Contemporaries of Shakespeare

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CONTEMPORARIES
OF SHAKESPEARE

The Works of
Algernon Charles Swinburne

COLLECTED POETICAL WORKS. In 6
vols. 36s. net the set.

POSTHUMOUS POEMS. 6s. net.

THE GOLDEN PINE EDITION, atss. 6d.
net in cloth, and 6s. net in leather (limp
covers), of the following works —

1. POEMS AND BALLADS. First Series.

2. POEMS AND BALLADS. Second and

Third Series.

3. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE, including

Song-s of Italy.

4. ATALANTA IN CALYDON, and

ERECTHEUS.

5. TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE.

6. A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE.

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

CONTEMPORARIES OF
SHAKESPEARE

By

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Edited by Edmund Gosse, C.B.
and Thomas James Wise

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

London t William Heinemann, igi^

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION: by Edmund Gosse vii

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE IN RELATION TO

GREENE, PEELE, AND LODGE i

GEORGE CHAPMAN 13

THE EARLIER PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND

FLETCHER 143

PHILIP MASSINGER 167

JOHN DAY 211

ROBERT DAVENPORT 233

THOMAS NABBES 251

RICHARD BROME 259

JAMES SHIRLEY 275

\Jfi^f>l,'-\j-'

INTRODUCTION

The shadow of irreparable loss lies across the essays
which are here for the first time collected. During
a period of sixty years, from his boyhood at Eton
to his last weeks at Putney, Swinburne brooded over
the history of the Elizabethan poets, chanted their
music, compared them one with another and cele-
brated their beauties in a voice that shook with
adoration. No one who ever lived, not Charles
Lamb himself, approached our great poet-critic in
worship of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans or in
textual familiarity with their writings. He had
read and reread them all, even the obscurest ; not
one " dim watchfire of some darkling hour " but he
had measured what faint light and heat it had to
give. All through his life he held before him the
design of a work of broad extent which should cover
with enthusiastic analysis the entire field, and
render future critical excursions in that direction
useless and indeed impossible. Day by day, stand-
ing before his bookshelves, a precious quarto quiver-
ing in his hands, he would start with ecstasy at some

vii

viii INTRODUCTION

new discovery, and resolve more firmly than ever
to complete the great task of illumination. But he
died, overburdened perhaps by his own erudition
and his own enthusiasm, without having done more
than finish certain portions of the structure. The
palace of Elizabethan criticism which he dreamed of
building remains a fragment.

The scheme of it, I believe, is to be traced in the
cycle of twenty-one sonnets which he published in
1882. If this is correct, the completed work would
have consisted of a series of volumes, various in size
and scope, but identical in method. There would
have been a predominance, but not an overpowering
predominance, allotted to Shakespeare ; this Swin-
burne gave in the Study of Shakespeare of 1880,
and in the much less important and less valuable
volume of 1909. Of the other parts of the work, the
elaborate essay about Ford (1871) and the volume
about Ben Jonson (1889) represent the ambitious scale
on which Swinburne originally planned the work. He
told me that a volume, larger than that devoted to
Jonson, would enshrine what he had to say about
Beaumont and Fletcher. Of this all that was ever
achieved is presented in the following pages, the
provisional essay included in Studies in Prose and
Poetry (1894) being scarcely worthy of mention.
Although Marlowe had occupied his thoughts almost
to excess through his whole career, he never produced

INTRODUCTION ix

the finished study of that great precursor's genius
which he often proposed to himself and mentioned
to his friends. These comments indicate the points
at which the vast structure is most obviously
incomplete.

It was not, indeed, until about the close of his
life that Swinburne determined to unveil, as it
were, the messuages and minor chambers of his
edifice. In 1908, a few months before his death,
he published, without preface or comment of any
kind, the volume entitled The Age of Shakespeare. It
consisted of nine chapters, written and periodically
printed long before, but now first collected. There
was a short paper on Marlowe, an entirely per-
functory note on Chapman, and monographs of due
fullness and in fair relation to the original scheme
on Webster, Dekker, Marston, Middleton, William
Rowley, Hejrwood, and Cyril Toumeur. It was ap-
parent, of course, that several of the great names
were still unrepresented, and if what the world
possessed in collected form at the death of Swin-
burne had been all that he left behind him, the
hope of even hazily indicating the scope of the
main work which he projected would be denied
to us.

Happily, however, it appeared on careful exami-
nation that uncollected material for a second
series of The Age of Shakespeare was in existence.

X INTRODUCTION

Various essays were unearthed from old periodicals,
and among the manuscripts purchased by Mr. T. J.
Wise from Watts-Dunton the missing chapters were
included. The only section of the present volume
which has appeared in separate book-form before is
the essay on George Chapman. This was originally
published, a thin octavo, in 1875, and has been out
of print for more than a quarter of a century.
Swinburne neglected to order its republication,
doubtless because he wished it eventually to take its
place as a part of the great Elizabethan structure.
In restoring it, therefore, we believe that we are
carrying out his wishes to the utmost of our power.
In a further rearrangement, the short summary
of Chapman's life written for the Encydopcedia
Byitannica, like the trifling pages on Webster pub-
lished in 1894, will disappear from the system of
The Age of Shakespeare.

An examination of the ensuing pages will show
that the main outline of Swinburne's enterprise is
clearly indicated at last. Until now, we have
known practically nothing of his attitude to
Massinger and Shirley, not to mention various
minor figures of no extreme positive value, but each
necessary to fill up the general plan of criticism. It
will be found that the present instalment of the
work completes the design. The huge canvas is still,
and must remain, unequally finished, but every

INTRODUCTION xi

portion of its surface is now covered and there are
no blank spaces left. Possibly, if he had chosen to
do so, Swinburne might have devoted one more
chapter to the small playwrights of the opening
age : he has sketched them in a few rapid lines :

Kyd, whose grim sport still gambolled over graves :
And Chettle, in whose fresh funereal verse
Weeps Marian yet on Robin's wildwood hearse :

Cooke, whose light boat of song one soft breath
saves,
Sighed from a maiden's amorous mouth averse.

He might even have spared a second to the Tribe
of Benjamin, the disciples of Jonson :

Prince Randolph, nighest his throne of all his
men, . . .
Cartwright, a soul pent in with narrower
pale, . . .
Marmion, whose verse keeps alway'keen and fine
The perfume of their Apollonian wine
Who shared with that stout sire , . .
The exuberant chalice of his echoing shrine.

It is still more likely that he would have been
glad to expatiate further than in frequent notes and
passages he has elsewhere done on the Anonymous
Plays, " more yet, and more, and yet we mark
not all," among which he placed far higher than the
rest the mysterious and almost miraculous Arden of
Feversham. But these would be ornamental addi-

xii INTRODUCTION

tions, extraneous appendages to the main building,
of which, as we may be proud to assert, the essential
scheme is now for the first time exhibited in its
fullness.

Edmund Gosse

October igi8

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

IN RELATION TO

GREENE, PEELE, AND LODGE

The list which comprises the names of the very
greatest among great poets or among men otherwise
great can naturally never be a long one : briefer
yet is the list of theirs who are only less great than
these, and who first began the work or gave the
example which none but they could follow, could
complete, or could excel. Above all others enrolled
in this latter list the name of Marlowe stands high,
and will stand for ever. The father of English
tragedy and the creator of English blank verse was
therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shake-
speare.

There is no such test of critical facultj^ and
genuine instinct for true appreciation of poetry as
the estimate given or accepted of Marlowe's place
among poets. For his countrymen, at all events,
there is none as yet, and probably there never will
be. Most writers and most readers above the level
of such as would do well to abstain and should in
pity be prohibited from reading or from writing
are much of one mind about Chaucer and Spenser,
about Shakespeare and Milton, about Coleridge and

3

4 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Shelley. Those only who know and understand, as
Pindar and as Dante would have expressed it, can
hope or can be expected to appreciate the greatness
of the man who began his career by a double
and incomparable achievement : the invention of
English blank verse and the creation of English
tragedy.

It has not always been duly remarked, it is not
now always duly remembered, by students of the
age of Shakespeare that Marlowe is the one and
only precursor of that veritable king of kings and
lord of lords among all writers and all thinkers of
all time. The names usually associated with his by
painstaking and well-meaning historians of dramatic
poetry are hardly memorable or mentionable at all,
except from a chronological point of view, among
the names of dramatic poets. Lily, Greene, Peele,
Nash, and Lodge were true though not great poets,
who blundered into playwriting — invitissima Minerva
— in search of popularity or of bread. Lily, Nash,
and Greene were writers of prose which it would be
difficult to overpraise if we had here to consider the
finest work of Greene in romantic fiction, of Nash
and Lily in controversial satire, Thackeray has
given to the sweetest and loftiest verses of Peele
the immortality which they could hardly have
expected or attained, beautiful and noble and
pathetic as they are, but for the more than royal
dignity conferred on them by association with the
deathless name and memory of Colonel Newcome.
But their plays, though something in advance of
the unreadable Gorboduc and the unspeakable
Locrine, have no particular claim to record among

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 5

the trophies of our incomparable drama : they
belong rather to the historic province of antiquarian
curiosity than to the aesthetic or spiritual kingdom
of EngHsh poetry. No man can be more grateful
than I for the research of the learned and laborious
historians whose industry has been devoted to the
noble task of lighting up the dark ways of study for
all future students of the highest, the wealthiest, the
most precious and golden branch of a matchless
literature. For all these illustrious scholars it was
a matter of obvious and obtrusive necessity to
register all surviving literary documents which
belong to the subject of their study. For a writer
whose aim is confined to the indication and illustra-
tion of poetic and dramatic quality, of imaginative
or spiritual excellence the attempt would be worse
than a superfluous impertinence : it would be an
injurious aberration or excursion from the straight
line of his intended labour.

Nash is always readable, even when religious :
and something of the " lightness and brightness " of
his sunny and fiery spirit gives life to his fantastic
little interlude of Summer's Last Will and Testament.
The graceful author of Rosalynde is unrecognizable
in Lodge's lamentable Roman tragedy The Wofinds
of Civil War. The Selimus and Alphonsus of Greene
are feeble and futile essays in hopeless and heartless
imitation of Tamburlaine the Great ; very bloody,
very wordy, very vehement, but essentially spiritless
and passionless. Had Shakespeare never retouched
his Titus Andronicus, and earned by his surely
slight and transient additions in Greene's own semi-
lyrical style the shamefully famous expression of the

6 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

dying man's undying rancour, that strangely fated
play could hardly have been remembered except as
the third in this trinity or triunity of rhetorical and
rhapsodical horrors. The composition of Orlando
Furioso is as pitifully scandalous as the story of its
author's roguery in the disposal or venditation of his
rubbish. James the Fourth is a comparatively
creditable piece of work ; but its few, poor, meagre
merits are noticeable mainly because of its date.
There is something more of liveliness and coherence
in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay : enough to
exasperate the reader who can see what a far better
and what a really charming work of realistic and
fantastic invention might have been made of it —
by the nameless author, for instance, of The Merry
Devil of Edmonton. George a Greene is an honest
and homely expansion of a good old ballad into a
passable if rather formless little play. It might
savour of paradox to avow a preference for so tardy
and so singular a survival of the old moralities as
A Looking-Glass for London and England ; but, if
that preference is not perverse and capricious, no
more final proof of the fact that Dr. Lodge and
Master Greene (M.A.) ought never to have strayed
or staggered on to the boards could possibly be
exacted. For there is not only much to amuse the
reader of this quaint and belated sermon in scenes,
there is something for him to admire and enjoy.
And it is a pity, if not a shame, that even the
smallest and least precious jewel of poetry should
have been misframed in so barbaric a setting.

Something of the same regret may probably or
must surely be felt by readers of The Arraignment

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 7

of Paris. That George Peele might and should have
left a more honoured name among English poets
than he chose or than he could manage to leave is
painfully or pleasurably obvious when we compare
the lovely lyrical and pastoral opening of this little
courtly interlude with the weary and wordy common-
place of the rhyming and rhymeless verses that
follow and fill out its five acts — " tedious and brief."
Quaint and pretty casualties or fehcities of expres-
sion may be found here and there to relieve the
general platitude of style and matter. The " ora-
tion " of Paris in the fourth act is noticeable, if not
memorable, as a decent exercise in blank verse
when few could achieve anything better in that line
than " untimely breathings, sick and short assays."
But it has no more claim to be classed among plays
or even among attempts at playwriting than any of
Lily's courtly allegories in dialogue ; effusions or
elaborations of devout and decorous ingenuity with
which a critic, or even a chronicler, of dramatic
poetry or fiction has naturally no concern.

It is lamentable that neither Shakespeare nor Mar-
lowe should have taken in hand so magnificent and
suggestive a subject for historic drama as the reign
of the greatest Plantagenet : it is deplorable that
Peele should have ventured on it. Difficult and
exacting as even the greatest among poets might or
rather must have found it, that a man of any literary
capacity whatsoever should have dropped upon the
nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its
spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play
of Edward 7 is a riddle beyond and also beneath
solution. There is hardly a passable line or couplet

8 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

in all the vile expanse of its twenty-five chaotic
scenes ; the treatment of character and the handling
of incident would be disgraceful to a child. The
community in platitude of metre, baseness of spirit,
and brutality of dullness, between the detestable
scenes which do their bestial and futile utmost to
pollute such names as Joan of Arc and Eleanor of
Castile, may not suffice as thoroughly as we may
wish they might suffice to establish the infamous
identity of the author of Edward I with the author
of the Fourth Scene of the Fifth Act of The First
Part of King Henry VI ; but at least it goes very
far to confirm all rational English readers in their
confidence that this villainy is the branding badge
of but one minor poet — not of two curs, but of one
cur. The heavy tumidity of The Battle of Alcazar
is relieved by the really fine scene which reminded
Lamb of Marlowe, and is rather honoured than
disgraced by the kindly raillery of Shakespeare.
The miserable traitor and apostate Stukeley would
have had no more reason to thank George Peele than
to thank the anonymous author of a later play
devoted to the commemoration of his misdeeds for
the feeble attempt to present them as the achieve-
ments or attempts of a melodramatic megalomaniac.
The soliloquy which closes the fourth act is match-
less, I should hope, for drivel of desperation and
platitude of bombast, in all the dramatic memorials
of ambitious and hopeless impotence.

The scriptural tragedy of David and Bethsabe
hardly deserves either the exuberant effusion of
Campbell's praise or the all but unqualified scorn
of other critics. It is a poor thing on the whole ;

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 9

yet there is the mark of a real though certainly
not a great poet on the earlier scenes. But Voltaire's
farce on the same subject, " translated " with such
adorable impudence " from the English of Hume,"
is much better worth reading and far more provoca-
tive of reperusal. Whether Peele is or is not
responsible for the authorship of Sir Clyomon and
Sir Clamydes is a matter which may be left for
debate to the wise men of Gotham who question
the authenticity of Shakespeare's part in The Two
Noble Kinsmen. I should hardly suppose that even
this meanest among the precursors of Shakespeare
must be credited or discredited with the production
of so lamentable if not so belated an attempt to
reopen " King Cambyses' vein." The only redeem-
ing point in all the narcotic or hypnotic rubbish is
the sometimes rather amusing humour of the clown
Subtle Shift — a not unwelcome survival of the Vice
who gives occasional life to the mysteries and
moralities which preceded the birth of tragedy or
comedy in England as in France.

" These three gifted men," Greene, Peele, and
Marlowe, have been thus bracketed by such critics
as in three hundred years' time may possibly chain
together the contemporary names of those three gifted
men, Charles Mackay, Haynes Bayley, and Alfred
Tennyson. It is shameful that it should not be (if it
be not) superfluous to say that Marlowe differs from
such little people as Peele and Greene, not in degree,
but in kind ; not as an eagle differs from wrens or
titmice, but as an eagle differs from frogs or tadpoles.
He first, and he alone, gave wings to English poetry ;
he first brought into its serene and radiant atmos-

10 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

phere the new strange element of sublimity. And,
innovator as he was, revolutionist and creator, he
was no less loyal and no less competent an artist,
no less perfect and instinctive a workman in words,
than Chaucer or than Spenser was before him. He
had neither the boyish humour nor the childlike
pathos of Chaucer : he had nothing of Spenser's
incomparable melody and all but inexhaustible
fancy ; but among all English poets he was the
first full-grown man ; young indeed, and immature
if set beside such disciples and successors as Shake-
speare and Milton, but the first-born among us of
their kind. Flutes and lutes and harps and harpsi-
chords we had heard before the organ-music of hLs
verse astonished and entranced all ears not naturally
sealed against the higher strains of harmony, all
hearts not religiously closed against the nobler tones
of thought. And Shakespeare heard at once, and
cast off shard by shard the crust of habit which
fostered and sometimes fevered the jigging vein of
his rhyming mother- wit, sweet and exquisite as it
was ; and Milton long afterwards prolonged and
magnified by reverberation the music of " Marlowe's
mighty line." His place among poets is exactly as
questionable as Dante's. M. de Lamartine thought
little or nothing of Dante, and M. de Lamartine was
once a very great poet indeed. When such another
champion assails the fame of Marlowe, it will be time
for those who know better to undertake his defence.
The reviler of Shakespeare can be no other than
a scurrilous buffoon, " a decent priest where mon-
keys are the gods," and where Ibsen is the idol.
The anatomist of Shakespeare — the superior person

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 11

who knows all about the weaknesses of that in-
ferior nature, who can expound the qualities and
define the influences which made him the man he
was, and precluded him from the dubious chance
of showing himself a greater and a stronger man
than the soft, flaccid weaklings in whom his pitiful
and unmanly ideal of heroic or philosophic manhood
is so degradingly revealed — the thinker whose
masculine intelligence can fathom Shakespeare's at
a glance and dismiss it with a smile — is worthy to
be classed and remembered as a representative man
after the order of Archquack Emerson. Collier the
cleric and Rymer the railer are dead and damned to
something less, let us hope, than everlasting fame ;
pity may surely be allowed to believe in a briefer
term of expiatory survival, a milder infliction of
purgatorial remembrance, for their successors in
the inheritance of contempt. " Zo'ile aussi eternel
qu' Homer e " — what hardest of all hearts would not
pity the case of Zoilus, eternally alive (or, in Brown-
ing's characteristically audacious phrase, " immor-
tally immerded ") in " the eternal cesspools " to
which, when a living soul, he contributed all the
irrepressible exuberance of effusive or explosive
malignity which tortured what served him for a
brain, and corroded what sufficed him for. a heart ?
No other creature, alive or dead, can be quite so
utterly and so hopelessly pitiable.

A much less incongruous and fissiparous trinity
or triunity of pre-Shakespearean playwrights would
be revealed in the reunion of three associated
names much less inharmonious than the copulation
of Greene's and Peele's with Marlowe's. Greene,

12 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Peele, and Lodge hang very well together ; three
really good poets at their best, who can only have
been whipped and spurred into scribbling for the
stage by insanity of ambition or stimulation of
hunger. The dullness of The Wounds of Civil War
is so dense and malarious that it is difficult for a
suffering reader to remember the existence of
Rosalynde. Nothing more perfectly and absolutely
worthless, or more difficult for patient application
to dig through, has ever been reissued in the various
reissues of Dodsley's Old Plays : stupendous as
is the stupidity or perversity which has always
ignored James Howard's really excellent comedy of
The English Monsieur, and selected for infliction on
modern readers a piece of noisome nonsense which
must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the
nauseated reader.

But enough or too much has before been written
on this pigmy trinity of dwarfish dramatists. It is
not with their names, it is with no such names as
theirs, that poets or judges of poetry will ever
associate the deathless name of Marlowe. To one
man only did Shakespeare ever pay the tribute of a
passing word — a word of honour, of regret, of
admiration, and it might almost seem of affection.
And to Marlowe alone it is that we can feel as
though such a tribute had been due. But to him
we may feel that it would be strange if not a word
of homage had been offered, not a token of regard
had been vouchsafed, by Shakespeare.

Note. — The foregoing essay ivas the last prose compo-
sition completed by Swinburne before his death.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

GEORGE CHAPMAN

The fame which from his own day to ours has never
wholly failed to attend the memory of George
Chapman has yet been hitherto of a looser and
vaguer kind than floats about the memory of most
other poets. In the great revival of studious
enthusiasm for the works of the many famous men
who won themselves a name during the seventy-five
memorable years of his laborious life, the mass of
his original work has been left too long unnoticed
and unhonoured. Our " Homer-Lucan," as he
was happily termed by Daniel in that admirable
Defence of Rhyme which remains to this day one of
the most perfect examples of sound and temperate
sense, of pure style and just judgment, to be found
in the literature of criticism, has received, it may be,
not much less than his due meed of praise for those
Homeric labours by which his name is still chiefly
known : but what the great translator could accom-
plish when fighting for his own hand few students
of English poetry have been careful to inquire or
competent to appreciate.

And yet there are not many among his various
and unequal writings which we can open without
some sense of great qualities in the workman whose
work lies before us. There are few poets from whose

X5

16 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

remains a more copious and noble anthology of
detached beauties might be selected. He has a
singular force and depth of moral thought, a con-
stant energy and intensity of expression, an occa-
sional delicacy and perfection of fanciful or reflective
beauty, which should have ensured him a place in
the front rank at least of gnomic poets. It is true
that his " wisdom entangles itself in overniceness " ;
that his philosophy is apt to lose its way among
brakes of digression and jungles of paradox ; that
his subtle and sleepless ingenuity can never resist
the lure of any quaint or perverse illustration which
may start across its path from some obscure corner
at the unluckiest and unlikeliest time ; that the
rough and barren byways of incongruous allusion, of
unseasonable reflection or preposterous and grotesque
symbolism, are more tempting to his feet than the
highway of art, and the brushwood or the morass of
metaphysics seems often preferable in his eyes to
the pastures or the gardens of poetry. But from
first to last the grave and frequent blemishes of his
genius bear manifestly more likeness to the defor-
mities of a giant than to the malformations of a
dwarf, to the overstrained muscles of an athlete
than to the withered limbs of a weakling.

He was bom between Spenser and Shakespeare,
before the first dawn of English tragedy with the
morning star of Marlowe. Five years later that
great poet began a life more brief, more glorious and
more fruitful in proportion to its brevity than that
of any among his followers except Beaumont and
Shelley : each of these leaving at the close of some
thirty years of life a fresh crown of immortality to

GEORGE CHAPMAN 17

the national drama founded by the first-born of the
three. A few months more and Shakespeare was
in the world ; ten years further and Ben Jonson
had followed. This latter poet, the loving and
generous panegyrist of Chapman, was therefore
fifteen years younger than his friend ; who was thus
twenty years older than Fletcher, and twenty-seven
years older than Beaumont. All these immortals
he outlived on earth, with the single exception of
Jonson, who died but three years after the death of
the elder poet. No man could ever look round
upon a more godlike company of his fellows ; yet
we have no record of his relations with any of these
but Jonson and Fletcher.

The date of Chapman's birth is significant, and
should be borne in mind when we attempt to
determine his rank among the poets of that golden
age. From the splendid and triumphant example
of the one great poet whose popularity his earlier
years must have witnessed, he may have caught a
contagious love of allegory and moral symbolism ;
he certainly caught nothing of the melodious ease
and delicate grace which gave Spenser his supremacy
in the soft empire of that moonlight-coloured world
where only his genius was at home. Chapman's
allegories are harsh, crude, and shapeless ; for the
sweet airs and tender outlines and floating Elysian
echoes of Spenser's vision he has nothing to offer in
exchange but the thick rank mist of a lowland
inhabited by monstrous hybrids and haunted by
jarring discords. Behind Spenser came Sidney and
the Euphuists ; and in their schools neither Chapman
nor any other was likely to learn much good. The

18 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

natural defects and dangers of his genius were
precisely of the kind most likely to increase in the
contagion of such compan}^ He had received from
nature at his birth a profuse and turbid imagination,
a fiery energy and restless ardour of moral passion
and spiritual ambition, with a plentiful lack of taste
and judgment, and a notable excess of those precious
qualities of pride and self-reliance which are at once
needful to support and liable to misguide an artist
on his way of work.

The two main faults of the school of poets which
blossomed and faded from the brief flower of court
favour during the youth of Chapman were tedious
excess of talk and grotesque encumbrance of
imagery ; and Chapman had unhappily a native
tendency to the grotesque and tedious, which all
his study of the highest and purest literature in
the world was inadequate to suppress or to chasten.
For all his labours in the field of Greek transla-
tion, no poet was ever less of a Greek in style or
spirit. He enters the serene temples and handles
the holy vessels of Hellenic art with the stride
and the grasp of a high-handed and high-minded
barbarian. Nevertheless it is among the schools of
Greek poetry that we must look for a type of the
class to which this poet belongs. In the great age
of Greece he would have found a place of some
credit among the ranks of the gnomic poets, and
written much grave and lofty verse of a moral and
political sort in praise of a powerful conservative
oHgarchy, and in illustration of the public virtues
which are fostered and the public vices which are
repressed under the strong sharp tutelage of such

GEORGE CHAPMAN 19

a government. At the many-headed beast of de-
mocracy he would have discharged the keenest
arrows of his declamation, and sought shelter at
need from its advance behind the shield of some
tutelary Pittacus or Pisistratus.

What Pope said of Chapman's Homer may be
applied with a difference to his original poetry ; it
might not be inaccurate to say that he often writes,
not indeed as Homer, but as Theognis might have
written before he came to years of discretion. He
shows, we must admit, only in a few couplets or
brief paragraphs the pure and luminous charm of
perfect speech proper to a Greek moralist of the
elegiac school ; but he has more of a certain fire
and force of fancy than we should look for in a poet
of that order, where with far less of thick acrid
smoke there is also less real heat and flame per-
ceptible than struggles here through the fume and
fog of a Cimmerian style. The dialect of Chapman's
poems is undoubtedly portentous in its general
barbarism ; and that study of purer writers, which
might in another case have been trusted to correct
and chasten the turgid and fiery vigour of a bar-
barian imagination, seems too often to have encrusted
the mind with such arrogance and the style with
such pedantry as to make certain of these poems,
full of earnest thought, of passionate energy, of
tumid and fitful eloquence, the most indigestible food
ever served up to the guests of a man of genius by
the master of the feast.

Under no circumstances, probably, would Chap-
man have been always a pure and harmonious
writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form

20 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

the dark hard masses of his deep and ardent
thought, of uttering the weighty and noble things
he had to say in a fluent and lucid style ; but as
it was, he appears from first to last to have erected
his natural defects into an artificial system, and
cultivated his incapacities as other men cultivate
their faculties. " That Poesy should be as pervial
as oratory, and plainness her special ornament, were
the plain way to barbarism " : so he tells us at the
very outset of his career, in a letter of dedication
prefixed to the second of his published poems, and
containing several excellent reflections on the folly
of those who expect grave and deep matter of
poetry to be so handled that he who runs or lounges
need not pause or rouse himself to read.

" That energia, or clearness of representation,
required in absolute poems is not the perspicuous
delivery of a low invention ; but high and hearty
invention expressed in most significant and unaf-
fected phrase." That is admirably said ; but when
we turn to the practical comment supplied by the
poetry which illustrates this critical profession of
faith, we find it hard to stomach the preacher's
application of his text. In this same dedication,
which is well worth note and regard from all students
of Chapman — and with all his shortcomings we may
reasonably hope that the number of them will
increase, with the first issue of his complete works,
among all professed students of English poetry at
its highest periods — ^he proceeds to a yet more
distinct avowal of his main principle ; and it is
something to know that he had any, though the
knowledge be but too likely to depress the interest

GEORGE CHAPMAN 21

and dishearten the sympathy of a reader who but
for this assurance of design would probably have
supposed that great part of these poems had been
written in a chaotic jargon, where grammar, metre,
sense, sound, coherence, and relevancy are hurled
together on a heap of jarring and hurthng ruins,
rather because the author wanted skill or care to
write better than because he took pains to achieve
so remarkable a result by the observance of fixed
means for the attainment of a fixed purpose. It
should seem to be with maUce aforethought that he
sets himself to bring to perfection the qualities of
crabbed turgidity and barbarous bombast with
which nature had but too richly endowed him,
mingling these among many better gifts with so
cunning a hand and so malignant a liberality as well-
nigh to stifle the good seed of which yet she had not
been sparing. " There is no confection made to
last, but is admitted more cost and skill than
presently-to-be-used simples ; and in my opinion
that which being with a little endeavour searched
adds a kind of majesty to poesy is better than that
which every cobbler may sing to his patch. Ob-
scurity in affection of words and indigested con-
ceits is pedantical and childish ; but where it
shroudeth itself in the heart of his subject, uttered
with fitness of figure and expressive epithets, with
that darkness will I still labour to be shadowed."

This promise, we may add, was most religiously
kept ; but the labour was at least superfluous. To
translate out of the crude and incoherent forms of
expression in which they now lie weltering the
scholastic subtleties and metaphysical symbols which

22 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

beset the reader's diverted and distracted attention
at every step through the jungle of these poems,
and thus to render what he had to say into some
decent order and harmony, he would have found a
harder if a more profitable labour than to fling forth
his undigested thoughts and incongruous fancies in
a mass of rich inextricable confusion for them to
sift and sort who list. But this, we see, was far
enough from his purpose. He takes his motto from
Persius :

Quis leget haec ? Nemo, hercule, nemo ;
Vel duo vel nemo ;

and the label thus affixed to the forehead of one
volume might have served for almost any other of
his poems. His despair of a fit audience is less
remarkable than the bitter and violent expression
of his contempt for general opinion. " Such is the
wilful poverty of judgments, wandering like pass-
portless men in contempt of the divine discipline of
poesy, that a man may well fear to frequent their
walks. The profane multitude I hate, and only
consecrate my strange poems to those searching
spirits whom learning hath made noble, and nobility
sacred." And this is throughout his manner of
reference to the tastes and judgments of those
common readers in whose eyes he took such less
than little pains to make his work even passably
attractive that wc may presume this acrid tone of
angry contempt, half haughty and half petulant in
its endless repetition, to have had in it some salt of
sincerity as well as some underlying sense of conscious
failure in the pursuit of that success on the image or

GEORGE CHAPMAN 28

idea of which he turns and tramples with passionate
scorn. It is not usually till he has failed to please
that a man discovers how despicable and undesirable
a thing it would have been to succeed.

No student, however warm his goodwill and
admiration for the high-toned spirit and genius of
Chapman, v/ill be disposed to wonder that he found
cause to growl and rail at the neglect and distaste
of the multitude for his writings. Demosthenes,
according to report, taught himself to speak with
pebbles in his mouth ; but it is presumable that he
also learnt to dispense with their aid before he
stood up against ^Eschines or Hyperides on any
great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic
poet, on the other hand, before addressing such
audience as he may find, is careful always to fill his
mouth till the jaws are stretched wellnigh to bursting
with the largest, roughest, and most angular of
polygonal fiintstones that can be hewn or dug out
of the mine of human language ; and as fast as one
voluminous sentence or unwieldy paragraph has
emptied his mouth of the first batch of barbarisms,
he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to
a fresh delivery. I sincerely think and hope that
no poems with a tithe of their genuine power and
merit were ever written on such a plan or after
such a fashion as the Shadow of Night or Andro-
meda Liber ata of Chapman. It is not merely the
heavy and convulsive movement of the broken and
jarring sentences, the hurried broken- winded rhetoric
that seems to wheeze and pant at every painful
step, the incessant byplay of incongruous digressions
and impenetrable allusions, that make the first

24 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

reading of these poems as tough and tedious a task
for the mind as oakum-picking or stone-breaking
can be for the body. Worse than all this is the
want of any perceptible centre towards which these
tangled and ravelled lines of thought may seem at
least to converge. We see that the author has
thought hard and felt deeply ; we apprehend that
he is charged as it were to the muzzle with some
ardent matter of spiritual interest, of which he would
fain deliver himself in explosive eloquence ; we
perceive that he is angry, ambitious, vehement,
and arrogant ; no pretender, but a genuine seer or
Pythian bemused and stifled by the oracular fumes
which choke in its very utterance the message they
inspire, and for ever preclude the seer from becoming
properly the prophet of their mysteries :

We understand a fury in his words.
But not the words ;

and the fury which alone we understand waxes ten-
fold hotter at our incompetence to comprehend
what the orator is incompetent to express. He
foams at the mouth with rage through all the flints
and pebbles of hard language which he spits forth,
so to say, in the face of " the prejudicate and
peremptory reader " whose ears he belabours with
" very bitter words," and with words not less turgid
than were hurled by Pistol at the head of the
recalcitrant and contumelious Mistress Tearsheet :
nor assuredly had the poet much right to expect
that they would be received by the profane multitude
with more reverence and humility than was the
poetic fury of " such a fustian rascal " by that

GEORGE CHAPMAN 25

" honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman." The charge
of obscurity is perhaps of all charges the likeliest to
impair the fame or to imperil the success of a rising
or an established poet. It is often misapplied by
hasty or ignorant criticism as any other on the roll
of accusations ; and was never misapplied more
persistently and perversely than to an eminent
writer of our own time. The difficulty found by
many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from
a quality the very reverse of that which produces
obscurity properly so called. Obscurity is the
natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas ;
of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed
and chaotic intellect. Such a poet as Lord Brooke,
for example — and I take George Chapman and
Fulke Greville to be of all English poets the two
most genuinely obscure in style upon whose works
I have ever adventured to embark in search of
treasure hidden beneath the dark gulfs and crossing
currents of their rocky and weedy waters, at some
risk of my understanding being swept away by the
ground-swell — such a poet, overcharged with over-
flowing thoughts, is not sufficiently possessed by any
one leading idea, or attracted towards any one
central point, to see with decision the proper end
and use with resolution the proper instruments of
his design.

Now if there is any great quahty more percep-
tible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is
his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his
sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and
trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with
obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus

26 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the
telegraphic wire. He is something too much the
reverse of obscure ; he is too brilliant and subtle for
the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with
any certainty the track of an intelligence which
moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to
realize with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity
his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and
backward and forward as it lives along the animated
line of its labour, springs from thread to thread and
darts from centre to circumference of the glittering
and quivering web of living thought woven from the
inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled
from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He
never thinks but at full speed ; and the rate of his
thought is to that of another man's as the speed of
a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a
telegraph to that of a railway. It is hopeless to
enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his
writings except with a mind thoroughly alert, an
attention awake at all points, a spirit open and
ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's.

To do justice to any book which deserves any
other sort of justice than that of the fire or the
waste-paper basket, it is necessary to read it in the
fit frame of mind ; and the proper mood in which to
study for the first time a book of Mr. Browning's is
the freshest, clearest, most active mood of the mind
in its brightest and keenest hours of work. Read
at such a time, and not " with half-shut eyes falling
asleep in a half-dream," it will be found (in Chap-
man's phrase) " pervial " enough to any but a
sluggish or a sand-blind eye ; but at no time and in

GEORGE CHAPMAN 27

no mood will a really obscure writer be found other
than obscure. The difference between the two is
the difference between smoke and lightning ; and it
is far more difficult to pitch the tone of your thought
in harmony with that of a foggy thinker than with
that of one whose thought is electric in its motion.
To the latter we have but to come with an open and
pliant spirit, untired and undisturbed by the work
or the idleness of the day, and we cannot but receive
a vivid and active pleasure in following the swift
and fine radiations, the subtle play and keen vibra-
tion of its sleepless fires ; and the more steadily we
trace their course the more surely do we see that all
these forked flashes of fancy and changing lights of
thought move unerringly around one centre and
strike straight in the end to one point. Only
random thinking and random writing produce
obscurity ; and these are the radical faults of
Chapman's style of poetry. We find no obscurity in
the lightning, whether it play about the heights of
metaphysical speculation or the depths of character
and motive ; the mind derives as much of vigorous
enjoyment from the study by such light of the one
as of the other. The action of so bright and swift
a spirit gives insight as it were to the eyes and
wings to the feet of our own ; the reader's apprehen-
sion takes fire from the writer's, and he catches from
a subtler and more active mind the infection of
spiritual interest ; so that any candid and clear-
headed student finds himself able to follow for the
time in fancy the lead of such a thinker with equal
satisfaction on any course of thought or argument ;
when he sets himself to refute Renan through the

28 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

dying lips of St. John or to try conclusions with
Strauss in his own person, and when he flashes at
once the whole force of his illumination full upon
the inmost thought and mind of the most infamous
criminal, a Guido Franceschini or a Louis Bonaparte,
compelling the black and obscene abyss of such a
spirit to yield up at last the secret of its profoundest
sophistries, and let forth the serpent of a soul that
lies coiled under all the most intricate and supple
reasonings of self-justified and self-conscious crime.
And thanks to this very quaUty of vivid spiritual
ilfumination we are able to see by the light of the
author's mind without being compelled to see with
his eyes, or with the eyes of the living mask which
he assumes for his momentary impersonation of
saint or sophist, philosopher or malefactor ; without
accepting one conclusion, conceding one point, or
condoning one crime.

It is evident that to produce any such effect
requires above all things brightness and decision
as well as subtlety and pliancy of genius ; and
this is the supreme gift and distinctive faculty of
Mr. Browning's mind. If indeed there be ever
any likelihood of error in his exquisite analysis,
he will doubtless be found to err rather through
excess of light than through any touch of darkness ;
we may doubt, not without a sense that the fittest
mood of criticism might be that of a self-distrustful
confidence in the deeper intuition of his finer and
more perfect knowledge, whether the perception of
good or evil would actually be so acute in the mind
of the supposed reasoner ; whether, for instance, a
veritable household assassin, a veritable saviour of

GEORGE CHAPMAN 29

society or other incarnation of moral pestilence,
would in effect see so clearly and so far, with what-
ever perversion or distortion of view, into the
recesses of the pit of hell wherein he lives and moves
and has his being ; recognizing with quick and
delicate apprehension what points of vantage he
must strive to gain, what outposts of self-defence he
may hope to guard, in the explanation and vindica-
tion of the motive forces of his nature and the latent
mainspring of his deeds. This fineness of intellect
and dramatic sympathy which is ever on the watch
to anticipate and answer the unspoken imputations
and prepossessions of his hearer, the very movements
of his mind, the very action of his instincts, is
perhaps a quality hardly compatible with a nature
which we might rather suppose, judging from public
evidence and historic indication, to be sluggish and
short-sighted, " a sly slow thing with circumspective
eye " that can see but a little way immediately
around it, but neither before it nor behind, above it
nor beneath ; and whose introspection, if ever that
eye were turned inward, would probably be turbid,
vacillating, cloudy and uncertain as the action of a
spirit incapable of self-knowledge but not incapable
of self-distrust, timid and impenitent, abased and
unabashed, remorseless but not resolute, shameless
but not fearless.

If such be in reality the public traitor and
murderer of a nation, we may fairly infer that his
humbler but not viler counterpart in private life
will be unlikely to exhibit a finer quality of mind or
a clearer faculty of reason. But this is a question
of realism which in no wise affects the spiritual value

30 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

and interest of such work as Mr. Browning's. What
is important for our present purpose is to observe
that this work of exposition by sohloquy and
apology by analysis can only be accomplished or
undertaken by the genius of a great special pleader,
able to fling himself with all his heart and all his
brain, with all the force of his intellect and all the
strength of his imagination, into the assumed part
of his client ; to concentrate on the cause in hand
his whole power of illustration and illumination, and
bring to bear upon one point at once all the rays of
his thought in one focus. Apart from his gift of
moral imagination, Mr. Browning has in the supreme
degree the qualities of a great debater or an eminent
leading counsel ; his finest reasoning has in its
expression and development something of the ardour
of personal energy and active interest which inflames
the argument of a public speaker ; we feel, without
the reverse regret of Pope, how many a first-rate
barrister or parliamentary tactician has been lost in
this poet.

The enjoyment that Browning's best and most
characteristic work affords us is doubtless far other
than the delight we derive from the purest and
highest fomis of the lyric or dramatic art ; there is
a radical difference between the analyst and the
dramatist, the pleader and the prophet ; it would
be clearly impossible for the subtle tongue which
can undertake at once the apology and the anatomy
of such motives as may be assumed to impel or to
support a " Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau " on his
ways of thought and action, ever to be touched with
the fire which turns to a sword or to a scourge the

GEORGE CHAPMAN 31

tongue of a poet to whom it is given to utter as
from Patmos or from Sinai the word that fills all
the heaven of song with the lightnings and thunders
of chastisement. But in place of lyric rapture or
dramatic action we may profitably enjoy the unique
and incomparable genius of analysis which gives to
these special pleadings such marvellous life and
interest as no other workman in that kind was ever
or will ever again be able to give : we may pursue
with the same sense of strenuous delight in a new
exercise of intellect and interest the slender and
luminous threads of speculation wound up into a
clue with so fine a skill and such haii)py sleight of
hand in Fifine at the Fair or the sixth book of
Sordello, where the subtle secret of spiritual weakness
in a soul of too various powers and too restless
refinement is laid bare with such cunning strength
of touch, condemned and consoled with such far-
sighted compassion and regret.

This last-named poem has been held especially
liable to the charge which we have seen to be
especially inapplicable to the general work of its
author ; but although the manner of its construc-
tion should not seem defensible, as to me I may
confess that it does not, it would be an utter
misuse of terms to find in obscurity of thought
or language the cause of this perceptible defect.
The point of difference was accurately touched
by the exquisite critical genius of Coleridge when
he defined the style of Persius as " hard — not
obscure " : for this is equally true in the main of
the style of Sordello ; only the hard metal is of a
different quality and temper, as the intellect of the

32 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

English thinker is far wider in its reach, far subtler
in its action and its aim, than that of the Roman
stoic. The error, if I may take on myself to indicate
what I conceive to be the error, of style in Sordello
is twofold ; it is a composite style, an amalgam of
irreconcilable materials that naturally refuse to
coalesce ; and, like a few of the author's minor
poems, it is written at least partially in shorthand,
which a casual reader is likely to mistake for cipher,
and to complain accordingly that the key should be
withheld from him.

A curious light is thrown on the method of
its composition by the avowal put forth in the
dedication of a reissue of this poem, that since
its first adventure on publicity the writer had
added and had cancelled a notable amount of
illustrative or explanatory matter, preferring ulti-
mately to leave his work such a poem as the few
must like, rather than such as the many might.
Against this decision no one has a right to appeal ;
and there is doubtless much in the work as it stands
that all imaginative thinkers and capable students
of poetry most assuredly must regard with much
more than mere liking ; but when the reader is
further invited to observe that the sole aim kept in
sight, the sole object of interest pursued by the
author was the inner study of an individual mind,
the occult psychology of a single soul, the personal
pathology of a special intelligence, he has a right to
suggest that in that case there is too much, and in
any other case there is not enough, of external
illustration and the by-play of alien actions and
passions which now serve only to perplex the scheme

GEORGE CHAPMAN 33

they ought to explain. If it 'was the author's
purpose to give to his philosophic poem a back-
ground of historic action, to reheve against the
broad mass and movement of outer life the solitary
process of that inward and spiritual tragedy which
was the main occupation of his mind and art, to set
the picture of a human spirit in the frame of circum-
stances within which it may actually have been
environed and beset with offers of help, with threats
and temptations, doubts and prospects and chances
of the day it had on earth — if this were his purpose,
then surely there is not here enough of such relief
to illustrate a design which there is more than
enough of it to confuse. But if, as we are now
obhged to assume, the' author's purpose was stu-
diously and strenuously to restrict within the limits
of inner spiritual study the interest and the motive
of his work, to concentrate our attention with his
own upon the growth and the fortune, the triumph
and the failure, the light and the darkness of this
one human spirit, the soul of a man of genius fallen
upon evil days and . elect for great occasions and
begirt with strange perplexities, then surely there is
here far too much of external distraction and
diversion for the reader's mind even to apprehend
the issue, much less to comprehend the process, of
this inner tragic action. The poem, in short, is like
a picture in which the background runs into the
foreground, the figures and the landscape confound
each other for want of space and keeping, and there
is no middle distance discernible at all. It is but a
natural corollar^^ to this general error that the body
like the spirit of the poem, its form not less than its

c

84 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

thought, should halt between two or three diverse
ways, and that the style should too often come to
the ground between two stools or more ; being as it
is neither a dramatic nor a narrative style, neither
personal nor impersonal, neither lyric nor historic,
but at once too much of all these and not enough of
any. The result may be to the hasty reader no less
repellent than the result of obscurity in thought or
in style ; but from identit^r of effect we are not to
infer an identity of cause. The best parts of this
poem also belong in substance always and some-
times in form to the class of monodramas or solilo-
quies of the spirit ; a form to which the analytic
genius of Mr. Browning leads him ever as by instinct
to return, and in which alone it finds play for its
especial faculties and security against its especial
liabilities to error and confusion of styles ; a security
for want of which his lyric and dramatic writing is apt
to be neither dramatic nor lyrical, simply because-
of the writer's natural and inevitable tendency to
anatysis, which, by the nature of things as well as
by the laws of art, can only explain and express
itself either through the method of direct exposition
or in the form of elaborate mental monologue.

The whole argument of the sixth book is mono-
dramatic ; and its counterpart is to be sought in
the most dramatic and to me the most delightful
passage of equal length in the poem, the mag-
nificent soliloquy of Salingiierra in the fourth book,
full of the subtle life and reality and pathos which
the author, to speak truth as it seems to me,
too generally fails to transfer from monologue into
dialogue, to translate into the sensible action and

GEORGE CHAPMAN 85

passion of tragedy, or adequately to express in
fullness and fitness of lyric form. The finest and
most memorable parts of his plays not less than of
his poems are almost always reducible in their
essence to what I have called monodrama ; and if
cast into the monodramatic form common to all his
later writings would have found a better if not a
keener expression and left a clearer if not a deeper
impression on the mind. For one example, the
communing of old King Victor with himself on his
return to the palace he has resigned is surely far
more impressive and memorable to any reader than
the rest of the play where his character is exhibited
in the mutual action and reaction of dialogue
among characters who seem unable to say rightly
what they should say except when alone or secure
from interruption. Even Chapman, from whom I
may be thought to have wandered somewhat far in
this inquiry as to what is or is not properly definable
as obscurity, has in my judgment a sounder instinct
of dramatic dialogue and movement than the
illustrious writer who has carved out for himself in
the second period of his career a new and better way
to the end appointed bj^ nature for the exercise of
his highest powers : and Chapman was certainly
not remarkable among the great men of his day for
the specially dramatic bent of his genius.

I have dwelt thus long on a seemingly irrelevant
and discursive inquiry because I could discover no
method so fit to explain the nature of the fault I
cannot but find in the poet of whom I have to speak,
as by contrast of his work with the work of another,
upon whom this fault has been wrongly charged by

.36 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

the inaccurate verdict of hasty judges. In answer
to these I have shown that the very essence of Mr.
Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the
ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies
above all other things the possession of a quality the '
very opposite of obscurity — a faculty of spiritual
illumination rapid and intense and subtle as light-
ning, which brings to bear upon its central object
by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol
and every detail on which its light is flashed in
passing. Thus in Fifine the illustration derived
from a visionary retrospect of Venice, and in
Sordello the superb and wonderful comparison of the
mental action of a man who puts by for a season
the memories in which he has indulged for a moment
before turning again to the day's work, with that of
a fugitive slave who thinks over in a pause of his
flight and puts aside for more practical means of
revenge the thought of enchantments " sovereign to
plague his enemies," as he buckles himself again to
the grim business of escape — these and other such
illustrative passages are not more remarkable for the
splendour of their imaginative quality than for the
aptness of their cunning application and the direct
light reflected from them on the immediate argu-
ment which is penetrated and vivified thronghout
by the insinuation and exploration of its radiance.

Few poets, on the other hand, have been more
unsparing in the use of illustration than Chapman ;
he flings about similes by the handful, many of
them diffuse and elaborate in expression, most
of them curiously thoughtful and ingenious, not a
few of them eloquent and impressive ; but in

GEORGE CHAPMAN 37

many cases they tend rather to distract the attention
of the reader than to elucidate the matter of his
study. To his first poem, short as it is, Chapman
appends a glossary to explain the accumulated
allusions of a mythological kind, with this note at
the foot of it : " For the rest of his own invention,
figures and similes, touching their aptness and
noveltj^, he hath not laboured to justify them,
because he hopes -they will be proved enough to
justify themselves, and prove sufhciently authentical
to such as understand them ; for the rest, God help
them " (for the poet evidently will not), " I cannot
do as others, make day seem a lighter woman than
she is, by painting her." The poem is, however, rich
in fine verses which struggle into sight through the
vaporous atmosphere of bombast and confusion ; it
is thoughtful, earnest, eloquent, with interludes of
mere violent and dissonant declamation, and rarer
flashes of high and subtle beauty. The licentious
grammar and the shapeless structure of sentences
that break all bounds of sense or harmony are faults
that cannot be overlooked and must be condoned if
we care to get at the kernel underlying these outer
and inner husks of hard language. The same
comment may be applied to the poems which follow ;
but the second Hymn, being longer and more
discursive than the first, is more extravagant and
incoherent, and its allegory more confused and
difficult (whenever it is possible) to follow.

