mask in a great nobleman’s castle that Milton—a Puritan of a very different cast—not long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of English poems. Comus has been judged and condemned as a drama—unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development as the poetic mask.
The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare’s contemporaries and The later Elizabethan drama.successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as they are, his tragic works[1] stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history,[2] always with vigour, and at times with genuine effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action. Mention has been made above of Ford’s isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme—ranging as these plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance—of equally astonishing variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction, original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations—among others to Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And, in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of this kind;[3] but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class,[4] to which some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of motives employed—at least as a rule—in the tragic drama of this period was comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled masculine passion—such are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion, which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,[5] master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,[6] surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by any of their contemporaries—a power seconded by a beauty of diction and softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked; but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.
In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of “humours” (which found the most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays[7]), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the presentation of distinctive human types. As such it survived by name into the Restoration age[8] and cannot be said to have ever died out. In the actual reproduction of humanity in its infinite but never, in his hands, alien variety, it was impossible that Shakespeare should be excelled by Jonson; but in the consciousness with which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist’s labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which the greater master had left unperformed. By the rest of his contemporaries and his successors, some of whom, such as R. Brome, were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achievements his genius as a comic dramatist remained unapproached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible verve of T. Middleton, the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field, and the artistic
- ↑ Sejanus his Fall; Catiline his Conspiracy.
- ↑ Bussy d’Ambois; The Revenge of B. d’A.; The Conspiracy of Byron; The Tragedy of B.; Chabot, Admiral of France (with Shirley).
- ↑ Arden of Faversham; A Yorkshire Tragedy.
- ↑ A Woman killed with Kindness; The English Traveller.
- ↑ Vittoria Coromboni; The Duchess of Malfi.
- ↑ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; The Broken Heart.
- ↑ Every Man in his Humour; Every Man out of his Humour.
- ↑ Shadwell, The Humorists.
