way to freer treatment of romantic or historical material. Revenge and the ghost are ever prominent; and English history introduces a host of events, varied, incongruous, panoramic, and bursting the bounds of the traditional structure. Nash, Marlowe, and others of the later dramatists were university men, and saw some of these plays performed, and perhaps took part in them. Their scenic spectacle, choices of themes, handling of situation, and general effect must have had an appreciable influence upon the subsequent course of the drama. To the various influences which we have denominated humanistic, and especially to the derivative influences reinforcing that of Seneca, we must add this of the Latin plays at Oxford and Cambridge. Latin tragedies continued to be acted at the universities for many years, but their influence on the popular drama can have been potent only during its formative period.
When we turn from these academic and amateur productions to the more popular performances,[7] we have to deal with a very different class of plays. The four to be considered were all written by men of scholarly training, and all deal with classical themes, but the Senecan influence is slight and mainly discernible in the figurative and hyperbolic diction and the fondness for sententious maxims. None of the four are divided into acts; none have choruses or other characteristic marks of Senecan structure; all present action to the exclusion of reflection, and all are in rhymed verse, the favorite metre, at least in the serious portions, being doggerel. All admit comic and farcical scenes, and three are in a large measure moralities. In the tragic portions all admit violence and murders of all kinds on the stage; there is a beheading, a hanging, and, in the case of "Cambyses," a flaying, accomplished, the stage direction reassures us, "with a false skin."
"Damon and Pithias" (1571), by Richard Edwards, was acted by the Children of the Chapel at court in 1563-64, and, judging from the title-page, probably also in public. The prologue, which contains a discussion of "decorum," explains that the term "tragicall comedy" is used because the story is a matter "mixed up with mirth and care." The serious portion of the play presents the tyrant Dionysius as well as the two faithful friends, and shows evidence of a study of Seneca; but it is intermixed with comedy, where the influence of Plautus is noticeable, and indeed with scenes of broadest farce. Carisophus, the parasite, is hardly distinguishable from the vice of the moralities, and is not only clown and mischief-maker, but the villain, whose infamy brings about the tragic entanglements. The play contains a number of songs, and this mixture of tragedy, farce, and musical comedy seems typical of the children's plays of this period.
"Appius and Virginia" (S. R. 1567-68), by an unknown R. B., was also evidently acted by one of the children's companies, perhaps, as Mr. Fleay plausibly conjectures, by the boys of the Westminster school. It is much shorter than "Damon and Pithias," but, like that play, is styled a tragical comedy, is written in rhymed verse, mostly doggerel, and contains farcical scenes and many songs. The vice Haphazard is a clown and mischief-maker; and, in addition, a number of personified abstractions, Conscience, Justice, Comfort, Doctrina, etc., indicate the close relation of the play to the moralities. The main plot, however, is tragic and has no integral connection with the comic scenes. It begins with the domestic happiness of the family of Virginius, and proceeds promptly to the action. Virginia is beheaded, and the head is afterwards exhibited; Appius Claudius and Haphazard are executed out of the sight of the audience; and in the closing scene the tomb of Virginia is shown upon the stage, Memory inscribes her renown, while Justice, Reward, Doctrine, and Fame apparently join in a song "around about the tomb in honor of her name."
"Horestes" (1567) by John Pickering was probably the "Orestes" acted at court 1567-68. It also seems to have been performed by children, but was very likely given public presentation by various companies. The title runs significantly, "A New Interlude of Vice, conteyninge the Historye of Horestes," etc. The vice, indeed, is hardly absent from the stage, and offers much that is new in his species. He is a clown, but apparently this is only a disguise, for he appears to Horestes as a messenger from the gods, urging him to revenge; later as Courage he is Horestes' faithful friend and supporter, then as Revenge he attends to the execution of Clytemnestra, and finally he appears as a beggar thrust out of court, since Revenge could not agree with the Amity dwelling there, and takes the opportunity to read a long lecture to women. The diversity of elements confused in this personage is typical of the play. It is in a large measure a morality; Nature appears to Horestes to dissuade him from including his mother in his vengeance, Fame appears as a judge and exempts him from guilt, and other abstractions are numerous and voluble. There are also a number of songs, Egisthus and Clytemnestra having just finished a love song when the messenger announces the avenger's approach. There are many scenes of sheer farce, where the humor lies wholly in fisticuffs and beatings; and the spectacular element suggests the later historical plays. Horestes is accompanied by an army which marches with drums about the stage and fights two pitched battles, one with the host of Egisthus and the other for the possession of the city. "Make your lively battel and let it be long," says the stage direction. Still further, the classical elements are curiously confused. Although there are a number of quotations from Ovid and frequent citations of other classical worthies, there is no mention of Seneca, though the plot of "a revenge for a father" here makes its first appearance in the English drama, and the authors appear to have been entirely ignorant of the Greek tragedies. The ultimate source is the sixth book of Dictys Cretensis. The author follows closely one of the popular versions of the Troy legend, retains the anachronisms of the romantic version, and imposes on that the structure of the morality, the vice taking the place of the oracle of Apollo, and abstractions mingling with the knights and dukes of the Trojan war. The play is thus interesting as marking another step in the translation of the morality into the "history" type of tragedy. The closing scenes, in particular, illustrate the adherence to sources with morality embellishments. The play by no means ends with the murders. Horestes is approved by Fame, accused by Menelaus, who arrives, defended by Nestor, who throws down his glove as a gage, then reconciled to Menelaus, married to Hermione, crowned by Duty and Truth, and applauded and advised by Commons and Nobelles.
"Cambyses" (S. R. 1569-70) was written by Thomas Preston, afterwards Master of Trinity Hall, and acted some time in the sixties. Perhaps originally intended for a school performance, it was later evidently acted in public, and seems more suited than even "Appius and Virginia" or "Horestes" to a performance by an ordinary professional adult company. The title-page sets forth the plot with a terse emphasis of its various elements: "A Lamentable Tragedie mixed full of pleasant mirth containing the Life of Cambises King of Persia from the beginning of his kingdome unto his Death, his one good deede of execution, after that, many wicked deedes and tyrannous murders committed by and through him, and last of all, his odious death by Gods Justice appointed." Like "Horestes," this is a combination of morality and history, and the chronicle or epical method is enforced by the fact that we have the whole story of "the life and death," as later titles ran, of a monarch. The chronicle structure is mixed full of pleasant mirth and pays a certain regard to climax. Cambyses begins by executing an unjust judge, and proceeds to murder the child of his minister, then his brother, then his bride, and finally himself. The comic scenes have a link of connection with the tragic ones in Ambidexter, the vice and accomplice of the villanous tyrant. Seneca is appealed to as an authority in the prologue, but there is little trace of his influence, unless it is found in the central figure of the wicked tyrant and his gory career, or in the highfalutin of Cambyses' vein. The extraordinary list of dramatis personae indicates sufficiently the hodge-podge of the action and the prominence of the morality influence. The deaths are managed by Cruelty or Murder; Commons Cry, Commons Complaint, Small Nobility, and Proof appeal against tyranny; the marriage feast is arranged by Preparation; the comic scenes are shared by Huf, Ruf, Snuf, Hob, and Lob; Venus and Cupid manage the love affairs; and Shame appears as a sort of tentative ghost:
"From among the grisly ghosts I come, from tyrants' testy train."
The fall of the Prince Cambyses, it should be added, is accidentally or providentially upon his own sword; and only the exit of Ambidexter and a few words from the three lords, who pronounce the accident a just reward from heaven and promise princely burial, are required to bring the play to a close.
In these plays we may trace the gradual emergence of tragedy in the popular drama in response to a growing knowledge of its functions and methods. It appears still mixed with farce and morality, but it has themes like those of Seneca, bloody, revolting, and sensational, and its freedom in stage presentation permits an emphasis on crime and death even greater than in the Senecan imitations. Notably, it introduces the stories of the downfall of a tyrant and the revenge of a son for a father. The structure has none of the Senecan characteristics, and consists merely in linking together, or rather in interrupting by extraneous comedy, a few scenes illustrating a story; but it is like that of the English Senecan plays in the space it gives to catastrophe. In general the plays begin conventionally with the depiction of peaceful and prosperous circumstances, and proceed at once to the disasters and deaths, with very little attention to the events or motives that lead to these results. The element of conflict is as yet hardly translated out of the abstract terms of the morality into those of actual life. The conflict of motives never leads to a dramatic crisis but keeps to the form of a medieval debate, as between Nature and Horestes, or, indeed, between the bad and good counselors in "Gorboduc." Characterization likewise depends mostly on the form of arguing abstractions, though certain types of importance later are already noticeable. The faithful friend and the aged counselor are ever at hand, and the part, if not the character, of the tragic hero is provided in Horestes and Virginius. The villain receives considerable attention. The English dramatists were puzzled to follow the classical tragedies in placing the source of evil in Fate or the decrees of the gods; and even when their stories provided them with persons sufficiently iniquitous to cause all the tragic trouble, they seem to have felt the need for a visible and special representative of the devil. Evil in "Gorboduc" may be said to arise from the counsels of the parasites as well as from the folly of the king and the envy of the princes. In "Tancred and Gismunda" it is due, after classical imitation, to the intervention of Cupid. In the popular plays the vice is borrowed from the moralities, and, in all except "Horestes," is made a mischief-maker, a source of evil, and the special representative of the devil. Questions in regard to the origin of the vice and his relationship to the devil of the medieval drama have not been freed from doubt by recent investigation, but it seems clear that in the early tragedies he was given some of the work later accomplished by the stage-villain and his accomplices. The part that women play in these early tragedies should also be noticed. Women and love, as Professor Creizenach has observed, receive far more attention in Renaissance tragedy than in Greek or Senecan. "Tancred and Gismunda" and "Promus and Cassandra" deal with stories of romantic love; Virginia and the queen in "Cambyses" present noteworthy though slight examples of the idealization of women so important in later drama. The purpose of all these plays, Senecan or popular, is superficially didactic, as is witnessed not only by the abundant moralizing in the Senecan imitations, but also in the popular plays by the emphasis in the closing scenes on the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice. In the last act of "Appius and Virginia" the lesson of the play is written on the tomb, and in "Horestes" the conduct of the hero is discussed by Nestor and Fame and finally rewarded by Hermione, Truth, and Duty. "Cambyses" is more in line with later tragedy in presenting the protagonist as a monster and in closing promptly after his punishment by death.
The most certain accomplishment, however, in the development of the drama up to 1570 had been in the widening of its range of material. The bible narrative and moral allegory had been superseded by classical myth and history, and these in turn were being encroached upon by the romantic fiction of the Italian novelle and by the chronicles of English history. Italian novelle were open to dramatists mainly through a series of collections of translations, of which "Painter's Palace of Pleasure" (1566) was the chief. The interest in English history was stimulated and fed by "The Mirror for Magistrates" and the various editions of the chronicles; Grafton, Stowe, and the third edition of Fabyan appearing in the sixties, and Holinshed in 1577; while interest in the classics was maintained by numerous translations as well as by an increasing knowledge of Latin. Translation, indeed, had brought the stories of the world to the English mart, and the dramatic industry was now eager in its demand for material.
Of the continued development of popular tragedy after 1570, and particularly of the sources drawn upon for dramatic material, we can get a few hints from the titles of non-extant plays. The incomplete Revels Accounts of performances at court preserve the names of over sixty plays acted between 1570 and 1585, and about thirty are derived from other sources. Of the court plays, none had biblical subjects; a number were moralities, a few were drawn from old romances; but the majority were from classical or Italian sources. Many of these must have contained tragic incidents,[8] though probably they were not much more classical in form than "Appius and Virginia" or "Horestes." Only one title drawn from national history presents itself, "The King of Scots." The English chronicle play had evidently not yet made any stir at court; but many of the classical plays were drawn from Livy. Two other titles, "The Cruelty of a Stepmother" and "Murderous Michael" (Sussex's men, '78, '79), and a third of a play at Bristol in 1578, "What Mischief Worketh in the Mind of Man," may possibly have had for sources accounts of contemporary murders, and thus have instituted the species of domestic tragedy. A few titles, suggestive of tragedy, with accompanying comments, have been preserved by Gosson, who praises: "The Jew," "representing the greediness of worldly chusers and bloody minds of usurers," apparently a forerunner of "The Merchant of Venice"; "Ptolemy," "describing the overthrow of seditious estates and rebellious commons"; "The Blacksmith's Daughter," "contayning the treachery of the Turkes, the honourable bountye of a noble mind, and the shining of virtue in distress"; and his own play, "Catilin's Conspiracy," "showing the reward of traitors."
Some further information concerning the emergence of popular tragedy can be derived from the criticisms of the period. Gosson in his "Plays Confuted" (1582), declares:—
"For the poets drive it most commonly unto such points as may best show the majesty of their pen in tragical speeches, or set their hearers agog with discourses of love; or paint a few antics to fit their own humours with scoffs and taunts or wring in a show to furnish forth the stage when it is too bare; when the matter itself comes short of this, they follow the practice of the cobbler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out.... So," he adds, "was the history of Cæsar and Pompey and the play of the Fabii at the theatre, both amplified where the drums might walk or the pen ruffle."
A similar criticism is made by Whetstone in his dedication of "Promus and Cassandra" (1578): "The Englishman in this qualitie, is most vaine, indiscreete, and out of order: he first groundes his work on impossibilities: then in three howers more likely ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets Children, makes Children men, men to conquer kingdomes, murder monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heaven and fetcheth Divels from Hel." Sidney in the well-known passage on the contemporary drama in his "Apologie for Poetrie" (1595, but written about 1580) amplified these same criticisms, deploring the lack of "noble moralitie," the violation of the unities, and the admixture of farce in current tragedies, and especially animadverting on the histories and the "mongrel Tragy-comedie." He asks scornfully: "And doe they not knowe, that a Tragedie is tied to the lawes of Poesie, and not of Historie? not bound to follow the storie, but having liberty either to faine a quite new matter, or to frame the history to the most tragicall conveniencie. Againe, many things may be told, which cannot be shewed, if they knewe the difference betwixt reporting and representing,"—and he goes on to illustrate. Evidently the medieval methods were still potent rather than those of Sidney's models, Euripides, Seneca, and "Gorboduc"; and the tragedies in the theatres followed their sources without recognition of the difference between a narrative and a dramatic structure, and with an appeal to vulgar taste by means of hideous monsters, pitched fields, scurrility, or "some extreme shew of doltishness." From these critical comments we may infer that the popular drama had before 1585 triumphed over the Senecan. The few extant tragedies before that date have shown little which was not paralleled in the contemporary drama of western Europe; but in the popularization of a professional drama that rejected Senecan technic but still delighted in the presentation of tragic fact we have the first clear differentiation of English tragedy from that of other nations. Unfortunately we have only this indirect evidence that such differentiation was well under way before Marlowe.
On the basis of such evidence, however, we may draw a few inferences in regard to the course of popular tragedy from 1570 to 1585. We may infer that Senecan imitations in the hands of amateurs did not multiply, and were not readily accepted even as object lessons by writers for the public theatres, who, whatever inspiration they may have received from amateur or academic plays, must have felt the increasing force of the demand from the public for amusement and sensation. While undoubtedly many traces of Senecan influence continued, and while classical themes persisted, the prevalent type of drama became neither right comedy nor right tragedy but the so-called "history." Whether based on history or fiction, its main purpose was the presentation of a story, the more marvelous the better; and, even if it ended in deaths, it was likely to contain a mixture of farce, romantic love, stage spectacle, and, as time went on, a diminishing inculcation of morality. Throughout the period, popular tragedy probably remained commingled with other species of drama. As it forsook the morality, it found itself wedded with farce or spectacle; or, perhaps more extensively, with history and romantic comedy. What course the popular drama farthest removed from court or academic influence may have taken, we can only surmise, though the presentation of contemporary murders, which found favor even at court, must presumably have flourished with less cultivated audiences. And it is impossible to resist the conjecture that English history must have received crude presentation in the public theatres much earlier than we have any record of.
We may also surmise that in the quarter of a century from "Cambyses" to "Tamburlaine" there must have been some considerable development in the power to depict tragic fact, in the traditions of tragic acting, and in the cultivation of the taste of both audiences and authors for the genuinely terrible, pathetic, and heroic, but we must assume that tragedy still awaited the service of both literary and dramatic genius. The genius of Marlowe, however, had its way prepared by twenty-five years of extraordinary dramatic activity, during which the functions of comedy and tragedy had become known if not observed, comedy had attained a considerable development in Lyly and Peele, and tragedy had gained sufficient vigor to extend its themes, and to decide against a development imitative and scholarly, and in favor of one original and popular.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Most of the books in the list for the last chapter are useful in connection with the matter of this. Creizenach and Ward are the chief authorities; Collier, Symonds, and Jusserand deal with the period. Spingarn, Cunliffe, and Fischer are valuable for their special fields. Texts are to be found in Manly, Dodsley, Brandl, and discussions in the latter. For the stage history of the Elizabethan drama, the works of F. G. Fleay are very valuable, though marred by much unsupported conjecture: A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642, 2 vols. (1891); A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1559-1642 (1890); A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare (1886). The first-named is the most reliable and useful of the three. Original documents and records are printed in part in Collier and Fleay; and in Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (6th ed., 1886); Malone's Variorum ed. of Shakespeare, 1821; Cunningham's Extracts from the Annals of the Revels at Court, Shakespeare Society, 1842; Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols., 1823; Aussere Geschichte der englischen Theatertruppen, 1559-1642, by Hermann Maas (Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas, 1907); Hazlitt's English Drama and Stage (1869); Chamber's Notes on the Revels Office (1906). The essays of Gosson, Sidney, Webbe, Puttenham, which supply most of the dramatic criticism of the period, are in Arber's Reprints; selections from these and other critical works with an introduction are collected in Elizabethan Critical Essays, G. Gregory Smith (1904). J. W. Cunliffe's edition of Gascoigne's Posies (1907) contains the plays, which he has also edited with an introduction in The Belles-Lettres Series (1906). A study of Legge's Richardus Tertius is found in G. B. Churchill's Richard III up to Shakespeare (Berlin, 1906); and an account of the Latin university plays in the article cited, by G. B. Churchill and W. Keller (Shakspere Jahrbuch, 1898). W. W. Greg's A List of English Plays written before 1643 and printed before 1700 (London Bibliographical Society) is based on the title-pages of the original copies. Fleay's Biographical Chronicle includes all plays known, extant or not. Greg, Fleay, and Schelling supersede Halliwell-Phillipps's Dictionary of Old English Plays (1860), and W. C. Hazlitt's Manual of Old English Plays (1892). English Drama, a Working Basis, by K. L. Bates and L. B. Godfrey, Wellesley College (1895), is the only attempt at a directory to modern editions, and though very incomplete, is the most serviceable guide to the whole field of English drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Before the first act, "there came in upon the stage a king with an Imperiall Crowne upon his head ... sitting in a chariot very richely furnished, drawne in by foure kinges in their dublettes and hosen, with crownes upon their heades, representing unto us ambition," etc. And before the fifth act there is a similar exhibition of a woman in a chariot driving kings and slaves. These shows may have suggested to Marlowe the famous business of Tamburlaine and his chariot. The show before act ii introduces the paraphernalia of coffins and a grave, afterwards so frequent in popular tragedy.
[3] The earlier version also survives in MS. and has been published by Professor Brandl in his Quellen des Weltlichen Dramas. The revised version is the result of elaborate care and reflects more highly developed dramatic conditions than existed in the sixties, but in some respects it may be closer to the original performance than is the manuscript. The songs of the chorus, now four maids of Gismunda's instead of four gentlemen of Salerne, and the dumb shows must have had some equivalents in the presentation before the Queen, though both are wanting in the earlier version. The dumb shows are noteworthy because, unlike those in Gorboduc and Jocasta, they are not allegorical, but represent important actions described or referred to in the text.
[4] Geschichte des neueren Dramas, ii, 471.
[5] For a list of Latin plays acted at the universities, see Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, vol. ii, 347-366. This list must be corrected in many particulars by an article, "Die Lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen in der Zeit der Königin Elisabeth," by George B. Churchill and Wolfgang Keller, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, xxxiv, 220-323.
[6] Far more novel than any of the plays discussed in its departures from Senecan precedent, is Perfidus Hetruscus. So far as can be judged from the outline (Jahrbuch, xxxiv, 250-252), it offers no semblance of Senecan structure. There is no chorus, but there are six ghosts, a villain, two accomplices,—one a Capuchin, the other a Jesuit,—and an elaborate plot, as full of surprises as of poisonings. It seems to be a popular revenge play turned into Latin, and can hardly come within our period.