Whether or not there be as usual any reference to
Elizabeth and her court under the likeness of Cynthia
and her nymphs, or. any allusion to English matters
of contemporary interest, to perils and triumphs of

38 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

policy or war, in the " sweet chase " of the trans-
formed nymph Euthymia under the shape of a
panther or a boar by the hounds of the goddess
which pursue her into the impenetrable thicket
where the souls of such as have revolted from the
empire of Cynthia are held in bondage and torment,
and whence the hunters who hew themselves a way
into the covert are forced to recoil in horror, it is
easier to conjecture than to determine : but the
" fruitful island " to which the panther flies and
eludes the hounds who track her by scent should be
recognizable as England, " full of all wealth, delight,
and empery " ; though the sequel in which the
panther, turned into a huger boar than that of
Calydon, lays waste its " noblest mansions, gardens,
and groves " through which the chase makes way,
may seem now more impenetrable to human appre-
hension than the covert before described. Leaving,
however, to others, without heed of the poet's
expressed contempt for our "flesh-confounded souls,"
the task of seeking a solution for riddles to us
insoluble, we may note in this poem the first sign of
that high patriotic quality which, though common
to all the great of his generation, is more constantly
perceptible in the nobler moods of Chapman's mind
than in the work of many among his compeers.
Especially in the reference of one elaborate simile to
a campaign in the Netherlands, and the leadership
of the English forces by

War's quick artisan,

Fame-thriving Vere, that in those countries wan

More fame than guerdon,

we trace the lifelong interest taken by this poet in

GEORGE CHAPMAN 39

the fortunes of English fighting men in foreign wars,
and the generous impulse which moved him twenty-
eight years later, at the age of sixty-three, to plead
in earnest and fervent verses the cause of Sir Horatio
Vere, then engaged " with his poor handful of
English " in the " first act " of the Thirty Years'
War * (" besieged and distressed in Mainhem," Chap-
man tells us), in the ears of the courtiers of James I.
A quainter example of this interest in the foreign
campaigns of his countrymen may be found in the
most untimely intrusion of such another simile into
the third sestiad of Hero and Leandev.

Before 1 take in hand the examination of Chap-
man's works as a dramatist, I may sum up the best
and the worst I have to say of his earlier poems in
the remark that on a first plunge into their depths
even the reader most willing to accept and most
anxious to admire the firstfniits of a poet's mind
which he knows to have elsewhere put forth such
noble fruit as Chapman's will be liable to do them
less than justice until his own mind recovers from
the shock giverr to his taste by the crabbed and
bombastic verbiage, the tortuous and pedantic
obscurity, the rigidity and the laxity of a style
which moves as it were with a stiff shuffle, at once
formal and shambling ; which breaks bounds with
a limping gait, and plays truant from all rule
without any of the grace of freedom ; wanders
beyond law and straggles out of order at the halting
pace of age and gravity, and in the garb of a school-
master plays the pranks of a schoolboy with a
ponderous and lumbaginous licence of movement, at

* Carlyle's Frederick the Great, bk. iii, ch, xvi ; vol. i, p. 329.

40 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

once rheumatic and erratic. With the recovery will
probably come a reaction from this first impression ;
and the student will perhaps be more than sufficiently
inclined to condone these shortcomings in favour of
the merits they obscure at first sight ; the wealth
of imagery, the ardour of thought and feeling, the
grave and vigorous harmony of the better parts, and
the general impression left on us of communion with
a strong, earnest, high-minded man of genius, set
adrift without helm or rudder ; of lofty instincts
and large aspirations that run rather to leaf than to
fruit for want of an eye to choose their proper aim
and a hand to use the means to it aright. The
editor of the first and by no means the worst English
anthology has gathered from these poems, and
especially from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, large
handfuls of fine verses, which when thus culled out
and bound up into separate sheaves make a better
show than in the text where they lay entangled
among weeds and briers. There are beauties
enough lost in this thick and thorny jungle of
scholastic sensuality to furnish. forth a dozen or so
of pilfering poeticules with abundance of purple
patches to be sewn on at intervals to the common
texture of their style. It is with a singular sense
of jarring admiration and irritation that we find
couplets and quatrains of the most noble and
delicate beauty embedded in the cumbrous ore of
crude pedantic jargon : but those who will may find
throughout the two earliest publications of Chapman
a profusion of good verses thickly scattered among
an overgrowth of bad. The first poem, however,
which leaves us on the whole with a general and

GEORGE CHAPMAN 41

equable impression of content, is the small "epic
. song " or copy of verses on the second expedition to
Guiana. Here the poet has got clear of those erotic
subtleties and sensual metaphysics which were
served up at his " banquet " in such clumsy vessels
of the coarsest ware by the awkward and unwashed
hands of an amorous pedant, soiling with the ink
of the schools the lifted hem of the garment of love ;
he has found instead a fit argument for his genius in
the ambition and adventure of his boldest country-
men, and applied himself to cheer and celebrate
them " in no ignoble verse." The first brief para-
graph alone is crabbed and inflated in style ; from
thence to the end, with but slight breaks or jars, the
strong and weighty verse steps out with masculine
dignity, and delivers in clear grave accents its
cordial message of praise and good cheer.

At all times Chapman took occasion to approve
himself a true son of the greatest age of Englishmen
in his quick and fiery sympathy with the daring
and the suffering of its warriors and adventurers ; a
sympathy which found vent at times where none but
Chapman would have made room for it ; witness the
sudden and singular illustration, in his Epicede on
the death of Prince Henry, of the popular anguish
and dismay at that calamity by a " description of
the tempest that cast Sir Th. Gates on the Bermudas,
and the state of his ship and men, to this kingdom's
plight applied in the Prince's death." It has been
remarked by editors and biographers that between
the years 1574, at or about which date, according
to Anthony Wood, " he, being well-grounded in
school learning, was sent to the university," and

42 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

1594, when he published his first poem, we have no
trace or hint to guide us in conjecturing how his Hfe
was spent from fifteen to thirty-five. This latter
age is the least he can have attained by any com-
putation at the time when he put forth his Shadow
of Night, full of loud and angry complaints of
neglect and slight endured at the hands of an
unthankful and besotted generation ; it is somewhat
late in life for the first appearance of a poet, and the
poem then issued is a more crude and chaotic
performance than might be looked for from a writer
who has no longer the plea of. unripe age to put
forward in excuse of the raw green fruits which he
offers to the reader. Dr. Elze, in the learned and
ingenious essay prefixed to his edition of Chapman's
Alphonsus, points out that from the internal evidence
of that play " we are driven to the alternative
either of supposing Chapman to have been in
Germany or of allowing him a German partner "
(P- 33) > S'lid. a little before observes that " there is
ample room between his leaving the university
without a degree in 1576 or 1578 and his first
acknowledged publication in 1594 even for a length-
ened stay in Germany." In default of evidence we
might perhaps be permitted to throw out a guess
that the future poet had in his youth seen some
service and been possibly an eyewitness of some
part of the campaigns in the Low Countries to which
he refers in a manner showing his intimate acquaint-
ance with the details of an action on the " most
excellent river " Waal before " stately-sighted sconce-
torn Nimiguen," fought between the cavalry of " the
Italian Duke " and the English leader, Sir Francis

GEORGE CHAPMAN 43

or Sir Horatio Vere, who drew the enemy's horse,
by a feint made with his own, into an ambuscade
of infantry by which they were put to rout. Both
the text and the note appended show a wilhngness
to display this knowledge of the strategy and
geography of the skirmish with some ostentation of
precision ; his parting remark at the end of the
note has a tone of satisfaction in the discovery of a
new order of illustration. " And these like similes,
in my opinion, drawn from the honourable deeds of
our noble countrymen, clad in comely habit of poesy,
would become a poem as well as further-fetched
grounds, if such as be poets nowadays would use
them." He was not himself, as we have seen, over-
careful to use them at the right moment or turn
them to the most natural account ; but to the
principle here advanced he remained staunch in his
later writings.

It may be thought somewhat out of keeping
with the general reputation of Chapman as a re-
tired student of a grave and sober habit of life
that he should be supposed to have ever taken
any active part in a military campaign ; but those
were days when scholars and men of letters were not
uncommonly found apt for employment in matters
of war and policy, and gave good proof of a right to
claim their place among other servants of the state
for the performance of high patriotic duty ; nor,
unless we please, need we imagine Chapman to have
served personally as a volunteer in the English
ranks ; but it is reasonable to conceive that either
in person or by proxy he may have had special
opportunities of studying the incidents of war in the

44 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Netherlands, which he would evidently have been
mindful to make the most of and quick to put to
use. It is also possible that his relations with the
stage may have begun at an earlier date than has
yet been traced ; and as we know that in 1585,
when Chapman was twenty-six years old, Leicester
brought over to Holland a company of actors in his
train when he set sail as commander of the forces
dispatched from England to the support of the
States-General, and that others followed suit on
their own score in succeeding years, those who are
unwilling to allow him a chance of service as a
soldier may prefer to conjecture that he was drawn
to the seat of war by the more probable force of
some poetic or theatrical connexion with either the
general's first troupe of players or that which followed
in its track five years later. That these earlier
adventurers were succeeded by fresh companies in
1604 and 1605, and again forty years later, at an
unpropitious date for actors in England, eleven
years after the death of Chapman, I further learn
from an article in the Athenceum (Sept. 5, 1874)
on Herr von Hellwald's " History of the Stage in
Holland " ; and eight years later than the venture
of the second company of players in 1590 we find
Chapman classed by Meres among the best of our
tragic writers for the stage, and repeatedly entered
on Henslowe's books as debtor to the manager for
some small advance of money on future dramatic
work to be supplied to his company.

In any case it is remarkable that his first play
should not have been brought on the stage till the
poet was thirty-six, or published till he was rising

GEORGE CHAPMAN 45

forty ; an age at which most men, who might have
written such a play at sixteen, would have been
unwilling to expose it to the light. It is even a
more crude and graceless piece of work, if we con-
sider it as designed for the stage, than his first
venture of the preceding year if we regard it as
intended for the study. The plot is more childish,
though the language may be purer, than we find in
the rudest sketches of Greene or Peele, vv^hose day
was now well over ; and even for the firstfruits of
" a person of most reverend aspect, religious and
temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet," it
will be admitted that the moral tone of Chapman's
two earliest comedies is not remarkably high. The
first deals solely with the impossible frauds, pre-
posterous adulteries, and farcical murders committed
by a disguised hero who assumes the mask of as
many pseudonyms to perpetrate his crimes as ever
were assumed in Old or New Grub Street by a
prudent member of the libellous order of rascally
rhymesters to vent his villainies in shameful safety.
The story is beneath the credulity of a nursery, and
but for some detached passages of clear and vigorous
writing the whole work might plausibly have been
signed by any of the names under which a dunce of
the order above mentioned might think it wisest to
put forth his lyrics or his lies. In the better passages,
and noticeably in a description of jewels engraved
with figures of the gods, we catch a faint echo of
the " mighty line " in which Marlowe would lavish
on such descriptions the wealth and strength, the
majesty and the fancy, of his full imperial style.
The frank folly and reckless extravagance of

46 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

incident which appear to have won for Chapman's
first play the favour of an audience not remarkable,
it should seem, for captious nicety of critical taste
and judgment, are less perceptible in his second
venture ; but this also is a crude and coarse example
of workmanship. The characters are a confused
crowd of rough sketches, whose thin outlines and
faint colours are huddled together on a ragged
canvas without order or proportion. There is some
promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adulteress,
but it comes to little or nothing ; and the comedy
rather collapses than concludes in a tangle of
incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecencies.
The text is seemingly more corrupt than we find in
Chapman's other plays, which are generally exempt
from such gross and multitudinous misprints as
deform the early editions of many Elizabethan
dramatists ; their chief defect is the confusion and
the paucity of stage directions. In the opening
speech of An Humorous Day's Mirth, from the
fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, we must supply
with some such reading as this the evident hiatus of
sense and metre in the fifteenth :

But pure religion being but mental stufi.
And sense, indeed, [being] all * [but] for itself
'Tis to be doubted, etc.

The text and arrangement of the scenes throughout
this comedy require a more careful revision than has
yet been given ; since if the crudest work of a man

* Perhaps an adjective has here dropped out, and we might
read the hemistich thus' "all covetous for itself," or "careful,"
"curious," "gluttonous," any of which words would fit the
metre and suit the sense of the passage.

GEORGE CHAPMAN 47

of genius is not to be rejected from the list of his
writings in which it has once found place, it claims
at least so much of editorial care as may leave it in
a reasonably legible form.

It appears that in the same year which gave to
the press this loose and slipshod effort at a comedy,
the most perfect of Chapman's plays, though not
published till six years later, was completed for the
stage. The admirable comedy of All Fools is the
first work which bears full evidence of the vigorous
and masculine versatility, the force and freshness of
his free and natural genius. The dedication, which
seems to have been cancelled almost as soon as issued,
gives one of the most singular proofs on record of a
poet's proverbial inability to discern between his
worse and better work. The writer who ten years
before was so loud in his complaint of men's neglect
and so haughty in his claim on their attention for
his crudest and faultiest work now assures the friend
to whom he inscribes a poem of real excellence,

I am most loth to pass your sight

With any such-like mark of vanity.
Being marked with age for aims of greater weight

And drowned in dark death-ushering melancholy :

but for fear of piratical publishers who might print
" by stealth " an unauthorized and interpolated
edition, " without my passport, patched with others'
wit," he consents to " expose to every common eye "
what he calls

The least allowed birth of my shaken brain,

alleging as his excuse that " of two enforced ills I
elect the least " ; and with this most superfluous

48 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

apology he ushers in one of the most faultless
examples of high comedy to be found in the whole
rich field of our Elizabethan drama. The style is
limpid and luminous as running water, the verse
pure, simple, smooth and strong, the dialogue always
bright, fluent, lively, and at times relieved with
delicate touches of high moral and intellectual
beauty ; the plot and the characters excellently
fitted to each other, with just enough intricacy and
fullness of incident to sustain without relaxation or
confusion the ready interest of readers or spectators.
The play and counterplay of action by which all
the chief persons of the comedy trick and are tricked
by each other in turn might easily have become per-
plexed or excessive in less careful and skilful hands ;
but the lightness and dexterity of handling which
the poet has here for once manifested throughout
the whole development of his dramatic scheme
suffice to keep the course of the story clear and the
attention of the reader alert v\dthout involution or
fatigue : and over all the dialogue and action there
plays a fresh and radiant air of mirth and light swift
buoyancy of life which breathes rather of joyous
strength and high-spirited health than of the fumes
of " dark death-ushering melancholy " ; and as in
matter of fact death w^as not ushered by melancholy
or any other evil spirit into the stout presence of the
old poet till full thirt37-five years after the appearance
and twenty-nine years after the dedication of this
play, we may hopefully set down this malcontent
phrase to some untimely fit of spleen from which,
having thus given it vent, he soon shook himself
clear and struck his pen through the record of it. I

GEORGE CHAPMAN 49

find but one slight and characteristic blemish worth
noting in a comedy in which the proudest among
his great compeers might have permissibly taken
fresh pride ; it is that the final scene of discovery
which winds up the main thread and reconciles the
chief agents of the intrigue is somewhat hurriedly
dispatched, with too rapid a change of character
and readjustment of relations, to make room for a
thin-spun and wire-drawn sample of that tedious
burlesque declamation with which the author was
too prone to indulge a taste not likely to be shared
or relished by his readers for the minute dissection
of a dead jest, so dry that it crumbles into dust
under the scalpel of the anatomist. All the rest of
the comedy is so light, bright, and easy in all its
paces that we are the less disposed to tolerate the
stiffness and elaboration of this oratorical interlude.
But this is really the only spot or patch I can discover
on the jocund face of a delightful comic poem.

It is not impossible that the merit of pure and
lucid style which distinguishes the best comedies of
Chapman from the bulk of his other writings may
in part be owing to the slighter value set by the
author on the workmanship of these. By tempera-
ment and inclination he was rather an epic or tragic
than a comic poet ; and in writing verse of a tragic
or epic quality he evidently felt it incumbent on him
to assert the dignity of his office, to inflate and exalt
his style with all helps of metaphor and hyperbole,
to stiffen the march of his metre and harden the
structure of his language ; and hence he is but too
prone to rely at need on false props of adventitious
and barbaric dignity, to stmt on stilts or to swim

D

50 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

on bladders : whereas in writing for the comic stage
he was content to forget, or at least to forgo, this
imaginary dignity and duty ; he felt himself no
longer bound to talk big or to stalk stiffly, and in
consequence was not too high-minded to move easily
and speak gracefully. It is clear that he set no
great store by his comic talent as compared with
the other gifts of his genius ; of all his comedies two
only, All Fools and The Widow's Tears, have dedica-
tions prefixed to them, and in both cases the tone
of the dedication is almost apologetic in its slighting
reference to the slight worth of the work presented ;
a tone by no means to be ascribed in this case to a
general and genuine humility, since the dedications
prefixed to his various poems, and to two among his
tragedies published under his own eye, are remark-
able for their lofty and dignified self-assertion. The
fact that of these two tragedies, one. The Revenge of
Bussy d'Ambois, was apparently unsuccessful on the
stage, and the other, Ccesar and Pompey, seems never
to have obtained a chance of appearing on the
boards at all, may naturally have moved the author
to assert their right to respect and acceptance with
more studied emphasis than usual ; in the earlier
instance at least he is emphatic enough in his appeal
from the verdict of the " maligners " with whom he
complains that it met " in the scenical representa-
tion," to the " approbation of more worthy judg-
ments " which " even therein " it did not fail to
obtain ; and in the second case, though he appears
to apologize for the lack of " novelty and fashion "
in a play " written so long since " that it " had
not the timely ripeness of that age " (seventy-two)

GEORGE CHAPMAN 51

" that, I thank God, I yet find no fault withal for
any such defects," yet he is apparently and reason-
ably confident that the offering of his " martial
history " is one honourable alike to poet and to
patron. Both plays are rich in rhetorical passages
of noble eloquence ; but in all points of workmanlike
construction and dramatic harmony they are incom-
parably inferior to the better sort of his comedies.

The year of the publication of All Fools was
memorable to Chapman for a more hazardous
misadventure on a more serious stage than the
failure of a comedy on the boards, for which he had
to thank the merited success of a play whose strange
fortune it was to prove as tragical in its sequence as
merry in itself, thus combining in a new fashion the
two main qualities of Bottom's immortal interlude.
All readers will remember the base offence taken
and the base revenge threatened by the son of
Darnley or of Rizzio for a passing jest aimed at
those among his countrymen who had anticipated
Dr. Johnson's discovery of the finest prospect ever
seen by a native of Scotland ; none can forget the
gallantry with which Ben Jonson, a Scot by descent,
of whom it might have been said as truly as of the
greatest in the generation before him that he " never
feared the face of man," approved himself the like-
minded son of a Roman-spirited mother by coming
forward to share the certainty of imprisonment and
the probability of mutilation with the two comrades
who without his knowledge had inserted such perilous
matter into their common work ; and many will
wish with me that he had never borne a nearer and
less honourable relation to a king who combined

52 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

with the northern virulence and pedantry which he
may have derived from his tutor Buchanan a savour
of the worst quaUties of the worst ItaHans of the
worst period of Itahan decadence. It was worthier
of the great spirit and the masterful genius of
Jonson to be the subject of his tyranny than the
laureate of his court. Far more fitly, had such a
one then been born, would that office have been
filled by any scribbling Scot of the excremental
school of letters who might have sought and found
in his natural prince a congenial patron with whom
to bathe his sympathetic spirit in the pure morality,
while swimming with somewhat short strokes in
" the deep delicious stream of the Latinit}^" of
Petronius Arbiter. Such a Crispinulus or Crispi-
naccio would have found his proper element in an
atmosphere whose fumes should never have been
inhaled by the haughty and high-souled author of
the Poetaster ; and from behind his master's chair,
with no need to seek for fear if not for shame the
dastardly and lying shelter of a pseudonym which
might at a pinch have been abjured, and the respon-
sibility for its use shifted from his own shoulders to
those of a well-meaning but invisible friend, the
laurelled lackey of King James might as securely
have launched his libels against the highest heads of
poets to whom in that age all eyes looked up which
would have looked down on him, as ever did the
illustrious Latinist Buchanan against the mother
of the worthy patron whose countenance would
probably have sufficed to protect the meanest and
obscurest creature of his common and unclean
favour against all recrimination on the part of

GEORGE CHAPMAN 53

Shakespeare or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of
Webster, of Fletcher or of Chapman.

The comedy thus celebrated for the peril it
brought upon the ears and noses of its authors has
of itself merit enough to have won for writers of less
previous note a sufficient share of more enviable
celebrity. It is one of the most spirited and brilliant
plays belonging to that class of which the two most
famous examples are the Merry Wives of Windsor
and Every Man in his Humour ; and for life and
movement, interest and gaiety, it may challenge a
comparison even with these. All the actors in
Eastward Ho, down to the very slightest, such as the
drawer, the butcher's man, and the keeper of the
prison, have some quality and character of their
own which gives them a place in the comic action ;
and in no play of the time do we get such a true
taste of the old city life so often turned to mere
ridicule and caricature by playwrights of less good
humour, or feel about us such a familiar air of
ancient London as blows through every scene ; the
homely household of the rich tradesman, the shop
with its stall in front, the usurer's lodging, the
waterside tavern, the Thames wharves, stand out as
sharply as if etched by the pen of Dickens or the
needle of Whistler. The London of Hogarth, as set
before us in that immortal series of engravings for
which he is said to have taken the hint from this
comedy, does not seem nearer or more actual than
this elder London of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston ;
and the more high-flying genius of Frank Quicksilver
is as real and lifelike as the humbler debauchery
and darker doom of Tom Idle. The parts of Mistress

54 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Touchstone and Gertrude are worthy of Mohere in
his homeher mood ; and but for one or two momen-
tary indecencies dropped here and there to attest
the passage of Marston, the scenes in which they
figure would be as perfect and blameless examples
of pure broad comedy as any stage can show. The
fluttering and exuberant ambition of the would-be
C61imene or Millamant of the city is painted with
such delightful force and freshness, her imperial
volubility of contempt, the joyous and tremulous
eagerness with which she obeys the precept of the
Psalmist to " forget her own people and her father's
house," her alternate phases of gracious patronage
and overflowing obloquy, are so charming in the
buoyancy and fertility of their changes that we are
rejoiced when after the term of adversity so differ-
ently put to use by the prodigal daughter and the
profligate apprentice Frank and Gertrude are alike
restored to the favour of the excellent old citizen by
the kind offlces of his worthy son-in-law. Not only
have the poets given proof of a gentler morality and
a juster sense of justice than the great painter who
followed long after in the track of their invention,
but they have contrived even to secure our cordial
regard for the kindly virtues of the respectable and
industrious characters whose aim it is to rise by
thrift and honesty ; and we salute the promotion of
" Master Deputy's worship " to the proud office of
substitute for the alderman of his ward with a
satisfaction which no man surely ever felt in the
exaltation of Hogarth's Lord Mayor to sit in judg-
ment on his luckless fellow. The figures of Gertmde's
gallant knight and his crew of Virginian adventurers.

GEORGE CHAPMAN 55

whose expedition finally culminates in a drunken
shipwreck on the Thames, are as vivid and as
pleasant as any of these other studies ; and the
scenes in which the jealous usurer is induced by
the devices of Quicksilver and Sir Petronel to bring
his disguised wife into the company of her paramour
and reassure her supposed scruples with his pithy
arguments against conjugal fidelity, while he lets fly
at her supposed husband the well-worn jests which
recoil on his own head, have in them enough of wit
and humorous invention to furnish forth the whole
five acts of an ordinary comedy of intrigue. Even
in these sketches from the prosaic. life of their day
the great and generous poets of that age were as
prodigal of the riches of their genius as in the tragic
and romantic work of their higher moods. The
style of Chapman is perceptible in some of the best
of these scenes in the third act as well as in the moral
passage of metrical philosophy put into the lips of the
half-drowned Quicksilver in the fourth, where only
the last editor has taken note of his handiwork.

Two allusions in the mouth of the usurer, one
to " the ship of famous Draco," and one to the
camel's horns of which we hear something too often
from this poet, are in the unmistakable manner of
Chapman. Other such points might perhaps be
discovered ; but on the whole we may probably feel
safe in assigning to each of the three associates as
equal a share in the labour and the credit as they
bore in the peril entailed on them by a comedy which,
though disclaiming all unfriendly aim at rivalry
with one of similar title already familiar to the
stage, must probably and deservedly have eclipsed

56 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

the success of two plays not published till two
years later under cognate names by Decker and
Webster ; though the plot of Northward Ho is not
wanting in humour and ingenuity, and in Westward
Ho there is one scene of exquisite and incongruous
beauty in which we recognize at once the tender and
reckless hand which five years earlier had inserted
into the yet more inappropriate framework of the
Saiiromasiix as sweet an episode of seeming martyr-
dom and chastity secured under the shelter of a
sleep like death.

In his next play Chapman reassumed the more
poetical style of comedy which in Eastward Ho had
been put off for the plainer garb of realism. The
Gentleman Usher is distinguishable from all his other
works by the serious grace and sweetness of the
love-scenes, and the higher tone of feminine character
and masculine regard which is sustained throughout
the graver passages. Elsewhere it should seem that
Chapman had scorned to attempt or failed to achieve
the task of rousing and retaining the chief interest
of his reader in the fortune of two young lovers ; but
in this play he has drawn such a passionate and
innocent couple with singular tenderness and deli-
cacy. The broader effects of humour are comic
enough, though perhaps somewhat too much pro-
longed and too often repeated ; but the charm of
the play lies in the bright and pure quality of its
romantic part. The scene in which the prince and
Margaret, debarred by tyranny and intrigue from
the right of public marriage, espouse each other in
secret by a pretty ceremony devised on the spot, in
a dialogue of the wounded Strozza with the wife who

GEORGE CHAPMAN 57

has restored him to spiritual strength by " the sweet
food of her divine advice," are models of the simple,
luminous, and fervent style of poetry proper to
romantic comedy at its highest. A noble passage in
the fifth act of this play contains, as far as I know,
the first direct protest against the principle of
monarchy to be found in our poetical or dramatic
literature ; his last year's hazardous experience of
royal susceptibilities may not improbably have given
edge to the author's pen as it set down these ven-
turous lines in a time when as yet no king had been
taught, in the phrase of old Lord Auchinleck, that
he had a joint in his neck.

And what's a prince ? Had all been virtuous men.

There never had been prince upon the earth.

And so no subject : all men had been princes.

A virtuous man is subject to no prince.

But to his soul and honour ; which are laws

That carry fire and sword within themselves.

Never corrupted, never out of rule :

What is there in a prince that his least lusts

Are valued at the lives of other men.

When common faults in him should prodigies be.

And his gross dotage rather loathed than soothed ?

I should be surprised to find in any poet of
Chapman's age an echo of such clear and daring
words as these, which may suffice to show that the
oligarchic habit of mind to which I have before
referred in him was the fruit of no sycophantic
temper, no pliant and prostitute spirit, the property
of a courtier or a courtesan, but sprung rather from
pure intellectual haughtiness and a contempt for the
mob of minds. Nevertheless it is well worth remark

58 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

that such a deUberate utterance of republican
principle should then have been endured on the
stage ; that so loud a blast of direct challenge to
the dominant superstition of the day should have
been blown so near the court in the ears of a popular
audience by a poet who, though at no time chargeable
with any stain of venal or parasitic servility, was
afterwards the habitual and grateful recipient of
patronage from princes and favourites, and at all
times, it must be confessed, in" all his other works a
strenuous and consistent supporter of the tradition
of royalty against the conception of democracy.

The opening scene of Monsieur d'Olive, the next
on the list of Chapman's comedies, is one of the
most admirable in any play. More than once indeed
the author has managed his overture, or what in the
classic dialect of the old French stage was called
the exposition, with a skill and animation giving
promise of better things to come than he has pro-
vided ; as though he had spent the utmost art his
genius could command in securing the interest of his
audience at the first start, and then left it for chance
to support, letting his work float at will on the lazy
waters of caprice or negligence. No more impres-
sive introduction to a play could have been devised
than the arrival of the' chief person, newly landed in
high hopes and spirits from a long voyage, before
the closed gates and curtained casements of an old
friend's house, within which tapers are burning at
noon, and before which the master walks sadly up
and down, and repels his proffered embrace ; and
the whole scene following which explains the trouble
of one household and the mourning of another is a

GEORGE CHAPMAN 59

model of clear, natural, dignified dialogue, in which
every word is harmonious, appropriate, and noble.
The grace and interest of this exposition are more
or less well sustained during the earlier part of the
play ; but as the underplot opens out at greater
length, the main interest is more and more thrust
aside, cramped as it were for space and squeezed out
of shape, till at last it is fairly hustled into a comer
of the action to make way for the overwrought
fooleries of the gull d' Olive and the courtiers who
play upon his vanity ; and this underplot, diverting
enough in a slight way for one or two scenes, is
stretched out on the tenterhooks of farcical rhetoric
and verbose dialogue till the reader finds himself
defrauded of the higher interest which he was led to
expect, and wearied of the empty substitute which
the wajrwardness or indolence of the author has
chosen to palm off on him in its stead. Towards
the end indeed there is a profuse waste of good
points and promising possibilities ; the humorous
ingenuity of the devices so well contrived to wind
up together and in order the double thread of the
main plot is stinted of room to work in and display
its excellent quality of invention, and the final scene,
which should have explained and reconciled all
doubts and errors at large with no less force and
fullness of careful dramatic capacity than was
employed upon their exposition, is hastily patched
up and slurred over to leave place for a last super-
fluous exhibition of such burlesque eloquence as had
already been admitted to encumber the close of
another comedy, more perfect than this in construc-
tion, but certainly not more interesting in concep-

60 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

tion. In spite, however, of this main blemish in the
action. Monsieur d'Olive may properly be counted
among the more notable and successful plays of
Chapman.

Of his two remaining comedies I may as well say
a word here as later. Mayday, which was printed
five years after the two last we have examined, is
full of the bustle and justle of intrigue which may be
expected in such comedies of incident as depend
rather on close and crowded action than on fine or
forcible character for whatever they may merit of
success. There is no touch in it of romance or
poetical interest, but several of the situations and
dialogues may have credit for some share of vigour
and humour. But of these qualities Chapman gave
much fuller proof next year in the unchivalrous
comedy of The Widow's Tears. This discourteous
drama is as rich in comic force as it is poor in amiable
sentiment. There is a brutal exuberant fun through-
out the whole action which finds its complete
expression and consummation in the brawny gal-
lantry and muscular merriment of Tharsalio. A
speculative commentator might throw out some
conjecture to the effect that the poet at fifty-three
may have been bent on revenge for a slight offered
to some unseasonable courtship of his own by a lady
less amenable to the proffer of future fame than the
" belle marquise " who has the credit for all time to
come of having lent a humble ear to the haughty
suit and looked with a gracious eye on the grey hairs
of the great Comeille. But whether this keen on-
slaught on the pretensions of the whole sex to
continence or constancy were or were not instigated

GEORGE CHAPMAN 61

by any individual rancour, the comedy is written
with no little power and constructed with no little
ingenuity ; the metrical scenes are pure and vigorous
in style, and the difficulty of fitting such a story to
the stage is surmounted with scarcely less of dexterity
than of daring. The action of the last scene is again
hampered by the intrusion of forced and misplaced
humours, and while the superfluous underlings of
the play are breaking and bandying their barren
jests, the story is not so much wound up as huddled
up in whispers and by-play ; but it may certainly be
pleaded in excuse of the poet that the reconciliation
of the Ephesian matron to her husband was a some-
what difficult ceremony to exhibit at length and
support with any plausible or effectual explanation.
Two other titles are usually found in the catalogue
of Chapman's extant comedies ; but it seems to me
as difficult to discover any trace of Chapman in the
comedy of The Ball as of Shirley in the tragedy of
Chdbot. These two plays were issued by the same
printer in the same year for the same publishers,
both bearing the names of Chapman and Shirley
linked together in the bonds of a most incongruous
union : but I know not if there be any further
ground for belief in this singular association. The
mere difference in age would make the rumour of a
collaboration between the eldest of old English
dramatists and the latest disriple of their school so
improbable as to demand the corroboration of some
trustworthier authority than a bookseller's title-
page bearing date five years after the death of
Chapman. In the very next year a play was
published under the name of Fletcher, who had then

62 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

been fifteen years dead ; this play was afterwards
reclaimed by Shirley as the work of his own hand,
and of his alone ; nor is there any doubt that
Fletcher had not a finger in it. Of the authorship
of Chahot there can be no question ; the subject, the
style, the manner, the metre, the construction, the
characters, all are perfectly Chapman's. The Ball,
on the other hand, is as thoroughly in the lightest
style of Shirley, and not a bad example of his airily
conventional manner ; it is lively and easy enough,
but much below the mark of his best comedies, such
as The Lady of Pleasure (where an allusion to this
earlier play is brought into the dialogue), which but
for a single ugly incongruity would be one of the
few finest examples of pure high comedy in verse
that our stage could show against that of Moliere.
A foundling of yet more dubious parentage has been
fathered upon Chapman by the tradition which has
affixed to his name the putative paternity of " a
comical moral censuring the follies of this age,"
anonymously published in his sixty-first year. It
has been plausibly suggested that the title of this
wonderful medley, Two Wise Men and all the rest
Fools, was the first and last cause of its attribution
to the hand of Chapman, and that the error arose
from a confusion of this with the title of All Fools,
the best of Chapman's comedies. In any case it is
difficult to believe that this voluminous pamphlet in
the form of dialogue on social questions can have
been the work of any practised or professional
dramatist. It is externally divided into seven acts,
and might as reasonably have been divided into
twenty-one. A careful and laborious perusal of the

GEORGE CHAPMAN 63

bulky tract from prologue to epilogue, which has
enabled me in some measure to appreciate the
double scientific experiment of Mr. Browning on
" Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," emboldens me also
to affirm that it has no vestige of dramatic action,
no trace of a story, no phantom of a plot ; that the
reader who can believe the assertion of its title-page
that it was " divers times " or indeed ever " acted "
on any mortal stage by any human company before
any living audience will have a better claim to be
saved by his faith than the author by this sample
at least of his works ; that it contains much curious
and sometimes amusing detail on social matters of
the day, and is not wanting in broad glimpses or
intervals of somewhat clownish humour. In the
strong coarse satire on female Puritanism those who
will may discern touches which recall the tone if not
the handiwork of the author of An Humorous Day's
Mirth. The fact that several names occurring in the
course of the dialogue, though not in the long list
of marvellously labelled interlocutors, are anagrams
of the simplest kind, being merely common English
names spelt backwards, may be thought to indicate
some personal aim in this elaborate onslaught on
usurers, money-lenders, brokers, and other such
cattle ; and if so we have certainly no right to lay
an anonymous attack of the kind, even upon such
as these, to the charge of a poet who, so far as we
know, never published a line in his long life that he
feared to subscribe with his own loyal and honour-
able name. Such a one is not lightly to be sus-
pected of the least approach in form or substance to
the dirty tactics of a verminous pseudonymuncule,

64 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

who at the risk of being ultimately shamed into
avowal or scared into denial of his ignominious
individuality may prefer for one rascally moment
the chance of infamy as a slanderer to the certitude
of obscurit}^ as a scribbler.

Although, however, we may be inclined to allow
no great weight to the tradition current fifty-seven
years after the death of Chapman, which according
to Langbaine was at that date the only authority
that led him to believe in the general vague ascrip-
tion of this work to the poet under whose name it
has ever since found a questionable place in the
corners of catalogues at the tail of his authentic
comedies, the very fact of this early attribution
gives it a certain external interest of antiquarian
curiosity, besides that which it may fairly claim as
a quaint example of controversial dialectics on the
conservative side. The dialogues are not remarkable
either for Platonic skill or for Platonic urbanity ;
for which reason they may probably be accepted
with the more confidence as fairly expressive of the
average of opinion then afloat among honest English
citizens of the middle class, jealous of change,
suspicious of innovation, indignant at the sight of
rascality which they were slow to detect, much given
to growl and wail over the decay of good old times
and the collapse of good old landmarks, the degene-
racy of modern manners, and the general intolera-
bility of things in an age of hitherto unknown
perversity ; men of heavy-headed patience and
heavy-witted humour, but by no means the kind of
cattle that it would be safe for any driver to goad
or load overmuch. The writer may be taken as an

GEORGE CHAPMAN 65

exponent of Anglican conservatism if not of Catholic
reaction in matters of religious doctrine and disci-
pline ; he throws his whole strength as a dialectician
(which is not Herculean, or quite equal to his
evident goodwill) into the discussion of a proposal
to secularize the festivals and suppress the holidays
appointed by the Church ; and the ground of his
defence is not popular but clerical ; these holidays
are to be observed not for the labourer's but for the
saint's sake ; and above all because our wiser fore-
fathers have so willed it, for reasons which we are
in duty bound to take on trust as indisputably more
valid than any reasoning of our own. He has a
hearty distrust of lawyers and merchants, and a
cordial distaste for soldiers and courtiers ; his
sentiments towards a Puritan are those of Sir
Andrew Aguecheek, his opinion of an agitator is
worthy of a bishop, and his view of a demagogue
would do honour to a duke.

A very different work from the effusion of this
worthy pamphleteer bears likewise, or at least has
once borne, the dubious name of Chapman. This is
a tragic or romantic drama without a title of its
own, labelled it should seem for the sake of con-
venience by the licencer of plays as a " second
Maiden's Tragedy." It was first printed in 1824
with a brief note of introduction, from which we
learn that the manuscript was originally inscribed
with the name of William Goughe ; that Thomas
was then substituted for William, while a third
Goughe, Robert, seems to have figured as one of the
principal actors ; that a second correction struck out
either Goughe at one sweep of the pen, and sup-

E

66 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

planted both names by that of George Chapman ;
and that last of all this also was erased to make way
for no less a claimant than William Shakespeare.
To this late and impudent attempt at imposture no
manner of notice need be accorded ; but the claim
preferred for Chapman deserves some attention from
all students of our dramatic poetry. In style and
metre this play, which bears the date of his fifty-
third year (1611), is noticeably different from all his
acknowledged tragedies, one only excepted ; but it
is not more different from the rest than this one,
which, though not published till twenty years after
the death of Chapman, has never yet been called in
question as a dubious or spurious pretender to the
credit of his authorship. And if, as I am unwilHng
to disbelieve. Chapman was actually the author of
Revenge for Honour, one serious obstacle is cleared
out of the way of our belief in the justice of the
claim advanced for him to this play also.

Not that the two can be said to show many or grave
points of likeness to each other ; but between all other
tragedies assigned to Chapman such points of inti-
mate resemblance do undoubtedly appear, while the
points of unhkeness between any one of these and
either of the plays in question are at once as many
and as grave. Of the posthumous tragedy I purpose
to say a word in its turn ; meantime we may
observe that it is not easy to conjecture any motive
of interest which might have induced a forger of
names to attribute an illegitimate issue of this kind
to Chapman rather than to another. His name was
probably never one of those whose popularity would
have sufficed to float the doubtful venture of a

GEORGE CHAPMAN 67

spurious play. To Shakespeare or to Fletcher it
was of course a profitable speculation for knavish
booksellers to assign the credit or discredit of any
dramatic bantling which they might think it but
barely possible to leave undetected at the door of
such a foster-father, or to pass off for a time on the
thickest-witted of his admirers as a sinful slip of the
great man's grafting in his idler hours of human
infirmity. But if there was in effect no plea for the
intrusion of such a changeling into the poetic house-
hold of Chapman, whose quiver was surely full
enough without the insertion of a stranger's shaft,
the gratuitous selection of this poet as sponsor for
this play appears to me simply unaccountable. No
plausible reason can as far as I see be assigned for
the superscription of Chapman's name in place of
the cancelled name of Goughe, unless the writer did
actually believe that the genuine work of George
Chapman had been wrongly ascribed to Thomas or
William Goughe ; whereas no reader of the play will
imagine it possible that the name of Shakespeare
can have been substituted in good faith and single-
ness of heart by a corrector honestly desirous of
repairing a supposed error.

Again, if the doubtless somewhat fragile claim of
Chapman be definitely rejected, we find hitherto no
other put forward to take its place. The author of
Death's Jest-hook, in that brilliant correspondence on
poetical questions which to me gives a higher view of
his fine and vigorous intelligence than any other section
of his literary remains, reasonably refuses to admit a
suggestion that the authorship of this nameless and
fatherless poem might be ascribed to Massinger.

68 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

" The poisoning and painting is like him, but also
like Cyril Toiirneur ; and it is too poetical for old
Philip." He might have added that it is also far
too loose and feeble in construction for the admirable
artist of whom Coleridge so justly remarked that his
plays have the interest of novels ; but Beddoes,
whose noble instinct for poetry could never carry
him in practice beyond the production of a few lofty
and massive fragments of half-formed verse which
stand better by themselves when detached from the
incoherent and disorderly context, was apparently
as incapable of doing justice to the art of Massinger
as of reducing under any law of harmony to any
fitness of form his own chaotic and abortive concep-
tions of a plot ; for the most faithful admirer of that
genius which is discernible beyond mistake in certain
majestic passages of his blank verse must admit that
his idea of a play never passed beyond the embrj^onic
stage of such an organism as that upon which he
conferred the gift of lyric utterance in his best and
favourite song, and that his hapless dramatic off-
spring was never and could never have been more
than " a bodiless childful of life in the gloom, Crying
with frog voice, What shall I be ? "

Perhaps too for him the taint of Clifford's patronage
was still on Massinger, and the good offices of that
rancorous pedant may have inclined him to under-
value the worth of a poet announced and accompanied
by the proclamation of such a herald. This connexion,
fortunate as in one way it was for the dramatist to
whose works it secured for ever a good and trust-
worthy text admirably edited and arranged, was
unfortunate in its influence on the minds of men

GEORGE CHAPMAN 69

who less unnaturally than unjustly were led to
regard the poet also with something of the distaste
so justly and generally incurred by his editor. This
prepossession evidently inflamed and discoloured the
opinions of the good Leigh Hunt, who probably
would under no conditions have been able adequately
to estimate the masculine and unfanciful genius of
such writers as Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Ford ;
and a like influence may not impossibly have dis-
turbed the far surer judgment and affected the far
finer taste of a student so immeasurably superior to
either Hunt or Beddoes in the higher and rarer
faculties of critical genius as Charles Lamb, To
Massinger at least, though assuredly not to Ford
(who had not yet been edited by Gifford when Lamb
put forth his priceless and incomparable book of
" Specimens "), the most exquisite as well as the
most generous of great critics was usually somewhat
less than liberal, if not somewhat less than just.

But what is most notable to me in the judgment
above cited from the correspondence of Beddoes is
that he should have touched on the incidental point
of action which this anonymous play has in common
with The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duke of Milan,
and should also have remarked on the poetical or
fanciful quality which does undoubtedly distinguish
its language from the comparatively unimaginative
diction of Massinger, without taking further account
of the general and radical dissimilarity of workman-
ship which leaves the style of this poem equidistant
from the three se"\ieral styles of the sober Philip, the
thoughtful George, and the fiery Cyril. It is singular
that the name of a fourth poet, the quality of whose

70 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

peculiar style is throughout perceptible, should have
been missed by so acute and well-read a student of
our dramatic poetry. The style is certainly and
equally unlike that of Chapman, Massinger, or
Tourneur ; but it is very like the style of Middleton.
The combination of the plots is as pitifully incon-
gruous and formless, the movement of the metre as
naturally sweet and fluent, the pathos of the situa-
tions as occasionally vivid and impressive, the play
of the fancy as generally dehcate and unaffected, as
in the best or the worst works of the fitful and
powerful hand which gave us The Changeling and
The Witch, The Spanish Gipsy and Women beware
Women. Were there but one grain of external
evidence, though light as that which now inclines
the scale of probabilities in favour of Chapman, I
should not hesitate in assigning to it the workman-
ship of this poem also ; but as even such a grain of
proof or of likelihood as this is wanting, we may
remark one or two points in which a resemblance
may be traced to the undoubted handiwork of
Chapman ; such as a certain grotesque abruptness
and violence in some of the incidents ; for example,
the discharge of a pistol at the father of the heroine
from the hand of her lover, by which that " ancient
sinner " is " but mocked with death " ; a semi-
burlesque interlude in a scene of tragic interest and
prelude to a speech of vivid eloquence, which may
recall the sudden and random introduction of deeds
of violence into the action in some of Chapman's
plays, as, for instance, the two attempts at murder
in The Gentleman Usher, where, though the plot is
neither ill devised nor ill arranged, yet some excesses

GEORGE CHAPMAN 71

and singularities in the leading incidents are at once
perceptible and pardonable ; and again, the manner
of the ghost's reappearance at the close, where a
disembodied spirit takes part in the stage business
with all the coolness and deliberation of a living
actor, and is apparently received among the com-
pany with little more sign of disturbance or surprise
than if she were not confronted with her own dead
body, can only be paralleled in Chapman's Bussy
d'Ambois or the Death's Jest-book of Beddoes, in each
of which a leading part is filled throughout the later
scenes by a ghost who takes his full share of the
action and the dialogue, and may be said to make
himself generally and creditably useful, without
exciting the slightest remark or perturbation among
his fleshly fellows of the scene. The quaint mate-
rialism of these realistic and too sohd spectres, who
show no sign and no desire of dissolution by melting
into air or evaporating into dew, has in it nothing
of the fine imagination which raises the supernatural
agencies employed by the author of The Witch into
a middle region of malign and monstrous life as far
above the common ground of mere prosaic phantoms
as below the dark aerial height at which Shakespeare
has clothed the forms with clouds and winged with
winds the feet of the weird sisters. Nevertheless,
both in Bussy d'Ambois and in this " second Maiden's
Tragedy " (as the Master of the Revels has some-
what inaptly labelled it), the first introduction of
ghostly agency is impressive : and the scene in this
latter where the sleep of the dead is first disturbed
and her tomb violated by the passion of the baffled
tyrant is well worthy of the praise it has received

72 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

for the choice simplicity and earnest sweetness of
style which j^et hardly distinguish it above many
other scenes and passages in this beautiful and
singular poem, the story of whose fate has proved
as strange and as fantastic as the incidents of its
plot.

The first of Chapman's historic tragedies was
published at the age of forty-eight, and stands now
sixth on the list of the plays in which he had the
help of no partner. He never wrote better and he
seldom wrote worse than in this only play of his
writing which kept any firm and durable hold on
the stage. The impression made on Dry den by its
" glaring colours " in the representation, and the
indignant reaction of his judgment " in the reading,"
are probably known to more than have studied the
work by the light of their own taste.

All his vituperation is well deserved by such excerpts
as those which alone Sir Walter Scott was careful to
select in his editorial note on this passage by way of
illustration ; not even the sharpest terms in the
terrible and splendid arsenal of Dryden's satire can
be too vivid or too vigorous in their condemnation
of the damnable jargon in which the elder poet was
prone to indulge his infirmity ; whole sections of his
poems and whole scenes of his plays are indeed but
shapeless masses of bombast and bulky vacuity, with
nothing better in them than most villainous " incor-
rect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry
and true nonsense ; or at best a scantling of wit,
which lies gasping for life and groaning beneath a
heap of rubbish." The injustice of the criticism lies
only in the assertion or implication that there was

GEORGE CHAPMAN 78

nothing discoverable on all Chapman's ground but
such cinder-heaps and windbags ; whereas the pro-
portion of good to bad in this very play of Bussy
d'Ambois is enough to outweigh even such demerits
as it doubtless shares with too much of its author's
work. There is a bright and fiery energy through-
out, a vigour of ambitious aspiration, which is
transmitted as it were by echo and reflection from
the spirit of the poet into the spirit of his hero. The
brilliant swordsman of the court of Henri III, who
flashes out on us as the joyous central figure of one
of the most joyous and vigorous in all the bright list
of those large historic groups to which the strong
swift hand of Dumas gave colour and life, has
undergone at the heavier hand of the old English
poet a singular transfiguration. He is still the
irresistible duellist and amorist of tradition ; but
instead of the grace and courtliness proper to his
age and rank. Chapman has bestowed on him the
grave qualities of an epic braggart, whose tongue is
at least as long as his sword, and whose gasconades
have in them less of the Gascon than of our "■ Homer-
Lucan " himself, who with all his notable interest in
the France of his time and her turbulent history had
assuredly nothing of the lighter and more gracious
characteristics of French genius. But in the broad
full outline of this figure, and in the robust handling
of the tragic action which serves for environment or
for background to its haughty and dilated propor-
tions, there is more proof of greatness than Chapman
had yet given. His comic or gnomic poetry may
be better or at least less faulty in its kind, but in
that kind there is less room for the growth and

74 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

display of those greater qualities which not infre-
quently struggle through the hot and turbid atmos-
phere of his tragic writing, and show by a stormy
and cloudy illumination the higher reaches of his
real genius. Nor is there in these rugged outlying
highlands of tragedy, and in the somewhat thick
and troubled air of the brooding skies above them,
no beauty perceptible but the beauty of cloud and
flame, of flood and fell : they have intervals of pure
sunshine and soft greensward, interludes of grave
and tender harmony, aspects of deep and serene
attraction. There is a noticeable abruptness and
want of ease in the disposal of the incidents, as
though the workman were not yet well broken in to
his business ; and in effect Chapman never did learn
to run with perfect ease and grace in tragic harness.
Yet if his tragedies were erased from the roll of his
works, and only the most perfect of his comedies
and the better portions of his other poems were left
for our judgment, the sentence that we should then
have to pass would assuredly assign him a much
lower place among English poets than he now may
rightly claim to hold. A greater and a faultier genius
finds expression in these tragic poems than in the
more general and equable excellence of even his best
comic or romantic plays.

The first in order of these, especially at first sight,
is beyond question the most effective in point of
dramatic interest. With all its tumid and turbid
exuberance of speech, the action of this play never
actually halts or flags. There is no depth or
delicacy of character discernible in any of the leading
parts ; in some cases indeed it is hard at first to

GEORGE CHAPMAN 75

determine whether the author meant to excite the
sympathies or the antipathies of his audience for a
good or for a bad character ; the virtue of the
heroine collapses without a touch, and friends and
foes change sides with no more reason shown than
that the figure of the dance requires it. But the
power of hand is gigantic which shifts and shuffles
these puppets about the board ; there are passages
of a sublime and Titanic beauty, rebellious and
excessive in style as in sentiment, but full of majestic
and massive harmony. The magnificent speech of
the hero, stricken to death and leaning on his sword
to die, has been often quoted, and as a sample of
fiery imagination clothed in verse of solemn and
sonorous music it can never be overpraised ; the
inevitable afterthought that the privilege of tragic
poetry to exceed the range of realism is here strained
to the utmost and beyond it will recur on reading
many of the most memorable passages in these plays,
where the epic declamation of the speaker breaks
the last limit of law to attain the last limit of licence
possible to a style which even in outward form keeps
up any pretence of dramatic plausibility. Any child
may see and object that no man ever died with
such a funeral oration on his lips ; but any critic
qualified to judge of such a poet in his strength and
his weakness will temper the reflection with admira-
tion of " that full and heightened style " which the
third among English tragic poets has applauded in
the tragedies of Chapman. The height indeed is
somewhat giddy, and the fullness too often tends or
threatens to dilate into tumidity ; sometimes the
foot slips and the style stumbles heavily from its

76 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

height, while for its fullness we find but the empti-
ness of a burst bladder ; but while the writer's head
remains clear and his hand sure, the high air of this
poetry is fresh and buoyant, and its full cadences
have in them a large echo as of mountain winds and
waters. And if Webster, with the generous justice
proper to a great fellow-craftsman in the highest
guild of art, was able to condone the manifest abuse
in Chapman's work of rhetoric and mere poetry,
those may well be content to do likewise who bear
duly in mind the admirable absence of any such
defect from the vivid and intense veracity of his
own.

If the union of active interest with superb decla-
mation may suffice to explain the prolonged good
fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards,
we can discover no such pretext to account for the
apparent favour shown to his next venture in the
same field. It has no passage comparable for force
and vehemence of imagination to the highest moods
of the author of Bussy d'Ambois ; to the second
evocation of the spirit in a speech of which Lamb
said well that it was " tremendous, even to the
curdling of the blood ; I know nothing in poetry
like it " ; nor to the dying appeal of Bussy to his
own surviving fame, or the sweet and weighty verses
of invocation in which his mistress adjures " all the
peaceful regents of the night " to favour the first
meeting of the lovers. It is disfigured by no such
bloated bombast and animated by no such theatrical
changes of effect, such sudden turns and sharp
surprises, as fit the earlier play to catch the eyes
and ears of an audience more impressible than

GEORGE CHAPMAN 77

critical. It has no such violent interlude of action
and emotion as the scene in which Montsurry
(Monsoreau) extorts by torture the confession of her
guilt from the bleeding hand of his wife, an incident
which singularly enough recalls a similar scene in
the earliest play of the great French improvisatore
who has told in such different fashion the story of
the ambuscade by which Bussy fell under the weight
of treacherous numbers ; though Dumas, in accor-
dance, I believe, with all tradition, assigns to the
Duke of Guise the brutal act of force by which his
wife was compelled to allure her lover into the snare
set by her husband ; whereas the English poet has
not only altered the persons of the agent and
patient, but has increased the means of compulsion
from a pinch on the arm to the application of the
rack to a body already mangled by such various
wounds that the all but unparalleled tenacity of life
in the victim, who reappears in the last scene not
perceptibly the worse for these connubial endear-
ments, is not the least notable in a series of wonders
among which we scarcely make account of the
singular part assigned to " the affable familiar
ghost " which moves so freely among the less
incorporeal actors. To the tough nerves and
vigorous appetite of the original audience this scene
was no doubt one of the most acceptable in a closing
act as remarkable for the stately passion of the style
as for the high poetic interest of thought and action.
Of these two qualities we find but one, and that the
less dramatic, in the next work of the poet. No
poem, I suppose, was ever cast in dramatic form
which appealed so wholly to the pure intellect. The

78 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

singleness of purpose and the steadiness of resolution
with which the poet has pursued his point and for-
borne all occasions to diverge from his path to it
have made his work that which it is ; a sculptured
type and monument of his high and austere genius
in the fullness of its faculties and the ripeness of its
aims. The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke
of Byron, Marshal of France, a small epic in ten
books or acts, is the noblest memorial we have of its
author's original powers. Considered from the point
of view it requires us to assume if we would do any
justice to the mind which conceived and the hand
which completed such a design, it is a wholly great
and harmonious work of genius. Here for once not
a note is out of tune, not a touch is out of keeping ;
the very inflation of the style is never the inflation
of vacuity ; its majesty is no longer tumid, and its
elevation is no longer insecure. This at least has a
right to be counted for ever among the classic works
of English poetry. We close the book at last with
a full and satisfied sense of severe delight in the
deep inner music which sounds on in the mind's ear
after study of the thought and passion which inform
it. The height and the harmony of this poem are
equal forces in the composition of its excellence ;
the height of its conception and the harmony of its
completion were alike needed to do justice to such
lofty thought and such profound passion as it was
called upon to handle and to sound. The strength
and wealth of intelligence and of language from the
opening of the first act to the close of the tenth
show not a sign anjrvvhere of possible exhaustion or
inadequacy to the large demands made on them by

GEORGE CHAPMAN 79

the poet's high design. But that such a poem
should ever have been " acted in two plays at the
Blackfriars and other public stages " must seem to
us one of the strangest records in theatrical history.
Its appearance on any boards for a single night
would have been remarkable enough ; but its
reappearance at various theatres is all but incredible.
The standard of culture and the level of intelligence
required in its auditors surpass what we can conceive
any theatrical audience to have attained in any
modern age. It is not merely that the hearer or
spectator of such a poem in action would have to
follow an unbroken line of high thought and lofty
language without interlude or relief worth mention-
ing of lower or lighter material ; he would have to
forgo all points of interest whatever but the satis-
faction of the pure intelligence. There is endless
repetition with absolutely no progress ; infinite
effusion of speech without one break of material
incident. Even the subtle action and reaction of
the mind, the ebb and flow of spiritual forces, the
coming and going of intellectual influences, are not
here given with the strength and cunning of such a
master's hand as might secure and sustain the
interest of a student in tracing their various move-
ments by the light of his guidance ; those movements
are too deep and delicate for the large epic touch of
Chapman to pursue with any certitude. A few
strong broad strokes often repeated suffice to com-
plete the simple and vigorous outline which is all he
can give us of a character. It has been observed
that the portrait of the traitor marshal " is overlaid
with so many touches that the outline is completely

80 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

disguised " ; but as none of these are incongruous,
none mistimed or misplaced, we may reply that it is
of the very essence of this character to express its
passion with such effusion and exuberance of verbal
energy that the very repetition and prolongation of
these effects tend rather to heighten than to weaken
the design, to intensify than to impair the impression
of the weakness and the force of the mind that thus
pours itself out and foams itself away in large and
swelling words. The quality of pathos is not among
the dominant notes of Chapman's genius ; but there
is pathos of a high and masculine order in the last
appeals and struggles of the ruined spirit and the
fallen pride which yet retain some trace and likeness
of the hero and the patriot that has been, though
these be now wellnigh erased and buried under the
disgrace of deeds which have left nothing in his place
but the ruins of a braggart and a traitor. Upon the
two high figures of the marshal and the king Chap-
man has expended his utmost power ; and they
confront each other on his page in gigantic outline
like two studies of a great sculptor whose work is
never at its best but when it assumes the heroic
proportion of simple and colossal forms. There is
no growth or development in cither character ;
Chapman is always least happy when he tries his
prentice hand at analysis ; he only docs well when
as here he brings before us a figure at once full-grown,
and takes no care but to enforce the first impression
by constant deepening of the lines first drawn, not
by addition of fresh light and shade, by softening
or heightening of minor tones and effects. The high
poetic austerity of this work as it now stands is all

GEORGE CHAPMAN 81

the more striking from the absence of any female
element ; the queen appears in the fourth act of the
second part as little more than a dumb figure ; the
whole interest is political, and the whole character
is masculine, of the action and the passion on which
the poet has fixed our attention and concentrated
his own. A passage now cancelled in which the
queen and Mademoiselle de Verneuil were brought
forward, and the wife gave the mistress a box on
the ear, had naturally drawn down a remonstrance
from the French ambassador who saw the domestic
life of his master's court presented with such singular
frankness of exposition to the contemporary eyes of
London pla^'goers ; and at his instigation the play
was not unreasonably prohibited, by an act of
censorship assuredly not so absurd or so arbitrary as
in our own day has repeatedly exposed the direction
of the English stage to the contempt and compassion
of civilized Europe ; which has seen at once the
classical and the contemporary masterpieces of Italy
and of France, and among them the works of the
greatest tragic dramatist whom the world has seen
since the death of vShakespeare, forbidden by the
imperial mandate of some Lord Chamberlain or
other Olympian person to corrupt the insular chastity
of an audience too virtuous to face the contamination
of such writers as Hugo or Alficri ; while the virtue
thus tenderly guarded from the very sight of a
Marion or a Mirra was by way of compensation —
there is a law of compensation in all things —
graciously permitted by leave of official examiners
and under favour of a chaste Chamberlain to gloat
upon the filthiest farces that could be raked from

F

82 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

the sweepings of a stage whose national masterpieces
were excluded from our own. But it is only proper
that the public virginity which averts her eyes from
the successors of Euripides or of Shakespeare should
open her bosom to the successors of Wycherley and
Mrs. Behn. In the time of Chapman the Master of
the Revels wielded with as fitful a hand as imperious
an authority as any court official of later date ; yet
then also there was so curious and scandalous an
alternation of laxity with rigour in the direction of
stage affairs that in the teeth of a direct prohibition
the players, " when they saw that the whole court
had left town, persisted in acting " the suppressed
play with all the offending parts revived for the
satisfaction of an audience of citizens whose un-
courtly suffrage was possibly attracted by this
defiance of the court ; and it may be conjectured
that the savour of this political scandal gave zest
and edge to their relish of the otherwise grave and
sober entertainment set before them by the poet,
whose somewhat weighty venture may thus have
been floated into favour on the artificial tide of a
chance which had made it the pretext of a popular
cry. If, however, there was any such anti-Gallican
or seditious element in the success of a play which
must certainly, one would say, have needed all the
outward and casual help it could get to impose itself
on the goodwill of the multitude, the French envoy
was not slack in bringing a counter-influence to bear
against it ; for three of the recalcitrant actors were
arrested at his suit ; but M. de Beaumont regretfully
adds that " the principal person, the author,
escaped." When three years later the poem was

GEORGE CHAPMAN 83

published, his printers had probably learnt caution
enough from this fresh experience to ensure the
suppression in all published copies of every trace of
the forbidden part ; and indeed there should seem
to be two gaps in the printed text ; one at the
sudden end of the brief fourth act of the first part,
which breaks off sharply after the eloquent and
elaborate narrative of the speeches exchanged on the
occasion of Biron's embassy to England, between
the marshal. Queen Elizabeth, and her prime
minister ; one at the end of the first or opening of
the second act of the second part, which acts in both
editions of the play are run into each other without
any mark of division ; but the great length of the
fifth (or tenth) act as it now stands may suggest that
this seeming confusion has been caused by a mere
numerical derangement or misprint.

The fittest symbol I can find for this great and
central work of Chapman's genius would be one
derived from itself ; we might liken tlie poem to
that " famous mountain " which was to be carved
into the colossal likeness of the hero, a giant holding
a city in his left hand and pouring from his right an
endless flood into a raging sea. This device of a
mad and magnificent vanity gives as it were a
reflection of the great and singular qualities of the
poem ; it has an epic and Titanic enormity of
imagination, the huge and naked solitude of a
mountain rising from the sea, whose head is oare
before the thunders, and whose sides are fuiTowed
with stormy streams ; and from all its rocks and
torrents, crags and scaurs and gulleys, there seems
to look forth the likeness afar off of a single face,

84. CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

superhuman and inordinate in the proportion of its
prodigious features. The general effect is as that of
some vast caprice of landscape ; at once fantastic,
exaggerated, and natural. Around it we may group
the remaining works of its author as lower spurs
of the outlying range of mountains. None of these
lesser poems were ever befriended by such an occa-
sion as lifted for a season into perilous popularity
the mightiest of their author's dramatic brood ; that
the two likest in form and spirit to this giant brother
of their race appear to have won no popular favour
at all is certainly less remarkable than the record of
its own success. The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois is
a singular example of Chapman's passion for para-
dox. It is a work of ma,ture power and serious
interest, richer in passages of moral magnificence
and interludes of exalted meditation than any but
that greatest of his poems which we have just been
considering ; from the large storehouse of these
three plays a student may select at every step
among their massive heaps of mental treasure fresh
samples of rare thought and costly style, fresh ingots
of weighty and glittering gold, fresh jewels of pro-
fomid and living lustre. The third of these has less
in common with the play of which it is the nominal
sequel than with the two of intervening date ; it has
indeed more of incident than they, but its value and
interest mainly depend on its gnomic or contempla-
tive passages. In the argument, the action, and the
characters of this poem one chief aim of the author
was apparently to reverse all expectations that
might be excited by its title, and bj' way of counter-
part to produce a figure in all points opposite to

GEORGE CHAPMAN 85

that of his former hero. The brother and avenger
of Bussy appears as the favourite and faithful
follower of a leading accomplice in his murder ; he
is as sober, sententious, and slow in action as his
brother was boastful, impetuous, and violent ; he
turns every chance of fortune and every change of
place into an occasion for philosophic debate and
moral declamation ; the shelter provided by his
patron and the ambuscade prepared by his enemies
are to him equally opportune for the delivery of a
lecture on ethics, as close and serried in its array of
argument as it is grave and measured in its eloquence
of exposition. Hamlet himself gave less cause of
complaint to the " poor ghost " whose second
resurrection was insufficient to impel him to the
discharge of his office than this yet more deliberate
and meditative avenger of blood : and it is not
without cause that the tardy shade of Bussy rises
to rebuke the tardier hand of his brother in words
heavier and more bitter than any that fall from the
majesty of buried Denmark. The quaint contrast
between the tragic violence of the story and the
calm interest of the dialogue is not the only aspect
afforded by this poem of its author's taste for
extravagance of paradox and shocks of moral
surprise. His delight throughout these historic
plays is to put into the mouths of his chief speakers
some defence of the most preposterous and untenable
proposition, some apology for the most enormous
and unpopular crime that his ingenuity can fix
upon for explanation or excuse. Into the mouth of
Biron he had already put a panegyric on the policy
and the person of PhiHp H ; into the mouth of

86 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Clermont he puts a vindication of the massacre of
St. Bartholomew. This latter curious and coura-
geous abuse of intellectual dexterity may perhaps
have contributed to the ill success of a play which
in any case must have disappointed, and that
apparently by design and of malice prepense, the
expectations appealed to by a title seemingly devised
to trade upon the popularity of Bussy d'Ambois,
and make its profit out of the artificial capital of a
past success. The audience attracted by the promise
implied in such a title may easily have been dis-
inclined by such a disappointment to receive with
toleration these freaks of dialectic ingenuity. It is
not likely that a writer who must have been old
enough at the age of thirteen to feel and to remember
the shock of the first tidings of the hideous twenty-
fourth of August 1572 — that an English poet and
patriot of the stalwart type which from all that we
know of Chapman we might expect to find always
as nobly exemplified in his life and writings as in
those of such elder and younger contemporaries as
Spenser and Jonson — should have indulged any
more personal sentiment in these eccentric trials of
intellectual strength than a wajrvvard pleasure in the
exercise and exhibition of his powers of argument
and eloquence ; but there was certainly in his
nature something of the sophist as well as of the
gnomic poet, of Thrasymachus as well as of Theognis.
He seems to feel a gladiator's pleasure in the sword-
play of a boisterous and high-handed sophistry less
designed to mislead or convince than to baffle or
bear down his opponent. We can imagine him
setting up almost any debatable theorem as a

GEORGE CHAPMAN 87

subject for dispute in the schools of rhetoric, and
maintaining his most indefensible position with as
much energy and cunning of argument as his native
force of mind could bring to the support of his
acquired skill of fence : we can perceive that in any
such case he would argue his point and reinforce his
reasoning with no less passion and profusion of
thought and speech than if his heart and conscience
were enlisted on the side which in fact he had taken
up by mere chance or defiant caprice. This, however,
is by no means the general character of the philo-
sophy set forth and the eloquence displayed in this
poem. The whole character of Clermont, conceived
as it is in a spirit of direct defiance to all rules and
traditions of dramatic effect, and elaborated as
though in disdain of possible success or the antici-
pated chance of popularity, shows once more the
masterly workmanship of a potent and resolute
hand. In almost every scene there are examples of
sound and noble thought clothed in the sober
colours of terse and masculine poetry ; of deep and
high meditation touched now and then with the
ardour of a fervid spirit and the light of a subtle
fancy. At every page some passage of severe beauty
reminds us with how great a spirit we are called to
commune, and stand in the presence of how proud
and profound a mind. His equal love for the depths
and the heights of speculation may too often impel
this poet to overstrain his powers of thought and
utterance in the strong effort to dive or to soar into
an atmosphere too thin or a sea too stormy to
admit the facile and natural play of his vigorous
faculties ; but when these are displayed in their full

88 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

strength and clearness the study of them gives us
some taste of the rare and haughty pleasure that
their owner must have taken in their exercise.
Here as elsewhere I had taken note in my mind of
special verses and passages fit for extraction, which
might give some sample of the general power and
charm of the keen intellect and the fine imagination
that shape and inform the scheme and action of the
poem ; but to cite one or more instances of these
would be to wrong the profuse and liberal genius
which has sown them broadcast in so rich a soil.
The reader who seeks them for himself with a
judging eye and an apprehensive spirit will not be
unlikely to make of The Revenge of Bussy d'Amhois,
for the wealth and the weight of its treasures of
ethical beauty, his chosen and peculiar favourite
among the works of Chapman.

In the last of this stately line of tragic poems
dealing with the recent or immediate history of
France we find the same prevailing qualities of moral
force and poetic dignity. The tragedy of Chabot is
more equable and less ambitious in treatment than
any of its compeers ; but the model given in its
hero of majestic faith and august integrity may be
classed among the purest and most perfect studies
that we have from the sculptor's hand. The serene
and stainless figure of a wholly righteous and loj^al
man is so thoroughly and truthfully sustained by
the high instinct and spiritual sense of the poet that
we may trace and recognize from the first a nature
so inflexible at once and so sensitive as to refuse all
shelter or compromise which might rather protect
than vindicate his innocence from the attacks of

GEORGE CHAPMAN 89

fraud and injustice, and when cleared of all their
charges and restored to all his honours to lie down
and die of the wound inflicted by the mere shame of
suspicion : a heart so stout and so tender that it
could resist all shocks and strokes of power or
treachery, and bleed to death for grief to be dis-
trusted where most of all it had deserved to find
trust. But here again the singleness and purity of
the interest could hardly be expected to secure
success on the stage ; and though we have no hint
as to the good or ill fortune of this high-toned poem,
we may conjecture that it could hardly have been
redeemed from popular indifference by the dramatic
power and pathetic impression of the scene in
which the wife and father-in-law of the arraigned
admiral prevail by the justice and dignity of
their appeal upon the pride and prepossession of
the queen. Yet this at least, and the last scene
in which Chabot dies at the feet of his repentant
master with a prayer for the pardon of his enemy
on the lips that kiss for the last time the hand
which must confer it, should have found favour
with an audience capable of doing justice to
the high desert of such austere and unseductive
excellence.

As we have no external ground for conjecture by
what original impulse or bias of mind the genius of
Chapman was attracted to the study and representa-
tion on an English stage of subjects derived from
the annals of contemporary France, or what freak
of perverse and erratic instinct may have led him
to bring before a Protestant audience the leading
criminals of the Catholic party under any but an

90 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

unfavourable aspect, so we have no means of
guessing whether or not any conscious reason or
principle induced him to present in much the same
light three princes of such diverse characters as the
first Francis and the third and fourth Henries of
France. Indeed, but for a single reference to his
ransom " from Pavian thraldom " (Act ii, Scene 3),
we should be wholly at a loss to recognize in the
royal master of Chabot the radiant and exuberant
lover of the whole world of women,

ce roi sacre chevalier par Bayard,
Jeune homme auquel il faut des plaisirs de vieillard,

who in our own age has been far otherwise presented
on the theatre of a far mightier poet. There is no
hint in the play that any more prevailing and less
legitimate influence than a wife's was brought to
bear in favour of Chabot on a king with whom his
lawful consort might have been supposed of all
women the least likely to prevail ; and by this
suppression or disguise of the personal interest
actually exerted on behalf of his hero the dramatist
has defrauded of her due credit the real friend of the
fallen admiral ; for it was not at the instance of the
queen, but at the instance of Madame d'Etampes, a
kinswoman of Chabot, that the chancellor Poyet
was arrested and disgraced in the same year (1542)
which had seen the fall, the restoration, and the
death by heart-break of the faithful minister who
owed not to the intercession of the king's wife but
to his own alliance by blood with the king's mistress
that revenge which at the first occasion given the
duchess was not slow to exact from her lover on the

GEORGE CHAPMAN 91

triumphant enemy of her kinsman. The haughty
integrity which involved and upheld Chabot in
danger and disgrace, and the susceptible pride which
when restored to favour could no longer support
him under the sense of past degradation, are painted
from the life of history ; but his poet may be
thought to have somewhat softened the harsher
features of that arrogance and roughness of temper
which impaired the high qualities and imperilled the
high station of the brave and upright admiral who
dared his king to find a ground for his impeachment.
And if we miss in Chapman's portrait those chival-
rous and amorous features which long kept fresh in
popular fancy the knightly fame of Francis I, the
figure set before us is not wanting in a kingly grace
and dignity which the dramatist has chosen to
bestow with an equal hand on the grandson to
whom neither history nor tradition has assigned even
so much of " the king-becoming graces " as may be
allowed to the conqueror of Marignano. Chapman
indeed has in this case taken so little care to preserve
the historic relations of his leading characters that
the king by whose intervention Bussy d'Amboise
was betrayed to the jealousy of Monsoreau appears
not as the treacherous enemy but as the trusty friend
and patron of his brother's rebellious favourite ;
pardons and prefers him to the rank of his own,
and adopts him into that station by the surname of
his eagle ; while instead of the king it is here the
Duke of Anjou who delivers his refractory minion
into the murderous snare set for him by an injured
husband. But if I read aright the hinted imputa-
tion of Brantome, it would seem that some years

92 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

before he put into the hands of Monsoreau the inter-
cepted correspondence of Bussy with his wife the
king had already laid an ambush of " twelve good
men " armed with pistols, and " mounted on
Spanish horses taken from the stables of a very
great personage who had set them on," to attempt
the life of his brother's indomitable champion, who
was preserved as well by his own presence of mind
and discretion as by the good fortune which befell
him to find the door of a neighbour's house ajar for
him to slip through and fasten it against pursuit.
Being compelled after this adventure to leave Paris
in consequence of his threats " to slit folk's nostrils,
and that he would kill everybody " in retaliation for
this nocturnal assault, the gallant bravo was escorted
out of the city by all the noble retainers of his
ignoble patron the Duke of Anjou, but by three
gentlemen only of the king's household brigade, his
kinsman Brantome, whom he charged at parting to
bear back his defiance to the whole court, M. de
Neuville, and the hero Crillon, who in spite of his
attachment to the king's party refused to forsake
the friendship of so stout a swordsman. Although
the first standard edition of Brantome's Lives was
not published by a descendant of his family till
thirty-two years after the death of Chapman, it is
singular that the English poet who thought fit to
choose as a subject for tragedy the fate of a man
at the time of whose murder he had himself reached
the age of twenty should also have thought fit so
seriously to alter the facts of his story for no dis-
cernible reason but a desire to shift the charge of
the principal villainy from the shoulders of a king

GEORGE CHAPMAN 93

to those of his brother. In either play dedicated to
the memory of Bussy — who at the wildest pitch of
his windy and boisterous vanity can never have
anticipated that twenty-eight years after his death
he would figure on the page of a foreign poet as a
hero of the Homeric or Lucanian type — the youngest
son of Catharine de' Medici is drawn in colours as
hateful as those of truth or tradition ; whereas the
last king of his hne is handled with such remarkable
forbearance that his most notorious qualities are
even less recognizable than those of his grandfather
in the delicate and dignified study of Chapman. A
reader indeed, if such a one were possible, who
should come to the perusal of these plays with no
previous knowledge of French history, would find
little difference or distinction between Henri de
Valois and Henri de Bourbon ; and would probably
carry away the somewhat inaccurate impression
that the slayer of the Duke of Guise and the judge
of the Duke of Biron were men of similar tastes and
manners, respectable if not venerable for their
private virtues, elegant and sententious in their
habitual choice of language, grave and decorous in
their habitual carriage and discourse, and equally
imbued with a fine and severe sense of responsibilit}'
for the conscientious discharge of the highest and
hardest duties of their royal office. It is less
remarkable, as the dramatist in his dedication to
Sir Thomas Howard disclaims all pretension to
observe " the authentical truth of either person or
action," as a thing not to be expected " in a poem
whose subject is not truth, but things like truth,"
that he should have provided to avenge the daring

94 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

and turbulent desperado who outbraved the gorgeous
minions of the king with a simple dress set off by
the splendour of six pages in cloth of gold, and then
signalized by a fresh insult under the very eyes of
Henri his enforced reconciliation with the luckless
leader of their crew, a brother of whose name I know
nothing but that Georges de Clermont d'Amboise,
not a follower of Guise but a leader of the Huguenots,
was slain seven years earlier than Bussy in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew. Chapman's apology
for the attribution of this name to the apparently
imaginar}^ avenger of his brother's blood is better
worth remembering than such inquiries are worth
pursuing. " Poor envious souls they are," says the
poet, " that cavil at truth's want in these natural
fictions " ; a reasonable and memorable protest
against the perverse or senseless paradox which
confounds truth with fact and refuses to distinguish
veracity from reality ; and which would not be
worth the passing notice of a contemptuous instant
if men of genius would forbear to confuse the minds
of their feebler and more servile admirers by the
adoption and promulgation in the loudest tones of
prophecy of such blatant and vacuous babble about
" kinship of fiction to lying " and so forth as should
properly be left to the lips of the dunces who may
naturally believe it, being thick-witted enough to
accept as serious reasoning and deliberate opinion
the most wilful and preposterous paradoxes thun-
dered forth from pulpit or from tripod in the most
riotous and ludicrous paroxysms of wajrward humour
or fantastic passion.

That the " Roman tragedy " of Ccesar and Pompey

GEORGE CHAPMAN 95

was earlier in date than most though later in publica-
tion than any except Chahot of the French series,
we might have conjectured without the evidence of
the dedication. It is more unequal and irregular in
the proportion of its good parts and its bad than
any of Chapman's tragedies except Bussy d'Ambois ;
I should imagine it to be a work of nearly the same
period ; though, as was before intimated, it bears
more affinity to the sequel of that play and to the
great tragic poem on Biron in the main quality of
interest and the preponderance of speech over
action. To this play we might adapt a well-known
critical remark of Dr. Johnson's on Henry VIII,
much less applicable in that case than in this, and
say that the genius of the author comes in and goes
out with Cato. Not that even in this case that
rhetorical phrase would be wholly accurate ; there
are noble lines and passages discernible elsewhere ;
but the glory of the poem is given it by the scenes
in which Cato is the leading figure. I know nothing
in moral or contemplative poetry more admirable
than the speech in the first scene on fear or mistrust
of the gods, and the soliloquy in the last act on
sleep and death. The serene and sublime emotion
of heroic wisdom is in either passage so touched and
tempered with something of the personal ardour of
a noble passion that its tone and effect are not
merely abstract or didactic but thoroughly dramatic
and human, and the weighty words ring in the ear
of our remembrance long after the mind has first
unconsciously absorbed and retained the lofty sound
and sense of the memorable and magnificent verse
It is especially in such examples as these that we

96 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

perceive the great quality of Chapman's genius, the
true height and purity of its power ; majestic
intellect lighted and enkindled by poetic imagination,
the high beauty of heroic thought warmed and
winged with the spiritual fire of a living sentiment.
It is true that those who read only the glorious
excerpts given from this poem by Charles Lamb
will have a nobler impression of its merit than they
who read the whole ; but those only who read the
whole will know all its merit as well as all its demerit ;
they will find fresh treasures of fine thought and
high expression embedded among dense laj^ers of
crabbed and confused rhetoric, wedged in between
rocky strata of thick and turgid verse. As there is
little other life or movement in the play but that of
declamation or discussion, we might presume that
if it had ever " touched at the stage " its reception
would in all likelihood have been something less
than favourable ; but we have already remarked on
such inexplicable variations of good and ill luck in
the fortunes of Chapman's plays that no conclusion
of the kind can be assumed as certain. That it
never did lose on any boards its long-preserved
immunity from the touch of actors or managers, we
may, I suppose, after the author's assurance of its
virginity at the date of publication, be tolerably
confident.

Twenty years after the death of Chapman the long
list of his dramatic works was completed by the
publication of two tragedies in which, though there
are but few qualities common to both, there are yet
fewer traces of either the chief merits or the chief
defects which distinguish and defonn alike the

GEORGE CHAPMAN 97

poems and the tragic plays published during the life
of the author. There is nothing in them of bombast,
of barbarism, or of obscurity ; there is assuredly no
lack of incidents, and these, however crowded and
violent in themselves, are conducted with such
clearness and simplicity of exposition as to keep the
attention and interest of the reader undistracted
and unfatigued. The style in both is pure, lucid,
and vigorous ; equably sustained at an even height
above the lowlands of prosaic realism and beneath
the cloudland of winds and vapours ; more forcible
and direct in the first play, more florid and decora-
tive in the second. On the other hand, these post-
humous children have not the lofty stature, the
kingly aspect, the gigantic sinews and the shining
eyes which went far to redeem the halting gait and
the irregular features of their elders. They want
the breadth of brow, the weight of brain, the fullness
of speech, and the fire of spirit which make amends
for the harsh voice and stammering tongue that
imperfectly deliver the message entrusted to them ;
the tumultuous eloquence which bears down and
sweeps away all physical impediment of utter-
ance, the fervid vitality which transfigures and
atones for all clumsiness of gesture or deformity
of limb.

No thought so ripe and sweet, no emotion so exalted
and august is here discernible as that which uplifts
the contemplation and upholds the confidence of the
highest in spirit and the deepest in thought among
those earlier speakers who served as mouthpieces of
the special genius of their high-minded and deep-
souled creator. There is no trace of the ethical

G

98 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

power which informs and moulds the meditation of
Clermont or of Cato, no relic of the imaginative
passion which expands and inflates the fancy of
Bussy or of Biron. In Alphonsus there is more
of Chapman's quality at first perceptible than in
Revenge for Honour ; there is a certain hardness in
the simplicity of tone, a certain rigidity in the
sharp masculine lineaments of style and character,
common to much of his work when free from the
taint of crabbed or bombastic obscurity. The
singular violation and confusion of history, which
may be taken to mask the probable allusions to
matters of more recent political interest, are ably
explained and illustrated by Dr. Elze in the
thoroughly efficient and sufficient introduction to
his edition of this play ; in which the student will
observe, with gratitude for his help and admiration
for his learning in all matters of social and historical
illustration, that the German editor has kept well
to such work as he was perfectly competent to
discharge, and has never on this occasion exchanged
the highest seat in the hall of scholarship for the
lowest form in the school of criticism. By him as
by others the actual merit of this most unhistoric of
historical dramas has perhaps been somewhat under-
rated. Naked as it is of ornament, violent in most
of its action and repulsive in several of its scenes,
barren of beauty in language and poor in treasure
of thought, it never fails in animation and interest ;
and the hardened student of our early stage who has
once entered the shambles will hardly turn away in
disgust or weariness from the fume and flow of
monotonous bloodshed till his curiosity at least has

GEORGE CHAPMAN 99

been satisfied by the final evolution of the tangled web
of slaughter. In this catastrophe especially there
is a remarkable sense of sirong material effect, with a
notable capacity for vigorous theatrical manipulation
of incident, which is as notably deficient in the
earlier and loftier works of Chapman.

In the tragedy of Revenge for Honour I have
already noticed the curious change of style which
distinguishes it from all other works of Chapman :
a change from rigidity to relaxation, from energy to
fluency, from concentration to effusion of language.
It has something of the manner and metre of
Fletcher and his school, something of the softness
and facility which lend a half-effeminate grace to
the best scenes of Shirley : while in the fifth act at
least I observe something too much of the merely
conventional imagery and the overflow of easy
verbosity which are the besetting sins of that poet's
style. Only in one image can I find anything of
that quaint fondness for remote and eccentric
illustration in which the verse of Chapman resembles
the prose of Fuller : this is put into the mouth of
the villain of the piece, who repudiates conscience as

a weak and fond remembrance
Which men should shun, as elephants clear springs.
Lest they behold their own deformities
And start at their grim shadows.

Even here the fall of the verse is not that of
Chapman, and the tone of the verses which imme-
diately follow is so utterly alien from the prevailing
tone of his that the authenticity of the scene, as
indeed of the whole play, can only be vindicated by

100 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

a supposition that in his last years he may for once
have taken the whim and had the power to change
his style and turn his hand to the new fashion of
the youngest writers then prospering on the stage.
Only the silliest and shallowest of pedants and of
sciolists can imagine that a question as to the date
or the authorship of any poem can be determined
by mere considerations of measure and mechanical
computation of numbers ; as though the language
of a poem were divisible from the thought, or (to
borrow a phrase from the INIiltonic theology) the
effluence were separable from the essence of a man's
genius. It should be superfluous and impertinent to
explain that the expression is not to be considered
apart from the substance ; but while men who do
not know this are suffered to utter as with the
authority of a pedagogue or a pulpiteer the verdict
of the gerundgrinders and metremongers on the
finest and most intricate questions of the subtlest
and most sublime of arts, it is but too evident that
the explanation of even so simple and radical a
truth can be neither impertinent nor superfluous.
It is not because a particular pronoun or conjunction
is used in this play some fifty times oftcner than it
occurs in any other work of its author, a point on
which I profess myself neither competent nor careful
to pronounce, that I am prepared to decide on the
question of its authenticity or its age. That ques-
tion indeed I am diffident enough to regard as one
impossible to resolve. That it is the work of
Chapman I see no definite reason to disbelieve, and
not a little reason to suppose that it may be. The
selection and treatment of the subject recall the

GEORGE CHAPMAN 101

trick of his fancy and the habit of his hand ; the
process of the story is in parts quaint and bloody,
galvanic and abrupt ; but the movement on the
whole is certainly smoother, the evolution more
regular, the arrangement more dramatic than of
old. Accepting it as the last tragic effort of the
author whose first extant attempt in that line was
Biissy d'Ambois, we shall find perhaps in the general
workmanship almost as much of likeness as of
unlikeness. Considered apart and judged by its
own merits, we shall certainly find it, like Alphonsus,
animated and amusing, noticeable for a close and
clear sequence of varying incident and interest, and
for a quick light touch in the sketching of superficial
character. These being its chief qualities, we may
fairly pronounce that whether or not it be the work
of Chapman it belongs less to his school than to the
school of Shirley ; yet being as it is altogether too
robust and masculine for a work of the latter school,
it seems most reasonable to admit it as the child of
an older father, the last-born of a more vigorous
generation, with less of strength and sap than its
brothers, but with something in return of the
younger and lighter graces of its fellows in age. The
hero and his father are figures well invented and
well sustained ; the villains are not distorted or
overdrawn, and the action is full of change and
vivacity.

Of the poems published by Chapman after the
first of his plays was given to the press, we may say
generally that they show some signs of advance
and none of retrogression from the standard of his
earlier work. Out of many lovely lines embedded

102 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

in much thick and turbid matter I choose one
couplet from The Tears of Peace as an example of
their best beauties :

Free sufferance for the truth makes sorrow sing,
And mourning far more sweet than banq\ieting.

In this poem, with much wearisome confusion and
iteration of thought and imagery, reprobation
and complaint, there are several noble interludes
of gnomic and symbolic verse. The allegory is of
course clouded and confounded by all manner of
perversities and obscurities worth no man's while to
elucidate or to rectify ; the verse hoarse and stiff,
the style dense and convulsive, inaccurate and
violent ; yet ever and anon the sense becomes clear,
the style pure, the imagery luminous and tender, the
verse gracious and majestic ; transformed for a
moment and redeemed by great brief touches of
high and profound harmony ; of which better mood
let us take in proof a single instance, and that the
most sustained and exquisite we shall find :

Before her flew Affliction, girt in storms,
Gash'd all with gushing wounds, and all the forms
Of bane and misery frowning in her face ;
Whom Tyranny and Injustice had in chase ;
Grim Persecution, Poverty, and Shame ;
Detraction, Envy, foul Mishap and lame
Scruple of Conscience ; Fear, Deceit, Despair ;
Slander and Clamour, that rent all the air ;
Hate, War, and Massacre ; uncrowned Toil
And Sickness, t' all the rest the base and foil,
Crept after ; and his deadly weight trod down
Wealth, Beauty, and the glory of a crown.

GEORGE CHAPMAN 103

These usher'd her far off ; as figures given

To show, these crosses borne make peace with heaven.

But now, made free from them, next her before,

Peaceful and young, Herculean silence bore

His cragg}^ club ; which up aloft he hild ;

With which and his fore-finger's charm he still'd

All sounds in air ; and left so free mine ears.

That I might hear the music of the spheres.

And all the angels singing out of heaven ;

Whose tunes were solemn, as to passion given ;

For now, that Justice was the happiness there

For all the wrongs to Right inflicted here.

Such was the passion that Peace now put on ;

And on all went ; when suddenly was gone

All light of heaven before us ; from a wood.

Whose sight foreseen now lost, amazed we stood.

The sun still gracing us ; when now, the air

Inflamed with meteors, we discover'd fair

The skipping goat ; the horse's flaming mane ;

Bearded and trained comets ; stars in wane

The burning sword ; the firebrand-flying snake ;

The lance ; the torch ; the licking fire ; the drake ;

And all else meteors that did ill abode

The thunder chid ; the lightning leapt abroad ;

And yet when Peace came in all heaven was clear ;

And then did all the horrid wood appear,

Where mortal dangers more than leaves did grow ;

In which we could not one free step bestow.

For treading on some murder'd passenger

Who thither was by witchcraft forced to err :

Whose face the bird hid that loves humans best.

That hath the bugle eyes and rosy breast,

And is the yellow autumn's nightingale.

This is Chapman at his best ; and few then can
better him. The language hardly holds lovelier

104 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

lines, of more perfect colour and more happy
cadence, than some few of these which I have given
to show how this poet could speak when for a change
he was content to empty his mouth of pebbles and
clear his forehead of fog. The vision of Home
which serves as overture to this poem is not the only
other noble feature which relieves a landscape in too
great part made up of rocks and brambles, of mire
and morass ; and for the sake of these hidden green
places and sunny moments some yet may care to
risk an hour or so of toil along the muddy and thorny
lanes that run between.

From the opening verses of The Tears of Peace
we get one of the few glimpses allowed us into the
poet's personal life, his birthplace, the manner and
the spirit of his work, and his hopes in his " retired
age " for " heaven's blessing in a free and harmless
life " ; the passage has beauty as well as interest far
beyond those too frequent utterances of querulous
anger at the neglect and poverty to which he could
not resign himself without resentment. It would
have been well for himself as for us, who cannot now
read such reiterated complaints without a sense of
weariness and irritation, if he had really laid once
for all to heart the noble verses in which he sup-
poses himself to be admonished by the " spirit
Elysian " of his divine patron Homer, who told
him, as he says, " that he was angel to me, star,
and fate."

Thou must not undervalue what thou hast.
In weighing it with that which more is graced ;
The worth that weigheth inward should not long
For outward prices. This should make thee strong

GEORGE CHAPMAN 105

In thy close value ; Nought so good can be
As that which lasts good between God and thee.
Remember thme own verse — Should Heaven turn Hell
For deeds well done, I would do ever well.

The dignity and serenity of spirit here inculcated are
not compatible with the tone of fierce remonstrance
and repining defiance which alternates with such
higher tones of meditation and self-reliance as
constantly exalt and dignify the praises of those
patrons to whom he appeals for recognition as for a
right not to be withheld wdthout discredit to them
and danger of future loss of that glory which he had
to give. In all dedicatory verse known to me I find
nothing that resembles the high self-respect and
haughty gratitude of a poet who never forgets that
for every benefit of patronage conferred he gives
fully as much as he may receive. Men usually hurry
over the dedications of poet to patron with a keen
angry sense of shame and sorrow, of pity and
repulsion and regret ; but it may be justly claimed
for Chapman that his verses of dedication can give
no reader such pain as those of others. His first and
best patron in the court of James was that youth
on whose coffin so many crowns of mourning verse
were showered, and who does by all report seem to
have w^ell deserved that other than official regrets
should go with him to his grave. A boy dying at
eighteen after three years' proof of interest in the
higher culture of his time, three years during which
he had shown himself as far as we can see sincere
and ardent in his love of noble things only, and only
of noble men, of poetry and of heroes — champion of
Raleigh in his prison and patron of Chapman in his

106 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

need — must certainly have been one worthy of notice
in higher places than a court ; one who, even if bom
in a loftier atmosphere and likelier to bring forth
seed of enduring honour, would assuredly have
earned remark and remembrance as a most excep-
tional figure, of truly rare and admirable promise.
The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince Henry
is one of his highest and purest examples of moral
verse : the august praise and grave exaltation of his
own great art give dignity to the words of admonition
as much as of appeal with which he commends it to
the acceptance and reverence of kings. We may
well believe that the prince's death gave to the high
heart of his old Homeric teacher and counsellor of
royal and heroic things a sharper pain than the mere
sense of a patron lost and of personal as well as of
national hopes cut off. Yet in his special case there
was good reason for special regret. The latter
instalments of his lofty labour on the translation of
Homer were inscribed to the ignoblest among the
minions, as the fornier had been inscribed to the
noblest among the children of the king. An austere
and stately moralist like Chapman could hardly have
sought a stranger patron than Carr ; and when we
find him officiating as paran5nnph at those nuptials
which recall the darkest and foulest history in all
the annals of that reign, the poisonous and adulterous
secrets of blood and shame in whose darkness
nothing is discernible but the two masked and
muffled figures of treachery and murder, we cannot
but remember and apply the parallel drawn by
Macaulay from the court of Nero ; nor can it be
with simple surprise that we listen to the sermon or

GEORGE CHAPMAN 107

the song composed by Seneca or by Lucan for the
epithalamiiim of Sporus and Locusta.

The celebration of that monstrous marriage in
ethic and allegoric verse brought nothing to Chapman
but disquiet and discredit. Neither Andromeda
Lady Essex nor Perseus Earl of Somerset had reason
to thank or to reward the solitary singer whose
voice was raised to call down blessings on the bridal
bed which gave such a Julia to the arms of such a
Manhus. The enormous absurdity of Chapman's
ever unfortunate allegory was on this auspicious
occasion so much more than absurd that Carr
himself would seem to have taken such offence as
his luckless panegyrist had undoubtedly no suspicion
that he might give. And yet this innocence of
intention affords one of the oddest instances on
record of the marvellous want of common sense and
common tact which has sometimes been so notable
in men of genius. It is hardly credible that a grave
poetic moralist of fifty-five should have written
without afterthought this thrice unhappy poem of
Andromeda Liberata. Its appearance did for once
succeed in attracting attention ; but the comment
it drew down was of such a nature as at once
to ehcit from the author " a free and offenceless
justification of a lately published and most mali-
ciously misinterpreted poem " ; a defence almost as
amazing as the offence, and decidedly more amusing.

The poet could never imagine till now so far-fetched
a thought in mahce (" such was my simplicity," he
adds with some reason) as would induce any reader
to regard as otherwise than " harmlessly and grace-
fully applicable to the occasion " — these are his

108 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

actual words — the representation of "an innocent
and spotless virgin [sic] rescued from the polluted
throat of a monster, which I in this place applied to
the savage multitude." Such is the perversity of
man, that on perusing this most apt and judicious
allegory " the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddy multi-
tude " of readers actually thought fit to inquire
from what " barren rock " the nev/ Perseus might
be said to have unbound his fettered virgin ; and in
answer to this not unnatural inquiry Chapman had
the audacious innocence to afhrm — and I doubt not
in all truth and simplicity — that the inevitable
application of this happy and appropriate symbol
had never so much as crossed his innocent mind.
As if, he exclaims indignantly, the word " barren "
could be applied to a man ! — was it ever said a man
was barren ? or was the burden of bearing fruit
ever laid on man ? Whether this vindication was
likely under the circumstances to mend matters
much " the prejudicate and peremptory reader " will
judge for himself. One rumour, however, the poet
repudiates in passing with some violence of language ;
to the effect, we may gather, that he had been
waylaid and assaulted as was Drydcn by Rochester's
ruffians, but at whose instigation we can only con-
jecture. He will omit, he says, " as struck dumb
with the disdain of it, their most unmanly lie both
of my baffling and wounding, sajdng ' Take this for
your Andromeda ' ; not being so much as touched,
I witness God, nor one syllable suffering."

The rumour is singular enough, and it would be
curious to know if at least any such threat or attempt
were actually made. From Carr at all events we can

GEORGE CHAPMAN 109

hardly believe that it would have come ; for it must
be set down to his credit that in the days of obscurity
which followed on his disgrace and retirement he
seems to have befriended the poet whose humbler
chances of court favour had presumably fallen with
his own. It was unlikely that any man ever so
slightly associated with the recollection of a matter
which the king was probably of all men least desirous
to keep in mind should again be summoned by two
of the Inns of Court, as Chapman had been sum-
moned the year before, to compose the marriage
masque for a royal wedding. More inauspicious by
far though far more innocent than those of Somerset
were the nuptials he had then been chosen to
celebrate ; the nuptials of Elizabeth, called the
Queen of Hearts, with Frederick, one day to be
sumamed the Winter-King. For that fatal marriage-
feast of " Goody Palsgrave " and her hapless bride-
groom he had been bidden to provide due decorations
of pageantry and verse ; and had produced at least
some bright graceful couplets and stanzas, among
others hardly so definable. But to such a task he
was now not likely to be called again ; the turning-
point of his fortunes as far as they hung upon the
chance of patronage at court was the wedding-day
of Carr. As a favourite of the dead prince to whom
his Homer had been inscribed in weighty and
worthy verses, he may have been thought fit the
year before to assist as the laureate of a day at the
marriage which had been postponed by the death cf
the bride's brother in the preceding autumn ; and
some remembrance of the favour shown him by the
noble youth for whom the country if not the court

110 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

had good reason to mourn may have kept his name
for a while before the eyes of the better part of the
courtiers, if a better part there were : but if ever,
as we may conjecture, his fortune had passed
through its hour of rise and its day of progress, we
must infer that its decHne was sudden and its fall
irremediable.