[7] One play should be mentioned here as standing in some ways between the classical and popular plays. Promus and Cassandra, by George Whetstone, published 1578, cannot be placed in any of our four classes, for there is no evidence that it was ever acted. Like Tancred and Gismunda, it was based on an Italian novella, also the source of Measure for Measure, and it follows Latin comedy rather than tragedy. In its division into five acts, its frequent soliloquies, its attempted observance of decorum (especially vaunted in the preface), and in its serious purpose and moral sentiments, the play shows a pedantic clinging to classicism. In the main, however, it belongs with Damon and Pithias and Appius and Virginia, and seems to have been intended for performance by children. It is a mixture of tragedy, comedy, farce, and songs; and this abundance of incongruous material seems to have led to its division into two plays, as Whetstone says, for the purpose of decorum. Here, as elsewhere in the period, the experiment of putting new material into old dramatic structures burst the bottles. Clowns, parasites, tyrants, prostitutes, hangmen, Egyptians, and girls in boys' clothing make up a pageant which is a sort of tragicomedy but which the learned author called by the more popular title, "a history."
[8] Ariodante and Genevra (Orlando Furioso), Ajax and Ulysses, Agamemnon and Ulysses, Cæsar and Pompey, Cloridon and Radimanta Duke of Milan, Effigenia (Iphigenia), Four Sons of Fabius, Mutius Scævola, Quintus Fabius, Perseus and Andromeda, Sarpedon, Scipio Africanus, Timoclea at the Siege of Thebes, Telemo, Twelve Labors of Hercules. Some titles suggesting medieval romance are: Knight of the Burning Bush, Red Knight, Paris and Vienna, Solitary Knight.
CHAPTER IV
MARLOWE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
The growing national consciousness that reached its triumphant culmination in the defeat of Spain made itself felt in the drama, specifically in efforts to present the glories of English history, and still more potently in an awakened responsiveness to the new fields and new incentives for artistic ambition. The beginning of the greatness of the national drama is significantly coincident with the victory over the Armada. By that time the spirit of noble endeavor had found lodgment in every worthy breast. It animated Marlowe no less than Drake, and the author of the least successful chronicle play as well as admiral or counselor. The extraordinary achievements that had been contributing to the might of England as a political power were, indeed, but one expression of the freedom and eagerness of individual initiative that characterized this English Renaissance and found other expression in the activities and accomplishments of literature. In comparison with the men of preceding generations, the Elizabethan Englishman faced a world of new horizons, new ideas, boundless opportunities, and alluring rewards. Every career was open and promised an untrod pathway and unworn laurels. He might win fame as a pirate, philosopher, or poet; or in the new excitement of living he might crowd not one but many careers into the span of life. The versatility of a Raleigh only typifies the excitement and energy of deed, the lively movement of thought which quickened mind and body, and resulted, now in a voyage to Virginia, now in a conspiracy, now in a sonnet, and now in a history of the universe. And this feverishness to make trial of thronging opportunities was symptomatic not only of vigor of intellect, celerity of emotion, and independence of will, but also of an imaginative idealism that enlightened the daily living of many a sorry citizen, and was destined to live resplendent in the verses of Spenser and Shakespeare. In the stir of free ideas, the surprise of discovery, and the glow of accomplishment, life grew heroic, attainment seemed easy, and no ideals too lofty for the scaling ladders of human aspiration. Men achieved much and they dreamt of more. The apprentice went to the theatre to don Fortunatus's cap or to triumph with Tamburlaine; every one had his El Dorado distant only a short voyage; and, with the new world before them, poets and playwrights set sail in blithe confidence of splendid discovery. Never before, or perhaps since, have so many new things seemed within grasp, whether in literature or in life; never has all living so throbbed with a sense of the nearness of the unattainable, the kinship of the real and the ideal.
In non-dramatic literature the incentives of the classics and of the Italians from Petrarch to Tasso had led on from translations and imitations to experiments and inventions. In the dozen years before the Armada, lyric poetry, criticism, and prose fiction had felt the stir of successful English innovation, and the time was almost ripe for the vast projects of Spenser, Hooker, and Bacon. In comedy the development had been earlier and more rapid than in tragedy, and had already in Peele and Lyly reached the stage of dexterous expression and varied innovation. Whether presenting a story of classical mythology or of medieval romance, whether farcical, Plautian, pastoral, sentimental, satirical, or spectacular, comedy was by the time of Marlowe ready with its examples to offer instruction to any writer attempting tragic themes. Tragedy could hardly remain longer in the stage of translation, imitation, and feeble experiment which we have been considering.
Still further, a stimulus for tragedy was exercised by the daily events of that active era. These stirred men's imagination and ambition, and must almost inevitably have directed artistic impulse toward the heroic, the passionate, and the terrible. The abundance of bloodshed in Elizabethan tragedy may find some interpretation in the fact that Ben Jonson killed his man in a duel and that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. The time was one of bloodshed, violence, quick and brutal passion; a time in which the torture of a Gloster or the revenge of a Shylock was far closer to life, to the life at least of poets and dramatists, than such stories are to-day. Drake in his cabin drinking and praying with the unmoved lieutenant whom he was to hang the next day is a bit of fact that rivals in horror the devilries of a Barabas. Even if Seneca's example had not already approved themes of adultery, murder, blood-vengeance, the atrocities of tyranny, and the deadly strife of father and son, such themes must have stirred men's minds in the days of the Massacre of St. Bartholemew and the career of Mary Stuart. If tradition had not already selected the falls of princes as the especial field for tragedy, the history of monarchical Europe in the sixteenth century must have given such stories a power of appeal hardly to be appreciated now. In that strenuous generation the dramatist must have found artistic impulses from bloody and gruesome deeds, and no less from daring ambition, heroic struggle, and indomitable greatness of mind.
The summons, however, which the tragic muse heeded came directly from the public theatres and the professional actors. The university men who at this time were writing for the theatre under the lash and loans of a slave-driving theatrical manager may have been tempted to forget that their sordid and Bohemian existence offered a means for triumphant artistic expression. The London theatres were now well established, patronized by the courtiers, and secured in prosperity by the motley audiences that crowded their performances. They had become important centres in the social life of the time, comparable to the newspaper offices of a twentieth-century city in their close touch with the daily life about them; and in their task of affording amusement and information fulfilling in part the functions of periodicals and novels as well as of the drama at present. The stage, without scenery, was still in a transition state between the medieval and modern, and, to our view, almost unrealizably crude. Places were sometimes indicated by signs; properties, beds, tables, or trees were brought on or off as occasion required; or, a heavier property, like a cave, might remain whether the scene was in cave-land or a counting-room. There was no drop curtain; actors went off, others came on, and the place changed from a seacoast to the palace; or, the actors merely moved across the platform, and it transpired that they had passed from "a fair and pleasant green" to a room in the house of Faustus. At the close of a tragedy all the survivors might be needed to bear off the bodies of the dead. A balcony in the rear of the stage stood in stead of a castle wall or the deck of a ship, while a curtained space below might represent an inner room or a dungeon vault. A curtain extending across the stage seems at times to have been used in managing a change of scene. Spectacular elements were not lacking: fireworks, ascents and descents of gods, armies, coronations, and battles delighted the eye. On costume, anachronistic but elaborate, the manager lavished his money and ingenuity. Cleopatra tightly laced, Tamburlaine in scarlet copper breeches are recorded facts, but Venuses, Apollos, mermaids, devils, satyrs, and nymphs leave something for fancy to conceive, as does the "gown to go invisible in" which perhaps shielded Ariel or Puck. Of the acting we have little information. Female parts were played by boys; clowns with their jigs were great favorites, but a considerable skill in acting must be supposed,—less subtle, less occupied with stage business than to-day, more declamatory possibly, and more attentive to the spoken word. Any superiority in the appreciation possessed by the audiences over those of to-day must be attributed not to their superior intelligence, but to their long training in listening to plays. They probably differed from uneducated audiences in the cheaper theatres of to-day chiefly, if at all, in spontaneity of emotions, a desire for emotional incongruity, and a cultivated delight in verbal fireworks or felicities. It is certain that in the time of Marlowe they were gaping for sensation and joyed in a comedy of beatings, a tragedy of murders, and a mixture of jigging and villany. For such audiences, for such a stage, under stress of immediate demand requiring hasty and collaborative work, Marlowe and his contemporaries wrote. They were hack writers, and so viewed by the literati of their day. Every one of them, Shakespeare included, had in the first place to satisfy the demands of the public theatres. This needs to be remembered no less than the fact that the plays of nearly all, of the meanest hack as well as Shakespeare, seem to have felt the stir and thrill of the effort to express thought in enduring words.
In the course of the six or seven years ending with Marlowe's death in 1593, tragedy experienced a rapid and multiform development. The various influences already noticed in the last chapter as at work were developed by the ingenuity and innovation of a dozen writers, and translated into the expression of individual genius by Marlowe and Shakespeare. No theory of tragedy ruled the theatres; no school of dramatists adopted any code of principles; the plays which we class as tragedies were mostly known as histories and were written in violence to the accepted literary conception. Nevertheless, tragedy was establishing itself as a popular species of drama, was separating its themes and their treatment clearly from those of comedy, and was defining the course which it was to follow until the Puritan revolution.
The impossibility of determining a precise chronology of the stage history of the period renders the exact appraisal of indebtedness, or the tracing of any certain evolution, very insecure. The changes in the companies in 1594 and the consequent publication of a large number of plays in the same year enable us to fix on a number of tragedies acted before Marlowe's death, and we may safely add a few others as not later than 1595. Among these extant tragedies and in the names of those that have not survived there are representatives of various types,—biblical plays, tragedies dealing with romantic love, domestic tragedies telling stories of contemporary crimes. In any one of these plays, indeed, various types may be combined; the writers were concerned with telling stories, not with l'évolution des genres. But the most salient and pervasive forces working in tragedy may be roughly denominated as (1) the chronicle history play, (2) the revenge type of tragedy, (3) the type of tragedy created by Marlowe. To these should perhaps be added romantic comedy with its idealized love story and its element of averted tragedy. But the first three types, though overlapping and not distinct, were of marked importance in the history of tragedy and need especial consideration in connection with the most important dramatists of this period, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.
The chronicle history play may claim attention first, not because it was demonstrably earlier in appearance than the others, but because it engaged the efforts of nearly every dramatic writer of the period, and because in its disregard of foreign influence or parallel in its methods and structure, and in its devotion to the demands of the London theatres, it is most typical of the drama of the period. The prime essential of a play was that it should tell a story. A playwright took his material from novella, poem, or chronicle, and strove to translate it into an interesting and varied series of scenes. In the chronicles he found material peculiarly suited to such translation. Everything was there,—battles, coronations, counsels, conspiracies, amours, speeches, characterization, and sentiments. No enlargement was necessary as in the case of a novella, no considerations of consistency of characterization, few incidents in addition to those in the highway or the byways of the narrative, and only a minimum of invention. The interest of a distinct plot was superseded by that of historical persons, events, and spectacles, and these compelled only such unity as might be secured by taking the reign of one monarch as the basis of a play, or sometimes of several plays. The presentation of history involved a large number of persons on the stage, many changes of place, a long stretch of time, and an incongruity of matter, all this loosely organized into scenes themselves often long and varied and admitting some change of place and lapse of time within their bounds. Though the scene, rather than the act, was the unit in popular drama, it had almost no structural value. A play was really a continuous performance, the actors coming and going, a battle intervening, and now and then a withdrawal of all the actors and the appearance of a new group presaging a marked change of place or the beginning of an entirely different action. In the arrangement of scenes, however, some attention to parallel, contrast, and climax soon became manifest; and some integration of the confused material from the chronicles, particularly in the separation from scenes abounding in action of those purely narrative or expository and those purely lyrical, chiefly lamentations. In spite of such beginnings of system, the early chronicle plays, "The Famous Victories of Henry V," "Jack Straw," "Leir," "Edward I," and "The Troublesome Reign" are less coherent in structure, more incongruous in material, and less regardful of any clear fable, tragic or comic, than are other contemporary plays.
To determine criteria to define these plays and their successors as a class is by no means easy. They were usually based on the chronicles, but the method of composition just described was applied to legend or poem with similar results, and there were also plays based on chronicles of contemporary events. They had for their main purpose the presentation of history, but this was shared by plays on French and Roman as well as English history, and there were historical plays that had no marks of the chronicle method of structure. The English chronicle plays usually show a pronounced patriotic temper, but this is often subsidiary and neglected in the desire for farce or sensation. The spectacular features are a characteristic element, a battle-scene being perhaps the most indispensable element or ingredient of a chronicle play, but this again fails to supply even more than a superficial criterion. In the popularity of the presentations of historical facts, all kinds of stories were worked over into a likeness to "true chronicle history," and the genuine historical, legendary, and biographical plays are hardly distinguishable from the pretenders. An illuminating illustration of the characteristics of the national drama about 1590 can be found in a comparison of two dramatic versions of a romance in Cinthio's "Hecatommithi," one by Cinthio himself, the other by Robert Greene. The Italian play is a tragicomedy in strict Senecan form, in which Arrenopia (Greene's Dorothea) appears as a declamatory queen confiding her troubles to the attendant nurse. Greene took the romantic comedy, added some pseudo-historical events, patriotic sentiments, and a pitched field for the finale, and called the whole "The Scottish Historie of James IV, slaine at Flodden." For our purpose the chronicle plays are to be regarded less as a distinct type than as representing a set of practices in vogue at this period and widely influential on the drama's development. They possessed the following characteristics and imposed some or all of them on very different forms of drama: subjects drawn from English history, the presentation of historical and political events, an incongruous mixture of material, a narrative structure almost as unorganized as the chronicles themselves, patriotic sentiments, and the stage pageantry of court and camp.
From their earliest appearance, however, the chronicle plays offered opportunities for developments later consummated by Shakespeare. Comic scenes were freely interspersed to enliven the tedium of royal declamations, and in these lay the possibility of the combination of history and comedy in the Falstaff plays. On the other hand, the history of a doleful fall of a prince or the retribution visited on some tyrant gave the plays a tragic tone and opened the way for "Macbeth" and "Lear." "The Troublesome Reign of King John,"[9] the basis of Shakespeare's play, is the best example of an early chronicle play presenting undeveloped possibilities for tragedy. It is written partly in blank verse, partly in rhyme, and partly in prose. It does not follow the chronicles with any fidelity, but twists history, adds fiction, and proclaims throughout a vigorous protestant patriotism. Battles, embassies, farce, orations, death, and much else mingle together, each scene being treated like another and no discernible method being followed in their arrangement or proportion, except that of a loose adherence to the scheme of "a life and death." The first part closes with John crowned and assured of the miscarriage of his intended murder of Arthur; in the second part, as the address to the reader declares,
"First scenes shows Arthur's death in infancie,
And last concludes John's fatall tragedie."
"The Troublesome Reign" indicates what little advance had been made toward tragedy when Marlowe's first play appeared. The prologue to that play was a declaration of reform and innovation.
"From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."
The doggerel rhyme favored in the popular drama was to give place to blank verse, and the jigging clowns to heroic themes and "high astounding terms." Marlowe came to the theatre,[10] fresh from the university, his fancy aflame with the beauty of Latin verse and story, his mind storming with the problems and ambitions of adolescent genius. He threw aside Senecan traditions and devoted himself to meeting the demands of the professional stage. When a few years later he died, English tragedy had been created anew largely through his achievement.
His independence and initiative are shown in his choice of subjects. Although in "Dido" he took a standard theme of humanistic tragedy, and in the Henry VI plays and "Edward II" followed the prevailing taste for English history, and in "The Massacre of Paris" another fashion for the dramatization of current atrocities; yet in "Tamburlaine" he chose the story of a world conqueror, in "Faustus" a legend that had just entered print in the German "Volksbuch" of 1587, and in "The Jew of Malta" he worked over unknown sources into a tragedy of revenge with evident freedom of invention. All three stories present notable contributions to tragic themes, and the last two disregard both the fashion for historical subjects and the requirement that tragedy deal only with princes. These new and varied themes gave a chance for a considerable revolution in the content of tragedy. Revenge, murders, battles, intrigue, physical horrors are still prominent; but the Senecan round of incest and adultery disappears, and the "Mirror for Magistrates" no longer represents the epitome of tragic action. Marlowe's choice and treatment of plots seem, indeed, dictated by a new conception of tragedy, as dealing not merely with a life and death, or a bloody crime, or a reversal of fortune, but with the heroic struggle of a great personality, doomed to inevitable defeat. "Tamburlaine" is scarcely a tragedy at all, but rather a chronicle of the hero's greatness; but in "Faustus" and "The Jew" heroes with ambitions boundless and passionate like Tamburlaine's are overwhelmed in the end by the inexorable destiny of human weakness. In "Edward II," where the hero is less dominant over the action, the study of historical facts results in a more restrained, more human presentation of the same theme, a ruling passion drawing the protagonist to pitiful defeat.
In the structure of his plots Marlowe forsook the Senecan models and began with the methods of the chronicle play. "Tamburlaine" is a chronicle history, presenting the story of the events of a life and ending with death. Originally the play contained comic scenes, omitted in the published form and evidently of no value in structure or conception. Without these there is enough of a medley, though the amazing succession of conquests, defiances, murders, harangues, battles, funerals, wooings, and horrors is arranged with considerable skill. There is manifest regard for contrast in the alternating exhibitions of Tamburlaine's power and his enemies' weakness; his love for Zenocrate, an addition to the source, is integrated with the main story of conquest; and in Part I the climactical arrangement is emphasized by the division into acts. Each act comprises an important stage in Tamburlaine's career, act v presenting the culmination in the suicide of the Turkish emperor and empress, the conquest of Arabia, Zenocrate's former betrothed, and the submission of her conquered father to her marriage with Tamburlaine. Part II, the prologue implies, was an afterthought due to the popularity of Part I. The climax is carried on somewhat loosely up to the harnessing of the jades of Asia; but the reversal of fortune, though developed in the death of Zenocrate, the unworthiness of the eldest son, and the approach of death to Tamburlaine, is not given effective emphasis. Tamburlaine's death is merely the end of the play, not a tragic catastrophe. Epical and crude though their structure is, the two plays possess a firmer organization and a greater unity than any preceding popular tragedy. Everything centres in the protagonist; he keeps the middle of the stage; his towering passion and incessant declamation fix one's attention; episodes like the deaths of the Turks or of Olympia hardly divert the mind from his titanic personality.
A similar unity governs the structure of "Faustus" and "The Jew." In each there are many actions, some comic, instead of one serious action, and the history of a lifetime instead of a great emotional crisis; but in each the dominant figure and the course of his controlling passion impose a certain unity of structure. Both begin with soliloquies, revealing the protagonists at the height of fortune and about to face crises in their careers; and it is significant of the increased importance given to inner conflict that reflective soliloquies, neglected in "Tamburlaine," play a considerable part, especially in "Faustus." In both plays there is also advance in the clear conception of catastrophe, which now controls the structure. In "The Jew" his thwarted lust for gold drives him through a series of villanous triumphs over difficulties until he is melodramatically hoist with his own petard. In "Faustus" the choice of the devilish magic leads through apparent success, past opportunities for repentance, to final remorse and damnation. In both plays, the domination of the protagonist by a passion, its conflicting joys and sorrows, and its final failure become points for emphasis. The history of a life thus becomes organized into a tragedy.
In "Edward II," Marlowe's masterpiece in structure as in other respects, there is an absence of comedy, for which he seems to have had no aptitude, and adherence to the chronicles is governed by his maturing sense of the structural principles which should proportion the tragic story. Twenty years of confusion are condensed into five acts which attain dramatic organization not only under the direction of the central personality and the inevitable catastrophe, but also from the skillful handling of the counter-force. The play begins with a salient manifestation in the recall of Gaveston of the passion which is to be the king's downfall. The hazardous combination of the two similar careers of Gaveston and Spenser is adroitly managed; it develops the central theme of Edward's weakness and brings into active conflict the counter-force of the barons under the leadership of Mortimer. The alternating triumph and discomfiture of the king in his struggle with the barons leads to the climax of their humiliation at the end of act iii; and thus the turning-point of the action is given an emphasis not found in earlier plays. Henceforth the counter-force is in the ascendant, and the catastrophe is realized with a tremendous power that justifies Lamb's extravagance: "the death scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted." The play, to be sure, has many faults of structure. It is the product of an immature period of the drama and of crude theatrical conditions; but it indicates clearly how Marlowe was developing tragic movement out of the confused narratives of the chronicles, and was giving to a presentation of diverse and crowded actions principles not altogether unlike those that Aristotle had found in the Attic drama.
It should be added that the manifest excellences of the dramatic treatment lie less in the structure of any one play as a whole than in the handling of the separate scenes. These have, of course, the peculiarities of the popular stage and the chronicle plays. Events are sometimes reported by an intercalary narrative like scene ii, act i, of "Edward II," which consists of four lines by Gaveston, announcing that the nobles have gone to Lambeth, and four words of reply by Kent. Soliloquies are often used to explain action or character. In the task of translating incident into dramatic situation, however, Marlowe had the advantages of centuries of dramatic practice and the traditions of tragic acting, and his genius often worked with facility and power. These qualities are most manifest in the death scenes. Olympia, Bajazeth, Zabina, Zenocrate, all die with at least stage effectiveness; and in the deaths of Faustus and Edward, Marlowe's dramatic power reached its highest mark. Death, synonymous with tragic catastrophe, was revealed to future dramatists as something more than physical horror or the end of existence. Death became the loss of active and glorious living, the negation of individual power, the expiring struggle of the drama of life, its last defiance and its most irresistible appeal to pity and terror.
Characterization, like conception and structure, in Marlowe's tragedy is largely an affair of the protagonist. Minor figures are for the most part mere sketches without any sustained and consistent delineation. Only in "Edward II" does the antagonist receive much attention, and only in that play is the character of the tragic hero free from lapses into caricature and absurdity. The protagonists, as in many tragedies before and since, are evil men intent on evil deeds. They appeal to our sympathy only in misfortune and disaster; in more fortunate circumstances they run counter to moral laws and excite a mixture of admiration, horror, and even contempt. Tamburlaine the atheist and Faust the dealer in magic invited a greater condemnation in every Christian then than now. Barabas is conceived, under the inspiration of Machiavelli and perhaps also of stage practice, as an intriguing villain with all the accompaniments ever since familiar in drama and fiction. He is the source of all evil and utterly without conscience; he avows his villany to the audience and he works by crafty intrigue with the aid of an equally conscienceless accomplice. Edward II, on the other hand, is of the type of tyrants, weak, vacillating, and self-indulgent, and he offers the difficult dramatic problem of a protagonist who is sometimes contemptible and must sometimes be heroic and pitiful. Marlowe's conception of a tragic hero, however, transcended any outlines furnished by his sources or any stage types such as villain and tyrant. He conceived his heroes first of all as men capable of great passions, consumed by their desires, abandoned to the pursuit of their lusts, whether they led to glory, butchery, loss of kingdom, or eternal damnation. This intensity of emotion gives them an elevation and a heroic interest that outlasts contemptibility or pathos. Nor are they without representational value. They linger in the mind as men, absurd, exaggerated, monstrous at times, but appealingly human in moments when their passion rings true, and impressively typical of the eternal struggle of passion and desire against the fixed limits of human attainment. It is in the realization of their emotions that the plays secure their great impressiveness. Tragedy has become not the presentation of history, myth, or events of any sort, but the presentation of the passionate struggle and pitiful defeat of an extraordinary human being.
Genuine human passion and a vital conception of life's tragedy found expression in verse, sometimes inspired, sometimes absurd, but always spontaneous and unfaltering. Blank verse, borrowed from Italy and adopted in English Senecan plays, now became a new instrument, and its preëminent adaptability for tragic poetry henceforth long remained unquestioned. If it has had many greater masters since, it had none comparable before, and, in spite of stiffness, monotony, and great unevenness, it rises now and again to remarkable technical excellence. It is sui generis, without known models, though it gathers to itself many of the prevailing characteristics of Renaissance poetry. It has plenty of Senecan hyperbole, but curiously little of Senecan antithesis or aphorism; it abounds in rant and bombast; it is over-adorned with classical allusion; it delights in ornament and sonority; and in the main it is declamatory and lyrical rather than dramatically suited to character and situation. Again, it is mannered and often monotonous, especially in "Tamburlaine," where the repetition of names and the recurrence of polysyllabic words at the ends of lines give the familiar swing:—
"To ride in triumph through Persepolis"....
"Soft ye, my lords, and sweet Zenocrate"....
"Then shall my native city, Samarcanda."
Yet the lover of romantic poetry will find delight in the very impetuosity of the rant, the thunder of the declamation, the roll of the proper names, the color and pageantry of the descriptions, the occasional loveliness of the luxurious classicism, and yet more in the splendid surges of the verse to reveal the turmoil and anguish of passionate death. From the first moment Marlowe was an undoubted poet; and to his tremendous facility of words and rhythm he was adding, as "Edward II" reveals, a moderation of ornament, an evenness of power, and a dramatic consistency, while still retaining the potentiality of dazzling dramatic flash. He brought not only blank verse but poetry to the English drama, and the greatness of its style dates from his achievement.
We must not, however, in the poet forget the playwright, or lose sight of Marlowe's contributions to the purely theatrical side of the drama. "Tamburlaine" set a standard in stage effects as well as in poetry. Kings and sultans appear in droves, crowns are handed about like toys, treaties are torn, cities stormed, battles fought. Frequently eight or ten chieftains crowd the stage with their trains. The tents of the conqueror are pitched and changed from white to red and then to black as the beleaguered city continues to withstand his power. An emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cages. Tamburlaine drives the bridled monarchs harnessed to his chariot. Two bodies are burnt; there are murders by the dozen; and there is a solemn funeral scene where the hearse advances in the light of a burning town. The popular stage had probably never seen such a spectacle before. In "Faustus" new and even more surprising stage effects are supplied to illustrate the wonders of magic. In "The Jew of Malta" there is a display of plots and atrocities which the plays of the next thirty years strove in vain to surpass. Apart from these spectacular elements, it is obvious that the characterization and declamation, in fact the very structure of the plays, were designed to supply full opportunity for the acting of Edward Alleyn. He was nearly seven feet tall, we are told, the greatest actor of his day, and especially skilled in majestic parts. So to him, perhaps, as well as to Marlowe's conception of tragedy, was due the one-part play, the sonorous lines, and the passionate protagonists.
Such considerations recall the double purpose, hardly separable from the drama and particularly manifest in the Elizabethan dramatists, the two desires, to please their audiences and to create literature. The spectacle, bombast, and horrors, the new and startling stories of Marlowe's plays were certainly intended to win his public, and they probably caused no twinges to his artistic conscience. On the other hand, while hardly an element of the dramas is without the influence of theatrical conditions, and while of deliberate artistic theories there is little evidence, yet the study of character, the underlying conceptions, the maturing power of structure, as well as the beauty and wisdom of separate passages, reveal a mind of intellectual and emotional profundity seeking to give noble expression to the things in life that impressed him most vividly. In the traffic of the stage the young poet found a chance to study men and their motives, to seek "the immortal flowers of poetry," and to utter something of his own experience and view of life. Into the rapid translation of stories for the stage he threw his own conception of the rewards and defeats of an overmastering passion, of the glory of struggle, and the pity and terror of failure. In the further development of the drama, his influence continued not only in his series of tragedies forming a fairly definite type, but also as that of an inspiring personality.
"Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clere;
For that fine madnes still he did retaine,
Which rightly should possess a poet's braine."
Drayton: Epistle to Henry Reynolds.
The influence upon the drama of Marlowe's whilom friend, Thomas Kyd, was not due to his personality, concerning which recently discovered documents create no very favorable impression, or to any remarkable poetic genius, but to a single play and the type of tragedy which it fathered. "The Spanish Tragedy,"[11] entered in the Stationers' Register, 1592, and probably acted at about the same time as "Tamburlaine," and earlier than Marlowe's other plays, was the first representative of this type of revenge tragedies, and it gained an immediate and lasting popularity, though after a time encountering the ridicule of Jonson and later dramatists. The story of revenge had already appeared in "Horestes" and in Latin plays at the universities; and theme, ghost, treatment, and structure were derived from Seneca by Kyd and adapted with great originality to the popular drama. At least, no other dramatist has as good a claim to be considered the creator of a species of tragedy that had a long series of representatives even after its culmination in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
The main theme of the play is revenge of a father for a son, superintended by a ghost; and this theme attaches to itself other motives important both here and in their later developments. The revenge is delayed by hesitation on the part of Hieronimo, who finds his task a difficult one and requires much proof and superabundant deliberation to spur his irresolution into activity. Madness is another accompaniment of the main theme; the second title of the 1602 quarto, "Old Hieronimo mad againe," indicating how important it was in the stage presentation. Hieronimo pretends madness, and his pretended madness often passes into real melancholy and distraction. Isabella, his wife, is driven by insanity to suicide. Intrigue used both against and by the avenger is another important element; the villain is a machinator and Hieronimo finally accomplishes his revenge by means of dissimulation and trickery. According to both Senecan and national precedents, vengeance moves in a pathway of blood; ten of the dramatis personae, innocent and guilty alike, pass to "the loathsome pool of Acheron," and the final slaughter leaves five bodies to be borne from the stage. Intrigue and slaughter characterize most of the tragedies of this period, notably "The Jew of Malta," but the ghost-directed revenge, hesitation, insanity, and the meditative soliloquies distinguished more specifically the Kydian species. In spite of the medley of intrigue and carnage, there is introduced, after Senecan fashion, much philosophizing and introspection. Meditations on fate, revenge, suicide, and similar subjects play a large part in the development of the story and are most frequently given the form of soliloquies. Hieronimo's inner struggle is revealed in lonely communings, now in defense, now in bitter condemnation of his delay.
The structure is an interesting adaptation of Senecan and popular characteristics. The play does not confine itself to the last phase of an action, and it introduces various actions introductory or subsidiary to that of the revenge, and a mixture of comedy. Moreover, everything is represented on the stage with the freedom established in the popular drama. On the other hand, there is much exposition by means of narrative, and Revenge and the ghost of Andrea appear, after Senecan fashion, as a prologue, and after each act as a sort of vestigial chorus. While there is a surplus of violent and external action, the epic, lyric, and reflective scenes picture an inner conflict and supply both aphorisms and a searching psychology. When late in the play Hieronimo's revenge for his son is finally started, it has to contend with both his own hesitation and the intrigues of the villain. Its development, in comparison with "Hamlet," is absurdly faulty because of Kyd's failure to make clear from the start the character of the avenger; but, if it is studied as a first attempt to give structure to a complex theme, the vicissitudes of Hieronimo's irresolution and frenzy will seem carefully designed and strikingly prophetic of the course of Hamlet's struggle.
Kyd's skill in devising stage situations is shown by the dramatic value and lasting effect on the public of the scene in which Hieronimo is called from his naked bed to discover the body of his son hanging in the arbor, or of the scene in which, offering a handkerchief to the weeping Senex, he draws forth the bloody napkin which he has kept as a reminder of his son's death. The play within the play, used here as a means of revenge; the scenes in which Isabella "runs lunatick"; the laments and final exultation of the ghost; the exhibition of the body of Horatio after the mock play, found later imitators and became usual accessories of revenge tragedies. Indeed, minor bits of stage business, as the wearing of black, the swearing by the cross of the sword, the capture of the accomplice by the watch, the reading of a book before a soliloquy, the falling on the ground as an expression of grief, though not the inventions of Kyd, were given their later vogue partly through the popularity of this play.
Some of the types of character represented also appear again and again in later plays. Lorenzo is the villain par excellence; his accomplice is grotesque as well as evil; and Bel Imperia, both prettily sentimental and desperately revengeful, is of a type not uncommon in later tragedy. The character of Hieronimo, rudely as it is drawn, is not without subtlety of conception. This type of tragic hero, very different from Marlowe's, naturally good and noble, meditative by temperament, driven to melancholy and madness by the responsibility forced on him by crime, and at length accomplishing direful revenge through trickery and irony, is manifestly a precursor of Hamlet. Kyd's style justifies Nash's description, "whole handfulls of tragical speeches" and "a blank verse bodged up with ifs and ands." It displays the rhetorician rather than the poet and, like his conception and structure, gives evidence of an ingenious innovator adapting Seneca. It abounds in artificial balance, parallelism, antitheses, word-play, strained figures, and it harrows hell for its tragic vocabulary; but its love scenes have a verbal prettiness and its tirades and soliloquies helped to confer on subsequent tragic style sententiousness and elevation as well as rant. Far inferior to "Tamburlaine" as an artistic achievement, "The Spanish Tragedy" can no more than that play be pushed aside as a mere blood and thunder tirade. Beneath its absurdities there lies the conception of an inner struggle against overwhelming responsibility, and of the conflict of the individual against evil and fate.
From the success of such a play Kyd may very naturally have turned to the similar story of revenge embodied in Belleforest's "Historie of Hamblet." From contemporary references we infer that the old "Hamlet" was a tragedy of blood, written under Senecan influence, and containing a ghost that cried "revenge." If, as seems undoubted, it was used by Shakespeare, traces of it must be found in the German version of Hamlet, in the corrupt first quarto, and even in Shakespeare's final version; but there is as yet no agreement among scholars as to what can be attributed to Shakespeare's borrowing rather than to his invention and transformation. It seems entirely probable, however, that the early play was a companion-piece to "The Spanish Tragedy," containing the motives of revenge, hesitation, insanity, intrigue, and slaughter, with the addition of the murderer's passion for the wife of the murdered. On the now established theory that the play was by Kyd, we may infer a protagonist like Hieronimo, much meditating and soliloquizing, a dramatic structure like that of "The Spanish Tragedy," a play within a play, a mad Ophelia, and an intrigue culminating in slaughter. There are evidences in Marston and later contributors to the revenge type that the original "Hamlet," fully as much as "The Spanish Tragedy," served as their model; while doubtless like "The Spanish Tragedy," Kyd's "Hamlet" must have borne a much closer resemblance than even that play to Shakespeare's masterpiece.
"Soliman and Perseda," if not by Kyd, at least shows many evidences of his influence and is itself an interesting combination of the tragedy of revenge and romantic comedy. Love, Fortune, and Death make up a Kydian chorus and debate for supremacy until the close, when Death, like the Ghost, exults in an enumeration of the dead. The love story furnishes a clearly defined plot. The course of true love, despite the heroine's jealousy, an unintended murder by the hero, his banishment, the sack of Rhodes by the Turks, and the Sultan's passion for the heroine, ascends through the first four acts to the reunion and prospective happiness of the lovers. The fifth act proceeds to their separation and death through the Sultan's wickedness. Some of the incidents are those of romantic comedy, such as the use of the chain as a symbol of loyal love, its loss, the resulting jealousy, and the donning of boy's clothes by the heroine in order to receive death from the sword of the hated suitor. The fun of the piece is furnished by a miles gloriosus, Basilisco, and the extraordinary merit of his characterization furnishes the chief reason for doubting Kyd's authorship. Over lyric love, fortune, and fun, however, Death reigns supreme. This is his favorite tragedy, for eighteen persons are actually killed on the stage, and at the close not one of the dramatis personae is left to bear off the bodies of the slain.
The successes of Marlowe and Kyd gave tragic stories a new popularity with actors and audiences, and the stage was occupied with fiercely declaiming Asiatic conquerors, deep-dyed villains, and shrieking ghosts. Marlowe's themes, characters, and blank verse found many imitators, while Kyd's plays encouraged the presentation of stories of ghosts and revenge similar to those in Seneca and his English imitators. Direct imitations of Seneca in technic and language are also common. The abundance of bloodshed is invariable. A wide range of material was drawn upon, including Asiatic story, Italian novelle, Plutarch, Xenophon, and the Bible, although the English chronicles remained the favorite source, and the majority have at least the semblance of a historical setting. Many have a mixture of comic material, but they show in general a preponderance of tragic events and emotions far greater than in the early popular tragedies. There seems to have been a general effort in conformity with an address to the audience placed in the second act of "The Wars of Cyrus," acted by the Children of the Revels, which announces that they have "exiled from our tragicke stage" "needlesse antickes," and promises "mournfull plaints writ sad, and tragicke tearmes." The gentle reader will not linger long over any of these plays or discover in them signs of nascent genius, but they have a considerable interest in illustrating further the development of chronicle history toward tragedy, the influence of the Senecan tradition, and the dominating power of Marlowe's example. They also inform us of the conditions governing tragedy when Shakespeare began his career. In their many resemblances one to another we have evidence not so much of direct borrowings as of the close relations then existing among the few theatrical playwrights and companies. Any successful innovation was bound to have its immediate imitations, and on the other hand the keen rivalry for success was likely to result in innovation and novelty.
Of these plays perhaps "Locrine"[12] has the most diverse indebtedness. It presents a story of a bloody family feud, but it is also of the chronicle history order, with a mixture of battles, patriotism, and farce. It exhibits borrowings from Spenser, imitations of "Tamburlaine," Ate as a chorus, dumb shows requiring a menagerie, two ghosts, one of whom takes part in the action, and a story of double revenge. The hero is occupied with revenge number one until the fourth act, when his infidelity makes him the object of a return revenge that culminates in his death. Among the plays mainly indebted to Marlowe are: Greene's "Alphonsus of Aragon," a comedy that is almost a travesty on the first part of "Tamburlaine"; "Selimus," ascribed to Greene, which also shows Senecan structure and philosophy; "The Wounds of Civil War, or the Tragedies of Marius and Sylla," the first extant play based on Plutarch; "The Wars of Cyrus," in part romantic comedy; and Peele's "Battle of Alcazar," which has a presenter, dumb shows, three ghosts, and a Moorish villain of the same class as Marlowe's Barabas and Aaron in "Titus Andronicus."
The English chronicle plays also felt Marlowe's influence, most notably in Shakespeare's early historical plays, to be considered in a moment, but also in several plays almost contemporary with "Edward II" and the first versions of "Henry VI." "The True Tragedy of Richard III" (1594), by an unknown author or authors, seems to have preceded Shakespeare's play and to have followed the third part of "Henry VI." It presents a combination of chronicle play with Marlowesque protagonist and a Kydian apparatus of revenge. The ghost of Clarence appears at the beginning crying, "Vindicta," and Truth and Poetry supply the necessary exposition. The revenge element becomes prominent toward the end of the play, when the ghosts of Richard's victims appear to him in a dream, not visible as in Shakespeare, and the remorseful villain declares that not merely his victims but all the forces of nature, sun, moon, and planets, cry revenge:—
"The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge.
The silly lambs sit bleating for revenge."
Richard is a man of powerful will carried away by ambition and evidently modeled on Tamburlaine; but unlike the Scythian and like Faustus, he is conscience-smitten, and his punishment comes in remorse as well as death. This conception, based on the chronicle, is treated with power, but in the main the play is a hodge-podge. More worthy examples of chronicle history are "Edward III," often ascribed to Marlowe and not unworthy of him, and the anonymous "Tragedy of Woodstock."[13] The latter shows frequent resemblances to "Edward II" and apparently preceded Shakespeare's "Richard II," leaving off at the point where that play begins. The events of half a reign are focused about the central personalities of Richard and Woodstock, a weak king beset by flatterers and an honorable and patriotic leader of the nobles. The construction is skillful in its integration of comedy with the main action and its alternation of tragic and comic, action and counsel, force and counter-force; and the characterization is remarkably well individualized. Woodstock, especially, has human appeal and is notable as a tragic hero, or at least the central figure of a history, who meets misfortune and death through no fault of his own but solely through the wickedness of others.
Holinshed's chronicle is also the source of "Arden of Feversham" (1592), sometimes ascribed on very insufficient grounds to Shakespeare, the earliest extant domestic tragedy. The play deals with a notorious murder of some forty years before, and follows the crude dramaturgy of the earliest chronicle plays. The stage presentation of notably brutal murders is common to-day and was to be expected on the Elizabethan stage, but the play seems also to represent reaction from the royalties, marvels, and unrealities of the contemporary tragedy. The epilogue, indeed, offers a defiance of romanticism and the since well-worn creed of the realist.
"Gentlemen, we hope youle pardon this naked tragedy,
Wherein no filed points are foisted in
To make it gratious to the eare or eye;
For simple truth is gratious enough,
And needes no other points of glosing stuffe."
Notwithstanding this protestation, occasional monologues reveal the common stylistic decorations. The play is tediously detailed and artlessly realistic, though it has some vigorous blank verse and several powerful scenes; the most powerful, when Michael in the middle of the night is awaiting the murderers of his master, recalling a well-known passage in "The Spanish Tragedy." But the greatest merit of the play lies in the portrait of Alice Arden, absorbed in a despicable passion, but cunning and unabashed, incomparably the most lifelike evil woman up to this time depicted in the drama.