In the same year which witnessed the unlucky
venture of his Andromeda Chapman put forth a
poem on the death of Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, a
patron, it should seem, of a far other kind than
Carr ; distinguished as a soldier in the field now
only memorable to us for the death of Sir Philip
Sidney, where if report may be trusted his romantic
or Homeric valour was worthy to have employed
the pen of a translator of the Iliad ; and yet more
remarkable for the comparative justice and mercy
displayed in his military administration of Ireland.
This epicede, longer and more ornate than that issued
two years before on Prince Henry, is neither much
worse nor much better in substance and in style.
Each may boast of some fine and vigorous verses,
and both are notable as examples of the poet's
somewhat troubled and confused elevation of
thought and language. In Eugenia especially the
same high note, of moral passion alternates with
the same sharp tone of contemptuous complaint
that we find in The Tears of Peace and in the
very last verses affixed by way of epilogue to his
translation of the Hymns and other Homeric frag-
ments. This bitterness of insinuation or invective
against meaner scholars or artists we should set
down rather to a genuine hatred of bad work, a

GEORGE CHAPMAN 111

genuine abhorrence of base ambition and false
pretence, than to any unjust or malevolent instinct
of mere jealousy ; which yet might perhaps be found
pardonable to the neglected and laborious old age
of a high-minded artist and hard-working scholar
such as Chapman. There are impressive touches of
a higher mood in the funeral hymn which completes
the somewhat voluminous tribute of ceremonial
verse offered up at the grave of Lord Russell ; but
the greater part of the poem is more noticeable for
quaintness than for any better quality, being indeed
eccentric in execution as in conception beyond the
wont even of Chapman. It carries, however, some
weight of thought, and contains probably the longest
and minutest catalogue ever given in verse of the
signs of an approaching storm ; a description which
shows at once the close and intense observation of
nature, the keen and forcible power of reproduction,
and the utter incompetence to select and arrange
his material, alike and at all times distinctive of
this poet.

Four years after the miscarriage of Andromeda
we find his translation of Hesiod ushered in by a
dignified appeal and compliment to " the truly
Greek inspiration and absolutely Attic elocution " of
no less a patron than Bacon ; " whose all-acknow-
ledged faculty hath banished flattery therein even
from the court ; much more from my country and
more than upland simplicity." But for his Odyssey
and Hymns of Homer, as well as for his plea addressed
to the country on behalf of the beleaguered handful
of troops serving with Sir Horace Vere, he sought or
found no patronage but that of Carr ; and that this

112 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

should not have failed him gives evidence of some
not ignoble qualit}^ in one whom we are accustomed
only to regard as the unloveliest of the Ganymcdes
whose Jupiter was James. In the dedication of the
Hymns he refers to the retired life of his disgraced
patron in a tone which might not unworthily have
saluted the more honourable seclusion of a better
man. To these as to others of Chapman's moral
verses Coleridge has paid a tribute of thoughtful
and memorable praise, deserved no less by the
fragments of ethical poetry printed some years
earlier with a metrical version, after that of Petrarca,
of the penitential Psalms. Among these there are
many grains of genuine thought, of terse and grave
expression, worth remark and remembrance. So
much indeed may be said in parting of Chapman's
poetry as a whole ; in all his poems of dedication
or mere compliment, as in the elaborate and elo-
quent rhapsody prefixed to Ben Jonson's Sejanus,
we shall find some weight of reflection and some
energy of utterance : in the commendatory verses to
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess we shall find some-
thing better ; four of the loveliest lines in the
language, perfect for melody, purity, and simple
sweetness of colour.

It is better to think of Chapman as the just
and generous friend of other and younger men's
genius than to remark except in passing on his
quarrel in old age with Jonson, of which we
know nothing but by an unhappy fragment of
virulent and worthless verse, transcribed it should
seem during his last illness by some foolish and
officious friend or flatterer (as we may conceive) of

GEORGE CHAPMAN 113

the old man's petulances and infirmities. For these
there is reason to fear that we may have to make
more allowance than must under all circumstances
be claimed by age and sickness, even where adversity
has no share in the sufferings of the last years of a
laborious and noble life. After the fall of Chapman's
fortunes, if as I have conjectured we may suppose
them to have risen for a while under the patronage
of Prince Henry and collapsed with the favour of
Carr, he lived for twenty years without further
success on the stage to which he had given so much
of the best labour and the best faculty of his mind :
and we may doubt whether the friends or patrons of
his old age were numerous or generous enough to
secure these latter years against neglect and ob-
scurity. One comfort, however, must have been with
him to the last, whether or not we agree with Gifford
in accepting the apparent evidence for the poverty
and solitude in which he died ; the comfort of great
work done, the recollection of high hopes attained,
the evidence of daring dreams made real and fruitful
of fame not yet to be. Some ten years before his
death the poet of sixty-five could look on his com-
pleted version of all the Homeric poems, and say :

The work that I was born to do is done.

It was a great work, and one wrought in a great
spirit ; and if, as he says of Homer, not without
evident and immediate reference to his own lot, " like
a man verecundi ingenii (which he witnesseth of
himself), he lived unhonoured and needy till his
death," we may believe that he did not live dis-
satisfied or dejected. Unworthy indeed would the

114 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

workman have been of his own work if from the
contemplation of it he had been too poor in spirit
or too covetous of reward to draw the consolation of
a high content. This strong and sovereign solace
against all the evils that can beset the failing age
and fallen fortunes of a brave man he surely deserved,
if ever man deserved, to have and to retain. His
work was done ; neither time nor trouble could
affect that ; neither age nor misfortune could undo
it. He had lived long and worked hard, and the
end of all the valiant labour and strenuous endurance
that must have gone to the perfonnance of his task
had not been less than triumphant. He had added
a monument to the temple which contains the
glories of his native language, the godlike images
and the costly relics of its past ; he had built himself
a massive and majestic memorial, where for all the
flaws and roughness of the weather-beaten work the
great workmen of days unborn would gather to give
honour to his name. He had kindled a fire which
the changing winds of time were not to put out, the
veering breath of taste and opinion was never to
blow upon so hard but that some would return to
warm themselves at its heat and to cheer themselves
with its light. He showed what he could of Homer
to the lifted eyes of Keats, and the strong and fiery
reflection was to the greater poet as very dawn itself,
the perfect splendour of Hellenic sunrise. Much of
precious and undying praise has been worthily
bestowed on it ; but while anything of English
poetry shall endure the sonnet of Keats will be the
final word of comment, the final note of verdict on
Chapman's Homer.

GEORGE CHAPMAN 115

This of course was the sovereign labour of his
life ; and to this the highest of his other works can
only be considered as bringing some addition of
honour. That there is yet in these enough to serve
as the foundation of a lasting fame I have made it
the purpose of my present task to show. But his
name will always first recall neither the plays nor
the poems which might well have sufficed for the
work and the witness of a briefer or less fruitful life ;
the great enterprise of which the firstfruits were
given to the world in his fortieth year and the last
harvest was garnered in his sixty-sixth must be the
first and last claim of his memory on the reverence
of all students who shall ever devote the best of
their time and of their thought to loving research
or to thankful labour in the full field of Enghsh
poetry. The indomitable force and fire of Chapman's
genius have given such breath and spirit to his
Homeric poems that whatever their faults and flaws
may be they are at least not those of other men's
versions ; they have a seed and salt of personal life
which divide them from the class of translated
works and remove them (it might wellnigh be said)
into the rank of original poems. By the standard
of original work they may be more fairly and more
worthily judged than by the standard of pure
translation : and upon their worth as tested by that
standard the judgment of Coleridge and of Lamb
has been passed once for all, without fear of appeal
or danger of reversal while the language in which
the poems were written and the judgment given
shall endure. To all lovers of high poetry the great
old version of our Homer-Lucan must be dear for

116 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

its own sake and for that of the men who have
loved and held it in honour ; to those who can be
content with fire for light and force for hannony it
must give pleasure inconceivable by such as cannot
but remember and repine for the lack of that sweet
and equal exaltation of style which no English poet
of his age, and Chapman less than any, could hope
even faintly to reproduce or to recall. In his
original poems the most turgid and barbarous
writer of a time whose poets had almost every other
merit in a higher degree than those Grecian gifts of
perfect form, of perfect light, and of perfect measure,
which are the marks of the Homeric poems no less
than of the Sophoclcan drama, he could not so put
off his native sin of forced and inflated obscurity as
to copy in the hot high colours of a somewhat
strained and tattered canvas more than the outlines
of the divine figures which his strong hand and
earnest eye were bent to bring before his readers'
sight. It is much that his ardour and vigour, his
energy and devotion, should have done the noble
and memorable work they have. That " uncon-
querable quaintness " which Lamb was the first to
point out as the one perpetual note of infirmity and
imperfection in the great work of Chapman is more
hopelessly alien from the quality of the original than
any other defect but that of absolute weakness or
sterility of spirit could be. Altering the verdict of
Bentley on Pope, we may say that instead of a very
pretty it is a very noble poem, but it must not be
called Homer, Quaintness and he, to steal a phrase
from Juliet, are many miles asunder.
The temperament of Chapman had more in it of

GEORGE CHAPMAN 117

an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's ; and had Homer
been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the Iliad
than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been
fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter.
His fiery and turbid style has in it the action rather
of earthquakes and volcanoes than of the oceanic
verse it labours to represent ; it can give us but the
pace of a giant for echo of the footfall of a god ; it
can show but the huge movements of the heaving
earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal and
violent life, for the innumerable unity and har-
mony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous
motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and
of power, the majestic monochord of single sound
underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric verse
the multitudinous measures of the epic sea.

The name of Chapman should always be held
great ; yet must it always at first recall the names
of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the
author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic
verse a score will at once remember him as the
translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe.
The most daring enterprise of a life which was full
of daring aspiration and arduous labour was this
of resuming and completing the " mighty line " of
Hero and Leander. For that poem stands out
alone amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of
its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small
shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour
of a tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly
express the rapture of relief with which you come
upon it amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once
more with your whole heart of that well of sweet

118 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

water after the long draughts you have taken from
such brackish and turbid springs as gush up among
the sands and thickets of his verse. Faultless
indeed this lovely fragment is not ; it also bears
traces of the Elizabethan barbarism, as though the
great queen's ruff and farthingale had been clapped
about the neck and waist of the Medicean Venus ;
but for all the strange costume we can see that the
limbs are perfect still. The name of Marlowe's
poem has been often coupled with that of the " first
heir " of Shakespeare's " invention " ; but with all
reverence to the highest name in letters be it said,
the comparison is hardly less absurd than a com-
parison of Tamburlaine with Othello. With all its
overcrowding beauties of detail, Shakespeare's first
poem is on the whole a model of what a young man
of genius should not write on such a subject ;
Marlowe's is a model of what he should. Scarcely
the art of Titian at its highest, and surely not the
art of Shakespeare at its dawn, could have made
acceptable such an inversion of natural rule as is
involved in the attempted violation by a passionate
woman of a passionless boy ; the part of a Joseph,
as no less a moralist than Henri Beyle has observed
in his great work on Love, has always a suspicion
about it of something ridiculous and offensive ; but
only the wretchedest of artists could wholly fail to
give charm to the picture of such a nuptial night
as that of Hero and Leander. The style of Shake-
speare's first essay is, to speak frankly, for the most
part no less vicious than the matter : it is burdened
and bedizened with all the heavy and fantastic
jewellery of Gongora and Marini ; it is written

GEORGE CHAPMAN 119

throughout in the style which an Itahan scholar
knows as that of the seicentisti, and which the
duncery of New Grub Street in its immeasurable
ignorance would probably designate as " Della-
Cruscan " ; nay, there are yet, I believe, in that
quarter rhymesters and libellers to be found who
imagine such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante
Alighieri to have been representative members of
the famous and farinaceous academy. Not one of
the faults chargeable on Shakespeare's beautiful but
faultful poem can justly be charged on the only not
faultless poem of Marlowe. The absence of all
cumbrous jewels and ponderous embroideries from
the sweet and limpid loveliness of its style is not
more noticeable than the absence of such other and
possibly such graver flaws as deform and diminish
the undeniable charms of Venus and Adonis.

With leave or without leave of a much-lauded critic
who could see nothing in the glorified version or expan-
sion by Marlowe of the little poem of Musaeus but " a
paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most
licentious kind," I must avow that I want and am
well content to want the sense, whatever it be,
which would enable me to discern more offence in
that lovely picture of the union of two lovers in
body as in soul than I can discern in the parting of
Romeo and Juliet. And if it be always a pleasure
to read a page of Marlowe, to read it after a page of
Chapman is to the capable student of high verse
" a pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king." Yet
there is not a little to be advanced in favour of
Chapman's audacious and arduous undertaking.
The poet was not alive, among all the mighty men

120 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

then living, who could worthily have completed the
divine fragment of Marlowe. As well might we look
now to find a sculptor who could worthily restore
for us the arms of the Venus of Melos — " Our Lady
of Beauty," as Heine said when lying at her feet
stricken to death, " who has no hands, and cannot
help us." For of narrative poets there were none
in that generation of any note but Drayton and
Daniel ; and though these might have more of
Marlowe's limpid sweetness and purity of style, they
lacked the force and weight of Chapman. Nor is
the continuation by any means altogether such as
we might have expected it to be — a sequel by
Marsyas to the song of Apollo. Thanks, as we may
suppose, to the high ambition of the poet's aim,
there are more beauties and fewer deformities than
I have found in any of his other poems. There are
passages indeed which at first sight may almost seem
to support the otherwise unsupported tradition that
a brief further fragment of verse from the hand of
Marlowe was left for Chapman to work up into his
sequel. This for instance, though somewhat over-
fantastic, has in it a sweet and genuine note of
fancy :

Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
Should be embathed, and swim in more heart 's-ease
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.

Here again is a beautiful example of the short sweet
interludes which relieve the general style of Chap-
man's narrative or reflective verse :

GEORGE CHAPMAN 121

For as proportion, white and crimson, meet
In beauty's mixture, all right clear and sweet,
The eye responsible, the golden hair,
And none is held without the other fair ;
All spring together, all together fade ;
Such intermix'd affections should invade
Two perfect lovers.

And this couplet has an exquisite touch of fanciful
colour :

As two clear tapers mix in one their light,
So did the lily and the hand their white.

That at least might have been written by Marlowe
himself. But the poem is largely deformed by
excrescences and aberrations, by misplaced morals
and mistimed conceits ; and at the catastrophe,
perhaps half consciously oppressed and overcome by
the sense that now indeed he must put forth all his
power to utter something not unworthy of what the
" dead shepherd " himself might have spoken over
the two dead lovers, he puts forth all his powers for
evil and for error, and gives such a narrative of their
end as might have sufficed to raise from his grave
the avenging ghost of the outraged poet who has
been supposed — but unless it was said in some
riotous humour of jesting irony, the supposition seems
to me incredible — to have commended to Chapman,
in case of his death, the task thus ill discharged of
completing this deathless and half-accomplished
work of a genius " that perished in its pride."

The faults and weaknesses of strong men seem
usually an integral part of the character or the
genius we admire for its strength ; and the faults
ingrained in the work of Chapman were probably

122 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

indivisible from the powers which gave that work its
worth. Those blemishes not less than those beauties
of which the student is at almost every other step
compelled perforce to take note seem inevitable by
a poet's mind of his peculiar bent and bias. There
are superfluities which we would fain see removed,
deformities which we would fain see straightened, in
all but the greatest among poets or men ; and these
are doubtless in effect irremovable and incurable.
Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear
the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been
hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own
day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it
was with the twofold load of his theories on art and
his pedantries of practice. And Chapman, though
also a brother of the giant brood, had not the
Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow-
student. That weight which could but bend the
back that carried the vast world of invention whose
twin hemispheres are Volpone and the Alchemist
was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength
of the lesser Titan. His style reels and struggles
under the pressure ; he snorts and heaves as
Typhoeus beneath Etna, sending up at each huge
turn and convulsion of his uneasy bulk some shower
of blinding sparkles or volume of stifling vapour.
But for all the discords and contortions of his
utterance the presence is always perceptible of a
giant, and of one issued from the lineage of the early
gods.

He alone, as far as I can see, among all the great
men of his great age, had anything in common
with Jonson for good or evil. It would not be

GEORGE CHAPMAN 123

accurate to lay the heaviest faults of either poet to
the account of his learning. A weight of learning
at least equal to that which bowed and deformed
the genius of Jonson and of Chapman served but to
give new shape and splendour to the genius of
Milton and of Landor. To these it was but as a
staff to guide and a crown to glorify their labours ;
a lantern by whose light they might walk, a well-
spring from whose water they might draw draughts
of fresh strength and rest. But by this light the
two elder poets too often failed to walk straight and
sure, drank too often from this fountain a heady or
a narcotic draught. One at least, and not he who
had drunk deepest of the divine and dangerous
spring, seems at times under its influence to move
and speak as under some Circean transformation.
The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and
sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or
allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous
jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit
and style. Nevertheless, of these four illustrious
men whom I suppose to have been the most deeply
read in classical literature, with the exception
probably of Gray and possibly of Coleridge, among
all our poets of the past, the two great republicans
as surely were not as the two distinguished royalists
surely were pedants : and Chapman, being the lesser
scholar, was naturally the greater pedant of the
pair.

As a dramatic poet he has assuredly never yet
received his due meed of discerning praise ; but
assuredly no man of genius ever did so much, as
though by perverse and prepense design, to insure a

124 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

continuance of neglect and injustice. Had he allied
himself with some enemy in a league against his own
fame — had he backed himself against success for a
wager, let his deserts be what they might — he could
have done no more than he has done to make
certain of the desired failure. With a fair share of
comic spirit and invention, remarkable at least in a
poet of such a grave and ambitious turn of genius,
he has spiced and larded his very comedies with the
thick insipid sauce of pedantic declamation. Their
savourless interludes of false and forced humour
may indeed be matched even in the greatest of
Jonson's works ; there is here hardly anything
heavier than the voluminous foolery of Scoto of
Mantua and the dolorous long-winded doggerel
drivelled forth by that dreary trinity of dwarf,
eunuch, and hermaphrodite, whom any patron of
less patience than Volpone, with a tithe of his wit
and genius, would surely have scourged out of doors
long before they were turned forth to play by
Mosca. But when on a fresh reading we skip over
these blocks laid as if on purpose in our way through
so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inven-
tions, the monument of a mind so miglity, the
palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson's, we
are more than content to forget such passing and
perishable impediments to our admiration of that
sovereign intellect which has transported us across
them into the royal presence of its ruling and inform-
ing power.

The " shaping spirit of imagination " proper
to all great men, and varying in each case from
all other, reforms of itself its own misshapen work,

GEORGE CHAPMAN 125

treads down and triumphs over its own faults
and errors, renews its faltering forces and resumes
its undiminished reign. But he who in so high a
matter as the dramatic art can sin so heavily, and
so triumphantly tread under the penalty of his
transgression, must be great among the greatest of
his fellows. Such, with all his excesses and short-
comings in the way of dramatic work, was Jonson ;
such certainly was not Chapman. The tragedy, for
example, of Chahot, a noble and dignified poem in
the main, and the otherwise lively and interesting
comedy of Monsieur d'Olive, are seriously impaired
by a worse than Jonsonian excess in the analysis
and anatomy of "humours." The turncoat advocate
and the mock ambassador bestride the action of the
plays and oppress the attention of the reader with
a more "importunate and heavy load" than that
of Sinbad's old man of the sea. Another point of
resemblance to Jonson on the wrong side is the
absence or insignificance of feminine interest through-
out his works. No poet ever showed less love or
regard for women, less care to study or less power
to paint them. With the exception of a couple of
passages in his two best comedies, the wide field of
Chapman's writings will be found wellnigh barren
of any tender or noble trace of passion or emo-
tion kindled between man and woman.

These two passages stand out in beautiful and bril-
liant contrast to the general tone of the poet's mood ;
the praise of love has seldom been uttered with loftier
and sweeter eloquence than in the well-known verses *
which celebrate it as " nature's second sun," inform-

* All Fools, Act i, Scene i.

126 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

ing and educing the latent virtues in man " as the
sun doth colours " ; the structure and cadence of
the verse, the choice and fullness of the words, are
alike memorable for the perfect power and purity,
the strong simplicity and luminous completeness of
workmanship which may be (too rarely) found and
enjoyed in the poetry of Chapman. The passage in
The Gentleman Usher (Act iv, Scene 3), which sets
forth the excellence of perfect marriage, has less of
poetic illustration and imaginative colour, but is a
no less admirable model of clear and vigorous
language applied to the fit and full expression of
high thought and noble emotion. But as a rule we
find the genius of Chapman at its best when furthest
removed from female influence ; as in the two plays
of Biron and those nobler parts of the " Roman
tragedy " of CcBsar and Pompey in which Cato
discourses on life and death. The two leading
heroines of his tragic drama, Tamyra and Caropia,
are but a slippery couple of sententious harlots, who
deliver themselves in eloquent and sometimes in
exalted verse to such amorous or vindictive purpose
as the action of the play may suggest. Whether
the secret of this singular defect in a dramatic poet
were to be sought in coldness of personal tempera-
ment, in narrowness of intellectual interest, or
simply in the accidental circumstances which may
have given a casual direction to his life and thought,
we need not now think to conjecture. He was
ready enough to read lectures on love or lust, to
expatiate with a dry scholastic sensuality on the
details and influences of form and colour, to apply
the terms and subtleties of metaphysical definition

GEORGE CHAPMAN 127

to the physical anatomy of beauty ; indeed, one at
least of his poems may be described as a study in
philosophic vivisection applied by a lover to his
mistress, in which analysis and synthesis of material
and spiritual qualities in action and reaction of
cause and effect meet and confound each other — to
say nothing of the reader. But of pure passion and
instinctive simplicity of desire or dehght there is
little more trace than of higher emotion or deeper
knowledge of such things as belong alike to mind
and body, and hold equally of the spirit and the
flesh.

Here again we find that Jonson and Chapman
stand far apart from their fellow men of genius. The
most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their
day, conscious of high aims and large capacities,
they would be content with no crown that might be
shared by others ; they had each his own severe
and haughty scheme of study and invention, and
sought for no excellence which lay beyond or outside
it ; that any could lie above, past the reach of their
strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their
keen and studious eyes, they would probably have
been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet
there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole
worlds of human passion and divine imagination
which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs
and trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs
were powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song
fell silent. Not greater spirits alone, such as
Marlowe's and Shakespeare's, but such lesser spirits
as Decker's had the secret of ways unknown to them
in the world of poetry, the key of chambers from

128 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

which they were shut out. In Marlowe the passion
of ideal love for the ultimate idea of beauty in art
or nature found its perfect and supreme expression,
faultless and unforced. The radiant ardour of his
desire, the light and the flame of his aspiration,
diffused and shed through all the forms of his
thought and all the colours of his verse, gave them
such shapeliness and strength of life as is given to
the spirits of the greatest poets alone.

He, far rather than Chaucer or Spenser, whose
laurels were first fed by the dews and sunbeams of
Italy and France, whose songs were full of sweet tradi-
tion from oversea, of memories and notes which " came
mended from their tongues " — he alone was the true
Apollo of our dawn, the bright and morning star of
the full midsummer day of English poetry at its
highest. Chaucer, Wyatt, and Spenser had left our
language as melodious, as fluent, as flexible to all
purposes of narrative or lyrical poetry as it could be
made by the grace of genius ; the supreme note of
its possible music was reserved for another to
strike. Of English blank verse, one of the few
highest forms of verbal harmony or poetic expres-
sion, the genius of Marlowe was the absolute and
divine creator. By mere dint of original and god-
like instinct he discovered and called it into life ;
and at his untimely and unhappy death, more
lamentable to us all than any other on record except
Shelley's, he left the marvellous instrument of his
invention so nearly perfect that Shakespeare first
and afterwards Milton came to learn of him before
they could vary or improve on it. In the changes
rung by them on the keys first tuned by Marlowe

GEORGE CHAPMAN 129

we trace a remembrance of the touches of his hand ;
in his own cadences we catch not a note of any
other man's. This poet, a poor scholar of humblest
parentage, lived to perfect the exquisite metre
invented for narrative by Chaucer, giving it (to my
ear at least) more of weight and depth, of force and
fullness, than its founder had to give ; he invented
the highest and hardest form of English verse, the
only instrument since found possible for our tragic
or epic poetry ; he created the modern tragic
drama ; and at the age of thirty he went

Where Orpheus and where Homer are.

Surely there are not more than two or three names
in any literature which can be set above the poet's
of whom this is the least that can in simple truth
be said. There is no record extant of his living
likeness ; if his country should ever bear men worthy
to raise a statue or a monument to his memory, he
should stand before them with the head and eyes of an
Apollo looking homeward from earth into the sun :
a face and figure, in the poet's own great phrase,

Like his desire, lift upward and divine.

To all things alike we find applied in turn this
fervour of ideal passion ; to the beauty of women, to
the hunger after sway, to the thirst after knowledge,
to the energy of friendship or ambition, to the energy
of avarice or revenge. Sorrow and triumph and
rapture and despair find in his poetry their most
single and intense expression, extreme but not
excessive ; the pleasures and the pains of each

I

130 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

passion are clothed with the splendour and harmony
of pure conceptions fitted with perfect words.

There is the same simple and naked power of
abstract outline in every stroke of every study which
remains to us from his hand ; in the strenuous greed
and fantastic hate of Barabas, in the hysteric ardours
and piteous agonies of Edward, in the illimitable
appetite of Tamburlaine for material rule and of
Faustus for spiritual empire, and in the highest and
haughtiest aspirations of either towards that ultimate
goal of possession where he may lay hands on power
unattainable and touch lips with beauty inexpres-
sible by man, we trace the same ideal quality of
passion. In the most glorious verses ever fashioned
by a poet to express with subtle and final truth the
supreme aim and the supreme limit of his art, the
glory and the joy of his labour, the satisfaction and
the insufficience of its triumph in the partial and
finite expression of an infinite delight and an inde-
finite desire, Marlowe has summed up all that can
be said or thought on the office and the object, the
means and the end of this highest form of spiritual
ambition, which for him was as it were shadowed
forth in all symbols and reflected in all shapes of
human energy, in all exaltations of the spirit, in all
aspirations of the will. Being a poet of the first
order, he was content to know and to accept the
knowledge that ideal beauty lies beyond the most
beautiful forms and ideal perfection beyond the
most perfect words that art can imbue with life or
inflame with colour ; an excellence that expression
can never realize, that possession can never destroy.

The nearer such an artist's work comes to this

GEORGE CHAPMAN 131

abstract perfection of absolute beauty, the more
clearly will he see and the more gladly will he admit
that it never can come so near as to close with it
and find, as in things of meaner life, a conclusion set
in the act of fruition to the sense of enjoyment, a
goal fixed at a point attainable where the delight of
spiritual desire may be consummated, and consumed
in the moment of its consummation. A man of the
second order of genius is of his nature less quick to
apprehend the truth that

If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,

and if one single and supreme poem could embody
in distilled expression the spirit and the sense of

every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes,

there would remain behind all things attainable and
expressible in sound or form or colour something
that will not be expressed or attained, nor pass into
the likeness of any perishable life ; but though all
were done that all poets could do.

Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least.
Which into words no virtue can digest.

No poet ever came nearer than Marlowe to the
expression of this inexpressible beauty, to the incar-
nation in actual form of ideal perfection, to the
embodiment in mortal music of immortal harmony ;
and he it is who has left on record and on evidence
to all time the truth that no poet can ever come
nearer. The lesser artist, with less liberty of action.

132 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

will be the likelier of the two to show less loyalty
of submission to the eternal laws of thought which
find their full and natural expression in the eternal
canons of art. In him we shall find that intellectual
energy has taken what it can of the place and done
what it can of the work proper to ideal passion.
This substitution of an intellectual for an ideal end,
of energetic mental action for passionate spiritual
emotion as the means towards that end, is as good
a test as may be taken of the difference in kind
rather than in degree between the first and the
second order of imaginative artists. By the change
of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may
at once verify the change of object. In almost
every page of Chapman's noblest work we discern
the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind con-
vulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the
effort to achieve something that lies beyond the
proper aim and the possible scope of that form of
art within which it has set itself to work. The hard
effort of a strong will, the conscious purpose of an
earnest ambition, the laborious obedience to a
resolute design is as perceptible in Jonson and
Chapman as in Shakespeare and in Marlowe is the
instinct of spiritual harmony, the loyalty and the
liberty of impulse and of work. The lesser poets are
poets prepense ; the greater are at once poets of
their own making and of nature's, equidistant in
their line of life from the mere singing-bird and the
mere student.

Of the first order we may be sure that in any
age or country the men that compose it must have
been what they were, great as poets or artists,

GEORGE CHAPMAN 133

lyric or dramatic ; of the second order we may
well believe that in a different time or place the
names which we find written in its catalogue might
have been distinguished by other trophies than such
as they now recall. And this, which may seem to
imply a superiority of intellectual power, does
actually imply the reverse. Those are not the
greatest among men of whom we can reasonably
conceive that circumstance might have made them
as great in some different way from that in which
they walked ; those are not the highest poets or
soldiers or statesmen whom it is possible or per-
missible to imagine as winning equal fame in some
other field than their own, by the application to
some other end of such energy and genius as made
them great in the line which they were impelled to
select at least as much by pressure of accident as
by force of instinct, by the external necessity of
chance as by the internal necessity of nature.
Accident and occasion may be strongest with men
of the second order ; but with minds of the first
rank that which we call the impulse of nature is yet
more strong than they. I doubt not that Jonson
might in another age have sought and won distinc-
tion from the active life of soldiership or of state-
craft ; I take leave to doubt whether Shakespeare,
had he sought it, would have won.

I am not disinclined to admit the supposition
that Chapman might have applied his power of
moral thought and his interest in historic action
to other ends than they ever served in literature
or in life. But neither for his sake nor for ours
am I disposed to regret that circumstance or

134 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

destiny should have impelled or induced him
to take instead that way of work which has given
his memory a right to live with that of men
who could never have taken another way than
they took ; which has made it honourable and
venerable to all who have any reverence for English
poetry or regard for English fame ; which has set
him for ever in the highest place among the servants
and interpreters of Homer, and allowed us to
inscribe in our imagination, as on the pedestal of a
statue reared in thought to the father of our tragic
verse, the name of George Chapman not too
discreditably far beneath the name of Christopher
Marlowe.

APPENDIX

The following list of passages extracted from
Chapman's poems by the editor of the Elizabethan
anthology published in 1600 under the name of
England's Parnassus ; or, The Choicest Flowers of our
Modern Poets, was drawn up from my own copy
of the original edition before I was aware that a
similar list had been compiled by Mr. J. P. Collier
to accompany and illustrate a private reprint of the
book. From this source I learn that one extract
given at p. 312 as from Chapman is in fact taken
from the Albion's England of Warner ; as
indeed, though acquainted only with fragmentary
excerpts from that poem, I had already conjectured
that it must be. This is preceded by another
extract signed with the name of Chapman, which

GEORGE CHAPMAN 135

according to Mr, Collier is discoverable in Ovid's
Banquet of Sense ; but after a second and third
search through every turn and recess of that dense
and torrid jungle of bad and good verses I have
failed to light on this particular weed or flower. Five
other extracts have baffled alike my own researches
and the far more capable inquisition of even Mr.
Collier's learning ; nor have they proved traceable
by the energy and enthusiasm of Chapman's latest
editor, who has properly included them in his text
as authentic fragments of unknown poems by the
writer to whom four of them have been assigned
by Robert Allot, the editor of England's Par-
nassus. The second of these five passages he
ascribes to Spenser ; Spenser's it undoubtedly is
not ; and as it is followed by an excerpt from
Chapman's Hero and Leander, which is likewise
bestowed on Spenser by the too hasty liberality of
the old editor, we have some additional reason to
rely on the unmistakable evidence of the style,
which bears immediate witness to the peculiar handi-
work of Chapman. The last excerpt but one seems
familiar to me, and is rather in the manner of Greene
or Peele and their fellows than of Chapman or any
later poet ; I cannot but think that a student more
deeply read than I in the poems interspersed among
the romances of Greene and Lodge might be able to
trace both the two last passages of the five here
fathered on Chapman to the hand of one or the
other. They have the fluency or fluidity rather of
the blank verse written by the smaller scholastic
poets whom we may see grouped about the feet of
Marlowe ; the same facile profusion and effusion of

136 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

classic imagery, the same equable elegance and
graceful tenuity of style, crossed here and there by
lines of really high and tender beauty. It may be
thought that in that case they would have been as
speedily and as surely tracked by Mr. Collier as were
the verses transferred from Warner to Chapman ;
but the most learned and acute among scholars
cannot always remember the right place for all
things on which his eye must have lit in the course
of a lifelong study ; and I find in Mr. Collier's list
two passages, one given at p. 22 of England's
Parnassus under the heading " Bliss," the other at
p. 108 under the heading " Gifts," marked as of
unknown origin, of which the first occurs in the
fifth sestiad of Chapman's Hero and Lcander,
the second in his Shadow of Night. These in the
list that follows are assigned to their proper places.
The number of the page referred to on the left is
that in England's Paiiiassus ; the number on
the right refers to the page in which the same
passage appears in the first edition of Chapman's
collected poems.

List of Passages extracted from Chapman's Poems in
" England's Parnassus ; or, The Choicest Floioers
of our Modern Poets." 1600.

PAGE PAGE

3. The golden chain of Homer's high device . 6

9. Things senseless live by art, and rational die . 77

12. Sacred Beauty is the fruit of sight . . 29

15. All excellence of shape is made for sight . 33
(In the next line E.P. reads :

" To be a beetle else were no defame.")

16. Rich Beauty, that each lover labours for 30, 31

GEORGE CHAPMAN 137

PAGE PAGE

i6. O Beauty, still thy empire swims in blood . 31

17. *Beauty enchasing love, love gaining beauty . 29

„ This Beauty fair f is an enchantment made . 29

19. Beauty (in) heaven and earth this grace doth win 76

20. O Beauty, how attractive is thy power ! . 31

21. So respected

Was Bashfulness in Athens . . . .86
,, Preferment seldom graceth Bashfulness . . 83

22. Hard it is

To imitate a false and forged bliss . . 82

,, Bliss not in height doth dwell . . .90

38. All wealth and wisdom rests in true content J 29

40. Action is fiery valour's sovereign good . . 85

47. Round-headed Custom th' apoplexy is § -74

56. In things without us no delight is sure . . 76

67. Fierce lightning from her eyes . 80

68. Begin where lightness will, in shame it ends . 80
108. Good gifts are often given to men past good . 13
no. King Amalthea was transformed by Jove . 5

* E.P. has three misprints in this extract; "gaining" for
"gracing," "conflict" for "constant," "time content" for
"true content"; but in a later extract at p. 38 it gives the
right reading, and cites the two first lines of the stanza follow-
ing, which with the third and fourth are here omitted. It
attempts, however, to correct two seeming errors in the fifth and
sixth : reading " is " f or " in " and " thrones " for " thorns " ; but
in the first instance the text will be found right if the punctua-
tion be corrected by striking out the period at the end of the
line preceding; and "thorns" may be taken to mean the harsh
doctrines of the stoics subsequently referred to. In the ninth
line of this unlucky stanza E.P. misprints " grave " for
"graven."

t So E.P, for "beauty's fair"; and in v. 5 reads "fault" for
"fate," and in v. 8 "god self-love" for "good self-love."

I In this extract E.P. corrects "Bend in our circle" to
"Bound" ; a reading which seems to me preferable.

§ This is the reading in E.P. of the line

"But custom, that the apoplexy is" ;

the two following lines are transcribed exactly as they stand in
the third sestiad of Hero and Leander.

138 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

PAGE PAGI

120. Good deeds in case that they be evil placed *
141. Many use temples to set godly faces
161. Thef noblest born dame should industrious be 86
164. Inchastity is ever prostitute . . . -15
170. They double life that dead things' grief sustain 77

74
35

49

87

11
34

172. Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams .
174. Love is a wanton famine, rich in food .
178. Love laws and judges hath in fee .

180. Love paints his longings in sweet virgins' eyes

181. Trifling attempts no serious acts advance
183. Pure love, said she, the purest grace pursues
196. What doth make man without the parts of men 5

6
82
86

197. Like as rude painters that contend to show

198. Hymen that now is god of nuptial rights %
„ Before them on an altar be presented .
„ In Athens §

The custom was that every maid did wear
208. The mind hath in itself || a deity .

,, That mind most is beautiful and high

221, We must in matters moral quite reject .
230. Too much desire to please pleasure divorces
260. Like ^ as a glass is an inanimate eye
271. None is so poor of sense and eyne
To whom a soldier doth not shine .

,, No elegancie ** can beautify
273. Every good motion that the soul awakes

86

15
16

32
28

74

45

44
?

• This extract runs thus in E.P. :

" Good deeds, in case that they be evil placed,
111 deeds are reckoned, and soon disgraced.
That is a good deed that prevents a bad."
The third line occurs in the third sestiad of Hero and Leander
(p. 76).

t So E.P. for "And."
X So E.P. for "rites."

§ These two words are interpolated by the editor of E.P.
jl So E.P. for "herself."

^ So E.P. for "For" ; and in the next verse "outwardly"
for "inwardly." ** So E.P. for "elegance."

GEORGE CHAPMAN 139

PAGE PAGE

274. As Phoebus throws

His beams abroad though he in clouds be closed 74
(These two are attributed to Spenser in E.P.)
285. Time's golden thigh

Upholds the flowery body of the earth . . 72

292. Virtue makes honour, as the soul doth sense . 32

Joy graven in sense like snow in water wastes 72

295. Good vows are never broken with good deeds 76

„ We know not how to vow till love unblind us , 76

297. Use makes things nothing huge, and huge things

nothing . . . , . • . '32

303. Wisdom and the sight of heavenly things

Shines not so clear as earthly vanities

(Blind Beggar of Alexandria, vol. i, p. 2.)
305. Best loves are lost for wit, when men blame

fortune ....... 32

308. Words well placed move things were never

thought ... .... 32

312. Their virtues mount like billows to the skies . ?
„ Women were made for this intent, to put us
into pain. (Warner's Albion's England.)
314. Women never

Love beauty in their sex, but envy ever . 83

„ Women are most won when men merit least * 83
321. Nothing doth the world so full of f mischief fill 82
324. The gentle humorous night

Implies X her middle course, and the sharp east ?

* In the third line of this extract E.P. reads "Love's proper
lesson" instead of "special."

t So E.P. The right reading of this beautiful couplet is :
Ah, nothing doth the world with mischief fill,
But want of feeling one another's ill.

Hero and Leander, 5th sestiad.
(E.P. prints "will" for "ill.")

I This word alone would suffice to vindicate the authenticity
of the fragment. It recurs perpetually in the poems of Chap-
man, who always uses it in the same peculiar and licentious
manner.

140 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

PAGE PAGE

355. With a brace of silver hinds . . 9

356. Nature's bright eyesight, and the world's fair

soul ....... 10

357. Amongst this gamesome crew is seen . . 48
366. In flowery season of the year . . -43

(With two lines prefixed at bottom of preced-
ing page—

The tenth of March when Aries received

Dan Phoebus' rays into his horned head.)

372. Day's king, God of undaunted verse . . 81

379. All suddenly a light of twenty hues . 72, 73

395. She lay, and seemed a flood of diamant 29, 30

(Omitting " Now Ovid's muse — to make me

better.")

399. Their soft young cheek-balls to the eye . . 47

407. To make the wondrous power of love appear . 36

409. *Then cast she off her robe and stood upright . 23

,, Herewith she rose, like the autumnal star . 31

417. See where she issues in her beauty's pomp . ?

,; Her hair was loose, and 'bout her shoulders hung ?

422. Like f as a taper burning in the dark . . 31

,, Now as when heaven is muffled with the vapours 33

424. As when Jove at once from east to J west 33

464. As she was looking in a glass . . -32

{Her glass in the text.)
469. In little time these ladies found . . -47

481. (Misprinted 465). In that mead-proud-making

grass . . . . . . 41, 42

485. A soft enflowered bank embraced the fount . 23
488. Grim Melampus with the Ethiop's feet . 13

There are thus in this anthology no less than
eighty-one extracts ascribed to Chapman, besides

* In the third line of this stanza England's Parnassus reads
"her night" for "the night"; in the eighth "choisefull" for
"charmfur'; in the ninth "varnishing" for "vanishing."

t So E. P. for "And." J So E.P. for "and."

GEORGE CHAPMAN 141

two of which one is known and the other suspected
to be the work of his hand ; these are wrongly-
assigned to Spenser. At the time of this pubHcation
Chapman was in his forty-second year ; he had
published but two plays and three volumes of verse,
the third being his continuation of Marlowe's Hero
and Leander. Of the eighty-three passages num-
bered above, thirty-two are taken from this poem,
twenty-five from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, ten
from The Shadow of Night, eight from The Con-
tention of Phillis and Flora, a quaint and some-
times a graceful version into the Elizabethan dialect
of a Latin or more probably a quasi-Latin poem
ascribed by Ritson to one of the most famous
among mediseval masters ; one is taken from the
first scene of his first play, one is spurious, and six
(including the passage wrongly referred in a former
list to Ovid's Banquet of Sense), whether spurious
or genuine, have yet to be traced to their true
source. In his critical memoir of Marlowe {Works,
vol. i, p. Ivii, ed. 1850), Mr. Dyce observes that " the
editor of England's Parnassus appears never to
have resorted to manuscript sources " ; and if, as is
of course most probable, the supposition of that
great scholar and careful critic be well founded, we
must conclude that these passages, as well as the
more precious and exquisite fragment of a greater
poet which called forth this remark from his editor,
were extracted by Allot from some printed book or
books long lost to human sight. One small but
noticeable extract of two lines and a half descriptive
of midnight is evidently, I think, from a lost play.
The taste of the worthy person who compiled this

142 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

first English anthology was remarkable apparently
for its equal relish of good verse and bad ; but we
may be grateful that it was by no means confined
to the more popular and dominant authors of his
age, such as Spenser and Sidney ; since his faculty
of miscellaneous admiration has been the means of
preserving many curious fragments of fine or quaint
verse, and occasionally a jewel of such price as the
fragment of Marlowe which alike for tone of verse
and tune of thought so vividly recalls Shelley's
poem, The Question, written in the same metre
and spirit, that one is tempted to dream that some
particles of the " predestined plot of dust and soul "
which had once gone to make up the elder must
have been used again in the composition of the
younger poet, who in fiery freedom of thought and
speech was like no other of our greatest men but
Marlowe, and in that as in his choice of tragic
motive was so singularly like this one.

THE EARLIER PLAYS OF
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

THE EARLIER PLAYS OF
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

For any man born only a little lesser than the
greatest, a little lower than the angels or the gods
of song, it is the heaviest and most enduring of all
conceivable misfortunes to have been rated for a
time among them if not above them. That a
Jephson or a Tate, a Gibber or an Ibsen, should for
a moment be compared or preferred to Shakespeare
by any howling dervish or laughing jackass of
letters is a matter of no moment : that men of
genius should ever have been thrust forward as
claimants for so ridiculous a promotion is only too
certain to impair or to imperil, it may be for only
too many generations, the recognition of their
genuine claims to honour. That typical Oxonicule,
the Rev. William Cartwright, " the most florid and
seraphical preacher in the university," not only
damned himself to everlasting fame, but did what
in him lay to damn the reputation of Fletcher by
assuring his departed spirit that " Shakespeare to
thee was dull," obscene, inartistic, and scurrilous :
dull as compared to the author of The Nice Valour,
obscene as compared to the author of The Custom
of the Country,, inartistic as compared to the author
of The Sea Voyage, and scurrilous as compared to the

145 K

146 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

author of The Scornful Lady. The criticism is worthy
of Matthew Arnold : and even he could not have
surpassed it in perversity of cultivated impertinence
and audacity of self -erratic conceit. But time has
always done justice, when time was needed to do
justice, on the academic aberrations of complacent
incompetence and overweening culture. It is of far
more importance that justice should be done to the
victims of their admiration. To be dispraised is
nothing : to be mispraised may be dangerous.
Justice has never been done to Beaumont and
Fletcher since the days in which their work was set
up against Shakespeare's. It is time to consider so
rich and various a treasure as they have bequeathed
us without consideration or recollection of the fact
that their garnets were once preferred to Shake-
speare's rubies, their pearls to his diamonds. No
other dramatic treasury can boast of so magnificent
a display in quantity, in quality, and in variety of
jewels.

It must be allowed that no expert in gems would
have given much for the first sample of their work-
shop. The generous and cordial friendship of Ben
Jonson could hardly have applauded so crude and
juvenile a study in his school of comedy as The
Woman-Hater. It is readable, absurd, and amusing :
I cannot think that much more can be said for it.
The rather dreary and mouldy Spanish tradition of
jocularity on the subject of hunger and gluttony
revives here in a final renaissance of farcical effect
which may charitably be found not altogether
unworthy of a tolerant rather than of a sympathetic
smile : but the protagonist is a mere monomaniac,

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 147

and the heroine is too eccentric to pass muster
except as a type of the very newest and oldest of
new women whom we may meet in the pages of
Aristophanes or the columns of the Times.

In the tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret a new
touch is felt — a new voice is audible. There is here
no trace of Jonson's influence ; nor is there any
sign of Shakespeare's except in so far as we may
say that all subsequent good work in tragedy must
inevitably bear witness to the effect of Marlowe's
example and of his. For this is good work, as well
as new : the impetuous and continuous rush of the
fluent and fervent verse is only the outward and
visible sign of the inward and spiritual ardour, head-
long and heedless of reflection or restraint, which
impels the writer's genius along its passionate and
breathless course. Even if, as has been plausibly
suggested, the staider and less vehement hand of
Massinger may here and there be traced, this play
is on the whole about the finest and the fullest
evidence left us of Fletcher's magnificent but far
from supreme power as a tragic poet. The men are
nothing : at least they are but rough and rudely
coloured sketches. The abnormal wickedness of
Brunhalt, the abnormal goodness of Ordella, give
all the life and interest to the tragic action that
readers can ever find in it or that spectators ever
can have found. It is not quite human life : for
the interest excited is hardly in human nature. But,
such as it is, the interest is unflaggingly sustained,
and the style is as admirable in its impulsive
fashion as is the style of Marlowe and Shake-
speare and Webster in the nobler and more

148 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

serious manner appropriate to higher and sincerer
inspiration.

Something more of such inspiration is perceptible
in Philaster : and yet, leaving Shakespeare out of
the question, we find here no figures comparable for
creative power and living truth to Faustus and
Edward, to Vittoria and Bracciano, the Duchess and
her brothers. The boyish or feminine incapacity to
draw even in outline, to paint even in monochrome,
the likeness of a man, which is here so unmistakably
displayed, was evidently no evidence of inferior
power, no reason for inferior regard, in the estimate
of contemporary admiration. Among all their tragic
or serious heroes we may look in vain for the lifelike
figure of a conceivable and acceptable man. A
gallant and roistering humorist they could paint
better and more delightfully, with more contagious
sympathy and more audacious truth, than even the
great Dumas himself ; but the finest type of heroic
manhood imaginable by either is a knight of Malta ;
an Origen in armour ; a hero who renounces man-
hood. Philaster is something worse : he is hardly
the shadow, the phantom, the wraith of a living
man. The she-page Bellario is simply the loveliest
and most interesting of all dramatic hermaphrodites
from Shakespeare's Viola down to Wycherley's
Fidelia : it is curious and significant that Beaumont
and Fletcher could never create a man or a woman
so attractive as this fantastic and pathetic figure,
whose unquestionable and inimitable charm of per-
fect purity and more than manly womanhood threw
so strange a fascination over the stage that it was
a less outrageously than pardonably? extravagant

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 149

exaggeration of the truth which Lamb allowed
himself in the assertion that " for many years after
the date of Philaster's first exhibition on the stage
scarce a play can be found without one of these
women pages in it." Certainly, as he adds, " our
ancestors seem to have been wonderfully delighted
with these transformations of sex." But after all
it must be admitted that the vital and enduring
fascination of this beautiful and famous play depends
less on character or on incident than on the exquisite
and living loveliness of the style — most attractive
when least realistic, most memorable when least
dramatic.