Peele's "The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, with the Tragedie of Absalon," acted about 1591, has, unlike "Arden," many "filed points to make it gratious to the eare and eye." It gains a unique interest as the only extant tragedy of this period based on the biblical narrative. The bible story is treated just as a historical chronicle would have been; and the play, divided by choruses into three "discourses," offers no advance in conception, structure, or characterization on the average tragedy of the period. Yet it is the masterpiece of one of the most active among Shakespeare's predecessors and illustrates his most distinctive contribution to the drama's development. As the author of "Alcazar," "Edward I," and possibly "Locrine," as well as "David and Bethsabe," Peele's contribution deserves some note. His dramatic career began at Oxford, where he made a version of one of the "Iphigenias" of Euripides, which was acted at Christ Church, and where he also aided in the production of Dr. Gager's Latin plays. In London he became the friend of Nash, Greene, and Marlowe, and the versatile adopter of the latest dramatic modes, whether in comedy, pastoral, history, or tragedy. In his best work, however, and especially in "David and Bethsabe," there are graces of style which justify Nash's eulogy of his friend as "primus verborum artifex." The great innovation of this early drama was, after all, in poetic style; and in furthering this Peele may claim a place only second to Marlowe. If Marlowe gave sweep and grandeur to blank verse, Peele brought a sweetness of cadence and, as Professor Ward observes, "a vivacity of fancy and a variety of imagery." As Marlowe turned everything into sonorous phrase, now bombastic, now superb, so Peele turned every thought to music and fancy, sometimes banal, sometimes lovely. "David and Bethsabe," with its oriental setting, though treated with careless dramatic art, proved an inspiration to the stylist. The excess of verbalism, indeed, gives the play a sugary and monotonous effect, and its poetry loses connection with character or situation. Absalon plays with conceits for twenty-five lines while hanging by his hair, and laments melodiously for fifteen lines more after being stabbed. But there is charm and gracefulness everywhere, in the choruses, in the defense of Hamon, and in the parables, and now and again the very allurement and luxury of words, as in the famous,
"Now comes my lover tripping like the roe
And brings my longings tangled in her hair."
While this operatic verbalism with its faults and merits cannot of course be assigned wholly to Peele, he seems to have been in the drama one of its earliest and most influential purveyors.
The dozen plays just noticed furnish departures from, as well as adaptations of, the Kydian and Marlowean types of tragedy, but they reveal no marked advance in conception or structure. In characterization, however, there is a development in various ways; thus, a hack play like "The True Tragedy" has considerable power in its conception of a conscience-smitten villain, in "Woodstock" there is clear individualization, and in Alice Arden and the Countess of "Edward III" female character becomes lifelike and impressive. Still more salient is the attention paid to style. The Elizabethan theatregoer was used to the spoken and not to the written word, and expected at the theatre to be delighted by verbal display. Dramatic style then had functions which have since been relegated to other arts. It was to be declamative, taking the place of oratory; descriptive, supplying in part the place of scenery; and operatic in its word-play and decorative phrasing, and in its lyric interludes and laments. Moreover, medieval tradition and Senecan models alike enforced the necessity in tragedy of a heightened style; and many dramatists doubtless agreed with Gosson in placing first among dramatic requirements "sweetness of words, fitness of epithets with metaphors, allegories." Still further, along with the excesses resultant from this delight in words, there was manifest a growing mastery of language to represent truthfully situation and character. "Arden" gave crude expression to this reaction toward realism in style; "Woodstock" much more effectively; and colloquial directness was mingled with the artificialities of "The Spanish Tragedy" and the beauties of "Edward II." Henceforth the Elizabethan drama exhibits a conflict between dramatic suitability of language and its declamatory, operatic, or aphoristic decorativeness, promoting on the one hand a realistic presentation of life, and on the other fantastic absurdity and imaginative idealism.
The preceding discussion of Marlowe and his contemporaries must have made it apparent that Shakespeare cannot be treated as outside of the circle, although his plays have for convenience been reserved until now. The young actor and poet learned to meet successfully the demands of the stage through an apprenticeship of hack-work, collaboration, and revision, and progressed in his art by means of adaptation and imitation. He wrote in association and rivalry with his fellow playwrights, responding like them to theatrical fashions, and feeling like them the spur of current artistic impulses. The dramatic activity that we have been discussing bears at every point upon his early work. He shared both the limitations and the incentives, bowed to the commanding influences, and rose to the opportunities for initiative which characterize this period. His dramatic career probably began two or three years later than Marlowe's, and of the plays now to be considered several were probably not written until the years following Marlowe's death. "Titus Andronicus" and the three parts of "Henry VI" belong to the early nineties and should be classed with the tragedies of blood and the chronicle histories of those years. "King John," "Richard III," and "Richard II" came somewhat later and form a part of the more advanced development of chronicle history variously represented by "Edward III," "Woodstock," and Marlowe's "Edward II." "Romeo and Juliet," in its final form perhaps still later, is a great and original masterpiece, but one still very characteristic of the dramatic period of which it is the crown and flower.
How much of "Titus Andronicus" is to be regarded as Shakespeare's remains a debated question, a recent and plausible theory being that it was his revision and combination of two old plays.[14] The play, which was coupled by Jonson with "The Spanish Tragedy" as popular twenty years after its first appearance, is mainly an imitation of Kyd, though the phrasing and rhythm frequently show an advance over that author's work. In situations and various specific passages the imitation is pronounced and the motives of the Kydian type are in the main repeated. The revenge of a father for his son is opposed by villanous intrigue, involves a play within the play, and leads the hero into madness. Kyd's finer conception of a tragic hero hesitating in the face of fearful responsibility is, however, lacking; the combination of the two revenge stories—Tamora for her child murdered by Titus, and Titus in return for the murder of his children—resembles "Locrine"; and the black Aaron is, like the negro-Moor in "Alcazar," one of the many Marlowesque villains. The play surpasses current revenge plays chiefly in its unapproached orgy of mutilation, murder, and horror.
The three parts of "Henry VI"[15] are certainly only in part Shakespeare's and represent the complex form of collaboration not infrequently found in the drama. It is likely that Marlowe and Greene were concerned in the plays, and that Shakespeare's share was mainly in revision. The three plays were at all events very popular and occupy an important place among the early chronicle histories. The contention between the houses of York and Lancaster becomes an epic theme, uniting the three parts, and affords manifold opportunity for battles, defiances, coronations, usurpations, and patriotism. The structure as well as the material is of the chronicle, without any approach to tragic unity or coherence; but the plays do in some ways invade the field of tragedy. Comedy is practically excluded except in the Cade scenes; and the last two parts, as their titles indicate, present a series of "falls of princes"—"the death of the good Duke Humphrey; And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the tragicall end of the proud cardinall of Winchester" and "The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt." With themes of bloodshed and battle, material at least full of tragical possibilities, and under the schooling of Marlowe, Shakespeare served his apprenticeship for historical tragedy.
In "King John" Shakespeare still followed chronicle history methods without any clear advance toward tragedy. He was engaged in rewriting the old "Troublesome Reign," and he followed its plot with great closeness, scene after scene with entrances and exits being the same in both plays. But here his indebtedness practically stops. He seems to have made out a careful scenario, following the old play with only such alterations and omissions as were necessary for the condensation of its two parts into a single play, and then to have thrown aside the old text and almost forgotten it. His improvements consequently coincide with the developments which we have found common in the tragedies of the period in that they concern characterization and style. Faulconbridge and Constance become incomparably more vital and impressive than in the old play and win our interest away from the battles and arguments of the rapid scenes. The style, almost never reminiscent of the early play, is mainly rhetorical, though always vigorous and usually surpassing the models which it frequently recalls. It often displays the conflict between the ornamental and naturalistic tendencies; as, for example, when Arthur, facing the murderer, quibbles for ten lines over the red-hot iron which is to put out his eyes, and then, as the attendants enter, forgets his rhetoric in words whose sincerity and simplicity have touched every reader.
"Richard III" and "Richard II," though possibly earlier than "King John," show the imitator and adapter rather than the reviser, and represent independent efforts to give tragic unity to the material of the English chronicles. While all the tragedies and histories so far considered have long since proved unfitted for the stage, "Richard III" has maintained its first popularity and continued to attract the greatest actors and to win the liking of the patrons of the theatre of each generation. Yet, though it has for three centuries exercised a profound impression on the popular imagination, it shows in the opinion of all critics a great indebtedness to Marlowe, and is so evidently imitative of current models that critics writing from such different points of view as Mr. Fleay and James Russell Lowell have been led to doubt Shakespeare's authorship. External and internal evidence both contradict such doubts emphatically, but the close relationship of the play to "Henry VI" makes it improbable that Shakespeare turned to the theme solely of his own initiative. "Richard III" is the fourth play of a tetralogy manifestly planned before the earlier members were completed. Margaret appears in all four plays; the character of Shakespeare's Richard is distinctly outlined in Part III; and it was evidently meant to end the contention of York and Lancaster with the triumph of the Tudor dynasty, and the long series of falls of princes with the tragedy of the villanous Gloster. The chronicle of Richard's reign had indeed been given a tragic unity in the history by Sir Thomas More and in a long saga of chronicle and literature which had developed still further the conception of this masterful and dreadful villain. The suitability of this material to current forms of tragedy was obvious. Dr. Legge had found in this saga the material for a Senecan play; the unknown author of "The True Tragedy" had discovered there a ready-made tragedy of blood and revenge; and there are indications of non-extant plays on the same theme. For either Marlowe or for Shakespeare working with him on the history of the struggle between York and Lancaster, the opportunity for a tragedy with a central hero of the type of Tamburlaine, Faustus, or Barabas must have been apparent.
Shakespeare found in the chronicles a full-length portrait of Richard and a detailed outline of the events of his career, while "The True Tragedy" supplied a few hints. His most notable omission of matter in the chronicle is his neglect of the pangs of conscience, dwelt on in More's history and made salient in "The True Tragedy," and suggesting such a dramatic presentation of remorse as he later created in "Macbeth." His most notable addition is the wooing of Anne, the betrothed but not the wife of Prince Edward, which has no historical foundation and is somewhat extraneous to the main action, though dramatically one of the most effective scenes in the play.[16] In dramatizing the chronicle he manifestly followed Marlowe, making the protagonist the dominating force everywhere in the action, and the other persons foils to set off the hero's villany. But he adopted only with skillful and essential modifications the prevailing methods of the tragedies of blood and revenge. The idea of Nemesis, made clear in Polydore Virgil's account of Richard, must have suggested a Senecan tragedy, or at least a ghost overseeing the course of the villain and finally triumphing in his defeat. Shakespeare, however, personified Nemesis in Margaret, and gave her the various functions of a supervising ghost and of a chorus,—curses, laments, and exultations. Moreover, with a tact unique at that time and not displayed by him in "Titus Andronicus," he perceived that the presentation of many murders on the stage would detract from rather than add to the terror and horror centred in Richard, and so removed all the murders from view excepting that of Clarence. To compensate in a way for this lack of stage sensation, he developed Richard's dream of ghosts into the highly spectacular presentation of the spirits of the eleven victims in their nocturnal appearance between the two opposing camps.
An abundance of theatrical effects, already familiar on the stage, is indeed supplied. The murder of Clarence, with its prolonged dialogue between the murderers, the victims led away to execution, the orations before the battle, the funeral cortège, the battle scenes, the laments and curses, now multiplied and expanded beyond the verge of absurdity, all reflect current stage practices. The structure, still over-dependent on the chronicle sources, indulges after the current fashion in the retention and prolongation of undramatic material: such as the feeble forebodings of the citizens (ii, 3), the prolongation of Hastings's warning of death (iii, 2), and the useless soliloquy of the scrivener (iii, 6). Yet, in comparison with contemporary plays, there is great superiority both in dramatic construction and theatrical effectiveness. The main action progresses with rapidity and coherence to the moment of Richard's reversal of fortune (iv, 4), thirteen years being condensed into a few days; and the interest from this climax to the catastrophe is maintained by startling melodramatic effects. But the great dramatic merit of the play lies in the use of contrast, surprise, and particularly of dramatic irony in the separate scenes and in their masterly integration to display the character of Richard himself.
Following closely the character outlined in the chronicle, borrowing conception and treatment from Marlowe's protagonists, and mindful of the host of stage villains that had proved so popular in tragedy, Shakespeare constructed a cacodemon who remains not only a great stage figure but also alive and human in our imaginations. That he is the source of all evil in the play; that he is absurdly and impossibly diabolic; that he informs the audience of all his nefarious schemes; that he has a Machiavellian skill in intrigue; that he is in intellect and will easily the superior of all whom he encounters; that he is possessed by an egoism superhuman in its audacity; that he is an accomplished and ironical hypocrite; that he is conscienceless except when half asleep and dreaming; that from the beginning to the end he is a masterful and relentless pursuer of his ambition, uninfluenced by persons or events, alike subjects of his contempt,—all this indicates a skillful adaptation and continuation of sources and models. But Richard is more. He is dramatically immensely effective; he is always at hand at the right moment; he is never nonplussed; a murder is hardly over when he appears smiling and ironically repentant; he can ask for strawberries with murder in his heart, or play with the children or woo the woman whom he has already marked for doom. That these theatrical fascinations were the results of a consistent conception based on a profound ethical and psychological study can hardly be maintained. It may indeed be doubted whether in this respect there is much advance over Marlowe's villains, or even those of his contemporaries, to say nothing of an approach to Macbeth and Iago. Richard is sometimes a human being, sometimes a monster, and always a stage villain. But the very fact that critics have delighted to analyze and moralize over his traits is proof that Shakespeare, in spite of the monstrosities of his conception, gave to its dramatic presentation not only a stage effectiveness but also plausibility.
This plausibility must be accredited largely to the vigorous colloquialism of his speeches. The play manifests the usual conflict of artificial and natural styles; the elaborate stichomythia and the wailing and cursing queens furnish examples of the common affectations of tragic style; and the rhetorical display appears not infrequently in Richard's speeches. But in the main he speaks with a naturalness and directness far greater than was usual in tragic heroes, and the natural-speaking Richard often makes plausible and convincing the theatrical and rhetorical villain. Thus, after the opening soliloquy he drops his rhetoric for the conversational tone of his conference with Clarence; and thus, the procession of ghosts remains still impressive on our stage because it is followed by a soliloquy that surpasses all except a few of Marlowe's in power and naturalness. Throughout the play, while others declaim, wail, and curse, the most impossible figure of them all becomes the only convincing human being, very largely because of the realism of his speech.
In "Richard II," written at about the time of "Richard III," Shakespeare was also writing under the influence of Marlowe, but now in direct imitation and rivalry of "Edward II." The first part of the reign of Richard II had already received treatment in "Jack Straw" and "Woodstock," and the theme of a weak king forced to abdicate had been presented in "Henry VI" as well as "Edward II." Shakespeare followed, as always hitherto, his source, Holinshed, very closely, and the historical material determined the plot and characterization, but Marlowe's example led him to an interpretation of the fifteen years' history as the tragedy of the reversal of fortune of a king whose temperament made him contemptible in prosperity but pitiable in adversity. Along with the story of the rise and progress of the conflict between Richard and the barons under Bolingbroke, there runs the story of "the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty," which give a new pathos to that favorite theme of medieval tragedy and Elizabethan history, the vanquishment of a prince by scornful Fortune. The struggle within Richard's own heart, even more than in the case of Edward II, absorbs the interest and points the moral, the hollowness and uncertainty of earthly grandeur.
Structurally there is no advance on "Edward II" in exposition, integration of action, or catastrophe. Adherence to the chronicle results in a long drawn out and iterative first act, a virtual repetition of Richard's struggle over the relinquishment of the crown in iii, 3, and iv, 1, and a slight and melodramatic treatment of the catastrophe. On the other hand, there are some changes from Marlowe's method of interest in connection with later tragedy. Elegiac scenes with their lamenting women, also conspicuous in "Richard III," are an addition to the historical source and an important factor in the structure; their distribution through the play indicating that they were employed to supply a relief from the scenes of much action and high tension, more suitable to tragedy than the relief of comic scenes, and also to take, as in "Richard III," the place of a chorus through their lyrical reinforcement of the tragic emotions excited by the action. Again, as the theme is Richard's reversal of fortune rather than his death, so the emotional crisis receives a structural prominence not unlike that given to Hamlet's, and the catastrophe of death is relegated to a postscript. The passage from crisis to catastrophe is managed, as in "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Macbeth," by the introduction of incidents extraneous to the main action, here the episode of Aumerle's conspiracy.
The main departures from Marlowe, however, are to be found in those elements of dramatic composition to which in this period the genius of Shakespeare as well as the talent of his contemporaries most readily responded, the characterization and the style. Not only the king himself but many other persons in the play, and notably Bolingbroke, are presented with consistency and subtlety. The historical narrative is transformed into a gallery of full-length historical portraits that lead us to forget history and drama in our study of their personalities. The euphuistic and sentimental Richard gives a fair field for the stylist, but his example is infectious, and the Queen, Gaunt, York, Bolingbroke, the gardener, and in fact all the persons of the drama, employ word-play, periphrasis, and the various flourishes of Elizabethan rhetorical style. If one accepts the theory that tragedy is a game for rhetorical display, and further accepts the conventionalities of Elizabethan style, there must be unmeasured admiration for the extraordinary verbal skill displayed. Shakespeare employs the current artificialities of diction with abounding facility and zest, and often suits them skillfully to the delineation of character; while his constant attention to expression results in a sustained eloquence, which, if it blurs the outlines of reality, substitutes a haze of fancy, and sometimes the glory of magnificent beauty. The miserable years of Richard's downfall are forever associated in our minds with the picturesqueness of the two entries into London and with the splendor of the apostrophe to England and the recital of Norfolk's death.
In the three chronicle histories just considered, although the historical material largely determines structure, tragic conception, and characterization, and although all these are obviously under Marlowe's influence, yet Shakespeare had reached a stage far more advanced than that of mere imitator or adapter. In "Richard III" he had added his own impress to the Marlowean type of tragedy, and in "Richard II" he had introduced innovations foreshadowing his later conceptions. As a playwright he had equaled any of his contemporaries in immediate popularity and outdone them in permanent theatrical effectiveness. He had acquired a complete mastery over the conditions and conventions of the stage, and had frequently, if not always, outdone the best of his rivals in dramatic ingenuity and power. Like his contemporaries, however, he was hampered by theatrical conditions and intractable historical material; and his chief interest was in the opportunities furnished by the chronicles for the delineation of character and the exercise of his gift of tongues. In range and verisimilitude his characters already far surpassed Marlowe's; and as a poet, whether in lyric, descriptive, or purely dramatic passages, whether in sustained treatment of situation or in splendid purple patches, he had shown himself the peer of his master.
In "Romeo and Juliet" the same dramatic and poetic qualities are exhibited as in the historical plays, but the happy choice of the already well-known love story led Shakespeare outside of the direct range of Marlowe's example, freed him from the limits of the historical material, and gave his genius full scope. The importance of love as a motive in the Italian drama of the Renaissance is one of the traits that distinguish it from its classical models, and the influence of Italian drama and fiction was important in turning Elizabethan dramatists to stories of romantic passion. These had already been widely adopted in comedy and had formed the principle plots of "Tancred and Gismunda" and "Soliman and Perseda," as well as minor parts in other tragedies of the period. The story of Romeo and Juliet, which Brooke speaks of having seen "lately (1562) set forth on the stage with more commendation than I can look for," may have been made into an English play before Shakespeare was born.[17] It had at least been dramatized in France and Italy, where Luigi Groto's "Adriana" (1578) surpassed all contemporary plays in the number of its editions.
Brooke's poem, "Romeus and Juliet" (1562), was the main source of the play and provided a story eminently adapted to dramatic representation. The plot, with its conflict between love and hate, the brief triumph of love, the interference of feud and family authority, the separation and death of the lovers, has been repeated in its essentials in thousands of stories, and has played an enormous part in the imaginations of four centuries; but it has hardly found a more effective scenario than that which lay imbedded in Brooke's long-spun narrative. A lesser genius than Shakespeare might have discovered it, but his powers of invention and construction are amply apparent, especially up to the turning-point of the play. The brawl and the love-sick Romeo of the first scene, dramatically expository and symbolic of the whole action, the meeting of the lovers at the dance, the balcony scene, the embassy and return of the nurse, the fatal fight with Tybalt, are all executed with a wealth of incidental invention, a sureness of technic, and a rapidity and directness of dramatic movement that relied but little on Brooke's narrative or contemporary example. The second half of the play, though skillfully condensed, follows the source more closely and, perhaps for this reason, impresses the modern reader less vividly. Shakespeare's dramatic skill is manifest in his departure from the current methods of the tragedy of blood as well as in his treatment of the narrative. What imitators of Seneca and of Kyd did with similar love stories we have seen in "Tancred and Gismunda" and "Soliman and Perseda"; and "Romeo and Juliet" had an equal chance for ghosts, villany, and physical horrors. Some traces of the prevailing fashion do survive, as in the addition to Brooke of the murder of Paris and in the attention paid to the horrors of the tomb. But many of the best scenes are of the sort that occur in romantic comedy,—the repartee of gallants, the preparations for a feast, the dance, the street affray, the meetings and partings of the lovers,—and there is no villain, no figure of Nemesis, no ghost, no warring armies, and no pomp of courts. No tragedy had yet appeared with less theatrical sensationalism, and none which maintained the interest of the spectators upon the story with comparable dramatic intensity.