The authors of The Maid's Tragedy succeeded in
showing themselves at all points superior to the
authors of Philaster. Their poetic power is equal in
charm and more perfectly adapted or subordinated
to the demands of dramatic art, the laws of theatrical
evolution or construction. That they could not
draw even in outline the figure of a man — that a
protagonist of heroic mould, such as Marlowe's
Faustus or Webster's Virginius, was not only unpre-
sentable, but inconceivable by the purely passionate
and impulsive nature of their tragic genius — this
masterpiece would suffice to prove, even without the
evidence of their later tragedies. The heroes, or
rather the passive and the braggart figures of man-
hood proposed for our acceptance as the heroes of
the play, are not above the rather lamentable level
of Philaster. But the sinners are better than their
elders ; Pharamond and his Megra are little more
than the sketches of a hot-blooded and headlong
boy if set against the vivid, vigorous outlines of

150 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Evadne and her king. Yet, exquisite though it is
as a poem, this famous tragedy is the first example
of an Enghsh play in which all other considerations
are subordinate to the imperious demands, the
dominant exactions, of stage effect. Evadne is the
one thoroughly credible and thoroughly realized
figure in the play : a bad woman who might not
have made so bad a man. Of the two heroes it can
only be further said that Amintor is abject and
Melantius absurd : the king is now and then as
theatrical in villainy as they in virtue, and Aspatia
is not so much a woman as a mouthpiece and a
subject for poetry incomparable in its kind. Shake-
speare and Webster did not find it necessary and
did not feel impelled to make their heroines talk so
lyrically and evoke from other and minor figures
such effusion of elegiac eloquence. In the earlier
scenes she says now and then something that could
not have been bettered by Webster or even by
Shakespeare : but she never has enough of life and
truth in her to stand beside " one of Shakespeare's
women " — or of Webster's.

That Fletcher or any of his friends should have
thought it probable or possible for The Faithful
Shepherdess to find favour on the stage is the most
wonderful and unimaginable witness we could have
to the delight of an Enghsh audience in pure and
absolute poetry throughout the age of Shakespeare —
during the generation that reaches from the sunrise
of Marlowe to the sunset of Shirley. That the
loveliest of all pastoral plays ever set by fancy in
the frame of a fantastic Arcadia should have evoked
by its failure such noble tributes of indignant

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 151

admiration from contemporary poets is an accident
which may well be held worthy of rejoicing and
thanksgiving by all who believe that sympathy and
gratitude rather than defamation and envy are
natural to all men not utterly ignoble and all com-
petitors not utterly incompetent. The difference
between this poem and Milton's exquisitely imitative
Comus is the difference between a rose with a leaf
or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and radiant,
and the faultless but scentless reproduction of a
rose in academic wax for the admiration and imita-
tion of such craftsmen as must confine their ambition
to the laurels of a college or the plaudits of a school.
The figures who play their parts on the woodland
stage of this fairyland theatre are hardly amenable
to criticism as actual or possible men and women.
The lover whose love is curable by compliance and
destructible by the destruction of his idol's ideal
inaccessibility would be absurdly misplaced in the
world of comedy or tragedy : in the world of fancy,
a world made up of poetic artifice and tradition, he
is a perfectly appropriate and coherent figure, native
to his fantastic element. To the same world the
constant Clorin and the wanton Cloe so unmistakably
belong that the serious application of an ethical
standard to their conduct or their characters is as
inept as a poet's objection to the unimaginative
realism of mathematics or a mathematician's to the
sterile impotence of poetry if apphed to the proof
of a theorem or the solution of a problem. The
most exquisitely appreciative and the most nearly
infallible of critics fell surely for once into incon-
sistent partiality and untenable paradox when he

152 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

objected to the contrast of the lascivious with the
virginal shepherdess on the score that " such weeds
by juxtaposition do not set off but kill sweet
flowers," and defended the outrageous obscenities of
The Virgin Martyr on the plea that they " have a
strength of contrast, a raciness and a glow in them
which set off the religion of the rest, somehow as
Caliban serves to show Miranda." Such dunghill
weeds as those were never planted or watered by
Fletcher.

It is curious from the historic or literary point of
view that the first burlesque ever presented on our
stage should still be so very much the best. The
Knight of the Burning Pestle is at least as superior
to The Rehearsal at all points as the fifth act of The
Chances substituted by the author of The Rehearsal
for Fletcher's original fifth act is superior in dramatic
force, character, and humour to that hasty and head-
long scrawl of a sketch. The seemingly incongruous
interfusion of serious and sometimes noble poetry
might have been expected to destroy the broad
comic effect of parody and raillery which it actually
heightens. The good old city poet w^hose Cockney
heroics it made no unkindly fun of, and whose
homely power of pathetic realism was a quality
altogether beyond the reach of Beaumont or of
Fletcher, might have smiled without wincing at so
good-humoured and hurtless a caricature of his
counter-jumping paladins.

In theatrical magnificence of incident and effect
A King and No King is as supreme a triumph as is
Othello or King Lear in poetic sublimity and spiritual
intensity of truth made manifest and awful in beauty

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 153

as in terror to all ages of mankind. To say that
there is nothing more in it would be shamefully and
stupidly false : there is much beautiful writing and
much brilliant vivacity of charm. But all serious
study of character, all rational or moral evolution
of conduct, is wantonly if not shamelessly sacrificed
to the immediate effect of vehement if not sometimes
galvanic sensation or surprise. The outrages on
human possibility in the parts of Gobrias and
Arane, the magnanimous murderess in design and
the virtuous promoter of a supposedly incestuous
passion, would have been impossible to any other
poet and even to any other playwright of genius in
any way comparable either with Beaumont or with
Fletcher. That any soldier king was ever such a
blatant braggart and swaggering swashbuckler as
Arbaces might surely have been questioned, as now
perhaps it may not be, in the days of the poets who
decked out his crazy and feather-headed vanity
with the splendid plumage of rhetorical rhapsody
which, as Macaulay long since observed, so singularly
anticipates the discoveries of modern mechanism.

The peculiar boyishness which distinguishes alike
the tragic and the comic genius of Beaumont and
Fletcher, but more especially the tragic work of
Fletcher and the comic work of Beaumont, displays
itself most amusingly in the once-famous parts of
the three beaten braggarts which in their day were
classed with the incomparable figure of Bobadil.
The far from subtle or exquisite humour of kicking
and cudgelling may have been caught from the
example of their illustrious friend and occasional
model, Ben Jonson : but the lightness of touch, the

154 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

buoyancy of burlesque, must be allowed to give it
a tone of contagious pleasantry which the heavier
hand of the more serious artist has not given and
perhaps did not care to give. The veriest horse-play
of farce in the broadest scenes of Beaumont and
Fletcher has more of good-humour and harmless or,
anyhow, spiteless merriment than is to be looked for
in the elaborate and deliberate brutality of such an
unsavoury masterpiece as The Silent Woman.

The eccentric tragedy of Cupid's Revenge has
always been a butt for the shafts of sarcasm rather
than criticism. It is certainly somewhat grotesque
and amorphous if not abnormal ; we cannot be
surprised that both Campbell and Dyce should have
dismissed it with a bitter word of scorn. But a far
greater than they or than any other critic of our
great dramatic poets has not only embalmed its
noblest passages in the deathless amber of a priceless
volume, but has selected it for the supreme honour
of a condensed rendering into narrative prose after
the fashion of his incomparable Tales from Shake-
speare. The rough and ready improvisation which
reduces to a far lower level all the huddled and head-
long later part of the play is as evidently due to
enforced haste or natural weariness of the work in
hand as is the inferiority of the latter part of
Marlowe's Jew of Malta to the magnificent beauty
and power of its opening scenes. To imagine in
either or in any such case the necessary or the
probable intervention or intrusion of a foreign hand
and a feebler touch is a facile and uncritical evasion
rather than explanation of a problem suggested by
the naturally inevitable inequality of the finished

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 155

parts with the hurried parts of even a great writer's
work, when casually compelled to write against
time for the stage or for any other pulpit or tribune
required for the utterance of whatever he has to
say. But no pantomimic absurdity in the opening
and no convulsive debility in the closing scenes of
the play can efface or should be allowed to affect
the impression of the two scenes between Leucippus
and his mistress before and after his chivalrous and
mendacious affirmation of her virtue has resulted,
during his absence at the seat of war, in her marriage
with his father : a situation treated with charac-
teristic frankness, but handled with exceptional
delicacy. It may be remembered that Mr. Samuel
Pepys, on August 17, 1668, " saw Cupid's Revenge,
under the new name of Love Despised, that hath
something very good in it, though I like not the
whole body of it." The somewhat eccentric judge
who preferred Tuke as a dramatic poet to Shake-
speare at his very highest was on this occasion
exactly and excellently right. He and Lamb
(" Powers eternal ! such names mingled ! ") have
alone been just in their expressed or implied judg-
ment of this otherwise unlucky play.

There are some pretty lines thrown away here and
there on the not very brilliant masque in celebration
of the ill-omened nuptials of Prince Rupert's ill-
starred mother ; but Beaumont would perhaps have
done as well to leave such work to the stronger and
more inventive hand of his friend Ben Jonson, whose
influence for good and evil, or at least for better
and for worse, is evident in Beaumont's part of the
Four Plays in One, which we must regret to remember

156 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

as the only surviving example of a form of dramatic
entertainment to which a horrible as well as terrible
little work of relentless and realistic genius never
to be unquestioningly rejected from the Shake-
spearean Apocrypha must pretty certainly be
admitted to belong. From what context of com-
panion plays or playlets such an inhuman or at least
such a merciless masterpiece of condensed and
concentrated horror as A Yorkshire Tragedy can
have been detached by its pubHsher or its author,
no imaginable student above the lowest level of
brainless and frontless duncery will care or will
presume to conjecture. In the present unique
instance it would not be difficult for the youngest
possible reader of average intelligence to distinguish
and to determine the parts assignable to Beaumont
from the parts assignable to Fletcher. The Jonsonian
induction is Beaumont's : he was never worse
employed than in imitation of his great friend Ben :
exemplar vitiis imitahile if ever there was one. No
one but a poet born could have written The Triumph
of Honour, though he could only have written it
during a transitory eclipse or collapse of his better
powers ; no one but an imitator of Ben Jonson
when least happily inspired could have scribbled
the farcical part of it. The Triumph of Love should
have been a beautiful and pathetic play instead of a
beautiful and pathetic sketch : but as it is we must
gladly acknowledge that one lovely scene in it has
been overpraised neither by Charles Lamb nor by
Leigh Hunt. The Triumph of Death, in which
there certainly is no suggestion of lovehness or
pathos, is a superb example of Fletcher's vehement

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 157

and fervent, though neither gentle nor sublime,
genius for passionate and headlong tragedy. The
Triumph of Time is a survival of the unfittest — a
revival of the obsolete morality play, not improved
by a dash of the contemporary masque. It is by
no means worthless : but its author would probably
have been the first to admit that it was not worth
very much.

The noble and cordial verses in which Ben Jonson
expressed the fervour of his love for a younger
friend who had shown such religious devotion
towards him should be borne in mind by the reader
who cannot but think that the " religion " so
affectionately acknowledged and so generously re-
quited did not bring forth any very sweet or savory
fruit in the rather too Jonsonian comedy of The
Scornful Lady. In all the curious and interesting
history of opinion — of moral and intellectual change
and progress and reaction — there is nothing more
singular than the variations of view among intelligent
and honourable men as to decency and indecency,
morality and immorality. It must surely be now
incomprehensible to any student of letters or of
ethics that so unquestionably good and true a man
as Dr. Johnson should have denounced the noble
and natural story of Tom Jones as a " corrupt "
book, and agreed with the clergy of his day in
commending to decent readers the infamous and
abominable story of Pamela. If the one is
sometimes blunt, the other is always vile. The
Scornful Lady is, of course, not so ignoble and
impure an abortion of immorality as Richardson's
shamelessly shameful book ; and in a rough way it

158 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

is a vigorous and memorable example of the very
broadest comedy : but alike in matter and in
manner, in language and in character, it is undeni-
ably the coarsest work of its authors. And yet it
was so long held comparatively blameless that this
particular discredit has generally been transferred
to a far less offensive work of more graceful if still
somewhat graceless audacity in treatment and in
humour. Even Wycherley, if at his worst more
basely and brutally immoral, was hardly more
impudent in theatrical invention or device of daringly
and undeniably comic effect.

The strange and straggling tragicomedy of The
Coxcomb is as unadvisedly and as singularly mis-
named from the idiotic protagonist of the unin-
terestingly extravagant underplot as is a far more
memorable example of dramatic poetry, the master-
piece at once of Middleton and of Rowley which was
somehow most absurdly misbaptized as The Change-
ling. In the gentle and devoted heroine of the
more serious part there is a touch of simplicity and
sweetness, in devotion and submission, of daring
and of patience, which distinguishes her as a daughter
of Beaumont's genius from the more vehement and
voluble children of Fletcher's. Another play which
is no less obviously a compound work, not less
interesting and not less insufficient to satisfy a
serious and grateful admirer of their sometimes
rather idle and irregular genius, is The Honest Man's
Fortune. The hero is a nobler and manlier type of
manhood than any of Fletcher's when left to work
by himself ; but the movement and ease and
spontaneity of the action in all but his very worst

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 159

and hastiest and most puerile plays, if not even in
those rather pitiful puerilities of invention and
execution, will hardly be found in this more serious
and ambitious poem. The two heroines are admi-
rably sketched rather than admirably painted : but
the simplicity and nobility of nature apparent and
consistent in them both would be not less hard to
find in the more theatrical and conventional heroines
of Fletcher's later plays. There are noble passages
and magnificent couplets in the little poem appended
to this play : it would be difficult if not impossible
to match them for moral dignity and for majesty of
expression in any other work of Fletcher's : but
few readers will probably agree with Leigh Hunt
that they suffice to corroborate or to justify the
expressed regret of Coleridge that Beaumont and
Fletcher had not devoted their genius and their
time to writing poems rather than to writing plays.
The ingrained and ineradicable juvenility of mind
which distinguishes them from all other men of true
and splendid genius is or should be at once apolo-
getically and amusingly patent if not obvious to
the readers of that admirably written comedy so
childishly misnamed The Captam : misnamed from
a Jonsonian figure of farce who is once happily
humanized by generous S5nnpathy and pity for the
supposed sufferings of an elder soldier. The mon-
strous and abnormal criminality of the almost
incredible heroine is more like the impudent fancy
of a naughty boy than the corrupt imagination of
a depraved man. But so bright and lively a piece
of work would in common scholastic justice be set
down so decidedly to the youngster's credit as to be

160 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

deservedly set against the discredit if not the
disgrace due to the juvenile audacity of his immature
imagination. And the first scene of cajolery in
which the woman's magnificent art of passionate
hypocrisy is brought to bear upon a half-conscious
and half-reluctant victim, a would-be dupe who
cannot dupe himself, is finer than anything I know
of the kind in prose or poetry before the advent of
Balzac's almighty and ever-living Valerie. Madame
Marneffe is as matchless as Madame de Merteuil :
but the patrician or the plebeian she-devil of
immortal fiction might have given a smile of
sympathy if not a hand of sisterhood to the hardly
less terrible harlot of an English poet's inven-
tion.

In the magnificent melodrama or tragicomedy of
The Little French Lawyer, it would be impossible to
overpraise the brilliancy of invention, the deftness
of composition, or the splendour of execution : but
the brutality of boyhood is as evident as its joyful-
ness. From any other hand the rufftanly insolence
which derides the infirmity of a veteran hero in the
public street would be unendurable and unpardon-
able ; but here the merciless infidelity of the bride
who has played false to her earlier and younger
lover makes it intelligible if inexcusable. And here
the incomparable and inimitable lightness of touch
which impairs the tragic work and glorifies the
comic work of Fletcher must be allowed by all
intelligent or aesthetic judges to redeem the offence
which would else be given to the moral or ethical
critic of the superb result or outcome of his weakness
and his strength — his inevitable limitations and his

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 161

magnificent capacities. The juvenile horse-play of
practical jokes which animates at once the serious
comedy and the rampant farce of this dazzling and
delightful poem, a poem in which no alloy of grave
or of humorous prose can anywhere be found latent
or apparent, contrives in some inexplicable if not
inexcusable but bewitching if not irresistible fashion
to succeed somehow in fusing them together with
such instinctive alchemy of inspiration as to yield
by way of product or result a deathless if not
blameless masterpiece of comic poetry.

It is impossible to imagine that the author of this
most brilliant and buoyant and high-spirited piece
of work can have had anything to do, or that his
even more glorious friend and compeer can have
had anything to do, with one of the dullest and
feeblest plays surviving — another survival of the
unfittest — from the marvellous and matchless har-
vest of their time. The Apocrypha of the Scripture
bequeathed to us by Beaumont and Fletcher may
be more easily and more decisively tested and
gauged and disposed of than the Apocrypha
of Shakespeare's. That the bright and pleasant
comedy of The Widow is Middleton's work alone
will hardly be questioned by any reader whose
time would not be better spent on even the most
futile of employments or diversions than in the
study of poetic or comic drama : and the most
conscientious examination will only find in The
Faithful Friends a passage or a verse here and
there which may charitably be thought not quite
bad enough for an old Sharpham or a new Shake-
speare. It is perhaps not so utterly worthless and

162 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

hopeless a failure as Cupid's Whirligig or Thomas
Lord Cromwell. But it is sad stuff.

The riotous and outrageous farce of Wit at Several
Weapons is such a play as might conceivably have
been written in his nonage by a bastard son of Ben
Jonson who had inherited more of the worse than
of the better qualities, intellectual and moral, of his
illustrious father. Even Ben, whose indignant
humour so often concerned itself with crime, would
hardly have introduced at the very opening of the
action as a figure of pure comedy a veteran in
villainy who boasts to his own son of his early
successes as a professional pimp, and his later gains
by the robbery and ruin of little children confided
to his guardianship. This is the most seriously and
odiously revolting passage in all the various and
voluminous work of these great dramatic poets —
or of any that I can remember among their fellows.
And this comes of taking life and character too
lightly and too stagily. The play is throughout a
very slight and rather childish piece of work, with
some touches in it of fun rather than of humour —
unless there be humour in a schoolboy's pillow-fight.
But the intended fun of the opening could only seem
funny to an exceptionally ill-conditioned schoolboy.
It is only fair to add that some of the heroine's
tricks and shifts to rid herself of an idiot suitor and
attract a hesitating lover are really not unworthy
to remind the reader of Moliere in his broader and
rougher mood of practical pleasantry.

The genius of Beaumont and Fletcher for pure
comedy was at its nadir in Wit at Several Weapons :
in Wit Without Money it rises easily and visibly to

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 163

its radiant zenith. The matchless instinct of expres-
sion, the incomparable lightness of touch, which
distinguishes its best work from all other triumphs
of poetic comedy in the language, carries off and
sweeps away all too curious or serious consideration
of character or conduct. But, indeed, if the pro-
tagonist is a somewhat too extravagant figure of
humorous extravagance when he joyously makes
away with his brother's fortune as well as his own,
the younger brother is so noble a fellow when he
refuses to resent his ruin, or to forget the finer
qualities of his reckless and rapacious elder, that this
single figure should suffice to confute all charges
ever brought against his creator or his twin creators
on the score of immoral incompetence to conceive
or to present a morally attractive and admirable
young English hero. Even Shakespeare — to say
nothing of Jonson, who in this race is quite out of
the running — can show no other to be set beside
him.*

The curious laxity with which educated and able
men will fling about epithets when engaged in
critical comment is rather singularly exemplified in
the terms applied by Dyce as well as by Hallam to
so magnificent a work of comic and tragic genius as
The Custom of the Country. Dryden's previous
attack on it as compared with his own dirty and
greasy comedies and those of his brighter but not

* Why Frank should be sometimes called Francisco is as
insoluble a mystery as why the word "else," a word as neces-
sary to the sense as to the metre, should have been persistently
omitted by all editors in the penultimate scene of this comedy.
"Do not allure me," says Valentine when secure of his bride.
"Thou art no widow of this world (else)!" Without this
obvious little word the line is immetrical nonsense.

164 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

less unsavoury rivals may be dismissed with a brief
expression of regret that so great a writer should
have shown himself so small a critic — so stupidly
shameless in misjudgment alike from the moral or
ethical and from the intelligent or aesthetic point of
view. " The very grossest " (as Mr. Dyce unhappily
miscalls it) of all these plays is beyond all question
The Scornful Lady. The Custom of the Country is
certainly almost as audacious a comic poem as is
even the alarmingly fearless and morally rather
than immorally impudent Lysistrata : but coarse or
obscene it is not. There is not a dirty word in it :
not a touch, not a whiff, of Swiftian or Carlylesque
impurity.

When some forgotten fool observed to Byron that
Italian was an easy language, the supreme and
final and unapproachable master of serio-comic
poetry replied with unusual good sense and accuracy :
" A very easy language to know badly ; a very
difficult language to know well," It would be no
less easy to pass judgment on Fletcher as a tragic
poet in a sweeping and summary fashion ; it is
certainly no less difficult to adjust the due balance
of praise and blame, whether positive or compara-
tive, which must determine the verdict to be passed
on the admirable, though anything but impeccable,
author of such tragedies as Bonduca, Valentinian,
and The Double Marriage. Brilliant even to splen-
dour, ardent even to satiety, they most indisputably
are. That their somewhat hectic and feverish glory
cannot endure a moment's comparison with the
sunlight or the starlight of Shakespeare's, of Mar-
lowe's, and of Webster's is anything but a reproach

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 165

to a poet whose fame, if eclipsed, is not and can
never be effaced by theirs.

The dazzHng tragedy of Bonduca is half lit up by
the flame of the footlights and half by the radiance
of a magnificent if uncertain day. That it wanes
and withers into the dusk of an autumnal sunset
before the deathless dawn of Tennyson's almost
^schylean Boadicea can only be acknowledged as
inevitable. That more than one or two of his con-
temporaries might have made out of the subject
a far more perfect and a far sublimer poem is as
certain as that none of them could have turned it
to such triumphant account from the not ignobly
theatrical point of view. But the reader of Fletcher's
tragedies can never quite get away from the besetting
sense of the theatre. In this instance the incon-
gruous and excessive admixture or immixture of
broad and not always brilliant comedy deforms
and degrades the tragic beauty of the nobler scenes.
The death scene is splendid and memorable : but
while reading it we must not remember such another
and more magnificent example of poetic tribute to
the sacred and heroic virtue of suicide in face of
shame as Marston had set in the immolation of his
Sophonisba. The best by far of Fletcher's martial
heroes is Caratach : and his nephew is a much finer
and more natural youngster than Shakespeare's far
less lifelike and lovable Arthur in King John : who
would have made us reasonably doubt whether the
omnipotent hand of his creator could have created
a living little boy if it had not left us at a later date
the incomparable and unapproachable and adorable
figure of Mamillius.

PHILIP MASSINGER

PHILIP MASSINGER

It is no less singular than certain that the fame of
no English poet can ever have passed through more
alternate variations of notice and neglect than that
of the most temperate, studious, and conscientious
of the successors of Shakespeare. In his own day
Massinger would seem to have received, if not such
honours as English lovers of dramatic poetry might
think due to him in such days as ours, yet un-
doubtedly very much more recognition than was
accorded to poets of far purer and more potent
inspiration. Ford, as a master of perverse or noble
passion, of stately style and severe fervour in
presentation or suggestion of condensed and subdued
tragedy, stands far above him : Tourneur stands
higher than Ford ; and Webster, if compared to
them, is as Shakespeare if compared with Webster.
But if Massinger cannot be classed as a poet with
the least of these, it is no less certain that the best
of them cannot be ranked as an artist, I do not say
equal, but comparable to Massinger. That, as
Coleridge said, he is " always entertaining " — that
" his plays have the interest of novels " — is but one
of the excellent qualities which make the long
echpse of his fame so inexplicable. After the
Restoration, when Jonson and Fletcher were set

169

170 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

beside or above Shakespeare, Massinger was held
unworthy of so much as a bare mention in the
numerous and elaborate critical essays of the repre-
sentative poet and critic of his age. Yet the
subjects and the humours of Jonson's comedies
must then as now have seemed far more obsolete,
more stiff with old-fashioned wit and rusty with old-
world allusions, than the less personal and satirical
comedy of Massinger ; while the only qualities in
which Fletcher excels him beyond all question or
comparison are the qualities of poetry and fancy.
And it will hardly be contended that these can have
appealed with any particular force or likelihood of
success to the admiring contemporaries of Etherege
and Wycherley. On the other hand, coherence of
composition, dexterity of plot, and harmony of parts
are qualities which distinguish the best comedies of
the Restoration beyond most of those belonging to
the earlier and nobler period of English drama : and
in these the best work of Massinger is pre-eminent
above that of his more inspired and impulsive
rivals. And yet it was not till the opening of the
nineteenth century that his claims to honour or to
notice were adequately or generally acknowledged.
The two previous editions of his collected works,
now only known even to the special student through
the stripping and whipping inflicted by Gifford on
their editors, would seem to have attracted but
little general attention. There is indeed one memo-
rable passage in the most delightful if not the most
invaluable book bequeathed to us by that century,
which proves that one great moralist of those days
must have laid to heart the moral teaching of this

PHILIP MASSINGER 171

neglected poet. " Infidelity," observes Mr. James
Boswell — whose wife may possibly have agreed with
him ; in which case the domestic atmosphere of
Auchinleck must have been liable to occasional
disturbance — " infidelity is by no means a light
offence in a husband ; because it must hurt a
delicate attachment, in which a mutual constancy is
implied, with such refined sentiments as Massinger
has exhibited in his play of The Picture."

But when the conscientious devotion of Gifford
had fairly brought Massinger to the front, and
established his claims to notice and admiration as
difficult to exaggerate and impossible to ignore, the
reaction in his favour which set in and swept forward
must at first seem almost astonishing to those who
know anything of the greater dramatic poets with
whom he must be compared — I do not say, with
whom he challenges comparison : for the modest
dignity of his self-respecting reserve precludes the
notion of a challenge. It became a question, among
men to whom the names at least of Marlowe and
Webster should have been known if not familiar,
whether Massinger ought not to take precedence, as
a dramatic poet, of Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher
— and therefore of all other imaginable rivals in the
race for the first seat beneath Shakespeare's. The
typic Hallam, who thought Racine " next to Shake-
speare among all the moderns," gave upwards of
five pages to Massinger, and less than two to
Webster. And in our own day the process of
reaction or retribution has been carried so far that
a critic so immeasurably superior to Hallam in
literary intelhgence and ability as Leslie Stephen

172 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

has brought to bear upon the fame of Massinger so
heavy and so well-directed a battery of adverse or
depreciatory remarks that no student of the writer
attacked can pretend to ignore the breaches made
in the outworks of his reputation by the artillery of
so formidable an assailant. To me, indeed, it seems
impossible or futile to dispute the truth of his main
contention. The student of dramatic poetry as it
existed in the age which we call the age of Shake-
speare will undoubtedly feel, when he comes to the
time of Massinger, that he has come to the turning
of the tide. The ebb may at first seem all but
imperceptible : yet he cannot but perceive, if per-
ception be possible at all to him, that the inevitable
reflux has reluctantly but steadily begun ; that
nothing more must be looked for which may bear
comparison, I do not say with the masterpieces of
Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Webster, but with the
masterpieces of Tourneur, Middleton, or Beaumont.
What Fletcher could do, when left alone, may
not yet be altogether beyond the reach of ambi-
tious emulation : tragedies as good as Valentinian
or TJie Double Marriage, if no comedies as good as
Monsieur Thomas or The Spanish Curate, may yet
be hoped for — not without diffidence and misgiving ;
but the golden has given place to the silver age of
English drama. This cannot be denied ; but the
silver age of English drama would eclipse the golden
age of dramatic poetry in any other nation of
modern times. And when Leslie Stephen objects to
the admirers of Massinger that his morality is morbid,
and proceeds to enforce this objection by the unim-
peachable remark that a man who has " a vivid

PHILIP MASSINGER 173

perception of realities and a masculine grasp of
facts " " will not represent vice as so ugly that it
can have no charms, so foolish that it can never be
plausible, or so unlucky that it can never be trium-
phant," his reader will remember that we have only
to turn to the text of Massinger for evidence no less
unimpeachable that the poet was of the same
opinion as his critic, Luke and Overreach, the two
typical villains of Massinger's invention, are as
charming to those whom they seek to fascinate,
as plausible to those whom they seek to inveigle,
as triumphant in their good luck till the crash of
retribution falls. on them, as Goneril or Shylock, as
Regan or lago, as Edmund or as Richard.

On the other hand, it must be allowed that Leslie
Stephen has hit the weak point of Massinger's
proverbial morality when he strikes at the senti-
mental and rhetorical assumption or affectation of
belief in the power of sentiment and rhetoric to
work miracles impossible in nature. It is certain
that the morality which " makes villains condemn
themselves, because such a practice would save so
much trouble to judges and moralists," and " fancies
that a little rhetoric will change the heart as well as
the passing mood," is a morality which " becomes
necessarily effeminate." If Massinger's morality
were altogether or were mainly of such a kind — I
do not question that it sometimes is— -this epithet
would be too lenient and too temperate to define its
imperfection or its default. Such an adjective as
Catholic or papistical would be more appropriate,
and would scarcely be too severe. But I cannot
think — when allowance is made for the necessities

174 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

of stage effect — that this charge can be fairly or
even plausibly maintained. When the element of
supernatural religion or thaumaturgic theology is
brought in to make part of the poetic structure or
to quicken the dramatic movement, such monstrous
miracles of conversion must be accepted as part of
the stage business by the imagination of readers or
spectators as frankly as they are accepted, under
less reputable conditions, by the greasy and gibber-
ing theologians of the gutter. And when this all-
atoning and all-satisfying element of compulsory
conversion is not brought in, I hardly think that the
revulsions of conscience or the reversions of impulse
to which Massinger subjects his characters are so
liable as Leslie Stephen represents them to the charge
of making those who undergo them or pass through
them move and speak like the typical or exemplary
puppets of the pulpit or the stage. In the play
which heads the collected works of Massinger the
supernatural element of miraculous or transcendent
emotion or influence is of course the inevitable law
of action and passion which impels hither and
thither the agents or rather the patients of the
story. The only persons exempt from it are tyrants
or slaves — brutal satraps like Sapritius or bestial
clowns like the two hideous buffoons who disfigure
the background of a beautiful work of art. But the
parts of Diocletian and his daughter, which are
mainly to be attributed to the temperate and
cautious hand of Massinger, are treated with so
much artistic reserve and good sense that we can
only " stare and gasp " when wc find that in Hartley
Coleridge's opinion " the superhuman atrocity, obdu-

PHILIP MASSINGER 175

racy, and blasphemy of the persecutors, of the
Princess Artemia herself, one would think would
make an atheist shudder." The nervous system of
an atheist must in that case be as sensitive as the
cheek — I will not say, of a young person, but of the
most abandoned and hardened libertine : to which
all moralists know how proverbially easy it is to
bring the shamefaced blush of revolted modesty.
This unfortunate princess, on finding herself treacher-
ously betrayed and befooled, breaks out into rather
strong language of reproach and denunciation against
her false lover and her Christian rival ; but the only
" blasphemies " in the play, if by the word " blas-
phemy " we are to understand insult and outrage
levelled at the religion of others, are those aimed by
the Christian saint and her satellites at the gods of
their forefathers. And this form of blasphemy is of
course both historically and dramatically justifiable.
The style of Massinger — a style as unlike that of
any other English poet as that of Dryden or of
Pope ; as tempting to imitators as it is inimitable
by parasites, and as apparently easy as it is really
difficult to reproduce — is already recognizable in its
fullest development of rhetoric and metre throughout
those scenes of The Virgin Martyr in which his
steadfast and equable hand is easily and unques-
tionably to be traced. It is radically and essentially
unlike the style of his rivals : it is more serviceable,
more businesslike, more eloquently practical, and
more rhetorically effusive — but never effusive beyond
the bounds of effective rhetoric — than the style of
any Shakespearean or of any Jonsonian dramatist.
And in the second play on the list of Massinger's we

176 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

find this admirably supple and fluent and impeccable
style — as incapable of default from its own principle
or ideal of expression as it is incapable of rising, like
Webster's or even like Dekker's, to a purer note of
poetry or a clearer atmosphere of passion — not less
complete and rounded, not less pliant and perfect,
than in the first act of The Virgin Martyr ; "as fine
an act," said Coleridge, " as I remember in any
play." That great poet's memory must have been
somewhat shaken by indulgence in the excesses of a
theosophist and a druggard when he could not
remember as fine an act or a far finer act in the
plays of one Shakespeare, of one Jonson, or of one
Beaumont : ignorant as he seems to have been of
what others remember at the mention of such names
as Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and
Ford. And his opinion that " Massinger often deals
in exaggerated passion " is but ill supported by the
instance he cites in support of it. The author of
Remorse — not quite so good a play as The Unnatural
Combat — was convinced that the protagonist of this
tragedy, " however he may have had the moral will
to be so wicked, could never have actually done all
that he is represented as guilty of without losing his
senses. He would have been, in fact, mad." He is
represented as guilty of the murder by poison of a
wife whose sufferings impel their son to seek his
father's life in a duel which results in the death of
the patricidal champion of his mother ; and after-
wards as overcome by an incestuous passion for a
daughter whom he has not seen since her childhood,
and whose nubile beauty excites in his savage and
sensual nature an emotion against which he struggles

PHILIP MASSINGER 177

with more resolution, and with more abhorrence of
a temptation so inhuman and unnatural, than
might have been expected from so unscrupulous a
ruffian. This is doubtless a tragic record enough ;
but to say that it is the record of a lunatic is mere
foolishness — a confession of presumptuous ignorance
as to the darker elements of human character. A
less defensible point is the occasional conventionality
of expression ; Massinger, though by no means
generally inclined to pedantry or to rant, is liable
now and then, for lack of imaginative passion, to
stiffen and weaken his style with the bombast and
the platitude of cheap classical rhetoric — the com-
monplace tropes and flourishes of the schoolroom or
the schools. " Blustering Boreas " and ^olus with
his stormy issue make their appearance when not
only is there " no need of such vanity," but when
their intrusion chills and deadens the tragic effect
and the poetic plausibility at which the writer must
be supposed to aim. Compare the last declamation
of Malefort with any one of all those put by Cyril
Tourneur into the mouth of Vindice. Massinger's,
if written in Greek or Latin, would be admired on
all hands as deserving of the highest honours that
school or college could confer on the most brilliant
and vigorous exercise in passionate and tragic verse
which could be attempted in a foreign language by
the most accomplished and the most able scholar :
Tourneur's would recall the passion and the perfec-
tion, the fervour and the splendour and the harmony,
which even we at this distance of time, and through
the twilight of a dead language, can recognize in the
dialogue or the declamation of ^schvlus himself.

M

178 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

On the other hand, the grim, narrow, sardonic
humour of Cyril Tourneur is not comparable with
the excellent comedy which lightens and relieves the
fiery darkness and horror of this vehement and high-
flown tragedy. The career of the chief comic
personage is really worthy to be compared with that
of almost any one among Fletcher's comic heroes ;
and this is very high praise. Massinger's deficiency
in wit would seem to have blinded most of his
critics to the excellence of his humour ; which, if
less buoyant and spontaneous than Fletcher's in the
exuberance of its exultation, is at least as plausible
and coherent in the felicity of its invention. All
that Coleridge says of the fallacy implied in such
figures of mere burlesque as that of the buffoon
suitor in The Maid of Honour is no less true and
rational than pointed and incisive ; they are too
wilfully absurd to excite any emotion but that of
incredulity, or that of compassion for a congenital
infirmity or defect. But such figures as Belgarde in
this play, or as Borachia in a later work, are brilliant
and vivid creations of observant and original
humour.

The objection raised by Coleridge, echoed by
Hazlitt, and re-echoed by Leslie Stephen, that the
fools or the villains of Massinger's invention are
apt to talk of themselves as others would talk or
think of them is too often but too well grounded.
" Massinger," says Coleridge, " and all, indeed, but
Shakespeare " (a sweeping impeachment which
proves only the wide range of the critic's ignorance),
" take a dislike to their own characters, and spite
themselves upon them by making them talk like

PHILIP MASSINGER 179

fools or monsters." His obsequious backbiter
Hazlitt, our English precursor or prototype of
Sainte-Beuve, follows suit with the remark cited by
Leslie Stephen, that Massinger's villains appear like
drunkards or madmen. This objection is supported
by Leslie Stephen with far more cogency and felicity
of argument than either Hazlitt or Coleridge had
brought to bear on it. The passage in which he
presses and enforces his impeachment of Massinger
on the ground of moral and dramatic veracity is too
effective to be passed over or evaded by any cham-
pion or advocate who might think fit to undertake
the defence of the poet. The " rants " of Overreach,
he admits, " are singularly forcible, but they are
clearly what other people would think about him,
not what he would really think, still less what he
would say, of himself. . . . Read ' he ' for ' I,' and
' his ' for ' my,' and it is an admirable bit of denun-
ciation of a character probably " (no : palpably and
notoriously) " intended as a copy from life. It is a
description of a wicked man from outside ; and
wickedness seen from outside is generally unreason-
able and preposterous. When it is converted, by
simple alteration of pronouns, into the villain's own
account of himself, the internal logic which serves
as a pretext disappears, and he becomes a mere
monster."

There is so much truth in this that I am not
disposed to inquire whether there may not be
something to be said in deprecation or extenuation
of the charge ; nor will I deny that the singular
character of Sforza in The Duke of Milan is liable
to the imputation of unnatural and inhuman incon-

180 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

sistency. Massinger was only too lamentably in-
clined to let moral or theatrical considerations
prevail over the claims of dramatic or poetic har-
mony. The preacher or the scene-shifter supplants
the poet or the playwright after a fashion so palpable
or so primitive that we are disposed to condone, on
comparison, the worst offences of Fletcher against
the laws of aesthetic or intelligent art. For in
Fletcher's work the levity of treatment is in keeping
with the spontaneity of style ; with the brightness
and lightness of fancy, the headlong ease and
energetic idleness of irresponsible improvization.
But in Massinger the sense of an artist's responsibility
to himself and to those who are to judge of his
work is so singularly and so admirably evident that
it would be rather an injustice than an indulgence
to extenuate his errors on the plea of carelessness
or hurry or fatigue. And therefore, supposing that
I wished, I should find it as impossible to impugn
as to reinforce Leslie Stephen's impeachment of the
dramatist who represents his Sforza in the finest
scene of the play as a hero, and in all the other
scenes of the play as a miserable and morbid egotist.
But when we are told that this play " may be
described as a variation upon the theme of Othello,"
we can only reply that it might more truthfully be
described as a variation upon the theme of The
Comedy of Errors, or The Merry Wives of Windsor,
or The Taming of the Shreiv. Each one of these has
some minor point in common with it ; irritability
on the wife's part, jealousy on the husband's, or
violence of temper — actual or assumed — on either
part. But Othello, the most unsuspicious and the

PHILIP MASSINGER 181

most unselfish though the most passionate and the
most sensitive of men, has almost as much in
common with his destroyer as with the covetous and
murderous egotist who leaves orders for his wife to
be assassinated if he should happen to fall in battle.

In spite of this radical and central blemish, The
Duke oj Milan is a nobly written and an admirably
constructed play. To do justice to its excellence,
we should compare it, not with Othello — " which,"
in the classic phrase of Euchd, " is absurd " — but
with Ford's " variation " on the same theme in his
abortive tragedy of Love's Sacrifice. Ford was, in
the main, a greater tragic poet than Massinger ; but
the blemish which disfigures the elder poet's work
would be imperceptible in the work of his junior.
The action of Ford's play, like the action of Mas-
singer's, revolves on the jarring hinges of jealousy
and intrigue, malevolence and revenge ; but the
treatment is puerile in its perversity, while the
characters are preposterous in their incoherence.
Massinger 's tragedy, whatever objection may be
taken to this or that point in it, is a high and
harmonious work of art.

But on turning to his next play we find the poet
on ground more thoroughly suited to his genius than
the ground of pure or predominant tragedy. The
Bondman is the first, as it is with one exception the
best, of Massinger's romantic plays : tragic in
dignity of style, but happy in consummation of
event. In this field of work his hand is surer and
steadier than Fletcher's : if it has not all Fletcher's
grace and ease and lightness of touch, its treatment
of subject is more serious, its grasp of character

182 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

more firm, its method of execution more conscien-
tious and more composed. He sacrifices little where
Fletcher sacrifices much to sensational and theatrical
effect ; he is evidently and deeply in earnest where
Fletcher seems to be thinking mainly of rhetorical
or scenical displa}^ Compare the famous declama-
tion of Pisander against slavery, in the second scene
of the fourth act of this play, with the noble address
of Caesar to the severed head of Pompey in the first
scene of the second act of The False One. The style
of Massinger is sermoni propior — nearer the level of
eloquent prose : but it has a deeper and a graver
note of masculine sincerity in the measured earnest-
ness of its appeal than any that we find in the
rushing ripples and the swirling eddies of Fletcher's
effusive and impetuous rhetoric.

And here rather than elsewhere we may con-
sider the claims of the noble tragic poem
which the inappreciable devotion of Mr. BuUen
rescued for the careful study and the grateful
enjoyment of all its readers. The tragedy of Sir
John van Olden Barnavelt, if it be indeed the work
of Massinger and Fletcher, now that the date so
plausibly assigned to it by its editor has happily
been confirmed by such evidence as proves it no less
accurate than plausible, ought henceforward to be
printed at the head of Massingcr's works. I must
confess that on a first reading of this play I was
hardly prepared to accept so confident a conclusion
and so absolute an assertion as to the irrefragable
certainty of its authorship with a faith as unqualified
or a conviction so positive as Mr. BuUen's. But it
seems to me now that his confidence was more

PHILIP MASSINGER 188

justifiable than I thought it at first sight ; that the
hand of Massinger is as unmistakable in the two
opening scenes as the hand of Fletcher in the third.
Massinger reappears at the opening of the second
act : his vigorous eloquence and his inveterate
mannerism, his constant abundance of reciprocal
argument and his occasional flaccidity of collapsing
verse, could hardly be better exemplified than here.
Such a nerveless and invertebrate line as this — " I
love a soldier, and all I can do," or this — " Upon his
favour, 'twill take from his pride," or this — " How
much you promise, to win the old soldiers " — is a
characteristic and a grievous example of Massinger's
besetting sin as a versifier ; a sin which charity
might explain but not excuse as the result of a too
studious effort to bring the metrical language of the
boards into the closest possible conformity with the
actual language of real life. The scene is neverthe-
less a fine early example of Massinger's rhetorical
and dialectic ability. " This tune goes manly," the
student will say to himself on weighing the solid
and vigorous verse with the eloquent and effective
reasoning on both sides, and the spirited altercation
which succeeds it.

In the next scene it becomes evident that
to distinguish between the blended styles of
Fletcher and Massinger is a far harder and more
delicate task than to distinguish between the con-
fronted styles of Shakespeare and Fletcher. In
the last scene, for example, of The Two Noble
Kinsmen, the reader stands convicted of eyeless and
earless incompetence who cannot see at once and
say for certain where Shakespeare breaks off, where

184 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Fletcher strikes in, and again where Shakespeare
resumes and winds up the broken thread of tragic
harmony ; but here, if Fletcher should ever be
somewhat less exuberant and fervid or Massinger a
little less self-controlled and staid than usual, it
becomes a matter of some difficulty to distinguish
the swifter from the steadier current in this noble
stream of song. But on the whole I take the second
scene of the second act — an excellent interlude of
comedy — to be more probably Massinger's than
Fletcher's. The vein of humour, the cast of dialogue,
the sententious turns of phrase, the satire on feminine
pretension and its cackling cry for women's rights,
are all of such a nature as to remind us rather of
such comedies as The City Madam than of such
comedies as Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. To
Massinger I should also assign, on similar grounds
to these, the authorship of the five short scenes
following, full of spirit and movement, which
conclude this vivid and animated second act.

An ounce of proof is worth a pound of assertion ;
and no more typical example of Massinger's dramatic
style could be chosen than the speech of Barnavelt
(Act ii. Scene i) after the refusal of the foreign
mercenaries to support the enterprise of his party
against the authority of the Prince of Orange :

Oh, I am lost with anger ! are we fain
So low from what we were, that we dare hear
This from our servants and not punish it ?
Where is the terror of our name, our power
That Spain with fear hath felt in both his Indies ?
We are lost for ever, and from freemen grown
Slaves so contemptible as no worthy prince,

PHILIP MASSINGER 185

That would have men, not sluggish beasts, his servants,

Would e'er vouchsafe the owning. Now, my friends,

I call not on your furtherance to preserve

The lustre of my actions ; let me with them

Be ne'er remembered, so this government,

Your wives, your lives and liberties be safe :

And therefore, as you would be what you are,

Freemen and masters of what yet is yours.

Rise up against this t\/rant, and defend

With rigour what too gentle lenity

Hath almost lost.

In the qualities of passion and pathos, of poetic
imagination and distinction of style, instinctive
choice of inspired expression and exquisite phrase,
Massinger has many superiors : in purity and
lucidity of dignified eloquence he has none. But
the eloquence of Fletcher, if less masculine and less
thoughtful, has something of a more poetic quality
about it — more impulse and vehemence of impetuous
and unpremeditated effusion. The first scene of the
third act is a magnificent example of his best style ;
indeed, if style were everything in dramatic poetry,
we could not but agree with Mr. Bullen that " it
shows us Fletcher at his highest " ; but this very
act, if I mistake not, shows us even higher qualities
in the genius of Fletcher than such as can be dis-
played by the splendid style of even such noble
declamation as this :

I never knew to flatter, to kneel basely,

And beg from him a smile owes me an honour.

Ye are wretches, poor starved wretches, fed on crumbs

That he flings to ye from your own abundance :

Wretched and slavish people ye are become.

186 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

That feel the griping yoke, and yet bow to it.

What is this man, this Prince, this God ye make now.

But what our hands have moulded, wTought to fashion,

And by our constant labours given a life to ?

And must we fall before him now, adore him.

Blow all we can to fill his sails with greatness ?

Worship the image we set up ourselves ?

Put fate into his hand ? into his will

Our lives and fortunes ? howl and cry to our own clay,

" Be merciful, O prince " ? O pitied people 1

That in the next scene Massinger again resumes the
place lately supplied by Fletcher I have no more
doubt than Mr. Bullen has. In this play, earlier in
date than any other extant from his hand, we find
that at the age of thirty-five, three years before the
publication of The Virgin Martyr, his style was not
only formed but fixed ; there is no change, no
modification, no development perceptible in any one
of his many later works. We find also an exact
harmony or rather identity of style between the
language and versification of the scenes which are
obviously and indisputably Fletcher's and the
language and versification of the scenes undoubtedly
written by Fletcher in the play already mentioned,
which the all but irrefragable judgment of Mr. Dyce
assigned to the joint authorship of Massinger and
Fletcher, and which must probably have appeared
about the same time as the yet nobler work which
we are now engaged in examining. The False One
is full of brilliant and powerful writing ; but, like
the tragedy of Barnavelt, it is admirable rather on
that score than for constructive or impressive merit
as a dramatic poem ; the persons represented are

PHILIP MASSINGER 187

rather mouthpieces for fine verse than characters
of living men or women ; the development of the
story is somewhat lamely and loosely conducted or
evolved, and the upshot is consequently less effective
than it should and than it would have been if the
play had been built up or pieced together after a
more dramatic and a more workmanlike fashion.
Beaumont, we cannot doubt, would have looked to
this more carefully than did the brother in art
whom he had left to lament the loss of the younger
and greater partner in their poetic firm just three
years before the certain date of Barnavelt and the
probable date of The False One. And we should
not have had to observe and to lament a radical
defect in these noble scenes, full as they are of
magnificent eloquence and mastery in dramatic
debate : we should not have been left in doubt, we
should not have had to ask ourselves, in perplexity
if not with irritation, whether we, the intended
spectators or the actual readers of this play, were
expected by the authors to S3mipathize with the
calm and patriotic moderation of the Prince or with
the fiery and intemperate enthusiasm of the Advo-
cate.