The extraordinary advance over the historical plays in dramatic technic is, however, overshadowed in our appreciation of the play by the irresistible appeal made by the persons of the story. They are more closely realized for us than the friends and foes of our daily life, yet they dwell forever in the enchantment of idealized romance. To analyze Shakespeare's power to portray and at the same time to exalt human nature would be to unlock the very key to Shakespeare's heart; we may well be content to wonder and exclaim. Yet, we may note that, while characterization, which had been increasing in range and individualization in the historical plays, is here triumphant, the means and methods are not unlike those already noticed. The brilliant translation of prose narrative into monologue and dialogue gives us the nurse; the vivacious amplification of a type familiar in comedy—the garrulous old man—results in Capulet; and even the greatest creations naturally retain traces of contemporary influences. Mercutio is the prince of a throng of quick-witted quibblers, and Juliet is sometimes declamatory, sometimes fantastic, like Brooke's heroine. But they are Shakespeare's own, and the first representatives of two ways in which his imagination characteristically and supremely manifested itself in later plays. Mercutio is the first of those imaginative achievements that concentrate into a few lines of blank verse the complete individualization of a human being; Juliet is perhaps the first of the amazing series of idealized women. If one considers how often the young girl in love has been the theme of genius, and recalls Fielding, Scott, Browning, and Meredith, one may secure some measure of Shakespeare's achievement. When one seeks comparison with the naïve and likable young animal of Brooke's doggerel, or the women of preceding drama, even the charming heroines of Greene's comedies, the art that produced Juliet must seem miraculous. The idealization of woman was, to be sure, common in Renaissance art; and the union in her of wit and beauty, power and charm, passion and purity, innocence and wisdom, was not solely Shakespeare's conception; but the power to conceive such a being with truth and to realize her dramatically, alive, human, and consistent, was his alone.
The conception and expression of character cannot be separated; there lies in the qualities of the poetic style some explanation of the impression we receive of idealized humanity. While colloquial directness is not wanting in the play, the prevailing style has the artificialities, the lyricism, and the exuberance we have found prevailing elsewhere. It exhibits about all the faults and affectations of the dramatic poetry of the time, but these are the defects of an art that finds poetry in everything and ever lingers to enjoy the beauty of words, whether over Queen Mab, or the apothecary's shop, or Friar Laurence's herbs. It stops to display its verbal ingenuity in a pun; it delights in lyric outbursts, sestette or sonnet, morning-song or epithalamium; it riots in the refrains on "banished," becomes grotesque in the wailing quartette, and finds its supreme opportunity in the fancy and music and passion of the lovers underneath the summer moon. It is this exuberance, this spontaneity, this carelessness of incongruity, this delight in ornamentation, this abandon to music and fancy that transfigures the Verona of brawls, dinners, nurses, and deaths, and, forever ascendant over our fancies, like Romeo's blessed moon, "tips everything with silver."
It is in part this poetic style which distinguishes the play from the later tragedies, but the difference is everywhere manifest to our impressions. The evil and gloom and pessimism that help to make up the tragic fact in "Lear" and "Macbeth" are here scarcely felt. To joy comes sorrow, because of evil and through accident,—this is the tragic theme. In the course of its presentation one may find it suggestive of the passing of youth to age or of passionate love to oblivion, but surely no one comes from the poem with a dominant impression of the wickedness of family feuds, or of the inevitable brevity of romantic passion, or of the dangers of youthful precipitousness,—rather the mind glows with the beauty and joy revealed in life.
In this impression the play has a kinship with the tragedies, even the poor and the maimed, that had preceded it. Tragedies so far have been strangely free from Christian teaching or sentiment. Compared with the medieval drama, early Elizabethan tragedy seems not only secular but pagan. This is partly because it followed its sources and treated of Romans, Moors, Scythians, and heroes of myths and legends; partly because it derived stoic and fatalistic sentiments from Seneca and other classical writers; but it also represents an entire departure from the medieval point of view, a departure necessarily emphasized in tragedy. In the medieval drama, death had been a translation to final reward or punishment,—the portals of heaven and hell were open on the stage. In the Renaissance conception of tragedy death was the point and pith of tragic fact. Faith, forgiveness, reliance on Providence, assurance of immortality are rarely alluded to. Chance, mysterious fate, the emissaries of the devil, the powers of evil in the mind of man are the forces to which tragedy must attend; and they lead to a death terrible and pitiful, to be met bravely and defiantly, it may be, but not peacefully and hopefully. And this emphasis of the gloom of death required an equal emphasis on the glory and beauty of life. Tragedy was the passing into darkness from under this majestic roof fretted with golden fire, the loss of noble reason and infinite faculty; and it must needs proclaim the beauty of the world as well as the quintessence of dust.
And so, although writers of tragedy dwelt on the horrors of death and its accompaniments of blood and atrocity, and though they symbolized in their villains their sense of the reign of evil, yet, in Marlowe's treatment of an Asiatic conqueror or the ignoble fascination of Edward II, or in Peele's fancy that made musical the amours of David; everywhere indeed, in the Pantheas and Persedas, the Marii and Selimi, they were presenting human life as removed from the commonplace, the sordid, the usual, and as the abode of heroisms, splendors, and aspirations. Even evil deeds and villains, even death itself sometimes partook of this glorification; and tragic theory, moral purpose, and theological dogma were alike forgotten in the fascination of human character, passion, and achievement. This idealization of life was, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, characteristic of the national temper and of the artistic impulses in every field of literature during its brief breathing spell between the Protestant and Puritan revolutions. Its power is curiously illustrated in the effect of the story of Romeo and Juliet upon Brooke in the course of his by no means despicable attempt to turn it into a tragic poem. In his Address to the Reader, he dilates with medieval propriety on the moral of the poem "to raise in the reader an hatefull lothyng of so filthy beastlynes." "And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authorite and advice of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of unchastitie)"—and so on through all their evil doings until "finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe hastyng to most unhappye death." So wrote the conscious Puritan; but the story charmed the artist. It enticed his meagre art to a share in the joys of the lovers, it led him to a delight in unhonest life, it dissolved his sermon into romance and poetry, and left him enamored even of his "superstitious frier."
And so the tragedy of the lovers became for Shakespeare as for Brooke and as other stories had become for Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, the spur and the means to an idealization of life. It is not in the reconciliation of the families, still less in the sense of a deserved punishment, that we find an antidote for death and evil; but in the assurance that human passion may be so lovely, human nature so full of strength and beauty. "The sun for sorrow will not show his head," says Prince Escalus at the end, but we believe with Romeo that
"Jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops."
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward, Fleay, and Schelling are the best general guides for this period. The books already mentioned by Collier, Symonds, Jusserand, Cunliffe, Fischer, and Churchill bear directly on the matter of this chapter. The sources for documents and records are the same as for chapter iii, with the important addition of Henslowe's Diary, vol. i, 1904, ed. by W. W. Greg. The sources for lists of plays and bibliography are the same as in chapter ii,—Greg, Fleay, Hazlitt, Schelling, and Bates. There is no satisfactory and comprehensive treatment of Marlowe's work; J. H. Ingram's Christopher Marlowe and his Associates (1904) supplies a full bibliography. Marlowe has been well edited by Dyce and by A. H. Bullen. Dyce's editions of Greene and Peele have long been standard. Bullen has also a good edition of Peele. The recent Clarendon Press editions of Greene, Lyly, Kyd supply careful texts and full introductions. My article, The Relations of "Hamlet" to Contemporary Revenge Plays (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1902), has been drawn upon for the discussion of Kyd; it furnishes references to the various critical discussions of Kyd's work. Texts of the plays by minor writers are to be found in Dodsley; W. C. Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library (6 vols., 1875), containing old plays and other sources for Shakespeare's plays; Delius, Pseudo-Shakspere'sche Dramen (1874); the Tauchnitz edition of Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare; and in the editions of several of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays by K. Warncke and L. Proescholdt, Halle. This last edition of Arden of Feversham contains a valuable introduction. For direction to the bibliography of Shakespeare, see chapter v. On the Henry VI plays, Miss Jane Lee's paper, New Shaks. Soc. Transactions, 1875-76, still offers the most exhaustive treatment of the question of authorship. On Titus Andronicus, Mr. Harold DeW. Fuller's article, Mod. Lang. Publ. (1901), and Mr. J. M. Robertson's Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus? (1905) are among the latest discussions. My review of Mr. Robertson's book, Journal of Eng. and Germ. Philology (1907), treats in detail some of the discussion of this chapter. The latest studies of the Elizabethan theatre are C. Brodmeier's Die Shakespeare-Bühne (Weimar, 1904), which reduces the "alternation" theory to an absurdity, and G. F. Reynold's Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging (Chicago, 1905), which disposes of Brodmeier's theories, but goes a little too far in the other direction. See, also, Baker's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist for a careful and detailed account of the London theatres. Miss V. C. Gildersleeve's Governmental Regulation of the Shakespearean Drama (Columbia Univ. Studies in English, in press) is an exhaustive treatment of its subject and incidentally throws light on theatrical matters. Volume iv of Courthope's History of English Poetry is on the "Development and Decline of the Poetic Drama," from Marlowe to 1642. Schelling's The English Chronicle Play (1902) is the best discussion of this species. W. Bang's series, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas, includes reprints and studies of interest in connection with this and the three following chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] It consists of two parts published 1591, and acted, as the prologue indicates, shortly after Tamburlaine, perhaps in 1588. Its scenes cover about the same ground as Shakespeare's play, with the addition of a ribald account of the sack of a monastery, an explanation of the poisoning of John in his treatment of the clergy, and a scene of some power in which Philip obtains from his mother, Lady Fauconbridge, a confession that his father was Richard.
[10] Tamburlaine in two parts, certainly acted as early as 1588, gained an immediate and long-continued popularity, and was followed by a number of plays, all tragedies or histories. Without reckoning the numerous plays that have been assigned to Marlowe on no sufficient grounds, he collaborated on the Tragedy of Dido (1594), perhaps an early work, and on the three parts of Henry VI; and was the author of The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, printed 1604, acted 1588 (?); The Jew of Malta, acted about 1589, and long the most popular of Henslow's repertoire: The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, printed 1594, acted about 1591; and The Massacre of Paris, of an unknown date of acting.
[11] The only other play certainly by Kyd is a translation of Garnier's Cornelia, 1595, which was doubtless never acted. His authorship of the First Part of Jeronimo, 1605, is denied by recent critics, and at most the text represents a very corrupt abridgment of his work. Soliman and Perseda, S. R. 1592, is attributed to him solely on internal evidence, and may have been by an imitator. The non-extant Hamlet, alluded to by Nash in 1589, and not until twelve years later used by Shakespeare as the basis of his play, is now generally assigned to Kyd.
[12] Printed 1594, "as newly set forth, overseen, and corrected by W. S.," sometimes assigned to Peele, and in an earlier form perhaps acted about 1590.
[13] Preserved in MS. and first printed in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch in 1899.
[14] Harold DeW. Fuller, Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1901.
[15] The collaborators on Part I (1623) are unknown, and Shakespeare's contribution to the present form seems likely to have been written later than the bulk of the play, a not very impressive example of chronicle history. Parts II and III (1623) exist also in the abridged and altered forms of the two quartos of 1594, The First Part of The Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. The problems of the relations of these two quarto plays to the folio texts are among the most puzzling encountered by Shakespearean scholars.
[16] Somewhat similar situations between Lycus and Megæra in Hercules Furens, Locrine and Estrile in Locrine, and Tamburlaine and Zenocrate in Tamburlaine must have been known to Shakespeare.
[17] See H. DeW. Fuller, "Romeo and Julietta," Modern Philology, 1906. It seems clear, however, that Shakespeare drew directly from Brooke.
CHAPTER V
SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
After "Richard II" and "King John," Shakespeare turned aside from tragedy, and within the next half-dozen years produced his masterpieces of romantic comedy and non-tragical history. With the exception of "Titus Andronicus" and "Romeo and Juliet," the first half of his dramatic career was devoted entirely to comedy and history. With "Julius Cæsar," about 1600, began the period of tragedies and bitter comedies, which lasted until about 1608, when he turned again to romantic comedy and tragicomedy. In these main divisions and turning-points of his dramatic activity there is a correspondence with the development of the contemporary drama which we are able to mark with an approach to definiteness. Both romantic comedy and chronicle history had their hey-day during the dozen years that he was devoting to those species. Then at the close of the century various influences produced an abandonment of those forms, a revival of tragedy, and an extensive production of satirical and domestic comedy. About 1608, again, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher led a return to romance. The Shakespearean period of tragedy may thus be separated from the Marlowean by an interval, during which few tragedies of importance appeared; and its beginning was coincident with new and important developments in the drama.
The leading force in initiating these changes was apparently Ben Jonson, whose prologue to "Every Man in His Humour" (acted 1598) avowed the principles which that play exemplified, and proclaimed the establishment of a comedy of humors. This change was heralded as the result of a more critical and conscious art, of a desire to free the drama from the absurdities and lawlessness of the past, and to supply it with literary standards and artistic aims. His practice, which during the next ten years was mostly in accord with his preaching, was followed or paralleled in many respects by most of the other dramatists. At the date of "Every Man in His Humour" Shakespeare was proclaiming in the choruses of "Henry V" his sense of the incongruities of the chronicle history play and bidding farewell to a form of drama that he had made preëminently his own; and Chapman and Middleton were forsaking romantic comedy for realistic comedies of London life. Perhaps a little earlier, the satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston had created considerable stir and doubtless had a share in turning literary endeavor from sentiment to satire. This satire and exposure of the follies and evils of society also received encouragement from the moral and social change that was working in England and especially in London. The healthy and aspiring national life that had found expression in the sound morality and the imaginative idealism of the earlier drama was now giving place to the moral corruption, social laxity, and lack of national pride that render the reign of James I notorious. At all events, whatever the causes, the comedy of the next seven or eight years was prevailingly realistic, domestic, or satirical.
In tragedy the changes were similar, though less distinct. The protest against the lawlessness of the early drama was manifested in the infrequency of chronicle plays and the appearance of tragedies presenting foreign, and especially Roman, history with due regard for both historical truth and tragic structure. Realism appeared just at the beginning of the century in a number of domestic tragedies that violated the established conventions by dealing with actual events, contemporary society, and humble persons. Satire of contemporary manners became frequent in tragedy, and satirical comedies often dealt with tragic events and exercised an influence on pure tragedy similar to that exercised by romantic comedy in the earlier period. Up to this time popular tragedy had hardly received critical consideration even from the dramatists themselves. Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, and others had been mainly concerned in telling stories on the stage without much consciousness of theory or of the types of drama which they were creating. In this period, however, the demarcation between tragedy and comedy and the definition of a conception of tragedy became positive both in occasional critical comment and in the practice of the dramatists. The old types, however, survived. Medleys of various kinds of tragedy and comedy, such as "Old Fortunatus" or "The Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," are not found much after the beginning of the century; but the revenge tragedy received a remarkable development by Marston, Chettle, Tourneur, Chapman, and Jonson, to say nothing of Shakespeare.
Practically synchronous with the period of Shakespeare's great tragedies are these several interesting developments: the domestic tragedies, and especially the allied work of Heywood; the Roman historical tragedies, especially the two by Jonson; the French historical tragedies by Chapman; and the various revenge plays, beginning with Marston's "Antonio and Mellida." These dramatists, however, were mainly occupied with comedy, and no one of them devoted himself as exclusively to tragedy as did Shakespeare. Nor did any of them equal him in immediate popularity. The imitative methods of his artistic apprenticeship had given place to a maturity and independence of art that at once won a supremacy in tragedy even greater than that already attained in comedy. Yet in themes and treatment there is no divorce from the practice of his fellow dramatists. His genius continued responsive to the demands of the stage of the day, and it felt the changes in dramatic conditions, of which we have been noticing some symptoms, and which made the tragedies of others as well as his own more satirical and realistic than those of Marlowe's time, more concerned with the problem of evil, more conscious and critical in their art, and in their style less lyrical and descriptive, more reflective and sententious.
Of the domestic tragedies, very much in fashion from 1597 to 1603, the few survivors show little advance over "Arden of Feversham." These presentations of hideous contemporary crimes maintain the protest initiated by that play against the conventionalities of "the ghost and revenge" drama, and echo its demand for realism. The satirical description of Tragedy in the induction to "A Warning for Fair Women" (1599) is particularly noteworthy as indicating the definiteness which the current conception of tragedy had assumed. The epilogue reiterates the cry of the realist in an era of romanticism:—
"Perhaps it may seem strange unto you all,
That one hath not avenged another's death
After the observation of such course:
The reason is that now of truth I sing."
A second of these plays, "Two Lamentable Tragedies" (1601), is a curious combination of the story of the babes in the wood and that of the recent murder of one Beech. A third, "A Yorkshire Tragedy," acted by Shakespeare's company about 1605, and published with his name (1608), is remarkable for its naked realism and the vividness and rapidity of some of its prose.
With these plays may be grouped Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" (1607, acted 1603), for, although it does not deal with real events, it lacks the usual accompaniments of tragedy, courts, kings, ghosts, and battles, and presents a story of current English life. Its themes are the common ones of adultery and revenge, but it gives them an entirely novel treatment, the husband refusing to take vengeance on his guilty wife, who dies repentant and forgiven. After a fashion soon to become general, there is an underplot which, like the main plot, presents a problem of social ethics, the question of the sacrifice of chastity to save a brother's honor. Similar problems are common in contemporary comedy, and the play might be classed indifferently as a domestic tragedy or a tearful comedy. It is Heywood's masterpiece and exemplifies the qualities that won him the affection of Lamb, "generosity, courtesy, temperance in the depth of passion, sweetness, in a word, and gentleness." The wife falls too easily and repents too sentimentally to be of much interest, but the character of Frankfort is finely conceived and, especially in the great scene of the discovery, executed with a power and truth of feeling rarely combined outside of Shakespeare. In a very similar play, "The English Traveller," written long afterwards, Heywood speaks of two hundred and twenty plays in which he had a main finger. Some of these lost plays must have further exemplified the method of "A Woman Killed with Kindness"; but his success failed to encourage other dramatists to attempt domestic themes and to abandon the tragic conventions. Such realism as his was left to comedy, and tragedy continued to seek its stories in romance or history.
Ben Jonson's two tragedies, "Sejanus" and "Catiline," reveal an effort to treat Roman history with accuracy and dignity, and to enforce on the public stage what he regarded as the essential rules of tragedy. Such representations of Roman history as "The Wounds of Civil War" or the still more incongruous medley of Heywood's "Lucrece" must have excited in him still greater condemnation than did the English chronicle plays. Even Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar" provoked a sneer, though its dramatization of Plutarch's portraits of the great conspirators apparently excited his emulation and suggested much in his treatment of Sejanus and Catiline. Incongruous spectacle and farce disappear from these plays, and the events are treated upon a well thought out theory of historical tragedy. Jonson strove to present the main events and characters with accurate fidelity to authorities, and even minor persons and deeds in constant harmony with the historical narrative. But the scholar overtopped the dramatist. "Sejanus" has a paraphernalia of notes like a doctor's dissertation; and "Catiline" long excerpts from Cicero's orations.
His plays, however, were intended for the public stage, and are by no means to be classed with closet dramas like Daniel's "Philotas," the tragedies of Fulke Greville and Alexander, or the earlier translations of Kyd and the Countess of Pembroke. Jonson started with current popular forms, with "Julius Cæsar" rather than the Senecan models for a basis. His purpose was to rebuild these, not without some recognition of current dramatic method, but with his main reliance upon classical rules. His cardinal error was his acceptance of the current classical theory of tragedy, the belief that the essential difference between epic and dramatic fable lay in the observance of the three unities and similar proprieties. As he was forced to confess, the ambitious careers of Sejanus and Catiline and the style of action demanded by the audiences of the day did not lend themselves easily to such limitations. But he persevered in his doughty fashion. If in "Sejanus" he gave up the unity of time, he maintained the unity of place; if he retained the comic scenes of the courtesan, he avoided any grotesque mixture of the comic and tragic; he omitted battles, jigs, and spectacles, and secured a coherent development of the main action. In "Catiline," which he boldly proclaimed a "dramatic poem," he adopted the Senecan technic of an introductory ghost and a segregated chorus. But though the action be one, perfect and entire, according to Jonson's understanding of those terms, he never learned Shakespeare's art of focusing events about a spiritual conflict.