To hold the balance equally and fairly between
the extreme or excessive assertions or preten-
sions of principle or opinion on either side of a
political or historical question may be the noblest
aim and the highest honour of a constitutional
historian : it cannot be the sole or the final object
of a dramatic poet. Shakespeare, from^ the demo-
cratic or ochlocratic point of view, may have been
as wrong as Hazlitt and Hallam thought him — as

188 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

unjust to the plebeians and the tribunes of historical
or legendary Rome : but the tragedy of Coriolanus,
in consequence and not in spite of that hypothetical
iniquity, is a superb and perfect work of art. But
here, where we listen alternately to two equally
eloquent pleaders of whom we know nothing but
that they are equal in eloquence, we feel that the
demand made on our imagination, our interest, and
our faith is somewhat unreasonable in its exactions.
We cannot listen with equal confidence to the
orators on either side ; and beyond the effect of
their eloquence we are shown no reason, we are
given no hint, why our sympathies should be enlisted
on this side or on that. And this is so serious and
so deep a defect in the conception as well as in the
composition of a dramatic poem that we might too
justly apply to this otherwise most admirable
masterpiece the words in which Barnavelt (Act i.
Scene 3) replies to the Prince's threatening sugges-
tion of a cure for his errors which would make him
shrink, and shake, too — shake off his head. " You
are too weak i' the hams, sir," retorts the Advocate :
and this noble poem, considered either as a work of
art or as a study of character, is somewhat " too
weak i' the hams " — too uncertain in its bearings
and too equivocal in its effects. Fletcher never
thoroughly outgrew this ingrained infirmity of his
genius : we find him to the very last only too liable,
through mere weakness of handling or uncertainty
of design, to such error or such perversit}'' as impairs
or effaces the effect intended : his heroes swagger
like cravens, his constancy is unstable as water, and
his chastity is more immodest than wantonness itself.

PHILIP MASSINGER 189

But of Massinger we maj^ confidently and thank-
fully afiirm that no such accusation can reason-
ably be brought against any of his later and unas-
sisted plays. And to him we must assign the credit
of introducing the most beautiful and pathetic
figure in all this populous tragedy of Barnavelt :
though it is to Fletcher that we must pay homage
and give thanks for the lovely later scene in which
this little figure reappears. In the second scene of
the third act the rhetoric is as characteristic of
Massinger as the metrical construction and fusion
of the verses. The style of the scenes immediately
following is all but unmistakable as Fletcher's. The
very fine one in which Leidenberch confesses to
Barnavelt his previous revelation of their secrets is
written exactly in the same running hand, so to
speak — with the same impetuous fluency and
vehemence of verse, which we find in such typical
plays of Fletcher's as The Loyal Subject and The
Humorous Lieutenant. Not only by the headlong
rush and exuberance of the metre, the headlong
violence and fervour of the dialogue, but by the
sensational sophistry and the passionate paradox of
the reasoning by which Barnavelt impels into
suicide the penitent betrayer of his trust, we recog-
nize beyond all possibility of mistake the hand of
the English Euripides. The short scene which
follows is as evidently an interlude inserted by
Massinger between two scenes of Fletcher's : his
curious and vexatious addiction to the use of the
ablative absolute — a Latinizing habit peculiar to
him, and suggestive of a recurrent stutter or
twitch or accent — is no less obvious than objec-

190 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

tionable.* But the next scene — the sixth of the third
act — is in my opinion the most beautiful ever written
by Fletcher. Mr. Bullen assigns to Massinger the
" solemn and pathetic soliloquy " of the intending
suicide : and there are touches in it which recall
the manner of a poet somewhat overmuch given to
indulgence in classical allusion of a cheap and facile
kind ; f but it is to me absolutely inconceivable that
Massinger could have written what I am about to
transcribe : for the pathos is suggestive and the
writing is worthy of Webster ; I had wellnigh
written, of Shakespeare :

Boy. Shall I help you to bed, sir ?

Leidenherch. No, my boy, not yet.

Boy. 'Tis late, and I grow sleepy.

Leid. Go to bed then,

For I must write, my child.

Boy. I had rather watch, sir.

If you sit up, for I know you will wake me.

* Mr. Bullen's note on a passage in this scene, explaining the
word " fry " as here equivalent to " buzz, hiss," is surely an
oversight. Were this the sense, I do not see how the passage
could be either parsed or construed. Grotius threatens, if tlie
prince lays hands on Barnavelt, to set on lire the hall of justice
or house of parliament :

" His court, our gift, and where the general States,
Our equals, sit, I'll fry about their ears.
And quench it in their blood."
Any but the ordinary sense of a word not then so meanly familiar
in its sound as now would reduce the whole passage to incoherent
nonsense.

f I may observe that, while the metre is generally unmis-
takable as Fletcher's, there is one line in this scene —

" If you sit up, for I know you will wake me " —
as " weak i' the hams " as the weakest of Massinger 's ; but a
single metrical slip is a matter of little, or rather of no significance
if set against the whole weight of evidence inclining the other
way, and impelling us to asign it to the author of Bonduca.

PHILIP MASSINGER 191

Leid. Indeed I will not : go, I have much to do ;
Prithee, to bed ; I will not waken thee.

Boy. Pray, sir, leave writing till to-morrow.

Leid. Why, boy ?

Boy. You slept but ill last night, and talked in your
sleep, too ;
Tumbled, and took no rest.

Leid. 1 ever do so.

Good boy, to bed ; my business is of weight
And must not be deferred : good-night, sweet boy.

Boy. My father was not wont to be so kind.
To hug me and to kiss me so.

Leid. Why dost thou weep ?

Boy. I cannot tell ; but sure a tenderness,
Whether it be with your kind words unto me.
Or what it is, has crept about my heart, sir.
And such a sudden heaviness withal, too —

Leid. {aside) Thou bring'st fit mourners for my
funeral.

Boy. But why do you weep, father ?

Leid. O, my boy,

Thy tears are dewdrops, sweet as those on roses.
But mine the faint and iron sweat of sorrow.
Prithee, sweet child, to bed ; good rest dwell with

thee,
And heaven return a blessing : that's my good boy.

[Exit Boy
How nature rises now and turns me woman
When I should most be man ! Sweet heart, farewell.
Farewell for ever. When we get us children.
We then do give our freedoms up to fortune
And lose that native courage we are born to.
To die were nothing, — simply to leave the light ;
No more than going to our beds and sleeping ;
But to leave all these dearnesses behind us.
These figures of ourselves that we call blessings,

192 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Is that which troubles. Can man beget a thing
That shall be dearer than himself unto him ?

If the English world of letters owed nothing to
Mr. Bullen but the discovery and recovery of such
a jewel of dramatic poetry as this — a pearl richer
than all our tribe — the debt would be not merely
beyond all repayment but beyond all acknowledg-
ment. The famous death-scene of Hengo in Bonduca
is not more pathetic, nor more delightful as evidence
of Fletcher's almost Shakespearean tenderness for
children.

The first three scenes of the following act are
composed and written in the same poet's liveliest
and most spirited style ; but, full as they are of
active interest and animation, the most important
part of this fourth act bears the evident sign-manual
of Massinger. In the impeachment and defence of
Barnavclt the poet who was above all things a
pleader — who could never miss an opportunity of
displaying his talents as an advocate — found his
first occasion for such display, and made use of it
with such dexterous ability and such vigorous
temperance of style as to give promise of even finer
future work on the same lines ; of such noble
instances of dramatic ratiocination as the pleading
of Malefort before the council of war, of Sforza
before the Emperor, of Donusa before the Viceroy,
of Cleremond and Leonora before the Parliament of
Love, of Paris before the senate, of Camiola before
her rival and the King, of Antiochus and Flaminius
before the senators of Carthage, of Charalois before
the court of justice (twice in the same play) and
we might perhaps add that of Luke with Sir John

PHILIP MASSINGER 193

Frugal on behalf of his debtors. If Massinger, like
Heywood, had written a play on the legend of
Lucretia, we may be sure that the heroine, on being
awakened by Sextus, would have overwhelmed him
with oratorical demonstration and illustration of the
theorem that such a purpose as his in any man

Were most inhospitable ; this being granted,

(As you cannot deny it) 'tis in you

A more than barbarous cruelty ; kings being tyrants.

When they prefer their appetites (their conscience,

As a most dejected slave, cast down and trod on)

Before their nobler reason. Philomela —

And so forth, and so forth : it would be only too
easy to continue. But if the irrepressible barrister
too often intrudes or intrenches on the ground of
the dramatic poet, it must be allowed that his
pleading, if sometimes prosaic in expression and
conventional in rhetoric, is seldom or never ineffec-
tive either through flatulence of style or through
tenuity of matter. In the defence of Barnavelt
there is, however, one sign of comparative imma-
turity in the art of composition which would suffice
to distinguish it as the earliest of its author's sur-
viving attempts in this line. It is strange to find
Massinger writing as badly as Byron ; but Matthew
Arnold's denunciation of a " famous passage " in
the Giaour, " with those trailing relatives, that
crying grammatical solecism, that inextricable ana-
colouthon," is but too well deserved by the otherwise
effective and forcible speech of that Barnavelt

Who, when there was combustion in the state,

must be supposed to have said or done something ;

N

194 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

but what, we can only guess : for this unhappy
relative is left hanging in the void, without a verb
to support it, over a howhng wilderness of ablatives
absolute and parenthetical propositions.

The first scene of the fifth act must apparently
be divided — " like a bribe-buck," as Sir John (not
Barnavelt) would express it — ^between the two
illustrious partners in this admirable play. The
change of style and rhythm from Massinger's to
Fletcher's, after the departure of the French ambas-
sadors, must be perceptible to the dullest ear and
eye, if not absolutely inattentive or unobservant.
The ghastly jocularity of the scene succeeding, in
which the three executioners play at dice for the
office of headsman to the great Advocate, is more
like Fletcher than Massinger : it may be compared
with the farcical hanging scene in the tragedy of
Rollo Duke of Normandy ; though the humour of
this later interlude is very inferior to that of a scene
which may remind a modern reader of " the song
that Jack the headsman sings," as quoted by his
friend the friar in the third scene of the third act
of the second part of Sir Henry Taylor's masterwork.
But the final scene which follows is, I should say,
beyond all question Fletcher's ; and a magnificent
example of his literary and dramatic power. The
tragically humorous realism of the part immediately
preceding the appearance of the condemned man is
as fine in its way and as effective as the stately and
fervent eloquence of his last appeals and protesta-
tions ; the pathos, if not profound, is genuine, and
the grasp of character more firm and serious than
usual.

PHILIP MASSINGER 195

In energetic fertility of invention and fervid
fluency of rhetoric The Renegado is a fairly repre-
sentative example of Massinger's most characteristic
work : it can hardly be placed in the first class of
his plays, but must be allowed to stand high in the
second rank. Hartley Coleridge's critical summary
of this play is about the best thing in his essay on
Massinger and Ford. The Parliament of Love, for all
the miserable mutilation of its text, is still recogniz-
able as one of its author's most brilliant and animated
comedies ; no less graceful and interesting in its
graver parts than amusing and edifying in its lighter
interludes. In the tragedy of The Roman Actor, if
the interest is less keen and the emotion less vivid
than that excited by the previous tragic poems of
Massinger, the equable purity of style and the
conscientious symmetry of composition will seem all
the more praiseworthy if compared with the head-
long and slipshod vehemence of many among his
competitors ; but in the hands (for instance) of
Fletcher ; the all-important figure of Domitia,
though it might have been more theatrical and
exaggerative, would have been more animated and
interesting than it is. The Great Duke of Florence,
if remarkable even among Massinger's works for
elegance and grace of execution, does not aim high
enough or strike deep enough to give more than the
moderate pleasure of a temperate satisfaction.*

* The generous praise given to this play by a greater tragic
poet than Massinger does no less honour to Ford than to the
object of these well-turned lines :

" Action gives many poems right to live ;
This piece gave life to action ; and will give,
For state and language, in each change of age.
To time delight, and honour to the stage."

196 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

The Maid of Honour leaves a deeper impression of
the very noble and original character which gives
its title to the play. The others, with the possible
exception of the loyal and single-hearted Adomi,
are somewhat conventional in comparison. It is
impossible to take any sympathetic interest in the
vacillations and infidelities of such half-hearted
lovers and loyalists as figure too frequently on the
stage of Massinger ; who must have found them so
serviceable in the development of a story, and for
the presentation of a nobler nature in fuller relief
against their ignoble or pitiable figures, that he
could scarcely appreciate or foresee the inevitable
effect or impression of such characters — a compro-
mise between indifference and contempt. And it is
a serious if not a" ruinous defect in the structure of
a poem or a play that this should be the impression
left by any of its indispensable and leading characters.
In The Picture, an admirably written and admi-
rably constructed play, the typically constant and
devoted husband and wife are no sooner induced to
doubt or to disbelieve in each other's constancy
and fidelity than they begin to entertain, however
uncertainly and faintly, the notion of revenge or
retaliation in kind ; and this without the sHghtest
sense of attraction on the wife's part towards her
tempters or on the husband's towards his temptress.
One of Musset's brightest and gracefuUest little
comedies covers part of the same ground as this
much more ambitious and elaborate play of Mas-
singer's ; but the subject is touched with a far
lighter hand, and the figures are sketched in fainter
but more attractive colours.

PHILIP MASSINGER 197

In his two next plays, The Emperor of the East
and Believe as you list, Massinger has given a
colouring of romance to historical characters — or at
least to historical names — which in either case makes
the drama something of a hybrid, but a hybrid of
no unattractive or unlawful kind. The merit of
either play is rather literary than dramatic ; not
that there is any lack of interest and action, but
that, if set beside any play or any poem of strong
human interest, the comparative tenuity of com-
position, the comparative tepidity of emotion excited
or expressed, becomes manifest beyond all question.
Massinger' s Pulcheria may be compared with Cor-
neille's by those who take pleasure in studying the
secondary works of celebrated poets : they have in
common at least the gift of sober and dignified
eloquence or declamation. But Corneille's penulti-
mate play, in spite of some better among many bad
verses, is on the whole very dull and rather absurd
in style and in design : Massinger's is at any rate
vigorous and lively, well written and well composed.

In the very act of reading the Frenchman's dreary
tragicomedy, it is difficult even to remember or
to distinguish, among all its wordy and sjjadowy
figures, who is supposed to be in lukewarm love with
whom : in reading the Englishman's, if our interest
is rather the interest of literary curiosity than of
imaginative sympathy, we are at least amused and
gratified by the freedom and the fluency of invention
and of style. But neither Massinger, Corneille, nor
even Sir Walter Scott — though Count Robert of
Paris is worth far more than the common cry of
critics has ever admitted — could succeed in giving

198 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

life and interest to any subject or to any hero
selected from Byzantine history. One only poet has
ever done that : and it is not the least among Sir
Henry Taylor's many claims to a place of high
honour among English poets and dramatists that
such a success should have been reserved for him to
attain at the very outset of his literary career.

It is a coincidence something more than singular
that in his next play. Believe as you list, Massinger
should again have so nearly anticipated Comeille in
choice of subject, place, and time that two of the
most important figures in either tragicomedy are
identical, and might indeed be recognizable even
without the identity of name. And the comparison
is here of far more value than before : for Corneille
in Pulchene was at his weakest, and Massinger in
The Emperor of the East was not a little beneath
himself at his best. But in the tragic story of
Antiochus Massinger has displayed his gift of noble
writing and its quality of manly pathos as fully and
as impressively as in any of his more famous works :
and Corneille, in his corresponding play, has well
deserved the triple honour of denunciation from
Voltaire, of depreciation from Schlegel, and of
acclamation from Victor Hugo. " Le Nicomede si
moque du dernier si^cle pour sa fi^re et naive
couleur " is in its own way as noble and original a
work as Massinger's ; and if the final upshot of
neither play is satisfactory to the sympathies or
adequate to the expectations of the reader, this is
but another point of curious interest in the com-
parison of two poems equally admirable in vigour of
handhng and singular in selection of subject. But

PHILIP MASSINGER 199

the parallel runs far closer than this : the Prusias
of Massinger is essentially identical with the yet
more abject Prusias of Comeille, the Flaminius of
Comeille with the yet more arrogant and insolent
Flaminius of Massinger. And the patient heroism
of Antiochus under his sufferings is matched by the
haughtier heroism of Nicomedes in the face of con-
spiracy and danger. Ford's admirable Warbeck is
not a nobler or more interesting figure than either.
A certain deficiency in constructive power, a certain
monotony in dramatic arrangement and effect, may
perhaps be found alike in the English and in the
French play : there is something of pettiness, if not
something of discrepancy or confusion, in the motive
and the conduct of the intrigue which winds and
unwinds itself around or beneath the central
character of Comeille's ; while in Massinger's the
varied and protracted martyrdom of an innocent
and heroic victim becomes even before we reach the
fifth act too positively painful and oppressive for
the reader to find relief in any lighter interlude, were
it even far more exhilarating than the defiant
buffoonery of the indomitable fat Flamen. The
unmistakable reference in Massinger's prologue to
" a late and sad example " of royal misfortune " too
near " the subject-matter of his play — the crushing
defeat and the wandering exile of Charles I's luckless
brother-in-law, the Prince Palatine — is a noticeable
instance of his unflagging interest in contemporary
history as well as in social and political questions
more particular to England.

His next surviving play, The Fatal Dowry, is on
the whole the finest example of tragedy he has left

200 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

us : the most perfect in build, the most pathetic in
effect, and the most interesting in development,
harmony, and variety of character. The attention
and admiration of the reader are seized and kindled
at the very opening, and are kept alive and alight
to the last moment of the action. And on this
occasion we may feel confident in attributing to
Massinger all but all that is of value in a work
which we owe in part to another hand than his.
Nathaniel Field, his colleague in its composition, is
a dramatist of genuine and original quality ; but it
is impossible to suppose that the better and greater
part of this play can be either his work or any
man's work but Massinger's. Gifford, with com-
mendable candour and good taste, assigns to Field
the fine scene (as he justly calls it) in which the last
honours are paid to the father of the hero who has
sacrificed his own liberty to the claims of filial
respect : but except for this one scene we must
agree with him in regretting that Massinger did not
take upon himself the execution of the whole. His
calm command of earnest and impressive eloquence
was never put to nobler service : his austere sym-
pathy with self-denying courage or self-renouncing
resolution was never more worthily expressed than
in the devotion of Charalois to his father and of
Romont to his friend. But it is undeniable that the
best character in this play — the best in each sense
of the word, at once most effective from the dramatic
point of view, and most attractive if considered as
a separate figure — is a subordinate though neither
superfluous nor insignificant person. Romont is one
of the noblest of Massinger's men ; and Shakespeare

PHILIP MASSINGER 201

has hardly drawn nobler men more nobly than
Massinger. Fletcher's handling of such characters
is absolutely schoolboyish in its perverse conven-
tionality. Massinger's heroes have always some
touch of manly reason and loyal good sense which
preserves them from the ideal absurdity of Fletcher's
alternately blatant and abject martialists.

The figure of the heroine, on the other hand, is too
thinly and feebly drawn to attract even the conven-
tional and theatrical sympathy which Fletcher
might have excited for a frail and penitent heroine :
and the almost farcical insignificance and baseness
of her paramour would suffice to degrade his not
involuntary victim beneath the level of any serious
interest or pity. Rowe, in the play which he
founded on Massinger's, has very skilfully removed
this blemish. The victim of a Lothario we may
pity, excuse, and understand ; the victim of a
Novall is fit for enlistment in the sisterhood of the
streets. Rowe's place is rather low and Massinger's
place is rather high among dramatic poets ; but in
this instance the smaller man's poetic or dramatic
instinct was juster and worthier than the greater
man's. That his play is on the whole immeasurably
inferior in composition and execution to the original
from which it was rather treacherously conveyed or
derived is as certain as that the Phedre of Racine is
poetically inferior to the Hippolytus of Euripides ;
but Rowe's Calista is as much more pardonable
than Massinger's Beaumelle as the passionate peni-
tence of the French playwright's heroine is more
credible and more interesting than the unimaginable
atrocity — the murderous mendacity in suicide — of

202 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

the Greek's. Nevertheless it is curious to observe
the influence of a tradition rather Spanish than
French or Enghsh in the dehberate immolation of
the wretched girl by her husband's hand before her
father's face ; and to compare it with Heywood's
treatment of a similar subject in a far less ambitious
and a far more pathetic tragedy than any of Mas-
singer's. The English gentleman dismisses his adul-
terous wife from his house, to live and die in seclu-
sion : the French or rather the Spanish hero butchers
his poor traitress in cold blood, after killing her
paramour before her eyes and bringing her to trial
and sentence from the lips of her father and his
benefactor. The situation is theatrically superb ;
but the morality — even from the theatrical point of
view — belongs rather to the southern than the
northern side of the Pyrenees.

In tragedy Massinger was excelled by other
dramatic poets of his time : in the line of severe
and serious tragicomedy he certainly has never been
and probably never will be equalled. The hideous
hero of A New Way to pay Old Debts may perhaps
be now and then too strongly and even coarsely
coloured : the epilepsy of rage and remorse which
overtakes him in the last scene may be too obviously
the device of a preacher or a moralist who thinks
rather of impressing his audience with dread of a
special providence or a judicial visitation than of
worldng out the subject of a dramatic poem in a
natural and logical manner : but for all that, and
in spite of his theatrical and incredible expositions
of his own wickedness and baseness to men whom
he wishes to conciliate or attach, Sir Giles Overreach

PHILIP MASSINGER 203

will always and deservedly retain his place among
the great original figures or types created by the
genius and embodied in the art of our chief dramatic
poets. The spirit, eloquence, and animation of the
whole play are not more admirable than the perfect
harmony and proportion of all the figures displayed
in stronger or sHghter relief by the natural progress
of the well-constructed plot. Much of the same
praise may be given to the first four acts of The
City Madam ; and the figure of Luke Frugal, if less
imposing and impressive than that of Overreach, is
drawn with far subtler skill and finer insight into
the mystery of ingrained and incurable wickedness.
The self-deceit of the suffering hypocrite, his genuine
penitence and humility while under a cloud of
destitution and contempt, may probably be accepted
as the deepest and truest touch of nature, as it is
certainly the most daring and original, to be found
in the works of Massinger. Up to the fifth act the
conduct of the whole scheme of the play is almost
beyond praise : it is lighter and easier, more simple
and more clear, than the evolution of Jonson's best
comedies : the variety of living character is as
striking as the excellence of artistic composition.
But all the energetic advocacy of Gifford, earnest
and plausible as it is, cannot suffice to vindicate the
taste or justify the judgment of a comic poet who
has chosen to deface the closing scenes of a comedy
with such monstrous and unnatural horror as
deforms the fifth act of this play. We know, he
pleads, that the inhabitants of Virginia in his days
did not offer human sacrifice to god or devil (in
other words, that they were neither Catholics nor

204 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Calvinists). But Massinger and his contemporaries
did not know this, and must be excused for beheving
that they did. And therefore we must accept as a
natural and agreeable incident in a comic poem the
projected transportation and immolation of Lady
Frugal and her daughters "as an oblation unto
Hecate (!) and wanton Lust, her favourite." Ad-
mitting that so subtle and splendid a scoundrel as
Luke could be fool enough to swallow such a bait
and monster enough to entertain such a proposal,
we may surely crave leave to object that such a
conception is as monstrous, from an aesthetic point
of view, in a comedy, as it would be, from an ethical
point of view, in real life ; that it jars and unhinges
and disjoints the whole structure of the play. Luke,
under the impression of supernatural agency —
duped by his former dupes, and befooled by his
former victims — is no longer the same man : the
supple, pliable, quick-witted, humble', and resentful
rascal whom his creator had made as visible and
credible to us as Tartuffe himself subsides into a
devil and a fool, whom the simplest device can
delude and the insanest atrocity cannot revolt.

In these two noble and memorable plays Massinger
is no less a patriot than a poet ; his wise and
thoughtful interest in matters affecting the social
interests of the commonweal is as evident as his
mature and masterly power of construction and of
style. He was, it is evident, as all loyal Englishmen
must be, at once truly conservative and thoroughly
liberal in his views and in his aims ; all the more
bitter and unsparing in his hatred of corruption and
his abhorrence of abuses that he foresaw, as did no

PHILIP MASSINGER 205

other writer for the theatres, the inevitable result of
lawless extortion and transgression on the part of
the rulers of England. He was the Falkland as
Fletcher was the Rupert of the stage ; and a wiser
counsellor than ever won the ear of the king who
found his dramatic satire " too insolent " in its
exposure of the royal claims on " benevolences "
and the royal defiance of the law to be endured
without modification or excision. Coleridge's re-
marks on Massinger as a politician are equally
inaccurate and perverse ; nor are his strictures on
the dramatist and the moralist much more valid or
profound. It is true that some of his objections to
Massinger's treatment of character are not without
force ; and to the examples which he selects as
typically blameable he might well have added that
of the judicial frenzy which falls at last as a retri-
bution for his crimes on the head of Sir Giles
Overreach.

It has sometimes struck me as possible if not
probable that the first actor of this famous part
may have suggested or insisted on this tragic exag-
geration of its climax. We all remember how a similar
addition to the catastrophe of Dr. Johnson's Irene
was urged upon the author of that tragedy by the
fruitless importunity of Garrick : " The fellow wants
me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have
an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his
heels." The dumb despair in which Luke finally
leaves the scene is as much more impressive as it is
more lifelike than the raging desperation of Sir
Giles. But there is critical truth as well as friendly
cordiality in the pleasant commendatory verses of

206 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Sir Thomas Jay, whom Massinger, with characteristic
modesty and unselfishness, had rebuked for classing
him as " equal with those glorious men, Beaumont
and Fletcher." The good knight does no more than
justice to his friend in applauding

The crafty mazes of the cunning plot,
The polished phrase, the sweet expressions, got
Neither by theft nor violence ; the conceit
Fresh and unsullied.

The steady and conscientious independence of his
genius and his principles had fully and nobly
asserted itself in Massinger's studies from contem-
porary life in England : in his three remaining plays
he has given a freer if not a looser rein to his fancy,
with less of the ethical and more of the sentimental
in its action. The Guardian is much more like a
play of Fletcher's — such a play, for example, as
Women Pleased or The Pilgrim — than any other of
Massinger's unassisted works : I need hardly add
that its plot is unusually multifarious, improbable,
and amusing. It is always excellently and some-
times exquisitely written : there is no very severe
or serious grasp of character, though all the figures
are as lively and easy as some of the incidents are
violent and absurd. The Bashful Lover, his next
play but one, is little less well written and well
arranged, but very inferior in interest, and more
markedly conventional in character than any other
play of Massinger's ; nevertheless it is an able and
in some degree an admirable piece of work.

One play alone remains for us to notice : for there
is neither any internal nor any external evidence of

PHILIP MASSINGER 207

the slightest value or the faintest plausibility for
Massinger's alleged association with Middleton and
Rowley in their comedy of The Old Law. But this
one remaining play is the flower of all his flock ; so
lovely and attractive in its serious romance, so ripe
and rich in its broader strokes of humour, so full of a
peculiarly sweet and fascinating interest, as to justify
more than ever the compliment of a comparison
which its author's diffidence had reprovingly depre-
cated on the lips of Sir Thomas Jay. As I have so
lately had to protest against Coleridge's occasional if
not general misjudgment of Massinger, I am bound
as well as glad to quote his atoning tribute to the
merit and the charm of A Very Woman — " one of the
most perfect plays we have. There is some good
fun in the first scene between Don John Antonio "
disguised as a slave " and Cuculo, his master " — and
more, the greater poet might have added, in the
later scenes between each of them and the bibulous
wife of Cuculo ; " and can anything exceed the skill
and sweetness of the scene between him and his
mistress, in which he relates his story ? " The
exquisite temperance and justice and delicacy of
touch in that almost unrivalled example of narrative
by dialogue are hardly to be equalled or approached
in any similar or comparable scene of Fletcher's ;
but the loveliest passage in it — the loveliest both for
natural grace of feeling and for melodious purity
of expression — has perhaps somewhat more of the
peculiar cadence of Fletcher's very finest versifica-
tion than of Massinger's. Mr. Dyce, in his admirable
introduction to the works of Beaumont and Fletcher,
suggests that this play may be a recast of an earlier

208 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

play by those poets — A Right Woman, which was
" certainly never given to the press," and in which
" Massinger might have been originally concerned."
Possibilities are almost infinite in such cases ; but I
cannot believe in the probabiHty of any theory
which would tend to deprive Massinger of any part
of the honour and the gratitude which we owe to
the writer of this most beautiful and dehghtful play.
The great argument against the likelihood, if not
against the possibility, that Fletcher can have had
any hand or any finger in the text as it now stands
is the utter absence of his besetting faults. Violent
as are the passions and violent as are the revolutions
of passion represented in the course of the story, the
poet's aim is evidently to make them appear, if not
always reasonable, yet always natural and inevit-
able ; Fletcher, in his usual mood at least, would
have rioted in exaggeration of their contrasts,
improbabilities, and inconsistencies. His hunger
and thirst after sensation at any price could never
have allowed him to be content with so moderate,
so gradual, and so rational an evolution of the
story.

That Massinger was both greater and more trust-
worthy as a dramatic artist than as a dramatic poet
has already been admitted and avowed : but this
crowning work of his noble and accomplished genius,
at once so delicate and so masculine in its workman-
ship, would suffice to ensure him a place of honour
among the poets as well as among the dramatists
of his incomparable time. Upon the whole, how-
ever, I venture to think that his highest and most
distinctive claims to honour are rather moral and

PHILIP MASSINGER 209

intellectual (or, if Greek adjectives be preferred to
Latin as more fashionable and sonorous, we will
say rather ethical and aesthetic) than imaginative
and creative. Be this as it may, there can be no
question that the fame of Philip Massinger is secure
against all chance of oblivion or eclipse as long as
his countrymen retain any sense of sympathetic
admiration and respect for the work and the memory
of a most admirable and conscientious writer, who
was also a most rational and thoughtful patriot.

JOHN DAY

JOHN DAY

One of the very greatest poets that ever glorified
the world has left on record his wish that Beau-
mont and Fletcher had written poems instead of
plays ; and his wish has been echoed by one of the
finest and surest critics of poetry, himself an admi-
rable and memorable poet, unequalled in his own
line of terse and pathetic narrative or allegory. I am
reluctant if not ashamed, and sorry if not afraid, to
differ from Coleridge and Leigh Hunt ; yet I cannot
but think that it would have been a pity, a mistake,
and a grievous loss to poetic or creative literature if
the great twin brethren of our drama had not given
their whole soul and their whole strength to the
stage. I cannot imagine that any poetry they might
have left us, had they gone astray after Spenser
with the kinsmen of the elder of the two, could have
been worth Philaster or The Spanish Curate, The
Maid's Tragedy or The Knight of Malta. But I do
sincerely regret that a far humbler labourer in the
same Elysian field should have wasted the treasure
of a sweet bright fancy and the charm of a true
lyrical gift on work too hard and high for him.
John Day should never have written for the stage
of Shakespeare. The pretty allegory of his Peregri-
natio Scholastica, a really charming example of that

213

214 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

singular branch of mediaeval literature which had
yet to find its last consummate utterance in the
Pilgrim's Progress of a half-inspired but whoUy
demented and demoralized Christomaniac, is perhaps
better reading than his comedies ; and it is not the
least of our many debts to the industrious devotion
of Mr. Bullen that we owe to him the publication
of this long buried and forgotten little work of
kindly and manly and rather pathetic fancy. There
is nothing in it of such reptile rancour as hisses and
spits and pants with all the recreant malignity of a
fangless viper, through the stagnant and fetid
fenlands of The Return from Parnassus. We are
touched and interested by the modest plea — it is
rather a plea than a plaint — of the poor simple
scholar ; but perhaps we only realize how hard and
heavy must have been the pressure of necessity or
mischance on his gentle and fanciful genius when
we begin to read the first extant play in which he
took a fitful and indistinguishable part. And yet
there is good matter in The Blind Beggar of Bednal
Green, however hasty and headlong be the manage-
ment or conduct of the huddled and muddled
combination or confusion of plots. The scene in
which poor Bess, driven toward suicide by the
villainy of her guardian and the infidelity of her
betrothed, first comes across her disguised and
unrecognized father, and turns all her own sorrow
into pity for him and devotion to the needs of a
suffering stranger, is a good example of that exquisite
simplicity in expression of pathetic fancy which was
common to all the dramatic poets of the divine
Shakespearean generation, and peculiar to them.

JOHN DAY 215

Art thou blind, say est thou ? Let me see thy face :
O, let me kiss it too, and with ray tears
Wash off those blemishes which cruel time
Hath furrowed in thy cheeks L O, couldst thou see,
I'd show thine eyes whom thou dost represent.
I called thee father — ay, thou shalt be my father ;
Nor scorn my proffer : were my father here
He'd tell thee that his daughter held him dear ;
But in his absence, father, thou art he.

It would seem that the very existence and presence
of Shakespeare on English earth must have infected
with a celestial contagion of incomparable style the
very lowliest of his followers in art and his fellows
in aspiration. It would also seem that the instinct
of such emotion, the capacity of such expression,
had died out for ever with the afterglow of his
sunset. Even the grateful and joyful appreciation
of the legacies bequeathed to us by the poets of that
transcendent age is now no natural and general
property of all Englishmen who can read, but the
exceptional and eccentric quality of a few surviving
students who prefer old English silver and gold to
new foreign brass and copper.

Shakespeare and Marlowe to the vile seem vile :
Filths savour but themselves.

Themselves, that is, and their Ibsens. " Like lips,
like lettuce."

There is some good simple fun too in this homely
and humble old play : the Norfolk yeomen are not
all unworthy compatriots of Tennyson's immortal
Northern Farmers ; there is something in young
Tom's reflection, " Well, I see I might ha' kept

216 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

company with honest men all the days o' my life
ere I should ha' learned half this knavery." Worse
jests than this have found wider echoes of laughter ;
and Tom approves himself a good fellow, and a
living creature of a real creator, when he risks his
life for the bhnd old beggar : "I'll take up my
lodging on God's dear ground ere thou shalt take
any harm." It is a pity we have lost the double
sequel to this play ; I for one, at all events, should
rejoice to read " the second part of Strowd " and
" the third part of Tom Strowd." His evident
popularity does credit to the honest and wholesome
taste of his audience. It is a curious sign of the
times that Day and his comrade Chettle should have
ventured and found it profitable to venture a
trespass on ground preoccupied already by Marlowe,
if not by Shakespeare ; and we can only wonder
whether Duke Humphrey and Cardinal Beaufort
reappeared and renewed their tragic wrangling on
the stage of the second or the third part of a story
transported from the traditional date of Henry the
Third to the theatrically popular date of Henry the
Sixth. It is perhaps needless to remind any reader
that the blind beggar who played his part on the
Bethnal Green of our old baUad-mongers was sup-
posed to be the surviving son of the great Earl
Simon, blinded and left for dead on the battlefield
of Evesham.

A quaint and primitive little play, The Maid's
Metamorphosis, printed in the year which Henslowe
gives as the date of the production of The Blind
Beggar, who was not to see the light of print till
fifty-nine years later, has been conjccturally and

JOHN DAY 217

plausibly assigned by Mr. Gosse to the hand of Day.
The fluent simplicity of rhyming verse is sometimes
sweet as well as smooth. In the first scene of the
second act there is so singular an instance of the
crude and childish licence which allowed an actor in
the play to address the audience, that I should have
expected to find it a famihar quotation in the notes
or commentaries of editors who were scholars, and
not such impudently ignorant impostors as have
sometimes undertaken a work of which they did not
understand the simplest and most elementary condi-
tions. " {He speaks to the people.) Well, I pray you
look to my master, for here I leave him amongst
you." There are touches of pleasant fancy and
joyous music in this evidently juvenile poem which
may recall to a modern reader the lighter moods of
Keats. Its author, like the author of Doctor
DodipoU, must have had Shakespeare on the brain ;
no reader of either play can miss or can mistake
the gracious influence of A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Comedy of
Errors. The pun on the words Pan and pot antici-
pates a jest unconsciously borrowed and worked to
death by the typically Caledonian humour of Carlyle.
Any form of tribute to the memory of Sir Philip
Sidney, any kind of witness to the popularity of the
Arcadia, does honour to his lovers in the past and
gives pleasure to its lovers in the present ; but one
at least of these latter must express a wish that
the playwrights would have left that last and
loveliest of chivalrous and pastoral romances reveren-
tially and lovingly alone. The prologue to The
Isle of Gulls is a bright and amusing little sample of

218 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

dramatic satire ; its three types of critic, the lover
of Hbel, the lover of ribaldry, and the lover of
fustian, are outlines of figures not unworthy of Ben
Jonson. But there is Uttle or rather nothing in
the five acts thus ingeniously introduced of the
pecuhar charm which pervades the whole atmosphere
of the Arcadia : Day's young princes are mere
puppets, with no trace of likeness to the noble
original figures of Pyrocles and Musidorus ; not for
a moment can his light and loose-tongued heroines,
whatever grace of expression and of verse may be
wasted on the wanton and fantastic exposure of
their trivial inclinations, recall the two glorious
sister figures of Sidney's divine invention. There is
only one " person of the play " who has any
life or likeness of life in him : the rascally adven-
turer Manasses, morahst and satirist, informer and
swindler and preacher ; a very model and proto-
type of the so-called new journahst. The scene in
which he explains his professional aptitudes and
relates his varied experience is the only vigorous
piece of writing in the ragged and slipshod little
play ; his Puritan ■ sermon anticipates with quite
curious precision the peculiar eloquence of Mr.
Chadband. There is some rough and ready fun in
the part of Miso ; but the whole concern is on the
whole but " an indigest deformed lump." The
soliloquy which opens the fifth act has real sweetness
as well as smoothness of metre as well as fancy. A
few lines may serve to give the reader a taste of
Day's simple and gentle genius or gift of style :

Farewell, bright sun, thou lightener of all eyes ;

Thou fall'st to give a brighter beam to rise :

JOHN DAY 219

Each tree and shrub wear trammels of thy hair,
But these are wires for none but kings to wear.

For these we should probably read hers. The play
is as carelessly printed as it was carelessly composed.

The gentle minutes, crowned with crystal flowers,
Losing their youths, are grown up perfect hours
To hasten my delight : the bashful moon,
That since her dalliance with Endjnnion
Durst never walk by day, is under sail.

What follows is pretty and musical, but these are
the best lines,

Shakespeare and Heywood have both touched
smilingly on the " infinite variety " in style and
subject of their contemporary playwrights : neither
has included in his list of the sundry sorts and
kinds of play then aiming at popularity or bidding
for success one curious and interesting class, generally
perhaps interesting on historical rather than literary
grounds : the biographical drama. There are better
and there are worse examples of this kind than
The Travels of Three English Brothers ; the anony-
mous play of Sir Thomas More, which has scenes
and passages in it of a quiet beauty and grave
charm peculiar to the unknown and unconjecturable
writer, is very much better, and probably the finest
existing poem of its class ; Thomas Lord Cromwell,
by the new or German Shakespeare, must alike in
reason and in charity be hopefully accepted as the
worst. The curious and amorphous play in which
three men of genius — no competent reader of their
remaining works will deny the claim to that distinc-
tion of Rowley, of Wilkins, or of Day — took it by

220 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

turns to dash off a sketch of incidents suppHed by
report, and to compile a supplement of inventions
huddled up at random, is almost equally interesting
and disappointing to a student of heroic biography
or a lover of the drama which depends on adventure
and event. Hey wood was the man who should
have undertaken this subject : he would have made
out of it a simple and a noble work of artless and
unconscious art. The three adventurous brothers,
whose doings and sufferings, wise or unwise and
deserved or undeserved, can hardly be remembered
without sympathy by any not unworthy country-
man of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Burton,
do not seem to have made any complaint of the
liberties taken by their three volunteer laureates
with their persons or their names, their characters
or their experiences. And yet the representation of
a Christian hero, who might conceivably and quite
possibly have been sitting among the audience,
fastened in the stocks and distended on the rack
before the eyes of " the great Turk," must make a
modern Enghshman feel that the honest and admir-
ing enthusiasm of a dramatic poet no greater than
Rowley or Wilkins or Day might be almost more
terrible as an infliction than the pitiless and
unscrupulous animosity of Aristophanes or Shake-
speare or Moliere. Cleon or Lucy or Cotin may
have held up his head and smiled upon the foolish
and vulgar spectator who could imagine him acces-
sible or vulnerable by the satire of The Knights, or
The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Les Femmes
Savantes : an English gentleman must have been a
very Stoic if he could so far sacrifice his natural

JOHN DAY 221

instinct of personal reserve and noble shyness as to
abstain from wincing at his exhibition or exposure
as a hero and a martyr, on the chance that the
groundlings might be kindled and stimulated by his
example to a keener sense of religious or patriotic
duty.

The quaint and original prologue to this singular
play is perceptibly and demonstrably the work of
Rowley : who, though assuredly no dunce, would
seem to have anticipated the brilliant and convenient
theory of certain modern dunces that good metre
and musical verse must needs imply tenuity of
meaning and deficiency of thought — as in the
notorious and lamentable instances of Coleridge and
Shelley, whose melodious emptiness and vacuous
efflorescence of mere colour and mere sound were so
justly and so loudly derided and deplored by con-
temporary criticism. The singular point in Rowley's
case is that he really could write excellent good
verse if he chose, but usually preferred to hobble
and stagger rather than walk steady or run straight.
Lamb, who liked him so well, and took such pleasure
in culinary humour, must surely have missed this
curious illustration of the process by which fact
has to be trimmed up with fiction for the purposes
of the historic stage :

Who gives a fowl unto his cook to dress
Likewise expects to have a fowl again ;
Though in the cook's laborious workmanship
Much may be diminisht, somewhat added,
(The loss of feathers and the gain of sauce),
Yet in the back surrender of this dish
It is, and may be truly called, the same.

222 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Such are our acts : should our tedious Muse
Pace the particulars of our travellers,
Five days would break the limits of our scenes
But to express the shadows : therefore we
(Leaving the feathers and some needless stuff)
Present you with the fairest of our feast..
Clothing our truth within an argument
Fitting the stage and your attention,
Yet not so hid but that she may appear
To be herself, even tnith.

Eccentric in expression as this apology may seem,
I know not where to look for an apter or happier
explanation and vindication of the method by which
the nudity and aridity of mere casual fact must
needs be clothed and vivified by poetry or fiction
with the likeness and the spirit of enduring and
essential truth. The symbol or emblem is less
refined and ingenious than that of The Ring and the
Book, but hardly less exact in its aptitude of
application,

A curious use of a word which conveys to modern
English ears none but a very different meaning may
be noted in the dedication, where the authors
express a modest wish to have " a safe harbour and
umbrage for our well-willing yet weak labours."
One or two necessary corrections or completions of
an obviously defective text may be worth transcrip-
tion :

Refrain therefore, and [know,] whate'er you are (p. 38).
I thank thee : less [or more] I cannot give thee (p. 45).

An over-austere or impatient critic might set
down his opinion that the opening scene of Law

JOHN DAY 223

Tricks was less like the professional writing of a
sane adult than the furtive scribbling of a clever
child ; that a few pretty verses sprinkled here and
there throughout the infantile five acts of this
innocent little play could hardly carry weight
enough with even the most uncritical reader to
make him doubt whether a schoolboy with a touch
of ambition to give something like shape to his
rudest fancy and something of colour to his crudest
emotion might not have written it against time
between school hours — and hesitated to submit it
to the judicial and jocose opinion of any but his
most intimate and most closely coeval friend ; that
the two pages are the only satisfactory figures in it
— their elders, virtuous or murderous, being comically
rather than lamentably hke the creatures of such a
boy's brain. The mention of " Justice Slender " in
the first scene is noticeable as an early and blunder-
ing reference to the text of a play which, though
published four years before, can hardly have been
known to Day except on the stage ; the hastiest
reader of Shakespeare's first rough draft could
hardly have confused the two immortal cousins as
the memory of a playgoer who had but once seen it
acted may apparently if not evidently have done.
The dialogue is sometimes bright and pleasant ; it
shoots and sparkles through the rhyming retort of
fencing epigrams as lightly and gracefully as Shake-
speare's in any of his earliest and idlest wit-combats
or encounters of fancy. There are not a few notable
words and phrases in the text worth registering for
an English dictionary that should be worthy to
stand beside Littre's ; and there are touches of

^24 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

humour illustrative of manners which might repay
the notice of a social historian. This passage,
for instance, anticipates the aristocratic satire of
Etherege : " Still in the bogs of melancholy ! 'tis
staler than tobacco : not so much but the singing
cobbler is grown melancholy, and corrects shoes in
humour ; fie on't ! " * That modern American
slang has its roots in old or obsolete English is a
truth once more attested by this curious passage :
" Why, she is of my near affinity ! Should I see my
near affinity go in tatters ? " (Act ii. Scene i). It
may possibly be just worth notice that the same
speaker in a later scene echoes the famous and
defiant query of Ancient Pistol, " Have we not
Hiren here ? " and it seems to me certainly worth
while to note a singularly modern or modem-
sounding use of a commonplace^ adjective just
afterwards : " We will be odd in all things." I do
not know whether camp-ball and football be the
same game, but I should guess so from Tom Strowd's
offer [The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, V. i) to
" play gole at camp-ball." Football was then held

* For "doubt" (Act ii, Scene i) we must obviously read
" doubted " — certainly not " do't," which is hardly sense, as
tobacco is not exactly an aphrodisiac. Profligate the prince is,
says the jesting speaker ; " and that which makes him doubted
most, he is in love with the Indian punk Tobacco." In the
ninth line of p. 23 " induce " is, of course, a misprint for
" endure." In the second line of p. 42 a stage direction has
crept into the text ; the words " discover Lurdo behind the
arras " can only mean " Lurdo is discovered " ; as part of the
speech into which the printer has jumbled them they arc mere
nonsense. In the sixth line of the pretty rhyming scene which
follows, the word " away " is a palpable mistake for " awry."
The right reading is pathetic and consistent ; the wrong reading
stultifies a very graceful passage. On p. 78 there are two
consecutive and curious errors : " ungive " for " ungyve "
(3= unfetter), and ' Heate " for " Hecate."

JOHN DAY 225

a plebeian game — witness Shakespeare, to say
nothing of Beaumont and Fletcher. Anyhow, the
word is a rare one.

There is about as much substance in Humour out
of Breath as in a broken thread of gossamer ; but
even in the slightest and lightest of dramatic play-
things misconstructed by the very clumsiest crafts-
men who opened their toyshop on the stage of
Shakespeare there is a touch, a hint, an indication
of something more graceful and fanciful and child-
like in its pretty silly idleness or waywardness or
incompetence than can be found among the wares
of earlier or later " factors for the scene." Mr.
Bullen's generous commendation of such merit as
may be discovered in action or in character by a
kindly or friendly reader will be accepted rather
than controverted by a reasonably good-humoured
critic ; who nevertheless may be expected to regret
that a little more than the less than little which has
been was not made of the faintly pencilled outlines
and suggestions which promise now and then some-
thing better than we find realized in this unsteady
and headlong little play. The divine and universal
influence of Shakespeare lends it something of life
and light and charm ; we feel once more that the
very humblest and hastiest of his faithful and loyal
followers has something to give us which no later
stage poet of more vigorous and serious ability, no
Dry den or Otway or Southerne or Rowe, can give.
There is more merit in the least of these four play-
wrights, whichever he may be, than it is now the
fashion to allow him ; but in all those later days of
luminous decadence there was but one of their kind

p

226 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

who could write a verse or two after the manner of
the Shakespearean age in its earhest and simplest
expression of dramatic rapture by alternate or
elegiac rhyme. No competent judge of poetic style
would assign the following verses to a poet or a
dramatist of the Restoration :

Why was I destined to be born above,
By midwife Honour to the light conveyed,
Fame's darling, the bright infant of high love,
Crovmed, and in Empire's golden cradle laid ;
Rocked by the hand of empresses, that yield
Their sceptres formed to rattles for my hand,
Born to the wealth of the green floating field,
And the rich dust of all the yellow land ?

Any one who knows anything of the subject, if
asked to name at a venture the author of these last
two lovely lines, would assuredly name Tennyson.
They belong to Nathaniel Lee, and occur in the first
scene of the most hopelessly and obviously delirious
or lunatic performance that surely can ever have
got itself acted. I wish I could find anything in
Day so wholly and so delightfully worthy of the
hand which wrote the lovely scene of lyric and
romantic courtship between Antipholus of Syracuse
and Luciana : but there is some light faint breath
of the luminous April air which stirs and shines
through every scene of Shakespeare's earliest plays
in the opening of this fantastic little comedy. And
there is something of a higher note in the utterance
of the banished Duke's irreconcilable son, when he
refuses to acquiesce with his father and sisters in
submission to adversity without hope of retribution

JOHN DAY 227

or restoration, but repudiates all treacherous means
of revenge on their supplanter :

I will not play the coward, kill him first
And send my challenge after.

This almost tragic figure, which might have been
borrowed from Marston and tempered or toned
down in the borrowing, seems to bring luck to the
lesser and gentler poet ; the character of his mistress
takes something of life and charm on it when he
leaves her, rejected and contemptuous, and the
page to whom she has, confessed that she " cannot
live without him " replies, " O that he knew it,
lady ! " The rejoinder is worthy of a greater and
more famous dramatist. " He does : he would
never have left me else. He does." And the
wrangling and love-making dialogue that follows is
worthy either of Marston or of Jonson. But on the
whole this play might not unjustly be described as
Marston and water. Antonio, though he has some
very pretty and fanciful verses to say, is a very thin
" moonshine shadow " of Andrugio. But in lighter
things the lighter touch of Day is graceful and
pleasant enough ; the scene of blind man's buff in
which the prisoner escapes by the help of his princess
and her page, and leaves his gaoler in gaol, is as
pretty an interlude of farce as even Moliere could
have devised by way of relief to the graver interest
of romantic comedy.*

* In the third line of the second speech of this play there is
an obviously ridiculous misprint: the "steeds still armed"
could only have been " banded with steel," not " branded " —
or fired.

228 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

In the moral and satirical allegory of the scholar's
pilgrimage, for the survival or revival of which Day
and we owe sincere thanks to Mr. BuUen, the
opening attack on the tricks of tradesmen is notice-
able for a realistic force of humour not unworthy of
Dekker. The wealth of curious terms and phrases
would amply repay the research of a social historian
or an intelligent lexicographer.* There are such
vivid and picturesque touches in the description of
" Poneria, or Sin," as would be famous if they had
but had the luck to be laid on by the hand of no
better a poet than Bunyan. For example : " Her
hair, that hung in loose tramniels about her shoulders,
like find threads of gold, seemed like a curled flame
that hums downwards." The entire allegory is alive
with ingenious and imaginative invention of incident
and symbol. There are touches of genuine if not
very subtle or recondite humour in the seventeenth
tractate : the description of " a kind of justice in
law " and his household is hardly unworthy of
Fielding or of Dickens ; and " the new vicar, made
out of an old friar that had been twice turned at a
religion-dresser's," is a clergyman fit to stand beside
the reverend and immortal figure of Parson Trulliber,
In the nineteenth tractate it is curious to come once
more upon the old mediaeval fable or allegory of
human life as a tree growing in the side of a gulf or
pit, with God as a raging lion and the devil as a

* In his description of Envy, Day uses the word " hag " as
a masculine substantive, and Anger he defines as "a right
low country boot-haler." The rare word " swelted " which
occurs in the sixth tractate — "the beauteous flowers were
nothing else but swelted weeds " — is apparently another form
of " wilted."

JOHN DAY 229

fiery serpent above it and beneath, and the white
mouse Day and the black mouse Night ever nibbhng
at the root of it.*

The best known or rather the least unknown of
Day's works belongs to the same category of alle-
gorical satire. Leigh Hunt, who spoke of it with
his usual and unfaihng charm of sympathetic and
sensitive appreciation in that dehghtful book which
will always be especially cherished by all to whom
his genius and Richard Doyle's are dear, was as
right as might have been expected in his objection
that the characters who play their parts in The
Parliament of Bees were too unlike the makers of
honey to represent them fairly in sight of the
laziest and most indulgent fancy. He knew this
quaint and queer and beautiful poem only by the
extracts given in Lamb's priceless " Specimens," and
consequently could not guess that it was mainly
intended as a direct and obvious presentation,
satirical or panegyrical, of contemporary and charac-
teristic types of men and women under the merely
nominal and transparent form of bees. It is a real
pity that the happy and happy-making author of
A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla should never
have read even the title of the original version
unearthed by the deservedly fortunate and thank-
worthy research of Mr. Bullen : " An old Manuscript
containing the Parliament of Bees, found in a
hollow tree in a garden at Hybla, in a strange
language, and now faithfully translated into easy
English verse by John Day, Cantabrig." — who ven-

* In the seventh tractate there is a curious phrase which is
new to me : " he is his own as sure as a club."

230 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

tures to append the motto chosen by Shakespeare
for the first book which ever bore on its title-page
the most illustrious of all mortal or immortal names.
Balzac, if not Hugo, might have been interested to
learn from the dedication " how Lewis the eleventh
(of that name) King of France took notice, and
bountifully rewarded a decayed gardener, who
presented him with a bunch of carrots."

The partnership of Dekker in this work, detected
and verified by Mr. Bullen, is confirmed beyond all
question by comparison of the good metre in the
charming sixth scene with the scandalously slipshod
verse which here and there disfigures those which
precede and follow it : a perverse and villainous
defect peculiar to Dekker alone among all his
fellows ; a sin out of which even the merciless lash
of Ben Jonson failed to whip him into repentance
and reformation. The changes from the manuscript
in the printed text are sometimes at least such
improvements as transfigure rather poor verse into
really good poetry ; and sometimes of a much more
dubious kind. A passage which does not reappear
in the printed Parliament of Bees, but recurs in
Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom, seems to me better
expressed in its original manuscript form :

He that will read my acts of charity

Shall find them writ in ashes, which the wind

Shall scatter ere he spells them.

In the text of Dekker's play we find this surely

inferior version :

He that will read the wasting of my gold
Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind
WUl scatter ere he spends it.

JOHN DAY 231

But if Wordsworth, Landor, and even Tennyson,
did not al\vays-change for the better, we can hardly
expect a more infalHble felicity in revision from
Dekker or from Day.

That the third " Character " belongs to Dekker
seems to me evident from the cancelled couplet
which announces without introducing an important
figure in The Wonder of a Kingdom, the disowned
and impoverished brother of the profligate and
ruffianly braggart. As that gallant and ill-requited
soldier is the next " Character," this scene must
also, I presume, be Dekker's. But it is Day, I
think, who touches the loathsome lips of the typical
and eternal poetaster — sycophant and slanderer,
coward and liar — with indirect and involuntary
praise of Persius. I doubt whether Dekker could
have construed a dozen consecutive lines of the
noble young Roman stoic.

How Day could have had the heart to cancel
some of the sweetest lines he ever wrote I cannot
conjecture ; but the strange fact is that these pretty
verses were struck away from the sixth and grace-
fullest scene of the most delightful little poem he
has left us :

A pair of suns move in his spherelike eyes ;
Were I love's pirate, he should be my prize.
Only his person lightens all the room,
For where his beauty shines night dares not come.
His frown would school a tyrant to be meek ;
Love's chronicle is painted on his cheek,
Where lilies and fresh roses spread so high
As death himself to see them fade would die.

This passage can hardly have been cancelled

232 CONTEMPQJIARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

because the characteristics of fascinating youth
described in it were rather human than apiarian :
the whole poem, on that score, would at once
deserve the castigation of fire.

The seventh interlude, brightly and lightly written
after the ready fashion of Dekker, has just the
straightforward simplicity of his satire in its carica-
tures of parsimony and prodigality, with something
of his roughness and laxity in metre. In the ninth
and tenth we find him again, and recognize in each
the first shape or sketch of yet another scene in the
tragicomedy to which so much was transferred from
this as yet unpublished poem. The eighth, a sequel
or counterpart to the sixth, is no less evidently the
work of Day : as smooth and musical in metre, as
extravagant and fantastic in conceit. The two
sweet and graceful scenes which wind up the pretty
and fanciful weft of this lyric and satiric poem are
perhaps the best evidence left us of Day's especial
and delightful gift ; fresh, bright, and delicate as
the spirit and the genius of the poet and critic who
discovered him, and gave his modest and gentle
name the imperishable and most enviable honour of
association with the name of Lamb.

ROBERT DAVENPORT

ROBERT DAVENPORT

The posthumous fortune of Robert Davenport is
unique in the record of EngHsh poets. A moderate
amount of modest recognition would seem to have
fallen to his lot in life ; and then, after a century
and a half of all but absolute obUvion, he was dis-
covered and held up to honour by a critic from
America. For once it is not to Charles Lamb that
we owe the resurrection of a true and fine dramatic
poet whose work belongs to the age of Shakespeare
— to the half-century which closed on the outbreak
of the civil war. Lamb did not discover Davenport
till 1827 — nineteen years after the memorable issue of
his first " Specimens." Washington Irving had long
before introduced him to the readers of Bracebridge
Hall with a most cordial and generous commenda-
tion of a poet who had chosen for his heroine a
martyr or confessor to the religion of matrimony.

This was hardly so new or so exceptional a choice
as the kindly critic seems to have thought it — for-
getting apparently that the creator of Juliet was
also the creator of Imogen ; and that Imogen,
Hermione, and Desdemona are somewhat more
typical and memorable examples of Shakespeare's
women than Juliet, Ophelia, or Anne Page. But we
should not consider too curiously — we should not

285

236 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

be over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain
criticism, when it is animated by genuine goodwill
and instinct with a cordial sincerity. It is so much
to his honour that Washington Irving should have
been the first to introduce Davenport to his country-
men, that we may well overlook any seeming
inaccuracy or impropriety in the terms of introduc-
tion. He is by no means exceptional among his
fellows as an admiring student and a fervent painter
of virtue and devotion on the part of an injured
and long-suffering wife ; nor yet, on the other hand,
as an admiring preacher and a fervent advocate of
that abject and grovelhng servility which was
exacted from the ideal wife in ages whose ideal was
the prone and preposterous patience of Griselda.

Nor is he, it must in fairness be added, exceptional
among the followers of Shakespeare or of Fletcher
as a lover and honourer of a far nobler type of
womanhood. The heroine of his first extant play
is a figure not unworthy to be set beside Ordclla
and Juliana : nay, a partial though not a disin-
genuous advocate might be permitted to plead that
she is a more real and credible angel, less excessive
and " exaggerative " in her devotion, than is either
of these. Nor can I agree with Mr. Collier's verdict
that " Davenport's production is inferior in most
respects to the earlier work of Chettle and Munday "
on the same subject. No doubt it " goes precisely
over the same ground, and " (we must admit) " with
many decided marks of imitation, especially in the
conduct of the story " ; but what is best and most
characteristic in Davenport's work is not only not
derived from Chettle's, but is apparently inspired by

ROBERT DAVENPORT 237

a wish to do better and a resolution to do otherwise
than his predecessor. The two plays, valuable in
themselves to all lovers and students of dramatic
poetry, are invaluable as types of the sunrise and
the sunset of the Shakespearean half-century. The
earlier playwright's touch is lighter and swifter, but
his method is thinner and shallower : Davenport
has followed very closely on his track — as closely as
Shakespeare on the track left open by the author of
The Taming of a Shrew : but, hke Shakespeare, he
has deepened the lines and heightened the colours
of the original poem. Chettle's Fitzwater is an
admirable sketch, admirably completed by Daven-
port : Davenport's King John is perhaps less real
and credible — he is certainly more effusive and
poetic in his penitence — than Chettle's.

It is amusing to find in Mr. BuUen's reprint of the
first edition that among the actors of King John and
Matilda the representative of the venerable hero
Fitzwater was one " whose action gave grace to the
play," and that the murderer Brand was represented
by an actor " who performed excellently well."
These two were evidently recognized by the audience
as the most effective and important figures in the
composition of the play ; though the eponymous
persons are presented in a careful and workmanlike
manner. There is true and keen pathos in the
horrible scenes which represent the agony of a
mother and her child slowly starved to death under
the eye of their jeering gaoler : but few if any
readers will differ from Mr. BuUen's objection that
even tragedy has no right to deal with such harrow-
ing elaborations of physical horror. Nevertheless it

238 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

must be allowed that the picture of a noble child's
affectionate courage and devotion is as beautiful asL
the situation is hideous ; and that Davenport has
at least spared us one dreadful detail on which his
predecessor had expatiated — the fruitless attempt of
the mother to feed her dying child with her own
flesh and blood. Still on the whole he is the crueller
of the two in his expansion and prolongation of the
intolerable scene : though we may admit that he
has nowhere else shown anything like such intensity
of tragic and pathetic power. It is little less than
bewildering to compare the remorseless and fearful
realism of these revoltingly admirable scenes with
the vile fantastic jargon of John's parting address to
Matilda in the first scene of the play. Davenport
has here successfully emulated the demerit of the
worst passage in Chettle's tragedy — that in which
young Bruce gives vent to what he too truly calls
his " execrable execrations." Lamb has done no
more than justice to the " passion and poetry " of
the last scene : quaint and exuberant as the rhetoric
may seem to a modern reader, it is singularly
beautiful and musical as a close to so dark a tragedy.
The excess of stale second-hand euphuism in the
poetical or sentimental parts of The City Nightcap is
evidently due, as Mr. Bullen has shown, to the
servile and belated fidelity with which the author
has followed an already obsolete model in the
artificial and overloaded style of Robert Greene. In
the very first scene there are no less than six direct
plagiarisms from the text of the romance by that
poet on which the play is mainly founded : and
there is not one of these passages which would not

ROBERT DAVENPORT 239

be better away. Was it modesty, sheer laziness, or
inveterate admiration for an early favourite, which
so woefully misguided a poet who could write
when it pleased him with such masculine purity
and simplicity ? The barren and cumbersome
profusion of these faded artificial flowers, colour-
less now and scentless always, is not the only
fault of a play in which there is so much of
interest, pathos, passionate and poetic beauty.
The virtuous hero is a most vile rascal — a
bloody and cowardly cur ; while the irrational
brutality and the infernal rascality of a Leontes
who is also an lago — of a jealous husband whose
jealousy induces him to hire false witnesses against
the honour of his wife — are too plainly the qualities
of an incurably criminal lunatic to make it possible
or leave it credible that such a demoniac should be
capable of repentance and reform. This fault is
common to Greene's story and Davenport's play ;
but one of the finest passages in the latter is very
closely modelled upon the fervent and eloquent
prose of the older poet. Noble as are the parting
speeches with which the innocent victims of perjury
take leave of their betrayer in the trial scene of the
play, it is to Robert Greene, and not to Robert
Davenport, that the main honour is due for their
piercing and pathetic eloquence. Indeed, the pro-
test of Philomela is much finer, more dignified, and
more proper than the more piteous appeal of
Abstemia.

But the admirable if audacious broad comedy of
the underplot is unsuggested by anything in Greene's
novelette. Davenport is always more original and

240 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

usually more powerful as a comic than as a tragic
writer. A curious if also an undesirable or indeed
regrettable result of the poverty in stage properties
which otherwise so happily distinguished the Shake-
spearean theatre was the possibility of such a bedroom
scene as that which opens the second act being
represented by any actors and tolerated by any
spectators. The nakedness of the stage must have
served, as it were, as a screen or a veil for the naked-
ness of the situation : which would otherwise have
defied even the impudence of a Wycherley to
venture on it, and might have made the chaste
muse of Aphra Behn (first inventress though not
sole patentee of the heroic negro) blush like a black
dog — of the fairer sex.

In 1639 two little poems by Davenport, as well
as his dramatic masterpiece, were given to the press.
A Crown for a Conqueror is suggestive rather of a
fool's cap for the poet : I am confident that Quarles
has left behind him no worse trash. The " Dialogue
supposed between a Lover and the Day " is a very
different piece of work : it is even exquisitely pretty
here and there, and written, as the author says in
his dedication, " rather with a native familiarity
than an impertinent elegancy " : which latter phrase
would be only too appropriate a designation, too
accurate a description, of his own too frequent style.
A Survey of the Sciences, now first printed, is equally
quaint, ingenious, and humorous — sometimes inten-
tionally but oftcner unintentionally provocative of
a smile.

By far the best of Davenport's three surviving
plays is that one which had never been reissued

ROBERT DAVENPORT 241

until 1890. A New Trick to cheat the Devil is a master-
piece in its way, though it may be but " a stumbhng-
block " to readers who cannot imagine themselves
more credulous or otherwise credulous than they
are, and " foolishness " to such as will not understand
that the superstitions of their forefathers were no
whit more irrational and idiotic, unmanly and
unworthy, than those which lead fools by the nose —
by the nose of a palpably insensitive intelligence
— on the track of the male and female Sludges who
reap so rich a harvest from the typical idiocies and
the representative lunacies of our own sagacious
and contemptuous age. The construction of this
externally eccentric play is so ingenious that the
final solution, though admirably sufficient when we
come to it, hangs far beyond conjecture, swings high
out of apprehension, till the very close and consum-
mation of it all ; the supernatural machinery is so
deftly handled, and so naturally adapted to the
situations of the subjects on whom it is set to work,
that on a first reading it may probably and plausibly
seem as real and serious as in other plays of the
same age — A Mad World, my Masters, or Grim, the
Collier of Croydon ; and yet, when the unexpected
explanation is sprung upon us, and the terror is
resolved into laughter, and divine admonition
relaxes into human reprobation, the upshot is as
satisfactory, and if the date of the play be considered
is even as plausible, as that of any more famous and
elaborate comedy applauded by the admirers of
Congreve or of Sheridan. The style is far better
and purer than that of Davenport's other two plays :
the flowery verbosity which decorates and disfigures

Q

242 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

them is happily absent here. Nor do even the quasi-
miraculous incidents of the story tax our faith or
outrage our patience so severely as those of Fletcher's
Night-Walker — by no means one of its illustrious
author's worst plays. The more serious parts of
Davenport's tragicomedy may well sustain a com-
parison with Beaumont's work as well as Fletcher's ;
for the vigorous and masterly metre, infinitely
superior to that of his two other plays, is but the
natural and fitting raiment for the fresh and virile
humour oi dialogue and situation.

The exposition of the play is bright, brief, and
straightforward, though the rhapsody in which
Slightall plights his faith to Anne Changeable is
about the worst piece of sheer nonsense to be found
in the whole blatant record of euphuism. It does
not prevent her father from giving his consent and
blessing ; but Mrs. Changeable opposes the match
on behalf of the young Lord Skales, who has sent
a proxy to propose in his name for her daughter's
hand. Anne, forgetful of the fascinating and seduc-
tive eloquence which has just paid homage to " those
intrammelled rays, those starry eyes Endymion
blushes on " (whatever that may mean), " those
ruby lips, where a red sea of kisses is divided by
rocks of pearl," is easily persuaded to accept the
nobleman and forsake the commoner ; who there-
upon, like any modern French hero, abjures " affec-
tion and all loyal love," and resolves to seek comfort
in the career of a professional seducer and rioter.
A usurer is found ready to make his profit of this
rational resolution, on the assurance of the scrivener
with whom he deals that the youngster is " well

ROBERT DAVENPORT 248

possessed," having " three fair lordships, besides
sheep-walks, parks, and other large demesnes," and
that under the influence of a man of his who soothes
him up in all his riots, and leads him to gamble and
guzzle in places ^of bad fame, he may be led to sell
his landed property on terms convenient to the
conspirators. His honest and loyal servant Roger
is unable to counteract the influence of this pimp
and swindler Geoffrey ; but the eloquent simplicity
of his remonstrance may remind us of that admirable
song on which Leigh Hunt wrote so admirable a
commentary, The Old and Young Courtier.

The opening of the second act is as vivid and
animated as was the opening of the first. Changeable
begins by maintaining a better fight than Major
Ponto or poor Frank Berry could have attempted
against an imperious wife and an ambitious daughter:
but Thackeray himself could hardly ha^ve bettered
the sardonically comic effect of the scene when the
noble suitor arrives, and disgusts the young woman
who but a moment before was revelling in the
reflection that his lordship was coming to see her
ladyship. Mrs. Changeable's prostrate exultation
could hardly have been bettered by any dramatic
satirist — hardly even by Congreve or Moliere. " I
feel state come upon me," says her daughter ;

Speak, good mother,
How shall I bear myself ?

The worthy Mistress Changeable is at no loss for
an answer :

Why, such at first
As you must be hereafter ; like a lady.

244 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Proud, but not too perverse ; coy, not disdainful ;
Strange, but yet not too strait ; like one that would,
Were she well wooed, but yet not to be won
Without some formal courtship : had it been
My case, my wench, when I was young like thee,
I could have borne it bravely. See, he's come ;
Husband, your duty ; girl, your modest blush,
Mixt with a kind of strange hut loving welcome.

This last touch seems to me worthy of Shakespeare
rather than of Jonson. Anne, however, is even
more disgusted than disappointed at sight of his
luckless lordship ; and the satire aimed at the
superstition or tradition of titular nobility is as
remarkable as Chapman's attack on the institution
of monarchy in a play which had been printed
thirty-six years earlier. The spirit, humour, and
vigour of the dialogue, till it rises to the culmination
of contempt in Anne's inquiry whether her new
suitor could not lend his lordship to a friend whom,
had he but that slight addition, she gladly would
embrace, may bear comparison with the work of
any comic poet but Shakespeare. The squabble
between the usurer and scrivener over the leavings
of their victim is excellent ; there is hardly in all
Ben Jonson's work a better or neater little bit of
satiric realism : but the next scene has merit of a
higher kirid. Slightall, now thoroughly ruined,
takes leave of his good and his evil counsellor like
a generous and good-humoured gentleman : the
honest Roger begs his master to keep the money
bestowed on him at parting, and refuses to take it
except as " a steward to your use, and always ready
to furnish your least wants " ; but the unlucky

ROBERT DAVENPORT 245

fellow is now so case-hardened against all coming
troubles or comforts that even the appearance of
Anne, in a penitent and pathetic state of mind,
cannot move him to give over his fancy of applying
to the devil for redemption from present wretched-
ness. Mad with misery and indignation, he rejects
her ofers and repels her apologies ; breaks from
her, and leaves her in a rage of repentance, for the
treason of which she will not hold herself guilty —
the true culprits being " her mother and that lord."
The third act, by way of relief, changes both
scene and tone, style and subject, after a fashion
somewhat astonishing to modern readers ; but the
episode contained in it is a consummate and a
blameless example at once of the broadest and the
highest comedy. Old Friar Bernard and young
Friar John, belated after nightfall on their return
from visiting the sick, take shelter under the roof
of a hostess who in her husband's absence has only
a cock-loft at her disposal ; in which she has no
sooner locked up her reverend casuals than her
lover the constable knocks at the door, bringing a
couple of manchets and a bottle of wine. She lets
him in, and produces for his entertainment a roast
chicken piping hot, warning him not to speak loud
enough to wake the two abbey lubbers whom she
has locked up fast, being unable to get rid of them,
with neither light nor bed nor any other comfort.
Friar John, however, finding these conditions not
overconducive to a good night's rest, peeps down
from the cock-loft, and is watching with hungry
envy the festive preparations below, when they are
cut short by a fresh knock at the door and a call

246 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

from the hostess's husband outside for admittance.
The constable is in an agony.

Dost thou not think he'll spare an officer,
But fall on the king's image ?

He creeps under the bed : the supper is whisked
into a cupboard, the fire put out, and the host at
length admitted. He has travelled hard, and is
very hungry ; be the time of night what it may,
something he must and will have : his wife is obliged
to rekindle the fire. The worthy host, now in high
spirits, expresses a wish for company : "I had not
such an appetite to be merry for an hour this seven
year ; that I could tell where to call up some good
fellow that I knew ! we would not part these two
hours." The vigilant Friar John takes this as his
cue, and forthwith makes such a noise in the garret
that the hostess is compelled to confess what guests
she has locked up in the straw-loft. He beshrews
her for giving no better welcome to the very men
he would have wished to meet with, and sends her
up to release and bring them down. Unluckily,
there is nothing for supper ; " not so much as a
cantle of cheese or crust of bread that can this night
be come by," protests the inwardly furious hostess.
But Friar John, to the horror and amazement of
his superior, offers to procure supper by art magic,
and conjures the demon Asteroth to provide a
couple of loaves baked in Madrid, the best wheat
being in Spain ; bids mine host put but his hand
into the corner, pull them forth, and place them
behind the salt. Next, he calls for " a cup of divine
claret ; no, a bottle of some two quarts " ; and the

ROBERT DAVENPORT 247

host finds it in the place indicated. Asteroth must
be but once more employed as purveyor, and
provide a pullet piping hot : he, John, smells it
smoking, and sauce to it. Ay, but where ?

John. Somewhere about this room : who hath the key
Of that same cupboard ?

Host. Marry, Nan, my wife.

John. Call for it, good mine host.
You see I come near nothing, use fair play,
Saw neither fire nor candle to provide this.
Touched neither lock nor key within your house.
But was asleep i' the straw ; unlock, mine host.
See what the cupboard yields.

The men fall to and sup heartily. " Good Dame,"
says the attentive John, " me thinks you do not
eat." " I could eat thee," mutters the hostess to
herself. The host now naturally wishes for a sight
of so obliging a devil as Asteroth ; but John assures
him that it must be under some other likeness than
his own, or the sight of him in his terrors would
drive the spectator mad.

Have you no neighbour whom you best affect,
Whose shape he might assume to appear less terrible ?

Host. Yes, twenty I could name.

John. Soft, let me pause;

It must be some that still wake at these hours,
We have no power o'er sleepers : say I bring him
In person of some watchman ?

Host. No shape better.

John. Or in the habit of your constable ?

Host. Why, he's my honest gossip.

John. Why, then, his.

But, mine host, resolve me one thing : should great

248 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Asteroth appear to you in your gossip's shape,
How would you deal with him ?

Host. Why, as my friend.

My neighbour and my gossip.

John. No such thing :

You must imagine him what he appears,
An evil spirit, to kick him and defy him
As you would do the devil : otherwise.
When you are late abroad, and we gone hence,
He'll haunt your house hereafter.

Is it necessary to add that after a thunder-peal of
resonant invocations Asteroth appears as required
" from underneath the bed, in shape of Master
Constable," to be forthwith kicked out of the room ?
and that the hostess follows to let him out of doors,
" lest he should bear down part of the house " ?

John. We'll take our leaves ; make much of our good
dame,
And think no worse of your good officer.
Your gossip and your neighbour, in whose form
Asteroth so late appeared.

Only commend us to my dame, your wife.
And thank her for our lodging.

The jest, of course, is old enough ; but I cannot
imagine that it can ever have been presented with
such fullness of comic effect, such ripe and rich
humour, or such excellent spontaneity and simplicity
of natural and artistic style.

The next scene brings us back into an atmosphere
of more serious emotion. The faithful Roger refuses
the proffered patronage of Lord Skales, and tells

ROBERT DAVENPORT 249

him he has driven a better man than himself to
ruin — one whom his old servant will follow " to
his grave, or to his better fortunes." Anne denounces
his lordship to his face as a noble thief who has
stolen a contracted wife from her husband ; her
father as a gentle fool, her mother as a scold, and
the subordinates according to their respective deserts.
Her noble suitor, however, is rather attracted than
repelled by the ingenuous expression of her high
spirit.

To modem unbelievers in demonology the inci-
«dents of the two remaining acts, though excellently
constructed and arranged, may probably appear too
extravagant to evoke any more serious interest than
that of perplexed curiosity. But the solution is so
ingenious, and the stage effect of it so striking,
that the play cannot fairly be said to fall off in merit
towards the close ; and enough has now been shown
of it to justify the claim of its author to honourable
remembrance, and to enhance the claim of his editor
to our deepest and most cordial gratitude.

THOMAS NABBES

THOMAS NABBES

In the second issue of Lamb's Selections from the
Dramatic Poetry of the Shakespearean Age, we find
for the first time the name of Nabbes admitted to
the company of names honoured by the notice of the
greatest and surest critic that ever wrote or ever will
write on a subject of unsurpassable interest to any
historic student of English letters and of English
character. This name was hardly worthy of inclu-
sion in the priceless volume which first revived and
revealed to modern readers the now deathless
glories of Marlowe and of Webster, of Dekker and of
Ford ; but to all true lovers of the incomparable and
unapproachable work bequeathed us by our greatest
school of writers it will seem worthy of honourable
mention. Nabbes is to Shirley what Shirley is to
Massinger ; but the inspiration then afloat and aUve
in the air of English poetry was so strong and keen
and true that even the subordinates of the subor-
dinates of Shakespeare are still and will always be
memorable men. Any other nation but theirs
would have long since registered their names among
those which ought not to be forgotten.

Covent Garden, his earliest extant play, may be
remembered as a late and slight example of a
class which contains such admirable masterpieces

253

254 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

as Eastward Ho ! and Every Alan in his Humour ;
the realistic comedy of old-world London. It is
" pleasant " — as its title-page not too arrogantly
affirms — for students of the time who can be content
with a modest allowance of comic or farcical humour
interwoven with serious action and emotion. The
more ambitious and eloquent rhetoric of the graver
scenes has now and then some savour of the great
style then gradually dying out ; but the best
character is the really humorous and original figure
of the " complimenting vintner " — a new and
amusing specimen of the old English host.*

In the dedication of this comedy Nabbes compares
Suckling to Pindar and himself to Bacchylides —
Apollo alone knows why. He should have been
sentenced to translate into Pindaric verse the immor-
tal Ballad on a Wedding. His next attempt found no
such distinguished patron, and suggested no such
inexplicable comparisons. The " pleasant " comedy
of Tottenham Court is only less unpleasantly un-
satisfactory than Suckling's own abortive and
illegitimate plays to the lover of comedy or melo-
drama. There are glimpses in it of a poet, and
there are traces of a dramatist ; but the incidents
and the intrigues, instead of being fused or welded
into harmony by the strong hand of a poet or the
technical skill of a playwright, are not so much as
pasted or stitched together with any decent preten-
sion to plausible coherence. It is as far from success
on the lines of Etherege and Wycherley as on the

* A word rather overfamiliar as the sjmonym of the French
chauvin occurs — to me unintcUigibl}' — in the fifth scene
of the third act: "pity from an Executioner, or bashfulness
from a Jingo." The editor suggests no explanation.

THOMAS NABBES 255

lines of Jonson or Fletcher. There is matter enough
in this failure for one romantic comedy of an earlier
date and for more than one realistic comedy of a
later ; but there is a plentiful lack of construction,
composition, dramatic tact and inventive instinct.
These awkward and abortive efforts of a decadent
school may be found serviceable if not valuable as
foils to the finished and admirable work of the great
comic dramatists who arose at once after the Restora-
tion. There is here some little savour lingering of
poetry, of sentiment, of honest love and cordial
simplicity ; but it is unmistakably flat and stale.
Manners and morals are not very far above the later
level : in wit and humour, strength of hand and
excellence of workmanship, there can be no possible
comparison. How far this anaemic and crestfallen
generation of pithless poets and nerveless dramatists
had sunk below the level of their fathers' days may
be measured by the fact that a typical gallant of
their pitiful time can find no stronger evidence to
offer of his devotion to women than this : that he
would not only " spin, or thread their needles,"
but even " read Spenser and the Arcadia, for their
company,"

Euripides himself could not have written a
tragedy more spiritless and shapeless, more imbe-
cile and insipid, than Hannibal and Scipio. The
yawning reader will be reminded, and will yawn
again over the recollection, of Lodge's Marius and
Sylla. There are touches of rhetoric less merely
vacuous than usual here and there ; the style and
the metre are not so piteously prosaic as those of the
dramatic date when James Thomson and Samuel

256 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Johnson were taken for dramatic poets ; but the two
distinguishing quahties of the verbosity which per-
vades and dilates it are flatulence and platitude.

When Lee makes temperate Scipio fret and rave.
And Hannibal a whining amorous slave,

he is less unbearably unreadable than Nabbes.

The Bride is a play which would have done no
discredit to Shirley : it stands well above his worst
or hastiest comic work, if far beneath his thought-
fullest and his best. We may think that " the
picture would have been better if the artist had taken
more pains " ; and again we may doubt. There is
something flaccid and relaxed in the constitution or
composition of this comedy : it has enough of real
and vital merit to surprise and disappoint the reader
who finds it on the whole so strangely wanting in
the vigorous and coherent sufficiency of a really
good play. The broad comic effect of one character,
" an owner of rarities and antiquities," is exactly
such as we find in the personal caricatures which
still amuse the too infrequent reader in Foote's
comedies or farces : and the humour of the arrogant
and amorous French cook anticipates the more
finished and maturer dignity of Thackeray's immor-
tal Mirobolant. The simple justice and his imperious
wife are really good studies in the school of Jonson.
It is something for a writer of the Shakespearean
decadence to have shown himself at once a not
unworthy follower and a not unworthy precursor
of men so far greater than himself as the authors
of Pendennis and The Silent Woman.

The tragedy of intrigue is a subordinate form of

THOMAS NABBES 257

drama which cannot flourish, but in a period of
decadence, and cannot but flourish then. There
are much worse examples of it extant in our own
literature than a luckless play which was " denied
the credit which it might have gained from the
stage " on which the author's previous attempt at
tragedy had found acceptance or toleration. It is
not easy to imagine the reader who would not rather
read or the audience who would not rather sit out
the five acts of The Unfortunate Mother than the
five acts of Hamiihal and Scipio. And if the eye of
Charles Lamb had happened to rest or to alight on
the following lines, they would, if I mistake not,
have had a fair chance of being embalmed for
immortality —

If greatness
Were not a relative to all that's good
And glorious in the general speculation
Of things that do affect us, not in sense,
But the bright part of reason, emulous man
Would not through danger manage actions
So full of wonder, nor employ his faculties
In high designs : but like a heavy lump
That only by its weight moves to its centre.
And there sleeps, so should we : leave not so much
As the record of any memorable
And brave achievement, for a monument
That once such men had being. i

This passage is worthy of Massinger or Ford.

Microcosmus is an ingenious and graceful masque,
with enough in it of humour and poetry to keep the
fancy and invention which they serve and inform
alive and agreeable to the taste of modern readers

R

258 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

not overintolerant of facile moral allegory. The
lesser masque of The Spring's Glory is noticeable
only for the quaint and amusing passage at arms
between Christmas, Shrovetide, and Lent. There
is no great matter to be looked for in the minor
poems of a minor poet ; but a tolerant curiosity
may be amused now and then by some of those
appended to this masquelet. The modest and
good-humoured author may never find many
readers ; but none will regret the time spent on
reading him, or question his claim to a place among
English poets above the station of many whose
names, if not their works, are more familiar to
the docile and conventional student of English
poetry.

RICHARD BROME

RICHARD BROME

If the futile and venerable custom of academic
disputations on a given theme of debate were ever
to revive in the world of scholarship and of letters,
an amusing if not a profitable theme for discussion
might be the question whether a minor artist of real
and original merit is likelier to gain or to lose by the
association of his name with that of a master in his
art. And no better example could be taken than
that afforded by the relation of Dick Brome to Ben
Jonson; The well-known first line of the commen-
datory verses with which his master and patron
condescended to play the part of sponsor to his first
comedy must probably be familiar to many who
care to know no more than that Ben had '"' Dick "
for a servant once, and testified that he " performed
a servant's faithful parts " ; and further, that when
Dick took to play-writing Ben encouraged him with
sublime condescension and approval of the success
attained by his disciple through dutiful observation
of those laws of comedy " which I, your master,
first did teach the stage." From this Olympian
nod of supercilious approbation it might be in-
ferred, and indeed has very probably been inferred
by the run of readers, that Brome, as dramatist and
humorist, was little or nothing more than a shadow

261

262 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

or an echo, more or less definite or distinct, of his
master's figure and his master's voice. And un-
questionably he must have learnt much and gained
much by such intercourse and such discipleship.
His first play, The Northern Lass, appearing and
succeeding as it did under the kindly if haughty
patronage of his master, and deserving as it certainly
was of that patronage and success, might perhaps
have been better and might perhaps have been
worse if the author's agile and active talent had been
uninfluenced and unmodified by the rigid example
and the imperious authority of Ben Jonson. The
stage is so crowded and the action is so crossed by
the coming and going of so many ludicrous and
serious figures, that the attention if not the patience
of the reader is overstrained by the demand made on
it ; and the movements of the figures through the
mazes of a complex dramatic dance are not so happily
regulated as to avoid or to avert an irritating sense
of confusion and fatigue. But there are scenes and
touches of character in it worthy of very high
praise : the gentle heroine, tender and true (if some-
what soft and' simple) as a " northern lass " should
appear in compliance with tradition, is a figure very
gracefully outlined, if not quite adequately finished
or relieved : there is something more of sentimental
interest or romantic suggestion in the ingenious if
incomposite plot than might have been expected
from a disciple of Jonson's : and the direct imitation
of his Bobadil and Master Mathew is too lively and
happy to be liable to the charge of servile or sterile
discipleship. And there are few scenes in all the
range of serio-comic drama more effective and

RICHARD BROME 263

impressive on even a second or third reading than
that in which the friend of an intending bridegroom
attempts to break off his match with a woman whom
he beHeves unworthy by denunciation of his friend's
imaginary vices, and is fascinated himself by the
discovery of her unshaken and unselfish devotion.

The modern reader of this play, the earliest at-
tempt of its author and an excellent example of his
talent, will probably be struck by the evidence it
affords that Brome in our own day would have won
higher distinction as a novelist than he did in his
own as a playwright. Were he now alive, he would
be a brilHant and an able competitor in their own
field of work and study with such admirable writers
as Mrs. OHphant and Mr. Norris. His powers of
observation and invention were not, if I mistake not,
inferior to theirs ; and the bent of his mind was not
more technically dramatic. In fact, his characters
are cramped and his plots are distorted by com-
pression into dramatic shape : they would gain both
in execution and in effect by expansion, dilation,
or dilution into the form of direct and gradual
narrative.

The opening scene of The Sparagus Garden is as
happily humorous and as vividly natural as that
of any more famous comedy. Tim Hoyden is a
figure not unworthy of comparison with Sir Man-
nerly Shallow in Crowne's excellent broad comedy of
The Country Wit — as that rural knight may be held
worthy to rank as a precursor, a herald from afar, a
daystar announcing the sunrise, of Congreve's
matchless and inimitable Sir Wilfrid Witwould.
But in Congreve's time, and even in Crowne's, the

264 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

construction of a play — its carpentry, to use a
French term beloved of the great Dumas — was too
well understood for it to have been possible that a
writer of brilliant ability and conscientious energy
should have offered to the public a play so roughly
put together — so loose on its hinges and so shaky in
its joints. "It is no common play," says a friend
of the author in a remarkably well-written copy of
commendatory verses ;

Nor is thy labyrinth [? so] confused but we
In that disorder may proportion see.

That is, I should be inclined to add, on a second
reading. The actual audience of that ideal time for
dramatists and poets must have been as quick to
seize the clue and follow the evolution of the most
complicated plot or combination of plot with under-
plot or counterplot as to catch and relish the finer
graces of poetry, the rarer beauties of style, the
subtler excellences of expression. The influence of
Jonson is here still patent and palpable enough ; but
the incomposite composition of so vigorous and
humorous a piece of work will recall to the mind of a
critical reader, not the faultless evolution of such a
flawless masterpiece as The Alchemist, but the dis-
jointed and dislocated elaboration of so magnificent
a failure — if failure we may diffidently venture to
call it — as The Devil is an Ass. It is surely a very
bad fault for either a dramatist or a novelist to
cram into the scheme of a story or to crowd into the
structure of a play, too much bewildering ingenuity
of incident or too much confusing presentation of

RICHARD BROME 265

character : but such a fault is possible only to a
writer of real if not high ability.

A Mad Couple well Matched is very clever, very
coarse, and rather worse than dubious in the bias of
its morality ; but there is no fault to be found with
the writing or the movement of the play ; both
style and action are vivid and effective throughout.
That " a new language and quite a new turn of
comic interest came in with the Restoration " will
hardly be allowed by the readers of such plays as
this. That well-known and plausible observation
is typical of a stage in his studies when Lamb was
apparently if not evidently unversed in such reading
as may be said to cast over the gap between Etherege
and Fletcher a bridge on which Shirley may shake
hands with Shadwell, and Wycherley with Brome.
A more brutal blackguard, a more shameless ruffian,
than the leading young gentleman of this comedy
will hardly be found on the stage of the next thea-
trical generation. Variety of satirical observation
and fertility of comic invention, with such vigorous
dialogue and such strong sound English as might be
expected from a disciple of his master's, give to this
as to others of Brome's comedies a quality which may
fairly and without flattery be called Jonsonian ;
and one of the minor characters is less a reminiscence
of Juliet's nurse than an anticipation of Miss Hoy-
den's. No higher praise could be given, as no
higher could be deserved.

The prologue to The Novella is really worthy of
Dryden : its Jonsonian self-confidence and defiance
are tempered by a certain grace and dexterity of
expression which recalls the style and the manner

266 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

of the later rather than the earher laureate. In
this brilliant and audacious comedy the influence of
Ben Jonson's genius and example is exceptionally
perceptible and exceptionally happy ; for here it is
the author of Volpone, not the author of Bartholo-
mew Fair, who has inspired and guided the emulous
ability of his servant. The metre and style are
models of comic language and versification ; the
action, if a little complicated and more than a little
improbable, is as lively as in any of Fletcher's rather
than of Jonson's comedies. The plot is as usual a
little too exacting in its demands on the attention of
reader or spectator ; there is not quite sufficient
distinctness of outline in the various figures of
seniors and juniors, pantaloons and harlequins,
Gerontes and Leandres, to make it at first sight as
amusingly easy as it should be to follow their various
fortunes through so many rather diverting than edi-
fying evolutions and complications ; but, daring
even to the verge of impudence as is the central
conception of the subject, the tone or atmosphere
of this Venetian comedy is less greasy than that of
the author's London studies in vicious or dubious
lines of life ; a fresh point in common, I need hardly
observe, between the disciple and his master.

In The Court Beggar and The City Wit, twin
comedies of coarse-grained humour and complicated
intrigue, we breathe again the grimier air of Cockney
trickery and Cockney debauchery ; but the satire
on " projectors " or speculators in monopoly is
even now as amusing as it is creditable to the author
to have seconded in his humbler fashion the noble
satirical enterprise of Massinger and Ben Jonson

RICHARD BROME 267

against the most pernicious abuses of their lime.
The three wits of the court, the country, and the
city are good strong sketches in caricature ; and
there are passages of such admirable eloquence in
such excellent verse of the higher or graver comic
style as would not have misbeseemed the hand of
Jonson himself. The opening scene, for instance,
in which the heroine remonstrates with her father
for exchanging the happy and honoured life of a
hospitable and charitable country gentleman for the
mean and improvident existence of an intriguing
parasite, is as fine an example of earnest or serious
comedy as may be found in Shirley at his best : and
the scene in the second act between the grave and
eloquent dotard Sir Raphael and the unmercifully
ingenious Lady Strangelove is even a better because
a more humorous piece of high comic work ; so good,
indeed, that in its kind it could hardly be bettered.
But The City Wit is the finer and shapelier comedy of
the two ; well conceived, well constructed, and well
sustained. The conception, if somewhat farcically
extravagant in outline, is most happily and in-
geniously worked out ; and the process or progress
of the comic action is less broken, less intermittent,
more workmanlike and easier to follow, than in most
if not in all of the author's preceding plays. Even
where the comic types are far enough from original,
there is something original and happy in the treat-
ment and combination of their active or passive
humours.

The Damoiselle, a spirited and well- written comedy,
is so inferior in tone and composition as to suggest a
reversion on the author's part to the cruder and

268 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

coarser effects or attempts of his dramatic nonage.
Justice Bumpsey is one of Brome's very best and
most original creations — so fresh, and so genuine a
sample of comic or farcical invention that Jonson
might have applauded it with less extravagance or
perversion of generosity than his cordial kindliness of
nature led him sometimes to indulge in. There are
passages and scenes of genuine eloquence and of
pathetic sincerity in this rough and wayward piece
of dramatic composition or incomposition ; but
the presentation of the plot or plots is as clumsy and
confusing as their evolution is awkward and con-
fused ; and the noisome villainy of a character at
first presented as a possible object of sympathy, and
finally as a repentant and redeemed transgressor,
might have made Wycherley himself — or any one
but Wycherley — recoil. But there is no sign of
decadence in literary ability or inventive humour ;
indeed, if I mistake not, two or three better comedies
than this might have been carved out of the material
here compressed and contorted into the mould of
one. In the first scene of the second act a dramatic
and effective touch of satire will remind the reader of
Mr. Pickwick's horror and Mr. Perker's protest against
his horror at the existence — in his day as in Brome's
— of witnesses whose oaths were as readily on hire
as the principles of a disunionist politician — or, if
the phrase be preferred, of a separatist statesman.
The Queen's Exchange is one of the last examples
of its kind ; a survival from the old school of plays
founded on episodes of imaginary history and built
up with incidents of adventurous romance ; active
in invention and agile in movement, unambitious

RICHARD BROME 269

in style, and not unamusing in result. The clowneries
and the villainies, the confusions and the conver-
sions of character and fortune, seem curiously
archaic or old-fashioned for the date of this belated
tragicomedy ; but to lovers of the better sort of
drama it will be none the less acceptable or tolerable
on that account.

One of the most fanciful and dehghtful farces in
the world is The Antipodes. In this chcirming and
fantastic play a touch of poetic humour, a savour
of poetic style, transfigures and exalts wild farce to
the level of high comedy. The prologue to this,
one of his latest comedies, is as remarkable for its
exceptional quality of style as is the admirable
dedication of his earliest, The Northern Lass. After
a satirical apology for his inability to compete with
the fashionable writers of plays

that carry state
In scene magnificent and language high
And clothes worth all the rest, except the action,

he reminds his audience that

Low and home-bred subjects have their use
As well as those fetched from on high or far ;
And 'tis as hard a labour for the Muse
To move the earth, as to dislodge a star.

Had these two last Hues been Dry den's, they would
have been famous. And had the play thus intro-
duced been Jonson's, it must have taken high rank
in the second if not in the first class of his works as
a successful comedy of humours. Joylesse and his
wife, with the " fantastic " Lord Letoy, are faithful
but not servile studies after the manner of the master.

270 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

who had been dead but a year when it came out, and
as we learn from the author's postscript was generally
applauded. The small part of the curate or chap-
lain Quailpipe might have been of service to Macau-
lay in a famous chapter of his history as an example
of the humble if not contemptible position occupied
in great households by men of his cloth or calling.
If Shirley may be described as a bridge between
Fletcher and Etherege, Brome may be defined as a
link between Jonson and Wycherley But if some
of his stage effects are crude enough in their audacity
of presentation and suggestion to anticipate the tone
and manner of the theatre under Charles II, the
upshot of such a play as this pays at least a con-
ventional deference to the proprieties and moralities.
Virtue — of a kind — presides over the solution of a
tangled and crowded intrigue, which might perhaps
have gained rather than lost in clearness or vivacity
if impression and effect by a little more reserve in
the exercise or reticence in the display of ingenuity
and invention. Perplexity and surprise ought hardly
to be the mainsprings of comic art as displayed
either in the evolution of intrigue or in the develop-
ment of character. But no such fault, and indeed no
fault of any kind, can be found with the play within
this play. Even on a third or fourth reading it is
impossible for even a solitary reader to reopen it
at almost any part without an irresistible impulse
to laugh — not to smile approval or appreciation,
but to laugh out aloud and uncontrollably. The
logic of the burlesque, its topsy-turvy coherence, its
preposterous harmony, its incongruous congruity of
contradictions, is as perfect as its exuberance of

RICHARD BROME 271

spontaneous and variQus fertility in fancy and in
fun is inexhaustible and superb. The delicious
inversion of all social x)r natural relations between
husband and wife, mistress and servant, father and
son, poet and puritan, lawyer and client, courtiers
and clowns, might satisfy the most exacting
socialist ; and the projects for the relief, encourage-
ment, and support of criminals and scoundrels in
general at the expense of the State could hardly
be held unworthy of consideration by the latest
and loudest apostles of professional philanthropy.
Something of Jonson's influence is still perceptible
in the conception and construction of this play ; but
in joyous ease and spontaneity of comic imagination
and expression the disciple has excelled his master.
The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage, is an
ingenious and audacious comedy of ill-contrived and
ill-combined intrigue, at once amusing and confus-
ing, which might have been better than it is if both
characters and incidents had been fewer, but more
neatly and lucidly developed and arranged ; rich in
good suggestions and good possibilities, but imper-
fect in evolution and insufficient in impression
through overmuch crowding and cramping of the
various figures and the complicated action. The
Love-sick Coiirt is such an example of unromantic
romance and unimaginative invention as too often
wearies and disappoints the student of English
drama in its first period of decadence ; yet even in
the decadence of the greatest and most various
school of tragic and of comic poetry that ever this
country or this world has witnessed there are signs
of Hfe and survivals of style which give to all but its

272 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

very meanest examples a touch of comparative
interest and a tone of comparative distinction.