Yet in characterization Jonson's interest, like that of his contemporaries, largely centres. Catiline, Cicero, Sejanus, and Tiberius are thoughtfully conceived and faithfully represented. The representation, indeed, is that of exposition, each scene illustrating and emphasizing some trait without securing much illusion of life. The style, especially in the long speeches, is too often rhetorical, and rarely displays great beauty or dramatic power. Yet it is masterly in its way, careful and competent to its purposes, and free from obscurity or over-richness. His plays mark another failure to turn popular tragedy back into the classical mould. They contributed, perhaps, to a greater regularity of action on the part of his contemporaries and to a more serious consideration of the functions of drama, but the scholarly student of history failed to make it live, the author of "Bartholomew Fair" did not find his best opportunity in the acceptance of classicist theory.
Chapman's tragedies attempted a field hitherto untried except in Marlowe's "Massacre," that of contemporary French history. While treating historical events with freedom of invention, he dealt with real persons and careers familiar to his audience. In the long-popular tragedy of "The Death of Bussy D'Ambois" (1607, acted 1600-1604) he turned to the court of Henry III and centred a story of treasonable ambition, conspiracy, and adultery about the interesting personality of the insolent and indomitable D'Ambois. After the fashion of Kyd and Marston, he followed "The Death" with a "Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois," which adopted the established technic of the revenge plays, with less alteration than might have been expected after Shakespeare's transformation in "Hamlet." The avenger, Clermont, is a "Senecal man," and his sententious and rhetorical philosophizing was doubtless incited by "Hamlet," though it followed a long-established precedent. The "Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron" (two parts, 1608, acted 1607) dealt with important affairs in the reign of Henry IV that were still fresh in the memory of the audience, Biron having been executed in 1602. In the original form of the play, in fact, Queen Elizabeth was represented, and the French queen boxed the ears of her husband's mistress, but the protest of the French ambassador made a revision necessary.
The new material of these plays did not lead Chapman to attempt any variations in form from the current drama, nor did it result in any advance in method; his fondness for long speeches and narrations resulting rather in a treatment more epical and less dramatic than is found in any of his contemporaries. Nor did his study of contemporary memoirs for his sources and his interest in political philosophy result in any advance in reality or vividness of characterization, though here he is often very felicitous, as in his portrait of Henry IV, and though his arrogant protagonists are interesting and original variations of the Marlowean tragic hero, not without successors in the later drama. But for Chapman, tragedy was in the main, as for the writers whom Gosson derided, an opportunity "to show the majesty of his pen in tragical speeches." The abundance, ingenuity, and beauty of his figurative language are simply amazing. Every person, deed, or sentiment calls for illustration and lets loose a flood of similes. Finished verse, a highly picturesque sense of the value of words, a remarkable union of pregnant sententiousness with vividness of description, have made his plays the delight of many a reader, though perhaps most of his admirers have experienced a fatigue that found satisfaction in Dryden's perverse criticism, "dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles." For, though the thought is by no means dwarfish, the dress is often too big for it. We are wearied by the constant effort to write up to the tragic opportunity for a heightened and sententious eloquence. In this respect, Chapman's style partakes of the faults of his day. It has not the spontaneity and ease of Marlowe, Peele, and "Romeo and Juliet"; it is difficult, involved, pretentious, and self-conscious, yet its splendors remain. Its abundance of resource, its imaginative condensation, its suggestive power again and again compel comparison with Shakespeare himself.
Revenge directed by a ghost found favor with both Jonson and Chapman, but they were preceded in the use of this popular motive by John Marston. In 1598, at the age of twenty-three, he made something of a sensation by his satires and immediately proceeded to carry his censoriousness of human frailties into the drama. His earliest play, "Antonio and Mellida" (two parts, 1602, acted 1599-1600), reveals in Part I the still dominant influence of romantic comedy, despite its tragic trend; but Part II, "Antonio's Revenge," is a tragedy of the Kydian type. The play was followed by a number of comedies, all outspoken in satire of contemporary manners and in the exposure of social immorality. Several dealt with tragic material, and one, "The Malcontent," is a notable combination of a tragedy of blood and a satirical comedy. Its protagonist is of a type represented in the other comedies and not without influence on contemporary dramatists. Marston's malcontents are men of virtue and honor "who hate not man but man's lewd qualities"; in disfavor and out of joint with the world; given to melancholy and a showy pessimism that finds fitting expression only in images of filth and putrefaction. His tragedy "Sophonisba" (1606), which he seems to have deemed the most important of his plays, treats history with great freedom, and unites melodramatic horrors with his usual unflinching fondness for rankness of thought and imagery. The horrible realism of the Erichtho scenes comes in strange contrast with the songs, dances, and musical accompaniment suited to a performance by the child actors for whom all of Marston's plays were written.
"Antonio's Revenge" is the earliest representative in this period of the Kydian type of revenge tragedy. The satirical passages in "A Warning for Fair Women" indicate the popularity of ghosts and revenge, and there are many evidences of the continued vogue of "The Spanish Tragedy" from 1597 to 1602. Marston's play was evidently modeled on "The Spanish Tragedy," and probably still more directly on the Kydian "Hamlet." The story is the revenge of a son for a father murdered by a villanous duke who seeks to wed the hero's mother; the revenge is directed by the ghost of the father; the hero is driven to hesitation, irresolution, and the verge of madness; he pretends to be a fool; intrigue and trickery are indulged in by both hero and villain, and the revenge is accomplished with an abundance of bloodshed. There is a minor story of revenge, enforcing the main situation as does the Laertes story in "Hamlet" and the scene with the Senex in "The Spanish Tragedy"; and, doubtless as in the early "Hamlet," the passion of the murderer for the widow of his victim now becomes an important motive in the action. Moreover, the play abounds in psychological introspection and meditative philosophy set forth for the most part through the soliloquies of the hero.
The indebtedness to the earlier revenge plays extends to details of the stage presentation. Revenge is accomplished much as in "The Spanish Tragedy," though by means of a masque instead of a play, and without the death of the hero. From similar scenes in the old "Hamlet" were probably derived the appearance of the ghost at midnight, the cry "Antonio, revenge!" and the second appearance of the ghost to the hero and his mother. The dumb show exhibiting the wooing of Maria, the use of the churchyard, the banquets, carousals, funerals, exhibition of the dead bodies, and the oaths of the conspirators were perhaps already conventional accompaniments of a revenge play. "Antonio's Revenge," however, is not wanting in inventiveness; its abundant horrors and its melodramatically ingenious stage effects were probably recognized as an advance upon the old favorites, and they excited the emulation of succeeding dramatists.
The hero, too, is of the Kydian type. Like both Hieronimo and Hamlet, he is a scholar, interested in philosophy and also in theatrical performances. Like them he is distinguished by a tendency to reflection, and struggles in solitary meditation at each crisis in his career. Like them he is driven to the verge of madness by the pressure of his heavy responsibility and by his awakened sense of evil in the universe. Though he does not seek further proof, yet, like Hamlet after the revelations of the play, he becomes frantic and irresolute, neglects an opportunity to kill the duke, and wastes his vengeance upon an innocent child. Like Hieronimo and Hamlet, he is tricky, wild, and ranting. With all his overdrawn passion, however, his mental struggle occasionally attains intellectual depth and tragic power. As he tells us, it was "the stings of anguish," "the bruising stroke of chance" which made him run mad "as one confounded in a maze of mischief."
Several years, then, before Shakespeare's "Hamlet," we have a play dealing with the old story of a revenge of a son for a father, following closely the methods introduced by Kyd, appealing to a taste that delighted in extravagant violence and melodramatic sensationalism, but also striving to simulate profundity of thought and a passionate sense of evil. It is difficult to-day to take Marston seriously. His plays have little merit, while his bombastic sententiousness gives an air of insincerity to everything that he wrote; yet a serious purpose and a considerable influence on later drama cannot be denied to his efforts in tragedy. Like so many others, he deserves to be remembered for what he attempted rather than for what he did. Absurd though "Antonio's Revenge" be as an artistic achievement, it is historically of importance as indicating an ambitious attempt to give poetical expression to the spiritual conflict of a mind brought to face dreadful evil. The prologue that he addressed to his London audience testifies sufficiently to his serious and ambitious intentions, and to the clear separation of tragedy from other forms of drama, which he and other poets were trying to force upon the theatre.
"Therefore we proclaim,
If any spirit breathes within this round
Uncapable of weighty passion,
(As from his birth being hugged in the arms
And nuzled 'twixt the breasts of Happiness,)
Who winks and shuts his apprehension up
From common sense of what men were, and are;
Who would not know what men must be: let such
Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows;
We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast,
Nail'd to the earth with grief; if any heart,
Pierced through with anguish, pant within this ring;
If there be any blood, whose heat is choked
And stifled with true sense of misery:
If aught of these strains fill this consort up,
They arrive most welcome."
A number of plays dealing with "revenge for a father" followed. In 1602 "The Revenge of Hamlet" was entered in the Stationers' Register; and the first quarto, a pirated and very corrupt edition, appeared in the following year. This quarto, in the opinion of a majority of critics, represents Shakespeare's partial revision of the old play, which was put on the stage by Burbage's company in 1601-02. In the same years Ben Jonson was receiving pay from Henslowe of the rival company for two sets of additions to "The Spanish Tragedy," and these were published in 1602. In that year Henslowe also paid Chettle for a tragedy, "Hoffman" (1631); and in 1602-03 Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" (1611) was probably acted.[18] By 1603 Shakespeare had given "Hamlet" its final form as represented by the second quarto (1604). The almost simultaneous appearance of these various plays is sufficient testimony to the popularity of the old revenge story with both audiences and authors. Dealing with similar plots, they naturally have many elements in common, but they exhibit few or no signs of servile imitation of one another. They represent independent developments of the type that Kyd had introduced a dozen years before and that Marston had revived, each retaining many of the old conventions, and each adding much that was new.
Jonson's additions to "The Spanish Tragedy" are distinct from the rest of the play and affect the proportion and movement of the action rather for the worse. They deal in the main with Hieronimo; his irony is increased and made more effective; his reflections become more elaborate and pregnant; above all, his madness gains enormously in reality and intensity. His madness, indeed, receives a disproportionate development. Throughout the additions Jonson is picturing a mind diseased by grief, sometimes conscious of life's unrelaxing pain and again lost in frenzied delirium. Thus, the imaginative impulses that responded to the demand for revenge plays here stirred a great poet to a rehabilitation of the crude ravings of the old Hieronimo in a form more intellectual, more vitally human, and of immensely greater imaginative range.
"Hoffman" is a sensational melodrama by a hack writer not unskillful in using prevailing conventions with theatrical effectiveness. The story is again the revenge of a son for a father, but there is no ghost, only the skeleton to excite him to vengeance. He banishes "clouds of melancholy" at the start and shows no hesitation in carrying out the revenge until turned from his purpose by his passion for the mother of his chief victim. Intrigue and slaughter reign supreme; and, as in "Locrine," there are two plots of revenge—Hoffman seeking revenge for his father and every one else seeking revenge on Hoffman. In the pathetic situation of Lucibella, driven insane by grief, Chettle made use of a character and a situation familiar on the stage in much the same fashion as they must have been presented in the old "Hamlet." Lucibella's madness, however, is made the instrument of some telling hits at the villain and the means of discovering his iniquity. While Ophelia's madness has no influence on the main action, that of Lucibella leads directly to the dénouement. Dramatically this is a very important difference and seems due to Chettle's invention. Unlike Marston or Jonson, he made little effort to give the story either imaginative intensity or philosophical significance. He took common theatrical motives and situations, added much and changed much, and constructed a good acting play not without some grace of verse. A play that was popular thirty years after it was written must have successfully met the stage demand.
Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" differs in many respects from all preceding revenge plays. The revenge is for a father murdered by an uncle and directed by a ghost. The revenge, however, is left to Providence; the ghost is Christian; the avenging son not only hesitates, but after a little irresolution overcomes his inclinations to revenge, and, obeying the ghost's behests, resignedly awaits the judgment of heaven. In stage presentation the play also shows a wide departure from Kyd, especially in the indescribable comic underplot. There are, however, three appearances of the ghost,—one to soldiers on watch,—churchyard scenes, banquets, sword fights, suicides, scaffolds, and death's-heads. In the accumulation of horrors, in the development of the villain's character, in the emphasis on new sensational motives at the expense of revenge, and in the more elaborate handling of the intrigue, it may be said to carry the general development of the revenge tragedy a step farther than Marston or Chettle, and a step nearer to Webster. On the other hand, in its definite attempt to present an intellectual conception not lacking in moral grandeur, it sometimes, more closely than any of the other plays considered, approaches "Hamlet." The change in the revenge motive is especially manifest in the soliloquies and reflective passages, which unite in a fairly well connected argument that points the moral of the action, the omnipotence of God's providence.
When, after an interval of some half dozen years, Shakespeare returned to tragedy, evidently both the demands of the theatres and the artistic impulses of the poets were different from those of Marlowe's day. The plays of Marlowe and Kyd were still active forces in the drama, but in 1600-01, when Shakespeare was perhaps writing both "Julius Cæsar" and the first revision of "Hamlet," the man of the hour in tragedy was Marston.
In "Julius Cæsar" Shakespeare availed himself of a theme already a favorite. The story of the overthrow of a tyrant, the progress of a conspiracy, the fall of a prince, and his revenge upon the murderers furnished material well approved for tragedy, while the greatness of the events and the actors both gave assurance of popular interest and incited the poet to his best. Shakespeare was not directed by scrupulous regard for historical accuracy, but his genius was stirred by that of Plutarch to give the events of the Roman civil war the interest and vitality he had given to the reigns of English kings. In dealing with a story that followed so closely the standard lines of tragedy,—the murder and the revenge,—Shakespeare adopted some of the methods current in contemporary plays. There is really no evidence to support Mr. Fleay's ingenious surmise that the play was originally in two parts,—I, The Death, and II, The Revenge of Cæsar,—but the play seems to have separated itself naturally into those two divisions. The rise of the action traces the rise of the conspiracy to Cæsar's death; the return of the action proceeds to the failure and deaths of the conspirators. But from the beginning Shakespeare must have found his interest engaged less by the story of conspiracy or revenge, or even by the presentation of the turmoil of an empire, than by the delineation of the character of Brutus. There, for him, lay the kernel of the tragedy, in the struggle of a highly gifted nature with a task unfit for his accomplishment. The play became not a tragedy of over-reaching ambition, as Marlowe might have made "The Tragedy of Cæsar," nor the tragedy of supernaturally ordained revenge, as Kyd might have made "Cæsar's Revenge," but the tragedy of Brutus,—the fateful struggle of a noble mind against counter actors and against chance, and also against an incurable deficiency in his own temperament.
Similarly, in revising the old "Hamlet," Shakespeare must have been attracted by the possibilities in the character of the hesitating avenger. Here, however, as we have seen, the influence of his contemporaries was considerable and complex. The plot, situations, types of character, and leading motives of the old "Hamlet" were already familiar to the stage in several plays. Revenge, directed by a ghost, hesitation on the part of the hero, insanity real or feigned, intrigue, copious bloodshed, a secondary revenge plot, meditative philosophizing in the form of soliloquies, were all essential elements probably of the Kydian "Hamlet," certainly of several other revenge plays. The refusal of an opportunity to kill the villain, the songs and wild talk of a mad woman, the murder of an innocent intruder, scenes in a churchyard, the appearance of the ghost to soldiers of the watch, the play within the play,—all these as well as many more minor conventionalities, such as the swearing on the sword hilt, or the voice of the ghost in the cellar, had appeared in other plays than the old "Hamlet." And Hamlet himself, wild and ranting at times, crafty and dissimulating at others, cynical and ironical, given to melancholy and meditation, hesitating in bewilderment, harassed by the unavoidable "whips and scorns of time,"—so far as we can analyze the tragic hero, his characteristics had been already used by contemporary dramatists. Dramatic ingenuity was all that was required to make a new play out of this abundance of old material. Chettle succeeded in doing just this. Marston, Jonson, and Tourneur, however, had been trying to give the old story philosophical significance and a highly imaginative phrasing. They had glimpses of the dramatic and poetic possibilities that lay in the situation of the hesitating revenger, and at moments they succeeded in realizing these. Shakespeare set himself to their task, and naturally enough he was in many ways limited and directed by their efforts. It was perfectly possible for him to change the plot completely, or to omit the ghost in the cellar, or to remove the bloodthirsty and intriguing elements from the part of Hamlet, or to give a more Christian interpretation to the revenge; but in these and other matters he followed the practice of the earlier plays. There was no dramatic need of so many long soliloquies; the meditative avenger need not have been ironical; insanity might have received less elaboration; but in these respects Shakespeare was in agreement with his contemporaries. The themes which they took inspired him. He succeeded in doing what they vainly attempted.
He by no means neglected the external story or denied the theatrical demand for sensation. He, perhaps, did not radically change the course of events as depicted in the old play, but he unquestionably improved on any preceding tragedy in the mere effectiveness of the scenic presentation of a sensational story. How great this effectiveness is may be judged by the continued popularity of "Hamlet" as a stage performance even before unlettered auditors. We may surmise that had poetry and philosophy both perished, it would still draw its crowds as it does to-day on the remote borders of civilization. This theatrical triumph is due in part to dramatic excellence of structure and presentation. From the old play probably came a story restricted by semi-Senecan technic to a great emotional crisis; but Shakespeare at least resisted the temptation, to which his contemporaries succumbed, of extending the action over the events leading up to the murder. And assuredly to him rather than to Kyd or another is due the recognition of the dramatic values of the story's beginning, middle, and end. Magnificent as is his development of the ghost scenes at the beginning, still more important structurally is his realization of the value of the middle of the tragedy and treatment of the play within the play and its immediate sequences; and if the end is developed with an Elizabethan looseness of coherence that will not correspond to any logical scheme of structure, yet the pathos of the Ophelia scenes and the wonderful grotesquery of the graveyard excite and renew the spectator's interest to the final catastrophe. The scenic presentation, while telling a sensational story with preëminent effectiveness, becomes as never before in English drama the means for exhibiting the inner struggle of the protagonist. Parallel with the external conflict between murderer and avenger, beginning with the advent of the ghost and ending with a holocaust, there runs the story of a man's moods and thoughts; and this story of doubt and melancholy overpowering resolution imposes its unity of structure and emotional tone upon the external conflict so full of visible action. The throng of dreadful happenings becomes a foil to set off the inner struggle of thought. Their climax is only the brink of resolution from which Hamlet shrinks. Their catastrophe is the end of irresolution in silence.
The reflections and moralizings and broodings over misfortunes inherited from Seneca, and long an essential element in the revenge plays, are also, like the sensational incidents, integrated and humanized by the conception of the hero's character. The soliloquies, though keeping to the themes and methods of contemporary drama, become landmarks in the depiction of the inner struggle and in the general progress of the action. The absurd convention of speaking aloud one's unformed and unbidden thoughts becomes theatrically exciting, dramatically essential, and, through the reach of Shakespeare's imaginative expression, representative of the eternal battle of human frailty against the mysteries of chance and evil.
Analysis might, indeed, continue to discover in the multiform impressiveness of the characterization and the poetry survivals of old conventions and hints of the method of Shakespeare's transformation. Taken apart, various passages seem overburdened with rhetoric, after the style of the day, and others over-sententious. Taken piece by piece, the sarcasm, the irony, the pessimism, the stoic philosophy, even the passionate protest against destiny, have much in common with the ideas then current in other plays. But here again the transformation accomplished through unrivaled powers of expression and knowledge of human nature seems to result from an absorbing interest in the meditating and hesitating temperament of the hero. The union of a drama of blood-vengeance with a drama of thought, a union that had been often attempted by others, is finally achieved, because here for the first time there is full recognition of the tragic interest, movement, and significance of a man's battle with himself. The tragic drama of character has been consummated.
In Shakespeare's conception of the tragic hero we find many characteristics and some incongruities that belong to the old avengers; but there is new penetration into the sources of human motive that results in an essentially new view of the functions and scope of the tragic drama. As in most tragedies since "Tamburlaine," the play is a one-part play, presenting a hero far above the average in mental and moral power, but for the time mainly under the sway of one dominating mood or emotion. Like the other heroes of revenge tragedies, Hamlet is a good man brought suddenly face to face with evil. Again, like the heroes of Seneca and of most tragedies dealing with a reversal of fortune, Hamlet is a strong man brought to face the enmity of chance. He is an individual forced to struggle against a hostile environment. Again, he is a man in a tragic crisis that requires the exercise of all possible powers on his part if he is to avoid disaster, who finds himself afflicted with a temperamental weakness that makes failure possible or indeed inevitable. Critics emphasize now one and now another element of his character as they emphasize one or another of these conflicts as the most important. Shakespeare here, as again in later plays, united in one hero all the varieties of conflict catalogued by the critics. But if we ask which is most peculiarly Shakespearean, it must be said to be the conflict with his own temperamental unfitness, call that irresolution, melancholy, meditativeness, or what you will. Here lies Shakespeare's main differentiation from preceding tragedy, though one distinctly presaged in "Julius Cæsar." At all events, we have a conception of tragedy carried out in his succeeding plays. The hero, noble and righteous, is brought into conflict with the results of evil and circumstance, and he is crippled by his own inability or weakness. Tragedy becomes inherent in character, in the incompleteness that marks the best and mightiest of mankind.
Our consideration of "Hamlet" has been prolonged partly because its relations to contemporary drama can be traced more readily than those of Shakespeare's other tragedies, and partly because it is the first of his plays to afford a full definition of tragedy, a conception of prime importance both in the development of Shakespeare's art and in the future history of the drama. A sensational struggle is presented, and the abounding incidents are wrought into effective if loosely connected stage-scenes, dealing with material similar to that then current in the theatres,—villains, ghosts, murders, insanity, grim farce, meditations, aphorisms. But the scenic presentation and the dramatic structure are to express not only an external conflict between hero and counter-force, but an inner struggle of the hero himself. They are to be the effects and results, nay, the very mirror of the inner thought and feeling. And the disaster that falls upon the hero and those by him beloved comes home to us as due not merely to external forces or circumstances or to evil working within, but also to an inherent unfitness of his own.
This conception of tragedy found further exemplification in "Othello,"[19] freer from Elizabethan methods than any of the other tragedies, and the most masterful of all as a play. The fable was found in an Italian novella that related, like so many of its class, a bald story of love, jealousy, and villany. The very baldness of the narrative in comparison with the fullness of incident and characterization of the chronicles or Plutarch, gave Shakespeare's imagination an untrammeled opportunity. The ingredients of the story, common in romantic comedy and already combined by Shakespeare in "Much Ado about Nothing," were also not unfamiliar in tragedy, but Shakespeare enlarged and interpreted them to fit the conception of his two preceding tragedies, the presentation of a spiritual struggle in which goodness is attacked by evil at its point of greatest vulnerability. The credulity of Othello, however, is assaulted by a more active agent of evil than in "Julius Cæsar" or "Hamlet." Malignant evil is embodied in Iago, and it is against his machinations that the nobly idealized characters of Othello and Desdemona prove incompetent and defenseless. He is the person who dominates the action and gives explanation and plausibility to the circumstances. He not only opposes the hero in the external action, he creates through his insinuations all the evil suspicions that struggle in Othello's mind. He might almost be considered the protagonist of the tragedy.
In structure there is a notable advance over preceding plays, accomplished apparently in part through deliberate intent. The first act with its account of Iago's craft and the marriage is a distinct introduction. The remaining four acts present a practically continuous action, confined to Cyprus and representing about thirty-six hours. Moreover, by a skillful ambiguity, which Christopher North called "the double clock," Shakespeare, while securing this rapid and uninterrupted process of time, has succeeded in conveying an impression of protracted intrigue and slowly-developing motives. Thus, without lessening the variety and importance of the events and emotions, he gains, by a closer observance of unity than in the other tragedies, a greater degree of theatrical illusion and of dramatic intensity. Again, "Othello" technically is noticeable among the tragedies for its relinquishment of many current methods. It is neither a chronicle history nor a Senecan tragedy. There is no presentation of history and little of court ceremonies. There are no battles, no long exposition, no spectacles, no ghosts, no insanity, and almost no comedy. It has few persons and virtually a single action. The underplot is subordinated and closely united to the main action, and there are no delays and new excitements between crisis and catastrophe as in "Hamlet" and "Lear." Nowhere else in Shakespeare is the progress of character, emotion, and deed toward the final event so consecutive and so uninterrupted. This advance in coherence and proportion seems due less to the contributing causes just enumerated than to the explanation of action by character. Accept the unbelievable malignity of Iago—and you do accept it before you have proceeded far—and every step of the appalling chain of intrigue seems a natural outcome of the motives of the persons before us.
In consequence of this integration of character and action, the characters are, more than in the other tragedies, distinct and unmistakable. As if to make stronger the contrast between good and evil, the good man is a Moor, apparently, as in the case of the Moors in "Titus Andronicus" and "Selimus," hardly distinguishable from a negro; and the bad man is deprived of the motive which in the novella rendered his wickedness intelligible. Yet nowhere, even in Shakespeare, are generosity and greatness of soul more admirable than in Othello, nowhere is villany more human than in Iago. The stage villain here receives his apotheosis as the avenging hero did in "Hamlet." The source of all the evil in the play, the Machiavellian machinator, the subtle hypocrite whose every action is a pose to conceal its purpose, the simulator of honesty and bluntness, the shameless egoist who proudly avows his villany and bawls it to the gallery, the intellectual master who plays every one for a dupe, and especially his accomplice—all this had been embodied in the villains of Kyd and Marlowe. Although intelligible to Elizabethan psychology and theology, and credible in the light of Tudor politics and feuds, such a type would seem to lack enduring truth. While preserving all the attributes of the stage type, Shakespeare made it the means for that searching analysis of human depravity to which his contemporaries were less successfully dedicating their efforts. This soliloquizing devil becomes identified with the suggestions and sinuosities of evil that partake of the flux of our consciousness. Hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, the absence of human sympathies, the pride and malignity of intellectual superiority have henceforth their symbol in Iago. Impossible, diabolical, inhuman as Barabas or Richard III, he is never for a moment unplausible, because he ever unearths a corresponding potentiality in us.
The persons of the play, while unusually effective on the stage, and while human and real in their discourse, have a universality of appeal essential in the greatest works of art, desired by Aristotle and dimly foreshadowed in Elizabethan efforts after greatness and typicality. Othello, Desdemona, and Iago create fresh reflection and new impulse in every reader of every generation. And to each they are not only real persons but also symbols and ideals of the generosity, sweetness, and iniquity of the universe. This idealization of character is accomplished with wonderful clarity by means of an expression, splendidly eloquent, untroubled by conceit or obscurity, equally masterful in prose or verse, magnificently adapted to the representation of every mood or temperament. Shakespeare here realized the ideal toward which English tragedy under the leadership of Marlowe had been struggling, the presentation of human greatness in blank verse beautiful and dramatic.
If "Othello" is comparatively free from current conventions, "Lear" is in many respects the most Elizabethan of Shakespeare's tragedies. Story, themes, situations, stage effects constantly recall the plays of his predecessors; and if his creative imagination here attains the most astounding triumph in all literature, it cannot be said to free itself entirely from a confusion of archaisms and absurdities.
Returning to English history, Shakespeare selected a story that had outgrown the chronicles and been narrated by several poets and in one drama. From the early "Leir" he took a few important hints, but he treated the material of the chronicles with a freedom which both its obviously legendary character and its remoulding by other poets permitted. He was only slightly concerned with the presentation of history and hurried over the battles and the shows, the still indispensable accompaniment of historical plays. He was concerned solely with the tragic entanglements of character, with the devastations of evil and folly.
The kernel of the story, Lear's trick and Cordelia's unsatisfactory reply, though possessing a kind of objectivity suitable for the stage, is of itself so absurd and childish as to impede illusion of truth. Its development is full of inconsistency, and the interwoven themes of madness, villany, lust, ambition, family feud, and ideal virtue suggest no break from the Elizabethan canon of tragedy. To the story of Lear and his daughters, Shakespeare added the still more childish parallel story of Gloster and his sons. This common device of a reinforcing sub-plot is here extended to every situation and motive. Even the devoted Kent is balanced by Goneril's faithful creature, Oswald; the inhuman sisters are supported by the machinating Edmund; and, most extraordinary of all, the assumed madness of Edgar becomes an accompaniment for the real madness of Lear. The elaboration of the sub-plot causes an unprecedented complexity of persons and events, and it dislocates the structure. The intense interest which is absorbed in the sufferings of Lear finds itself distracted and dissipated in a medley of incidents so incongruous and so confusing that one wonders how a rational mind could have selected them. The crowded scenes which separate the climax of the third act from the catastrophe assuredly form one of the least happy instances of the Elizabethan habit of introducing a change of interest and a variety of incident in the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the structure of the play, if far from faultless, reveals amazing mastery. The development of the action in the first three acts with the constantly increasing tension of feeling, and the final gathering of all the different actions in the wonderfully condensed catastrophe, are among the greatest achievements of dramatic plotting. Moreover, in spite of his zest for crowded and diversified action, Shakespeare's feeling for unity of emotional effect caused him to omit one motive that modern renovators have never been able to forego. He found a place for battles, villany, childish intrigue, the clown's songs and jests, the plucking out of Gloster's eyes, and the protracted foolery between Edgar and his helpless father, but he refused to admit romantic love into this drama of the madness that separates father and child.
Though Shakespeare chose to involve himself in these manifold difficulties of story and structure, he hardly felt his fetters. No play depends less on mere incident and event. The inconsistencies and confusion of the action are forgotten in the wild turmoil of human passions. Wild, terrible, elementary, brutal, grotesque, or sublime,—everything in the play is touched with the imaginative truth that gives it limitless range of suggestion, applicable to any discord of parents and children or to the most dreadful spiritual torture. Insanity, long a favorite theme of Elizabethan tragedy, and fantastic grotesqueness, often its bane, summon his imagination to its most wonderful creation when the feigning Bedlam counters the mad king mid the jests of the fool and the havoc of the storm. Such a conception could have been attempted only in an age which took its emotions strong and mixed, which found insanity a subject for laughter as well as horror, and which refused to limit the imagination by reason or rule. In that age a lesser than Shakespeare might have formed the bare design of making his audience laugh at the fool and poor Tom, and shudder at the eyeless Gloster and the raving Ancient. Something akin to it may be found in many scenes, in that in which Marlowe's emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cage in a frenzy of humiliation, or that in which Webster's duchess stands undazzled amid the dancing ring of obscene maniacs. The Elizabethan drama had prepared the opportunity for the full and terrible presentation of the discords and agony of a breaking mind. The London audience was ready for the scenes on the heath.
Madness is only one element that contributes to the overwhelming effect of the play. Its so-called pessimism is the only other on which our meagre survey may dwell. English tragedy had from the beginning concerned itself mainly with heinous crime and sin; and during the years immediately preceding and following "Lear" there was a distinct conception of tragedy as the representation not only of the depths of iniquity but of the moral confusion and blackness that beset us all. In "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Measure for Measure" the sense of evil is ever present. In "Lear" it grips the reader like the rack. As in "Othello," evil, here represented by the two fiendish daughters as well as by an intriguing villain, dominates the action, and carries all that is good along with it to destruction. But evil is only one of the forces that cause suffering and ruin. Lear and Cordelia contend against their own imperfections and against chance and circumstance so hostile that they seem directed by gods who sport with men as with flies and loose the fury of the elements to torment their victims. Where else in tragedy are the forces that make for ruin so appalling and so irresistible; and where else are suffering and ruin so dreadful and so complete? The sufferers are powerless. Suffering does not here arouse a Promethean defiance, but it discovers and purifies human virtue. If evil is dominant over the action, Cordelia, Kent, the Fool, and the chastened and purified Lear are dominant in our reflections. The end is not the fall and cessation of all that is good. Even in our dismay at the convulsion which evil may cause, there remains the memory of the perfection of human devotion and love. The final impression must, however, partake of confusion and horror at the blackness and ruthlessness of a moral order that can sacrifice perfect virtue in an effort to free itself from the hideous enormity of evil. This is the tragedy of life as Shakespeare saw it, and the cry of bewilderment and agony seems to come from the poet's own heart. The language, sometimes crowded and difficult, has hardly a trace of artifice. Rarely as perfectly mastered as in "Hamlet" and "Othello," it surpasses even those plays in the tremendous sincerity of its passion. If passionate despair at things human has a language, it is the speech of Lear.
"Macbeth" offers a marked contrast to "Lear" in its brevity and rapidity. In spite of a few probable interpolations, the text is so short that it may likely represent a condensation of the original version. In none of the tragedies is the story told with more breathless directness, or with more effective presentation of the externals of the action. The play is more dependent on the chronicle than "Lear," and pays more attention to the representation of history. In "Lear" the political and national importance of the events is forgotten, but in "Macbeth" the convulsion of the kingdom is kept in mind, and the battles, political intrigue, and the prophecies of future dynasties recall the early chronicle plays. The story in Holinshed's chronicle, however, conforms to the current ideas of tragedy, so closely indeed that one wonders that some writer had not earlier attempted its dramatization.[20] Apparently it awaited a Scottish king and a general interest in Scottish affairs. The story is one of crime and retribution with a rather striking likeness to some of the classical dramas. It coincides with the Senecan plan of a crime committed and then revenged through the accompaniment of supernatural agencies. It is the story, familiar to both humanistic and popular tragedy, of a usurper who becomes a bloody tyrant and is overthrown after a reign of increasing crime. Macbeth's inordinate and fatal ambition also offers an obvious chance for a development akin to that of Marlowe's protagonists. Again, as in most English tragedies from "Cambyses" to "Sejanus," the story presents the punishment of evil rather than the suffering of the good, and, except for the absence of lust as a motive, might have found favor with any contemporary dramatist. All these possibilities in the story were seized upon by Shakespeare and adapted to his purpose. "Macbeth" might be studied as the complement of "Lear" in the reflection and summarizing of all preceding essays at tragedy.
Shakespeare's use of these various potentialities of the story and the definiteness of his unifying purpose may both be seen by a comparison with his treatment of the very similar materials furnished by the chronicles for "Richard III." There, following closely the Marlowean methods, he for some reason minimized the motive of remorse emphasized in his sources, and left Richard as conscienceless as Tamburlaine or Barabas. In "Macbeth" the story of ambition is also a story of the temptation, defeat, and remorse of conscience. As in the other great tragedies, Shakespeare informed the old material with the struggle of the human will. At the same time he made the most of the hints in the chronicle that the protagonist was driven by fate or some forces beyond his control. He united with marvelous dramatic tact the destiny tragedy of the Greeks and the villain tragedy of the Elizabethans. As a result the character of Macbeth has its paradoxes that are the despair of the analysts. We do not quite know how far free-will and how far superhuman agencies determined his course. But while the superhuman agencies give his villany a mystery and impressiveness, they never confuse for a moment the distinctions of good and evil. The powers of right and wrong are clearly marshaled, and the triumph of evil leads to anguish as well as to ruin.
Shakespeare's transforming and vitalizing use of both the suggestions of Holinshed and the established conventions of tragedy in order to suit this changed purpose is manifest at every turn, but nowhere so transcendently as in his treatment of the supernatural. The ghost that interrupts the banquet is no shrieking revenger, hardly more than a hallucination of the murderer. The invisibility of the ghost to all but the one whom he would frighten or admonish has other examples in the drama, but by 1605 most of the playwrights made their ghosts either melodramatically horrible or vulgarly familiar. In "Macbeth" Shakespeare not only etherealizes the ghost as in "Julius Cæsar" and "Hamlet," but makes him a part of the very mood and temper of the murderer. And similarly, the witches, drawn from Holinshed's hints, represent a supernatural interference very different from that of the furies, devils, or sorcerers usual in the theatre. Some of their stage effects are archaic enough, as the shows of the head, the bloody child, and the monarchs; some, like their vanishing in air, may have been novel on the stage of the Globe; certainly they were all intended to surpass in mere theatrical novelty and effectiveness any of the supernatural or magical creatures of the contemporary drama. Delighting the groundlings and appealing to the current interest in witchcraft, they are none the less essential to the drama, inwrapt in the conception of character. The foul hags of superstition, they seem also to have the attributes of the classical Fates. Novel and effective on the stage, they are the supervisors of Macbeth's destiny. They lay bare the path to his crimes, yet they seem to obey rather than to govern his inclinations. The embodiments of the desires hid in his bosom, they become, like the dagger in the air and the ghost of Banquo, the symptoms of his soul's disease.
The disease of the soul is the theme, and the attention is centred upon crime and its accompaniments, as in many contemporary plays, but with less relief than in any other of Shakespeare's tragedies. While the range of crime is confined, lust for instance never appearing as a motive, there is an unrelieved concentration on the evil course of ambition. The virtuous and noble have only minor parts. Lady Macbeth is an instigator and accomplice in crime. For the first time since Shakespeare's early plays, there is no idealized woman. The wickedness of Iago and the wolfish sisters was relieved by the lovableness of Desdemona and Cordelia, unavailing for the time but unforgettable in the sympathies of the reader. The eternal stars never glimmer through the blackness that broods over Macbeth.
Because of this concentration on one process of evil and the absence of any idealization of goodness, the play has a less intense appeal to our sympathies than the three preceding tragedies. Again, because of its concern with historical and political results, it removes itself from immediate relationship to common experience. In these respects it links itself with the two Roman historical tragedies that followed it.
"Antony and Cleopatra" and "Coriolanus," like "Julius Cæsar," are dramas of great historical characters already splendidly described in Plutarch. They are consequently far more limited by their sources than are the other tragedies. Shakespeare was circumscribed by the main historical facts of persons and events, and he was writing as the translator and interpreter of Plutarch; yet his conception and methods remained the same as in "Hamlet" or "Macbeth." An idealization of the tragic struggle of the protagonist is environed by a wealth of incidents and persons, and accomplished by a gathering and transformation of the methods and matters of current tragedy. The world of antiquity is not faithfully reproduced, but it is made alive and akin to our daily experience in the same fashion as are the Elsinore of Polonius and the grave-diggers, and the Britain of Osric and Kent. And the tragic conflicts that involve the great persons, if confused in the spectacles and actions of this varied stage, are the accompaniments of momentous national crises, themselves of hardly less imaginative appeal than the spiritual struggles which they parallel. The mental battles of Macbeth and Lear are reflected and magnified by the incantations of the weird sisters and the turmoil of the elements; those of Coriolanus and Antony by the battle of the powerful and the oppressed and by the throes of a dying civilization.
In "Antony and Cleopatra," the subject of many Renaissance tragedies, Shakespeare chose for a theme an ignoble infatuation that leads counter to duty and on to destruction. The difficulties of the historical material led to a remarkable reversion in dramatic structure to the methods of the early chronicle plays, innumerable and loosely connected scenes, constant shifting of place, prolonged time, and an absence of tragic unity. The problem of a confused and intricate action, voluntarily imposed in "Lear," is here forced upon the dramatist who will combine the wars of the triumvirs, the conflict of East and West, and the story of an enchantress and her victim. The tragic course of the conflict between infatuation and ambition is incumbered by historical details and stage spectacles, but in style and characterization few plays more greatly reveal Shakespeare's genius. In no play is the idealization of character more magnificent; no other dramatist has made Antony in the lures of a strumpet still representative of what is illustrious and magnanimous in mankind, no other has made a woman with the manners and heart of a strumpet the rightful empress of the imagination. The interest in the play is less centred than in the other tragedies. It is divided between the spectacle of historical events and the conflict of motives; it lies as much in the persons as vitalizations of history as in their fate as human beings. But this is the triumph of historical tragedy as Shakespeare conceived it. Its scenic presentation makes alive the events and persons, and through a grandiose panorama interprets the passions that ravished both empires and the souls of their possessors.