In The Covent Garden Weeded the studious though
not servile imitation of Ben Jonson is obvious
enough to explain though not to justify the sneer of
Randolph at the taste of the audiences who were
more contented with what Brome swept from his
master than with the worst leavings and the flattest
dregs of that master's exhausted genius and decrepit
industry. This clever and ingenious comedy is
evidently built more or less on the lines of Jonson's
most realistic and gigantic farce : and the obliga-
tion is no less directly than honourably acknowledged
by Brome at the very opening of the very first scene,
where Justice Cockbrain, " the Weeder of the Garden,"
cites with all due accuracy, as well as all due respect,
the authority of his reverend ancestor Justice Adam
Overdo. It cannot, of course, bear comparison with
that huge and unlovely though wonderful and memor-
able masterpiece ; but it is easier in movement and
lighter in handling of humours and events.

The New Academy, or The New Exchange, is a
tangled and huddled comedy of unattractive and
improbable intrigue, nor unrelieved by glimpses of
interest and touches of humour ; worth reading
once as a study of manners and language,* but
hardly worth tracing out and unravelling through
all the incoherent complications and tedious convo-
lutions of its misshapen and misconstructed plot.
The romantic tragicomedy of The Queen and Con-
cubine is a rather pallid study in the school of

* I have not met elsewhere with the quaint verb " to snook "
(" over my wife at home," says " an uxorious citizen ").

RICHARD BROME 273

Fletcher, with touches of Jonsonian farce and more
than Jonsonian iteration of cheap humours and
catchpenny catchwords : but it is not unamusing in
its vehement exaggeration of wickedness and good-
ness, of improbable impulse and impossible reaction ;
and there is still a certain lingering fragrance — the
French word relent would perhaps express it better
— of faint and fading poetry in the tone of style and
turn of phrase, which no later playwright could
regain or reproduce.

The best of all Brome's plays is curiously enough
the only one that has attained any posthumous
popularity or any durable celebrity. It has nothing
of such brilliant, spontaneous, and creative humour
as flashes and vibrates through every scene of The
Antipodes ; nothing of such eccentric, romantic,
and audacious originality as modesty must blush
to recognize and weep to acknowledge in The
Novella ; but for sustained interest and coherent
composition of quaint, extravagant, and consistent
characters with fresh, humorous, and plausible
results, for harmony of dramatic evolution and
vivacity of theatrical event, I doubt whether it
could be matched, and I am certain that it could not
be excelled, outside the range of Shakespeare's
comedies and farces. The infusion of romantic
interest and serious poetry in Beggar's Bush may
give to Fletcher's admirable tragicomedy a higher
literary place on the roll of the English drama ; but
the superiority of the minor poet as a dramatic
artist, and not merely as a theatrical craftsman, is
patent and palpable beyond discussion or dispute.*

* The text of Brom»'s plays, which, though reprinted with

S

274 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

In the dramatic literature of any country but ours
the name of Richard Brome would be eminent and
famous : being but an Englishman, he is naturally
regarded by critics and historians after the order of
Hallam as too ineffably inferior for mention or
comparison with such celebrities as Regnard or
Goldoni. That such a character as Justice Clack is
worthy of Moliere in his broader and happier moods
of humour could hardly seem questionable even to
the dullest of such dullards if his creator had but
" taken the trouble to be born " in France, in Italy,
or in any country but their own. As it is, I cannot
suppose it possible that English readers will ever
give him a place beside the least of those inferior
humorists who had the good fortune or the good
sense to be born outside the borders of England.

all their imperfections on their heads, have never yet been
edited, might supply the English dictionary with several rare
and noticeable words. In The City Wit a short dramatic enter-
tainment or interlude is announced as a " ballet." In A Jovial
Crew we find the word " gentile " (once used, and afterwards
cancelled, by Ben Jonson) : " Provided your deportment be
gentile " (a verse but too suggestive of Mr. Turveydrop and the
Prince Regent) ; " gentily " or " gentilely " : " They live very
civilly and gentily among us " — Act i. Scene i ; " remore "
as a verb : " Should that remore us " — same scene ; " rake-
shame," a curious variant or synonym of " rakehell " : "It
had been good to have apprehended the Rakeshame " — Act iii,
Scene i. " Skise," apparently a variant of the Shakespearean
word " skirr " : " Skise out this away, and skise out that away "
— Act iv, Scene i ; " yawdes " for jades : " Your yawdes may
take cold, and never be good after it " — same scene. In the
first scene of the second act there is a curious mention of Bath,
and of Captain Dover's games on the glorious Cotswold Hills :
" We are not for London." " What think you of the Bath
then ? " " Worse than t'other way. I love not to carry my
Health where others drop their Diseases. There's no sport i'
that." " Will you up to the hill-top of sports, then, and Merri-
ments, Dover's Olimpicks or the Cotswold Games ? " " No, that
will be too publique for our Recreation."

JAMES SHIRLEY

JAMES SHIRLEY

If ever the time-honoured French fashion of repub-
Hshing the select works of an author in place of a
complete edition might reasonably find favour in
the eyes of an English student, it certainly might in
the case of Shirley. A considerable section or
division of the six goodly volumes which contain the
first collection ever made of his multitudinous works
is taken up by such vapid and colourless sketches,
such mere shadows or phantoms of invertebrate
and bloodless fancy, as leave no trace behind on the
memory but a sense of tedious vanity and unprofit-
able promptitude of apparently copious but actually
sterile invention. Very possibly he never wrote any-
thing quite so bad, so insolently faulty, and so
impudently preposterous, as the very worst im-
provisations of his master Fletcher ; but even such
otherwise unqualified rubbish as The Sea Voyage or
The Nice Valour has the one qualifying merit, the
one extenuating circumstance, of being readable —
not without irritation, indignation, and astonish-
ment, but at all events without stupefying fatigue
and insuperable somnolence.

Too many of Shirley's plays may be read or
skimmed without exciting any more active or
stimulating emotions than these. Royal Masters,

277

278 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Duke's Mistresses, Constant Maids, Young Admirals,
Balls, Coronations, and Humorous Courtiers pass
before the reader's half-closed eyes in a long
thin stream of indistinguishable figures and im-
memorable events. They never, as far as he can
observe or can remember, sink below a certain
modest level of passable craftsmanship and humble
merit ; but they never rise into palpable distinction
or cohere into substantial form. The worst that
can be said of them is not that they are wanting in
merits or abounding in faults, but that they do not
exist ; they have absolutely no principle of life, no
reason for being, no germ of vitality whatever. It
would be something if even they were bad ; it would
be something if even they were dull ; but they are
not bad, they are nothing ; they are not dull, they
are null. You read them, and feel next day as if you
had read nothing. The leading articles of last week's
journals have left as much mark on your memory,
as much impression on your mind. Perhaps you
can hardly tell — they may be rather good of their
kind than bad ; but their kind has no right to
propagate, no reason to produce. Once or twice the
writer may remind you of Jonson — with all the sap
squeezed out of him, or of Fletcher — with all his
grace evaporated ; but as a rule they are simply
wearisome and conventional, anaemic and inverte-
brate. Even those who loathe the Puritans with a
loathing equal to that of Butler may admit, as one
at least of their number is ready to do, that if the
advent of those brainless and brutish devil-wor-
shippers had cut off nothing better worth keeping
than the average of Shirley's supply for the London

JAMES SHIRLEY 279

stage, literature and art and poetry would have had
no very heavy charge to bring against their deadliest
and most desperate enemies.

On the other hand, it would be unjust to under-
value the inerit of the work which seventy years
since found its first articulate admirer in Campbell,
and has lately found a no less cordial than capable
advocate in Mr. Gosse. Nor will any one deny the
claim of Shirley to the neutral credit of such negative
commendation as may be due to a writer alike
incapable of the faults and of the excellences which
distinguish or disfigure the work of greater men. In
Defoe's phrase, " he can't commit their crimes ;
it would task a stronger genius than his to do so.
But then the question with regard to a poet's claims
is not a question of abstinence, but of achievement ;
he must be judged by consideration of what he has
accomplished, not of what he has avoided. Virtue
which depends on incompetence to sin can hardly be
commended for withstanding temptation. " J'ad-
mire Scipion, soit," says Victor Hugo ; " j'admire
moins Origene."

Abstinence, however, is not Shirley's only virtue ;
if it were, he would now be sleeping with Tate and
Home, Cumberland and Jephson, Talfourd and
Sheridan Knowles. There are very remarkable
and admirable exceptions to the general mediocrity
of his level, conventional, unambitious, and languid
work. The terrible sarcasm which lashed him into
oblivion for a century and a half may possibly, if
not justifiably, have been provoked by the revival
of his first play, a year after the author's death : a
resurrection which may not unnaturally have been

280 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

regarded by Dryden — it must assuredly be regarded
by modern students — as an example of the survival
of the unfittest. That Love Tricks, or the School of
Complement (in modern English, of accomplishments) ,
should have been reissued on the stage forty-two
years after its first appearance is so unaccountable a
fact that it may be allowed to account for the
contempt with which the Laureate of the Restora-
tion referred to the memory of Shirley fifteen years
later.

This first attempt of its author is a feebly pre-
posterous and impotently imitative abortion, and
the product of second-hand humour and second-rate
sentiment : but though always absurd it is not
always dull ; there are one or two redeeming touches
which indicate or suggest a latent or dormant
capacity for better things. There is a pleasant
anticipation of modern progress on the social lines
of French democracy in the first scene, when an
amorous elder on the eve of marriage reflects and
resolves thus manfully : " I will get but one child,
and that shall be a boy, lest having too many
children I undo my heir, and my goods be divided."
That a royalist playwright of retrogressive and re-
actionary England should thus early have foreseen
and forecast the future of " the great nation," under
the practical and exemplary influence of the most
advanced and enlightened children of its unspeak-
ably sublime revolution, may perhaps be no less
edifying than amusing to readers not inoculated
with incurable Gallomania.

The absurd fancy of representing an old man under
the delusion that his youth had been restored to him

JAMES SHIRLEY 281

can only be excelled in preposterous and irritating
inanity of impotent invention by the ineffable
notion of introducing a young libertine, in the heyday
of impudent vigour and rampant recklessness, whom
a virtuous young woman, assisted by acquaintances
of such virtue as will ignore blows and kicks ad-
ministered by the subject of the experiment, succeeds
in persuading that he is dead. How such impudent
and insufferable nonsense can ever have crawled on
to the stage or crept into print it is difficult to under-
stand. The Witty. Fair One is woefully witless
stuff — inane, incoherent, incomposite, impossible,
and dull. A pretty piece of smooth and smirking
verse, which might have passed unobserved among
far nobler passages in almost any play of Dekker's or
Middleton's or Marston's, attracted the attention of a
critic who did not think overmuch of Shakespeare
to a somewhat vapid and flaccid play of Shirley's.
I doubt if the reader whom this quotation may induce
or impel to peruse The Brothers will bless the memory
of the critic who suggested such an enterprise.
" They did not think," says one of the actors in the
last scene, " to find this pale society of ghosts " ;
which shows that he had not had time to keep
company with his fellow phantoms, the other and
latter ghosts of their romantic or sentimental inven-
tion. A paler or more featureless " society " it
would be difficult to find.

But when Shirley was not astray on the track of
his adored Fletcher, limping and wheezing and hob-
bling behind that splendid if not always reliable
racer, he could run better than might have been
expected by a spectator of his performances in a field

282 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

reserved for steeds of finer blood and higher mettle.
I can by no means agree with Mr. Dyce that the
happiest efforts of his genius will perhaps be found in
the tragic portions of these variegated dramas, his
romantic or tragicomic studies in the school of
Fletcher rather than Beaumont. Such a tragedy as
The Traitor, such a comedy as The Example, may
defy comparison with the best of these hybrid and
imitative creatures of overworked invention and
fatigued or enfeebled fancy. Even The Maid's
Revenge, for which his very editors have hardly a
good word, is a failure which makes us feel that it
ought to have been a success ; crude, rude, coarse,
and rough as it is, there is more suggestion if not more
presentation of natural passion and dramatic life in
it than in a later play, so much better polished and
composed, so much more equable and elaborate,
as The Cardinal. But the fiendish atrocity of
Catalina is a flight beyond the gentle capacity of
Shirley : his pinion flags in the attempt, and his
voice cracks in the effort to express such murderous
and perfidious passions. A very fine tragedy might
have been made out of the story : but when we
think what Middleton and Rowley would have given
us, had they happily chanced to undertake it, we
cannot be thankful enough that the story of Beatrice
and De Fleres fell into the right hands, and was
treated by artists who could make at once the most
and the best of it, as they would have made, and
Shirley could not make, of the story of Antonio and
Berinthia.

In The Brothers, his next play, Shirley now and then
touches a note of feeling and expression more natural

JAMES SHIRLEY 288

and more graceful, more proper and peculiar to his
talent. The subject, in stronger hands, might have
been the groundwork of a very noble play ; in
Shirley's it is but faintly attempted and inadequately
carried out, with nothing like the vigour and vitality
of Mr. Norris's admirable story. Major and Minor.
One scene, however, is worthy of Fletcher : that
master of tender fancy and romantic emotion
might well have approved and enjoyed so charming a
study in his school of art as the interview between
the disinherited lover and the girl who would share
his fallen fortunes, but finds him unwiUing — too
loyal and unselfish, or too diffident and half-hearted
— to prove unkind, and marry her. That the
woman's part is finer than the man's is typical of the
author's somewhat feminine if not effeminate genius.
He looks on vice and virtue, prosperity and adver-
sity, action and passion, in the spirit of an amiable
woman whose instincts are innocent and domestic,
but whose literary ambition is apt to tempt her into
unseemly affectation of a man's unconscious tone,
and indecorous imitation of his natural manner.
He tries now and then to play Tom Jones, but his
heart is with Sir Charles Grandison. His passion,
at its highest and keenest, is never anything more
than intensified sentiment. Even in The Witty
Fair One, gross and monstrous in its coarseness and
absurdity as is the more original and rememberable
portion of the plot, there are touches of livehness and
ingenuity ; such as the amusing if rather easy and
trivial device of the letter returned by a mistake
which brings about one or two fairly effective scenes :
but even this better part is not vigorously or tho-

284 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

roughly conceived and carried out. The best thing
in the play, the ingenious device by which Violetta
discovers her regard and gains herself a lover, is
borrowed — and certainly not heightened or bettered
in the borrowing — from Marston's Dulcimel in The
Fawn. One excellent touch of humour and good
sense in this abortive comedy bears evidence to the
unchanged and unchangeable absurdity of affecta-
tion which will probably always distinguish a fool
whelped in England from a fool whelped in any other
country. " What say you to England ? " asks a
simple 5^oung fellow who has just been desired to
name what kingdom or province he has most mind
to travel in. " By no means," replies the tutor
who has undertaken to imbue him with the prin-
ciples of culture ; "it is not in fashion with gentle-
men to study their own nation ; you will discover a
dull easiness if you admire not, and with admiration
prefer not, the weeds of other regions before the
most pleasant flowers of your own garden." The
most " cultured " Oxonicule of the present day
could have said no better and no more.

The fifth of Shirley's plays is his first really good
one : and The Wedding is a tragicomedy which
would have done no discredit to an older and more
famous poet. Fletcher, who had been dead four
years when it first appeared in print, has left us much
worse as well as much better work than this. The
first and central incident of the action may or may
not have been borrowed from an earlier play that
Field had published, a comedy, twenty-seven years
before, in which the bridal of an innocent girl was
broken off by the intervention of a slanderer and the

JAMES SHIRLEY 285

defamation of her chastity. The effect is less
striking from a theatrical point of view in Shirley's
play than in Field's ; but the incident is at once more
credible and more explicable. The slanderer in
Field's play is a rather theatrical villain — an im-
probable compound of Pistol and lachimo : the
motive which impels the unconscious calumniator
in Shirley's is honest and friendly. And in com-
position and execution this play is so far ahead of
any previous work from the same hand that the first
audience or the first reader might well have been
inclined to question the authenticity of its ascription
to the author of Shirley's previous plays. The
farcical underplot is not very refined or very subtle,
but not less amusing than Massinger's or Fletcher's
rougher work on the same or a similar line : and the
construction would be almost blameless if the con-
duct of the disguised girl on whose perfidy the whole
plot hinges had been^ more rational and less thea-
trical. The eternal " she-page " who pesters and
infests the plays of the period is a more positive
nuisance in Shirley's than even in Massinger's. The
Viola-Cesario of Shakespeare's invention, the Bel-
lario-Euphrasia of Beaumont's or Fletcher's, must
regretfully be held responsible for numberless idiocies
of imitation. In the hands of Ford or Dekker this
common type of deformed devotion becomes too
tragic and pathetic to fall under the same reprobation
as the tricks and shifts of these more conventional
playwrights. Poor Winnifrede in The Witch of
Edmonton is a more touching and life-like figure
than the jaded invention of such imitative dealers in
sentiment or sensation could evoke.

286 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

It is amusing to find in the next work of so fervent
a royalist as Shirley so sharp a stroke of satire aimed
at his fellows of the court as might have been dealt
by a writer of the opposite party at the conspirators
against the constitution who were soon to succeed
in plunging their country into civil war and bring-
ing their leader to the scaffold. " I shall quickly
learn to forget myself," says " a foolish ambitious
steward " in the tragicomedy of The Grateful Servant,
" when I am great in office ; I will oppress the sub-
ject, flatter the prince, take bribes on both sides, do
right to neither, serve heaven as far as my profit will
give me leave, and tremble only at the summons of a
parliament." Charles I had been six months on the
throne when this comedy was licensed. Like the
great majority of Shirley's plays, it is " too bad for a
blessing, too good for a curse " : and the reader will
not improbably " wish from his soul it were better or
worse." There is no lack of pretty flowery writing
in it, which seems to have taken the fancy of Camp-
bell more than the more serious merit of its author's
better plays ; but there is not much else. Conven-
tional motives and fantastic impulses take the place
of noble passions and natural emotions ; the curious
mixture or alternation of shameless and unnatural
brutality in the villainous libertine of the play with
the most refined and rose-coloured devotion in its
sentimental heroine is not only significant but
typical of the decadence from the age of Shakespeare
and Webster which found its fittest and its fairest
representatives in Davenport and Shirley. That
the inevitable " she-page " was not yet unacceptable
to an overtolerant audience is no less evident than

JAMES SHIRLEY 287

inexplicable. The fantastic unreason of Spanish
chivalry and the fantastic perversity of English
sentimentalism have seldom been exemplified in a
more ludicrously serious manner than by a lover's
offer to cede his mistress to his sovereign out of
regard for her (" I love her still, and in that study
her advancement ! ") and by the author's evident
belief that this monstrous prostitution of sentimental
servility is (in his own words) a " miracle of honour,
and of love." It is enough to make one think that
the court whose fashionable sentiment found its
prophet or exponent in Shirley — the court of Hen-
rietta Maria — might have been the court of Blanche
Amory, the immortal j^oung lady who had always
on hand a whole stock of sham or second-hand
emotions.

Two years after the appearance of this pretty but
uninteresting sample of sentimental and ineffectual
invention, the one play which gives its author a
place among the tragic poets of Shakespeare's age
and country was licensed for the stage, and found its
way into print four years afterwards. The gravest
error or defect of Shirley's work as a dramatist is
usually perceptible in the management of his under-
plots ; his hand was neither strong enough to weld
nor skilful enough to weave them into unity or
harmony with the main action ; and the concurrent
or alternate interests, through lack of coherence and
fusion, become a source of mere worry and weariness
to the distracted attention and the jaded memory.
But the main plot of The Traitor, founded on the
assassination or immolation of Alessandro de' Medici
by his kinsman Lorenzino (whom Shirley — and for

288 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

that matter Musset and Dumas — probably did not
know to have been a brother dramatist), is very
neatly and happily interwoven with a story which at
first sight recalls that of the fatal marriage and
breach of promise through which the name of Buon-
delmonti had attained a significance so tragical for
Florence three hundred and twenty-two years
earlier. This underplot, however, is more probably
a device of the author's or an adaptation from some
serviceable " novel " or romance than a distorted
reflection of so remote an actual tragedy.

The unreal unselfishness of unnatural devotion and
the sentimental vehemence of moral paradox, which
mark the decline of English tragedy from the level
of Shakespeare's more immediate followers, are
flagrant in the folly of such a conception as this of a
lover who insists on resigning his mistress against
her will to a friend already betrothed or pledged in
honour to another woman. Chivalry has destroyed
itself — plucked out its own eyes, and cut its own
throat — when it descends to such heartless and sense-
less depths of sentimental superstition. But it must
be allowed that this perverse and preposterous im-
probability is skilfully and delicately adapted to
bring into fuller relief the most beautiful figure on
all the overcrowded stage of Shirley's invention.
His place among our poets would be very much
higher than it is if he could have left us but one or
two others as thoroughly realized and as attractively
presented as the noble and pathetic conception of
Amidea. There is something in the part which
reminds us of Beaumont's Aspatia ; but even
though the forsaken heroine of the elder poet has

JAMES SHIRLEY 289

yet more exquisite poetry to utter than any that
Shirley could produce, her character is less noble
and attractive, the manner of her death is less
natural and far less touching. The lover in either
case is equally contemptible ; but the heroic part
of Sciarrha is as superior in truthfulness as it was
inferior in popularity to the famous but histrionic
part of the boastful martialist Melantius. The King
in The Maid's Tragedy is certainly not better drawn
than his equally licentious but less tyrannous
counterpart in The Traitor ; and the very effective
scene in which Calianax denounces Melantius to the
King, only to be stormed down and put to silence
by the denial of his accomplice and the laughing
incredulity of the victim, is surpassed by the ad-
mirable device in which the chief conspirator's
superb and subtle audacity of resource confounds the
loyalty of Sciarrha and confirms the confidence of
Alessandro. A more ingenious, natural, and strik-
ing situation — admirable in itself, and more admir-
able in its introduction and its assistance to the
progress or evolution of the plot — it would be difficult
to find in any play. The swiftness and sharpness of
suspicious intuition, the promptitude and impudence
of intelligent hypocrisy, v/hich distinguish the
conduct of Shirley's ideal conspirator, are far above
the level of his usual studies or sketches of the same
or a similar kind. Nor is there, if I mistake not, so
much of really beautiful writing, of pure and vigorous
style, of powerful and pathetic simplicity, in any
earlier or later work of its author. Of Shakespeare
or of Marlowe or of Webster we can hardly hope to be
reminded while reading Shirley : but we are reminded

T

290 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

of Fletcher at his best by the cry of s5nTipathy with
which Amidea receives the assurance that the rival
who has unwittingly and reluctantly supplanted her
is also the victim of her lover's infidelity and in-
gratitude.

Alas, poor maid !
We two keep sorrow alive then.

This indeed, if I may venture to say so, seems to me a
touch not unworthy of Webster himself — the nearest
of all our poets to Shakespeare in command of
spontaneous and concentrated expression for tragic
and pathetic emotion.

It is somewhat singular that Shirley's next play,
a severely moral if audaciously realistic tragedy of
illicit passion, should have found favour on the stage
of the Restoration. Its tone is certainly so unlike
that of The Kind Keeper or The Country Wife that
its toleration by the patrons of Wycherley and of
Dryden is hard to explain — except perhaps by the
sisterly sympathy which may have been awakened
in the various foundresses of ducal houses for the
doings and sufferings of so impudent a strumpet as
its heroine. The advance in experience or intelli-
gence of such characters which distinguishes Love's
Cruelty from The Maid's Revenge must be unmis-
takable by the most innocent reader ; the perfidious
and poisonous Catalina is a violent and boyish
caricature, the lascivious and murderous Clariana
is a real and unmerciful portrait. The development
of her character from mere wayward and capricious
curiosity of coquettish irritation into lecherous and
irreclaimable ferocity of jealous egotism is at least

JAMES SHIRLEY 291

as well conceived and executed as any other study
from the same hand. Her soft-hearted but high-
minded husband, her penitent young lover and his
profligate old father, are more solid and vivid figures
than their easy-going creator could usually present :
and it is singular that Macaulay should so completely
have overlooked or forgotten the point of the
catastrophe as to cite this play as an instance in
which " the outraged honour of families is repaired
by a bloody revenge." No two catastrophes could
well be more widely dissimilar than this one and
that of The Fatal Dowry : the only point they have
in common is that in each case an adulteress dies
by a violent death. In the one case, a penitent
woman is executed by the unrelenting justice of an
inflexible husband : in the other, an impenitent
woman assassinates her paramour, and is slaughtered
by him in return ; a comfortable consummation
which surely carries with it no particular reference to
outraged honour.

The comedy which bears the pretty title of Changes,
or Love in a Maze, has some pretty passages and
scenes, but it is far too " high fantastical " for any
serious interest in the action or the agents to be
possible : and there is unpleasant evidence in one
place that no amount of noble or royal patronage
could make a gentleman at heart of the playwright
who was capable of representing as other than the
vilest of all villains and the meanest of all hounds a
wretch who by way of excuse for his own rascality
would support or encourage a suggestion against the
character and honour of a lady whom he has deserted
for a wealthier object of courtship. On the other

292 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

hand, the noble unselfishness of the hopeless lover
who is ready to serve her at the cost of his own
happiness is painted with so fine and warm a sym-
pathy as almost to renew our better opinion of the
poet. But except for the ingenuity of intrigue,
which from a theatrical point of view is really
creditable, and really amusing in the upshot, it is
too slight a thing to deserve any very serious praise,
as it is altogether too slight a thing to deserve any
serious blame. The Bird in a Cage is a play of much
the same weight : not ill done, if not particularly
worth doing ; with farcical passages which may be
found fairly diverting by idle or indulgent readers,
and a pretty touch of humanity in advance of an
age little inclined to such tenderness for animals as
moves the imprisoned princess to set free her captive
birds.

The bright light comedy of Hyde Park is the second
really good play of its kind on the long list of Shirley's
works. In vigour of style and force of interest it is
notably inferior to The Wedding : its tone is alto-
gether more modem, more remote from tragicomedy,
less serious and less ambitious ; but it belongs un-
mistakably to a period of transition. It is a quasi-
poetic or semi-poetic piece of work, and so far belongs
or aims at belonging to the same class as The Spanish
Curate or The Guardian — not to say as Twelfth
Night or Much Ado about Nothing. It aims also at a
transient sort of realism, a photographic represen-
tation of the fancies or the follies of the hour, its
passing affectations or extravagances of the drawing-
room or the race-course, which anticipates in some
degree the enterprise, if not the superb and perfect

JAMES SHIRLEY 293

mastery in that line, of such artists as Congreve and
Vanbrugh. The versatiHty and flexibihty of talent
required and displayed in such an attempt, admitting
it to be fairly and moderately successful, may
reasonably challenge our praise ; but Mistress
Carol, though bright and pleasant enough, is as far
beneath the level of Millamant as beneath the level
of Viola.

Between the sunset of Fletcher and the sunrise
of Etherege the moonlight of Shirley's more modest
and subdued genius serves well enough to display
him as a successor of the poetic or romantic
dramatist whose fancy walks hand in hand with
humour, and a precursor of the prosaic or realistic
playwright whose cynical humour has swallowed up
sentiment and fancy as a stork might swallow a
frog ; but this moonlit or starlit period of transition
is noticeable rather for its refraction of the past than
its anticipation of the coming day. The characters
in such comedies as this of Shirley's seem to be play-
ing at reality as shadows might play at being sub-
stantial, as ghosts might play at being alive, as
children do play at being " grown-up ; " and this at
least is a charge which can no more be brought
against the ruffians and strumpets of Wycherley's
or Shadwell's invention than against the noble men
or women of Shakespeare's or of Webster's. The
return of the shipwrecked husband to his supposed
widow is borrowed from Marston's What you Will ;
and though Shirley's comedy is far more neatly
and reasonably constructed, far more satisfactory
to an aesthetic or intelligent judge of composition,
it has nothing of such intellectual force or such

294 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

literary merit as must be recognized here and
there in the rougher and more vigorous work of
the elder and greater though ruder and faultier
poet. Marston, with all his shortcomings, is one
of Jonson's if not of Shakespeare's men-at-arms ;
Shirley, with all his merits, is but one of Fletcher's
body-guard.

There is some honest fun, though there is no great
matter, in the little satirical comedy of The Ball :
the sham traveller is a more original and amusing
j&gure than a copy of Ben Jonson's rather ponderous
Puntarvolo could have been ; and even after all his
precursors the braggart and beaten coward contrives
to have some amusing and original touches of base-
ness and comicality about him, which may make us
tolerate the reappearance of an almost worn-out
and wearisome type of farce. The ladies and their
lovers are so lamentably shadowy and shapeless that
a modem reader has no difficulty in understanding
the curious admission of the poet in a later and
better and less reticent play that he had been
" bribed to a modest admission of their antic gam-
bols." Had he rejected the bribe, supposing it to
have ever been offered, a less decorous and a less
vacuous comedy might have been better worth our
reading : but possibly, if not probably, the assertion
or imputation may be merely part of the character
to whom it is assigned. Shirley, however, must have
all due credit for this fresh stripe of satire applied to
the same idiotic affectation which he had lashed with
as wholesome and cordial a stroke of contempt just
four years earlier, in a passage already quoted.
" You must encourage strangers, while you live ;

JAMES SHIRLEY 295

it is the character of our nation, we are famous for
dejecting our own countr3mien."

Shirley's next play, The Young Admiral, is amusing
enough for a lazy and consequently a tolerant reader
to take up and put down with as much satisfaction as
he might hope to derive from a novel obviously and
exclusively intended for railway reading ; it is not at
all discreditable, and now and then promises — and
breaks its promise — to be seriously interesting as well
as tolerably entertaining ; the hero and heroine are
a very creditable couple of ultimately triumphant
victims, the kings and knaves, bullies and fools,
play their parts very decently and endurably. On
the whole, we may say of this and indeed most of
Shirley's plays that it admirably anticipates and
agreeably realizes Mrs. John Knightley's immortal
receipt for " nice smooth gruel — thin, but not too
thin."

The one thing memorable about this anaemic and
invertebrate play is the fact that it had the dis-
honour to be commended for its decency and pro-
priety by the mean puritan who then dishonoured
even the discreditable post of dramatic censor. A
censor of a far different kind has made of Shirley's
next play the central point of his impeachment, the
crowning witness in favour of his plea for puritans
against playwrights, for William Prynne against
William Shakespeare. A better point could not
have been made ; a better witness could not have
been cited. It would be worse than useless for a
lover of poetry and a hater of puritanism to under-
take the defence of the admirably constructed and
excellently written tragicomedy which Charles I set

296 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Shirley to write on a subject supplied by the royal
and kindly patron. The subject is excellent in its
way, and suggestive of even better and stronger
dramatic effects than Shirley has made out of it ;
but the utter vileness, the abject and atrocious
treachery of the two mean tricksters and traffickers
in women who play the leading parts in this comedy,
cannot reasonably be condoned on consideration of
the brilliant and striking situations which are brought
about by the villainy of these gilded and varnished
rascals. Fletcher was not a severe moralist ; he is
usually considered by modem critics to have some-
times broken the bounds of good taste and artistic
tact in his pictures of headlong youth and light-
hearted passion : but not one of his Rubilios,
Valentines, or Pinieros, can be imagined capable of
such baseness as would disgrace a professional
pander. The Gamester is a very clever, very power-
ful, and very amusing play : but Wycherley's Plain
Dealer, though doubtless more impudent in its inde-
cency, is certainly less immoral in its consummation.
Fletcher in his own way, like Congreve in his, has
always at least the graceless grace of high-bred
wantonness ; Shirley is nothing if not moral ; or
rather he is ruffianly and repulsive.

A Contention for Honour and Riches is a bright and
ingeni ;us little interlude in which the author shows
himself as faithful and as able an imitator of Jonson
as in the costly Triumph of Peace which soon after-
wards eclipsed all previous pageants of the kind for
gorgeous extravagance of elaborate profusion. In
the dramatic or literary part of this glorified puppet-
show there is some very pretty, humorous, and

JAMES SHIRLEY 297

ingenious writing ; the final interlude of burlesque
is so especially well conceived and invented that it
may provoke even a modern and private reader to a
quiet and approving smile. Four or five months
later the best of Shirley's comedies was licensed for
the stage. To have written such a tragedy as The
Traitor, such a comedy as The Example, should be
sufficient to secure for their author a doubly dis-
tinguished place among the poets of his country. A
judgment unblinded by perversity, prepossession, or
malevolence must allow that the noble tone of this
poem is at least as typical of its author's tone of
mind as the baser tone of a preceding play : a candid
and clear-headed critic would have admitted that
the moral credit due to the author of The Example
was enough to counterbalance, if not to efface and
obliterate, the moral discredit due to the author
of The Gamester.

The noble, high-spirited, simple-hearted and single-
minded heroine would suffice to sweeten and redeem
an otherwise condemnable or questionable piece of
work ; her husband is a figure not unworthy to be set
beside her ; and the passionate young tempter whose
chivalrous nature is so gracefully displayed in the
headstrong, punctilious, perverse, and generous course
of conduct which follows on the fact of his conversion
would be as thoroughly successful and complete a
study as either, if it were not for the luckless touch of
incongruous melodrama which throws the lady of
his love into a swoon at the sight of his preposterous
poniard and the sound of his theatrical threats. But
all that can be done to redeem this conventional
and sensational error is admirably well done in the

298 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

sequel of this noble and high-toned play ; a model
of simple construction and harmonious evolution,
in which the broad comedy of the underplot is rather
a relief than an encumbrance to the progress of the
more serious action.

The Opportunity is a lighter and slighter piece of
work, but as lively, ingenious, and amusing in its
complications and solutions, its intrigue and its
results, as any comedy of accidents and errors not
glorified by the sign-manual of Plautus, Shakespeare,
or Moliere. The night-scene under the balcony is as
dexterously contrived as the night-scene in George
Dandin, and more plausible as well as more decorous
in its arrangement and its upshot. The Coronation
is a too characteristic example of that uninteresting
ingenuity in construction and that unprofitable
fertility of invention which must be allowed to dis-
tinguish the duller and emptier plays of Shirley. It
opens with some promise of interest, but the promise
is almost immediately falsified : the passage in the
first scene which, in Gifford's opinion, " cannot be
exceeded for truth and humour," is the only passage
in the play which deserves the attributes of " liveli-
ness " and " pretty perversity " : the laboured com-
plications and revolutions of character and event are
perverse enough in their mechanical intricacy, but
their liveliness and prettiness are less easy to dis-
cover. The publisher's attribution of this play to
Fletcher is only exceeded in idiotic monstrosity of
speculative impudence by the publisher's attribution
of The London Prodigal to Shakespeare. And the
title-page which brackets Shirley's name with
Chapman's as joint author of the pathetic and

JAMES SHIRLEY 299

stately tragedy of Chabot makes almost as exorbitant
a demand upon our credulity.

But the comedy which was licensed six months
afterwards is the most brilliant though by no means
the most blameless of Shirley's plays. His gift of
graceful and humorous writing was never more happily
exercised and displayed than in the glittering and
shifting scenes of The Lady of Pleasure. In style and
in versification it is equally superior to most of his
other comedies : the rivalry of the two heroines in
fashionable extravagance and display could hardly
have been more lifelike and amusing if painted or
photographed by Etherege or Congreve. But it is
impossible to reconcile the morality of Love for Love
with the morality of A Woman killed with Kindness :
the endeavour to do so must needs result in a more
revolting and unnatural violation or adulteration of
morality than even the brutal and impudent genius
of a Wycherley could have attempted or conceived.
Charles Lamb was as absolutely and unanswerably
right as usual in his contention on behalf of the great
comic dramatists who flourished after the Restora-
tion that the characters of their plays are outside the
pale of moral criticism : and Macaulay, in his ener-
getic attempt at a refutation of this plea, gave
evidence of a more than Caledonian incapacity to
appreciate the finer shades of critical reasoning
and the subtler touches of humorous logic. Now
Shirley, in this splendid and sparkling comedy of
high life, has fallen into the very pit which Congreve
so skilfully and Vanbrugh so nearly avoided.

A little more, or a little less, and we might say of
his characters what Lamb says of Congreve 's, that

300 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

they do not offend our moral sense ; " in fact they do
not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their
proper element. They break through no laws, or
conscientious restraints. They know of none. They
have got out of Christendom into the land — what
shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry, the Utopia of gallantry,
where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect
freedom." In that land the escapades of such
characters as Aretina, Kickshaw, and Decoy would
be simply amusing and becoming : but in this half-
way house on the border which divides the genera-
tion of Massinger from the generation of Etherege
they are partly diverting and partly shocking. The
infusion of a little morality makes the whole affair
immoral : the intrusion of a somewhat equivocal
and utterly incongruous penitence reduces a comic
intrigue to the level of a serious crime. " II est
vrai," says the great Dumas, in an admirable
chapter of his delightful memoirs, " que du temps de
Moliere cela s'appclait le cocuage, et qu'on en riait ;
que de nos jours cela s'appelle I'adultere, et qu'on
en pleure." It is so obviously impossible to recon-
cile or to harmonize these two points of view that
the very attempt must needs be no less offensive to
the intelligence of good taste than repulsive to the
instinct of good feeling. With this very serious
reserve, it would be difficult to overpraise a play in
which the genius and the art of Shirley are seen
together at their brightest and their best.

The Royal Master is a fair example of Shirley's
ingenious and fertile talent ; there is a somewhat
faded and conventional grace in the stjde of it which
seems not unsuitable to a rather slight and artificial

JAMES SHIRLEY 301

but neither ill-conceived nor ill-conducted plot.
The Duke's Mistress has a little more Ufe and spirit
with interest enough of story to make it a better
specimen of the same class. The Doubtful Heir is
perhaps the best ; with the usual faults or conven-
tions of romantic tragicomedy and the particular
weaknesses of the author's style and manner it
combines some peculiar merits of genuine grace and
tenderness. There are touches in it of something
more like spontaneous pathos and serious interest
than we find in most of Shirley's plays. As much
may be said, though it may seem strange to say it,
for his remarkable attempt at a miracle-play, revived
under new conditions and adapted to maturer
tastes. In the very first scene of St. Patrick for
Ireland there is a note of truer and purer poetry than
usual : the style is a little fresher, the movement
more lively, and the action more amusing ; and in
the parts of Conallus and Emeria there are situations
of real interest and touches of real pathos.

The Constant Maid is a comedy of some spirit and
originality ; but a mother's attempt to win or to
test the affections of her daughter's lover is a revolt-
ing if not a ridiculous mainspring for the action
of a play. A farcical character which may remind
the reader of Bob Acres will only increase his appre-
ciation of Sheridan's superior art and intelligence ;
though there is some crude and rough-hewn humour
in Shirley's caricature of a loutish lover. But the
two plots are so badly mixed that any reader or
spectator would have supposed it the first attempt
of an awkward and ambitious novice in comedy.
The farce of The Humorous Courtier is not unhappily

302 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

nor unamusingly conceived, but the execution is too
extravagant and the infusion of serious villainy too
incongruous to pass muster with the idlest or most
tolerant of readers. The so-called pastoral in which
Sidney's voluminous romance is condensed into
dramatic form is so perfunctory in style and so
halting in metre as to be worthier of a Davenant or a
Killegrew than of even a second-rate or third-rate
dramatic poet ; but the reader who spends an hour
or so on perusal of The Arcadia must admit that the
playwright's work was neatly done — and not worth
doing. How and why such a play could have been
either required of any writer or performed by any
actors is a problem insoluble by the modern reader ;
who will find the complicated action as flat as the in-
vertebrate versification, and will not find any shadow
of serious interest or any plausible pretence to evoke
it from the limbo of an obsolete popularity. Any
tribute to the memory of the noble poet and hero
whose literary monument is the noble poem of
Astrophel and Stella does credit to the man who offers
it ; but a more singular sort of tribute than this was
never paid by the most injudicious and ineffectual
perversity or debility of devotion.

In The Gejttleman of Venice the bright and lively
talent of Shirley rises again after the eclipse through
which it would seem to have passed. The two plots
are more neatly interwoven into a more amusing and
coherent story than usual : though the one may be
somewhat too threadbare in its antiquity, the other
somewhat too unseemly in its extravagance. But
the writing throughout is graceful, easy, and pleasant
to read : and the characters, if rather theatrical

JAMES SHIRLEY 303

and rather thin, are at all events alive enough to
amuse and amusing enough to satisfy a not exacting
or intolerant reader. The Politician, if not one of
Shirley's best plays, is one of his liveliest and most
effective ; the pathos of the scene immortalized by
insertion in Lamb's immortal volume of "Specimens"
is so simple and so pure as to remind us rather of
Heywood than of Shirley ; and if the attempt at a
similar effect in the part of an injured and misused
wife is not equally happy or impressive, it is not for
lack of graceful and facile writing. The worst of
Shirley's tragedies is certain to be better, and very
much better, than the worst of Shirley's comedies.
Among these latter The Imposture is one of the many
that will be found tolerable by the tolerant reader,
though possibly by him alone ; its complications of
incident and intrigue, if (as usual) rather ingenious
than interesting, relieved as they are by scenes of
farcical horse-play, may serve to keep his idle atten-
tion idly awake.

If the treatment of character and passion had been
equal to the development of interest and the manage-
ment of the story, the vigorous and well-built
tragedy of The Cardinal might have been what its
author avowedly thought it, the flower of his flock ;
it is indeed a model of composition, simple and lucid
and thoroughly well sustained in its progress towards
a catastrophe remarkable for tragic originality and
power of invention ; with no confusion or encum-
brance of episodes, no change or fluctuation of
interest, no breach or defect of symmetry. But the
story is more interesting than the actors ; and the
points of resemblance between this play and The

304 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Duchess of Malfy are consequently as noticeable as
the points of ^resemblance between Macedon and
Monmouth. There is a wicked cardinal in each, and
the principal victim of his crimes is an innocent
duchess.

The very spirited and amusing comedy of The
Sisters is only not one of Shirley's very best ; The
Country Captain, discovered and reissued by Mr.
Bullen, is indisputably one of them. The tradi-
tional attribution of this brilliant play to the Duke
of Newcastle will hardly persuade any competent
reader that it is not mainly if not altogether the work
of Shirley ; though the burlesque picture of the
trained bands may possibl};' be assigned to the pro-
fessional hand of the martial and equestrian duke.
The parody of Donne's most elaborately eccentric
style in the verses ascribed to a fashionable poetaster
seems curiously out of date in a generation of writers
equally incapable of emulating the peculiar merits
and of copying the peculiar mannerisms of the great
poet who is to the Cowleys and Clevelands of Shirley's
day as a giant to pigmies who cannot even mimic
his gait ; for the strong uneven stride of his verse is
no more like the mincing amble of Cowley's than
Wordsworth is like Moore. The attack on mono-
polists does credit to the independence and courage
of the assailant ; but it is unfortunate that a figure
of mere farce should so much as recall what it does
not pretend to compete with, the most famous
character on the stage of Massinger. The humour
is throughout as much stronger as it is coarser than
usual with Shirley : the more high-flown parts are
more than fair examples of his fluent and flowery

JAMES SHIRLEY 305

style of rhetoric — not glaringly artificial, but sug-
gestive rather of perfumery than of natural perfume.
Some parts of the action, like some parts of the dia-
logue, are exceptionally daring in the licence if not
the licentiousness of their freedom ; but the upshot
is more satisfactory to the moral and intellectual
taste or judgment of a critical reader than is that
of The Lady of Pleasure — the only other play of
Shirley's which can be compared with it for sheer
brilliance and vivacity of movement and of style.

The Court Secret, of apparently later date, is a thin
dry cobweb of a play, with a few tender and graceful
touches here and there which hardly serve to lighten
or relieve the empty complications and confusions
of its tedious and conventional story. But there are
signs even here that the writer's invention, though
now a spur-galled and broken- winded jade, was once
a racer of some mettle. It is agreeable to reflect that
the condensed satire of the following brief descrip-
tion is inapplicable to any politician of our own day.

Why, there's
A statesman that can side with every faction ;
And yet most subtly can untwist himself
When he hath wrought the business up to danger !
He lives within a labyrinth.

There are some " pretty little tiny kickshaws "
among Shirley's poems. His Good Night is a curious
anticipation of Shelley's, though less graceful and
serious in expression ; but it would be flattery to
honour his elegies with the qualification of medio-
crity ; and his Narcissus must surely be the very
feeblest and faintest copy among all the innumerable

u

306 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

imitations of Shakespeare's too popular first poem.
The Triumph of Beauty is poor meagre stuff ; the
interlude of Cupid and Death is livelier and not un-
graceful, though much beneath what it might have
been. The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses is a very
fair piece of work, more solid in versification than
usual, though wanting alike in the stately grace of
Ovid and the sprightly facility of Heywood ; but
memorable only as containing the one universally
popular and famous poem of so fertile a writer as
Shirley. This celebrated dirge or monody is no
doubt a noble poem, but it has also been a very
lucky one. There is many a yet finer lyric of the
same age and kind which has had but two or three
readers where Shirley's lament has had a thousand.
His last work, the allegorical comedy of Honoria
and Mammon, is not merely a recast or expansion
of a twenty-six years older work, but a great im-
provement on that clever and bright little interlude.
Shirley's wit, style, and humour are all at their best
in the curious and ingenious drama with which he
took a final farewell of the stage. It is amusing to
find in his last as in his first play a touch of satire
which would have been even more timely and appro-
priate in a satirist of our own generation. " I'll
— build a bridge," says one of Lady Mammon's
suitors, " from Dover cHff to Calais." " A draw-
bridge ? " asks a countryman ; and another ob-
serves, with due reticence,

This may be done ; but I am of opinion
We shall not live to see it.

Amen to that : but the loyal and sensible old poet is

JAMES SHIRLEY 307

surely deserving of serious praise and credit for his
contemptuously imaginative anticipation of the most
monstrous project ever hatched — except perhaps its
fellow-folly, a submarine instead of an aerial con-
spiracy against the beneficence of nature.

The works of Shirley fall naturally into three
categories or classes ; those in the first class are very
good, those in the second class are very fair, those
in the third class are very poor. The Traitor, The
Example, The Lady of Pleasure, and The Country
Captain belong beyond all question to the first
class : The Wedding, Hyde Park, The Gamester,
and The Cardinal stand high in the second. If
these, with perhaps two or three more, were all we
had of Shirley, it would be simply impossible to see
the point or understand the meaning of Dryden's
bitter sneer at his " tautology." But to the patient
reader of all his plays the truth of the imputation will
be as evident as the cruelty of the insult. The
general charge of repetition, monotony, wearisome
reiteration of similar types and similar effects, can
hardly be disputed or denied. Of Heywood, whom
Dryden in his headlong ignorance and his headstrong
arrogance chose or chanced to bracket with Shirley
as a subject for indiscriminate satire, this cannot
either truthfully or plausibly be affirmed. He has
always something to say, even though it be said in
the homeliest of bald and prosy styles : Shirley at his
worst has"really nothing to say whatever. But the de-
merits of his duller and unhappier hours would hardly
be remembered by the admirers of his better work if
he had never been overpraised by such critics as
depreciate or ignore his betters.

308 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE

The " poet-critic " who ignores the existence of
Tourneur and dismisses Webster with a sneer
expatiates with exuberance of unction on the at-
tractions and fascinations of Shirley : and this
enthusiasm on the part of Campbell inclines us
to remember — if ever it were possible we should
forget — that a breath of Cyril Tourneur's fiery
passion would suffice to blast the fairest fruits of
Shirley's garden into dust and ashes, and a glance
from the eye of John Webster to strike its chirping
and twittering birds into breathless and cowering
silence. When we turn to such poets as these we can
hardly see or hear or remember Shirley as a singer
or a creator at all ; but it is as unjust and ungracious
to insist on the inferiority in kind which is estab-
lished by such a comparison, as it would be pre-
posterous and absurd to question it. The place of
James Shirley among English poets is naturally
unpretentious and modest : it is indisputably
authentic and secure.

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