The human drama in "Coriolanus" is involved not only in historical circumstances, but also in the eternal conflict between the upper and the lower classes, the incurable disease of the body politic. While their pride in class, their blindness to the rights of others, and their failure in patriotism are made apparent, the patricians are treated as the representatives of righteousness and nobility. The plebeians, on the contrary, are depicted without appreciation of their sufferings or rights, as ignorant, imbecile, and the dupes of tricky demagogues. Contempt for the mob was a common sentiment in Renaissance literature, and the people as a factor in history held little place in the thoughts of the sixteenth century or in the historical drama. But here and in "Julius Cæsar" Shakespeare treats them with far less consideration than does Fletcher or Massinger, with a contempt, indeed, that can hardly have flattered his audiences and that has often been taken as indicative of strong personal feeling. Shakespeare must have foreseen at least some of the political lessons which would be derived from the play, but one may easily exaggerate its importance as an exposition of his political theory. He was following Plutarch closely, with an eye for interesting theatrical scenes as in "Antony and Cleopatra," but with less than his usual inspiration. The lack of individuality in the persons, a certain typicality in the characterization, and the heaviness and complexity of the style may have been caused less by an intrusion of political theory than by a lapsing of that splendid power of characterization so long maintained. Moreover, the political partisanship is in part a dramatic necessity, almost compelled by Shakespeare's conception of tragedy and his dramatic method. Coriolanus must be given resplendent virtues. The populace as a foil and contrast must be made contemptible and the ready tool of vice. Pride, the fatal defect of the hero, must be exposed as was the sensuality of Antony, but it must be made the flaw of an Achilles. The rôle of villain is left for the demagogues, and that of the witless accomplice for the people. Again, here, as in all his histories, Shakespeare is blind to the importance of the people, because for him, as for his contemporaries, the dramatization of history was the dramatization of its great personages, and their passions, vices, and ambitions.
The loss of power discernible in "Coriolanus" is conspicuous in "Timon." Its corrupt text and unfinished condition and the certainty that only part of the play is Shakespeare's render uncertain its importance among the tragedies. Here, however, as in "Coriolanus," though the interest in the causes that make man's misery is still keen, the lack of inspiration results in an exaggerated type for a protagonist and in an unconvincing exposition of human baseness. If Coriolanus's politics were Shakespeare's, certainly Timon's misanthropy was not.
With these themes Shakespeare's interest in tragedy exhausted itself. Possibly influenced by the success of Beaumont and Fletcher's early romantic plays, he attempted in "Cymbeline," and perfected in "A Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest," a type of play combining tragic and idyllic elements, full of romantic variety of incident, and resulting in surprising and happy dénouements. The possibilities for tragedy are there; jealousy, villany, and intrigue abound; even death is introduced. But the main actions are not of suffering and ruin; love and forgiveness heal all ills; and the end is reconciliation and marriage. These romantic tragicomedies are not only departures from the established tragic forms, but from any consideration of tragic themes and problems comparable in seriousness or intensity with that of the plays which we have just discussed.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward, Fleay, and Schelling continue to be the best general guides. Important critical discussions of Shakespeare's tragedies by Professors A. C. Bradley, Lounsbury, and Baker were noted in the Bibliographical Note to chapter i. Other recent books of special interest are: Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh (1907, English Men of Letters Series); William Shakespere, Barrett Wendell (1894); Shakespeare and his Predecessors, F. S. Boas (1896). For a general surrey of the course of Shakespearean criticism, see Ward, vol. i, chap. iv; or Lounsbury, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, and Shakespeare and Voltaire; or the bibliographical lists in the various volumes of Furness's Variorum edition. This edition, now in progress, and Malone's Variorum edition of 1821, are the most valuable in furnishing information. Nearly all recent editions of Shakespeare supply fairly adequate information in regard to critical conclusions on matters of date, sources, and text. Probably the most serviceable bibliography of Shakespearean editions and criticism up to 1870, and to a considerable extent for the Elizabethan drama, is to be found in the Catalogue of the Barton Collection of the Boston Public Library (1888), accessible in most large libraries in this country. A complete Shakespearean bibliography since 1865 is supplied by the bibliographies published in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. These also comprise nearly all monographs of importance dealing with the drama from 1557 to 1642.
The present chapter borrows from my article on Hamlet and the Revenge Plays (Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1902), referred to in chap. iv. E. E. Stoll's John Webster (Cambridge, Mass., 1905) gives a further discussion of the Revenge Plays, and especially of Marston. Bullen's edition of Marston is the standard. The editions of Heywood's Works (1874) and of Chapman's (1873-75) attempt no scholarly discussion. F. S. Boas's edition of the two Bussy D'Ambois plays in the Belles-Lettres Series (Boston, 1905) has a valuable introduction. Gifford's edition of Jonson (1816) is unfortunately not yet superseded. The careful editions of various of his plays in the Yale Studies in English as yet include none of his tragedies. Ben Jonson, l'homme et l'œuvre Paris, 1907, by Maurice Castelain is very elaborate, and contains a full bibliography with a preliminary descriptive note of editions. A new edition of Jonson edited by C. H. Herford and P. Simpson is announced.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Mr. Elmer Stoll's argument against this early date does not seem to me convincing. See the Appendix to his John Webster, Cambridge, 1904.
[19] Troilus and Cressida in some form was probably acted in 1602. The editors of the Folio apparently first intended to class it with the tragedies, but they changed their minds while the book was printing and placed Troilus without pagination between the histories and tragedies. The preface to one of the quartos of 1609 classes it with the comedies, and the prologue inclines that way. For an interesting though not always convincing discussion of the many difficulties offered by the play, the reader is referred to Mr. R. A. Small's The Stage Quarrel between Ben Jonson and The So-called Poetasters (1899), pp. 139-170. The play offers problems of importance in Shakespearean criticism, but in a history of tragedy it seems negligible. The concluding scenes (v, 7-10) are clearly not by Shakespeare, and the Prologue and v, 4-6 are doubtful.
[20] There is in fact a reference in Kempe's Nine Days Wonder (1600) to the story, which may possibly indicate an earlier play.
CHAPTER VI
SHAKESPEARE
Our study has perhaps already made it evident that Shakespeare's tragedies were in many ways the product of a rapid and complex evolution. At the same time it is clear that, until Shakespeare, Elizabethan tragedy with all its genius and innovations had failed to attain finality of art, or to mark out any sure pathway thither. It was still in its formative period when he created out of it something new and immortal, and its development continued after his death mainly in response to forces not of his initiating. For the past two centuries, to a constantly increasing body of spectators and readers, his tragedies have had a life entirely unconnected with the works of his contemporaries, an existence that has dominated our theatres and our conceptions of tragedy, and become a part of the daily living and the permanent ideals of the race. It is therefore necessary to separate his plays from the mass of tragedies, and to review them for a moment as the creations of a genius that was the chief creator as well as the glory of English tragedy.
Two points of view that have been largely maintained in nineteenth century criticism of Shakespeare may, however, be neglected in our summary. His plays have been viewed as the reflection of his personal experiences and emotions; and his return to tragic themes about 1600 and his occupation with them for the next eight years have been connected with a supposed period of spiritual depression in his own life. Again, the generalization of experience and the abundant wisdom of his tragedies have been viewed as the result of a conscious and rather systematic philosophy of life. Much might be said for these attitudes of criticism. Any attempt to describe the plays in terms of our emotions as readers is likely to result in the attribution of those emotions to the author, an interesting process of analogy and one hardly to be disproved. Any attempt to survey his work as a whole and to relate its parts is likely to result in the systemization of his message and philosophy. But for students of the growth of his dramatic art under the peculiar conditions of the reigns of Elizabeth and James, these nineteenth century points of view involve dangerous critical anachronisms. Shakespeare does not seem to have been a lyric Shelley or Byron, making poetry out of his changing moods, or a Tennyson or Browning generalizing life in the persons of his men and women. There seems no reason for separating him from his companion poets and playwrights. Like them he was in the first place telling a story for the stage; like them he found in these plays opportunity for the expression of his knowledge of human motives in the guise of beautiful verse; and like them, when he chose tragic themes, he became absorbed in the presentation of the tragic facts and problems of life. Our attempt to determine his relations to them is not to discover indebtedness large or minute, but rather by the safest approach to arrive at a right appreciation of his genius and its transcendent contribution to tragedy.
For the purpose of our survey we may have the four great tragedies chiefly in mind. The early tragedies are manifestly the products of an experimental period and the precursors of the latter plays; and the three Roman histories have a subordinate and contributory rather than an essential and preëminent part in his achievement in tragedy. Whatever can be said of the four great tragedies applies in its essentials to all.
All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident, their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts the nearest to medieval models.
More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston, or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated. Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain discernible in the transformed result.
All the tragedies but "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," only partial exceptions, relate the falls of princes and the revolutions of kingdoms. These stories of princes are of the same kind as in other Elizabethan tragedy. In a setting of court and camp they place sensational crimes, and trace the accompaniments and consequences. Their themes are revenge, madness, tyranny, conspiracy, lust, adultery, and jealousy. They abound in villany, intrigue, and slaughter. They avoid Senecan atrocities and the abnormal phases of lust; but the tearing out of Gloster's eyes recalls the horrors of the early plays; while revenge, conspiracy, and villany are as prominent as in the contemporary tragedies of Marston, Jonson, and Chapman. Three of the stories include ghosts, while in "Macbeth" the weird sisters offer an opportunity for a most original treatment of the supernatural. Comedy is always combined with tragedy, and the medieval tradition and the popular taste for an emotional contrast receive artistic vindication in the grotesqueness of "Hamlet" and "Lear." Each plot, like those of Marlowe's plays, centres about a great personality and illustrates a temperament dominated by passion. It traces the course of folly, mistake, or sin to the wages of death as in "Lear," "Othello," and "Antony and Cleopatra"; or it begins with a murder and records its progeny of crime and death as in "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth."
Shakespeare's choice of stories was clearly determined by the Elizabethan conception of tragedy and by the current tastes of the theatre. And by these stories his imagination was directed and limited. However absorbed he became in character or ethics, he never neglected the plot or the theatre. Consequently the great revelation of tragic fact which he gave to posterity was limited by these stories of crime and hampered by their improbabilities and stage effects. The tragedy of ambition is limited to the story of a murderer who sees a ghost; and the tragedy of ingratitude is joined to a relation of senile folly, crime, and the humors of Tom of Bedlam. Even his interpretation of human motives suffers, for the bloodthirstiness of Hamlet and the perverse reticence of Cordelia belong to the old plots as much as to the characters. Yet Shakespeare's greatness of mind no less than his responsiveness to contemporary taste appears in his very choice of material. Whether he took the oft-told tragedies of Cæsar, Brutus, Antony and Cleopatra, or the old plays of Hamlet and Lear, or the neglected themes of Othello and Macbeth, he chose always stories of great dramatic interest and those that presented the range and vicissitudes of human passion. His attraction for each story was evidently in the emotional conflict that made each protagonist a great acting part and also a fascinating study of human motive.
Moreover, in his general treatment of this material there is a uniformity that gives some hint of a Shakespearean definition of tragedy. In each play a man of great attainments is presented as involved in a moral conflict that results in his death. This conflict is two-fold, internal between opposing desires, and external against some persons of the counter-actions. Conflicting forces contend for mastery in the hero's breast, and from their confusion he drives on to action that is disastrous. The unusual powers, the best potentialities, of his nature are opposed and thwarted by the forces of chance and circumstance beyond his control; by the force of evil, whether in his own breast or represented by the crime and intrigue of others; and still further, by a defect or deficiency in his own personality. The force of chance, equivalent to the Greek Fate, plays a part in all tragic story and drama; the power of evil without or within was the counter-force in medieval drama, and was the theme most powerfully dwelt upon by Shakespeare's immediate contemporaries. The fateful power of incompatibility of temperament with conditions of life seems to have been Shakespeare's own conception.
In Sophocles, arrogance and audacity are accounted evil; in Marlowe and Chapman, it is intensity of desire that drives to disaster; but in Shakespeare the melancholy and reflective temper of Hamlet and the generous and credulous magnanimity of Othello are the allies of untoward circumstance and designing villany in bringing suffering to the good and failure to the potent. The greatness of Shakespeare's conception, however, results from the massing of all these combatants against the hero. The conflict thus gains in the comprehensiveness of its presentation of life; and human nature in the face of such odds becomes magnificent even in failure. Hero wars with villain; human intrepidity and wisdom with chance and destiny; conscience with sin; greatness of purpose with crippling defects of temperament.
Such a conception of tragedy involves a recognition of the blindness of chance that cannot be squared with any theory of poetic justice or theological view of the rewards due to virtue. But it also involves a recognition of moral law that results in the punishment of its violators. The villains never escape as they do in comedy. The wages of sin are always death, though the reward of virtue is not happiness. The vastness of evil in the world, its malignant influence, its temporary triumphs are conceived in a manner not different from that of contemporary thought. The doctrines of total depravity and of moral responsibility go side by side as in medieval drama, theology, and psychology. In the depiction of the waste of effort, the expense of spirit, the crippling of greatness by weakness, the ineffectually of virtue, Shakespeare gave a far more comprehensive and a far more penetrating representation of tragic fact than the world had yet known, but without professing any solution of its mysteries.
Such a conception gives unity to the action of each play, but not always a unity that governs details of structure. The structure of a tragedy cannot be described in terms of a system, for the dramatic presentation of each play differs from the others and conforms to the story it relates. There are many survivals of the early epic lawlessness, as in "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Lear"; and in no play is the main action kept entirely free from intruding incongruities. Neither act nor scene receives much regard as an integral unit of structure. The most noticeable structural division is due to an event of extraordinary importance reached somewhere in the middle of the play. This point, to which the terms climax or crisis are sometimes applicable, brings to an end one important development of the action, and thus divides the play into two parts. Cæsar's murder, Duncan's murder, Lear's madness complete one course of tragic incident and introduce us to another.
The effectiveness of Shakespeare's construction, however, was not due to a formulation of system or rule but to his intuition and experience. His sense of what parts of a narrative should be acted and what parts not, had developed beyond that of most of his contemporaries. In comparison with his own earlier plays the tragedies contain little, whether comic, spectacular, or essential to the main tragic action, which had not a manifest value on the stage. His ability to create great dramatic situations was also at its height, and the great scenes are prepared for and emphasized by what precedes, so that they gain all the effect possible from the dramatic construction. Thus, the appearance of the ghost, the play within the play, the funeral of Ophelia, and the final slaughter are given a value in the mere narration of the story for which there is no parallel in the many other treatments of similar stories. Of far more importance is his use of the developments of character as the determining factors of the progress of the dramatic narrative. The rapidity with which the first two acts of "Macbeth" hurry us to the murder of Duncan, the tremendous climactic pressure of the first three acts of "Lear," are extraordinary examples of his power to compel incidents to reveal the course of motive convincingly. In each play the order of incidents becomes a logical development from the characters of the actors; each deed, thought, or speech has its sequence. There are no tricks, no surprises, no sudden conversions of character. Once admit the premises, a person of a certain temperament, facing a certain situation, and subject to a certain accident, mistake, or folly, and we cannot escape the conclusion. The dramatic necessities of character are never violated. From the clear exposition of the first scene, the progress is inevitable to the end.
The persons of the plays spring from the old stories, and by these the study of their motives is in many ways limited. It is limited again by the types and conditions of stage-land. The bloody tyrant, the hesitating avenger, the Machiavellian villain come hence. The acts which they commit, their moods, motives, their very language depend in part on the representatives of these types that had long been familiar to the audiences of the theatres. Yet the host of individual personalities are the result of a most profound and fresh observation of an almost boundless range of life. That interest in characterization which distinguishes the early drama and finds its main illustration in Shakespeare's own practice in the preceding decade here comes to its culmination. Not only the main actor, but the most conventional part, the most absurd business, the merest supernumerary, receives its touch of truth. And something more than truth to life or knowledge of motive is manifest. The great characters are cast in large moulds. They represent the courses of the master passions. Smallness of horizon, triviality of design, feebleness of mind or body are absent. Momentous crises that try men's souls are the real subjects of the tragedies. The accidents of dress, or manner, or time, or race, the incidents of action, are forgotten as revenge, jealousy, irresolution, and lust seize their splendid prey. The greatness of human nature, the power of the human will, the responsibility of the individual remain. There is no belittling of reason even when it breaks under the crash of the storm. Iago is no mere stage villain, though he has all the characteristics of the type; nor is he merely a transcript from life, though he has all the variety and plausibility of a human being. He is the embodiment of our countless evil impulses, the incarnation of depravity. So with all the others. They are human in their truth; they are magnificent idealizations in the range and value of their manifold suggestiveness; they leave the stage to become the habitants of our imaginations, contributing to our reflections their embodiments of good and evil, folly and reason, resolution and doubt.
They speak a language all their own, though with resemblances to their kinsmen in the other Elizabethan tragedies. The blank verse, far more flexible than in the early plays, presents a triumphant union of the conflicting tendencies toward decoration and naturalness observed in the other dramatists; and it is freely mingled with hardly less masterly prose. Marvelous in comparison with preceding verse is its extreme condensation in spite of its opulence of figures and aphorisms. Although crowded with thought and image, it is nevertheless, in its response to the varying persons and moods, superbly dramatic. A critic who is both a poet and a philosopher[21] objects to Macbeth's dagger "unmannerly breech'd with gore" as violent and crude in comparison with the historical reminiscences with which Homer might have made Achilles describe the weapon. But recall the scene. Macbeth has murdered the grooms and rushes from the chamber to confront the fearful suspicions of Duncan's sons and friends. Surely, his false and frenzied excuses must be over-fanciful, violent, and crude.
"Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore."
Such a style, however, does not readily give up opportunities for aphorism or beauty for the sake of absolute truth to situation or character. Still less does it mimic actual speech. It does give a potency to the stories, otherwise hardly conceivable; and it adds to truth of character the allurement of music and picture, and the idealization of a magnified suggestiveness. A father has reason to curse his daughter—gesture and incoherent words might correctly represent life; a plain sentence of Ibsen's might convey the tragedy of the situation—but it is the extravagant and terrible imprecation of Lear that has for centuries made men's imaginations shudder. Style such as this the drama will never recover. We shall sooner find another Shakespeare to blend its diverse elements than a host of dramatists, like the Elizabethans, fascinated by a newly discovered world of poetry and daringly adventurous in search of melody of verse, wealth of aphorism, luxury of fantasy, and truth to character.
The effect of Shakespeare's tragedies on spectator or reader is so complex as to defy analysis. Incidental wisdom, effective scene, immortal story all contribute; but the main sources of their abiding impressiveness have surely been the characterization and the poetic style. If we must continue to seek for a katharsis, do not they supply it? The great tragedies are full of disaster, wrong, and suffering. The world they reveal is not the abode of happiness, but of darkness and remorse. Though the bad are punished, the good are not rewarded. Sweetness and innocence suffer and perish along with foulness and malevolence. The noblest spirits are broken; the wages of mortal effort are failure. There are many "breaches in nature for ruin's wasteful entrance." Nor does the life hereafter offer a promise of compensation. Death ends all,—that is the great catastrophe toward which human endeavor precipitates itself. This is not Shakespeare's view of life, but it is his view of the tragedy of life, and its effect upon us is gloomy, overpowering, heartrending. But everywhere this tragedy of life is revealed in verse infinitely appealing to intellectual analysis and to imaginative exhilaration. Everywhere there are men and women, not dead but living, representative of much that is most intensely and universally interesting in life, and the permanent guests of our reflection. The old ethical adage that it does not so much matter what men do as what they are has a particular truth when applied to the people of Shakespeare. That they do this or that, love, murder, die, is in the story; what they are remains the possession of humanity. Our horror at the successful villany of Iago finds a certain relief in the intellectual pleasure and admiration at the creator's achievement; it accomplishes a certain purification in its application to the Iago in ourselves. Still more do the persons who most excite our sympathy survive the intolerable emotions that first greet their misfortunes. When we read "Othello" we feel an overwhelming pity, a fierce resentment, but we would not erase from our possession the memory of Desdemona and her Moor. The misery and wrong and death go to make up in our reflection the beings whom we love and cherish. It is Lear's fivefold "never" that completes for us the loveliness of Cordelia.
A comparison of the tragedies with the masterpieces of other national dramas might disclose their faults but would not diminish their glories. Faults in plenty there surely are, whether judgment be taken of classicists or realists, or of the best standards of the Elizabethans. There are many quibbles or fantasies of diction that might be criticised, many bits of dialogue or stage spectacle that might be omitted without detracting from the total impressiveness. How many minor inconsistencies of plot or characterization might be corrected. How complicated and bewildering is "Hamlet" in comparison with the simpler harmony of "Antigone." How involved and cumbrous, and how undignified in its appeal to the emotions, is much of "Antony and Cleopatra" in comparison with "Phèdre." How impossible and fantastic is much of "Lear" in comparison with "Ghosts." But Shakespeare's defects and deficiencies belong to his time and to his methods. They are inseparable, indeed, from the very means on which depend his consummate results. Not in response to literary tradition, but to the public theatre; not by a refined but by a daring art; not by simplicity and unity, but by complexity and opulence of effect; not by devotion to creed or science or fact, but by the idealization and sublimation of man's emotional nature, did Shakespeare give to his dramas their imperishable wealth of life.