The_English_Drama

First published 1928

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFOKD AND ESHER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER hAGE

I. FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS - 5

I. THE RELIGIOUS DRAMA - - -5

II. THE SECULARISATION OF THE STAGE - II

III. HARBINGERS OF SHAKESPEARE - l6

II. FROM SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY - 25

i. SHAKESPEARE'S PLACE - - - 25

II. BEN JONSON, HIS - - ' 2 9

III. THE CAVALIER DRAMA - - "35

IV. THE AFTERMATH CALLED RESTORATION - 52

III. THE RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA - 63

I. INTERREGNUM - - - - 63

II. REGENERATION - - - 67

III. SHAW AND COUNTER-SHAW - "73

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE - - - 80

THE ENGLISH DRAMA

CHAPTER I
FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS

I. THE RELIGIOUS DRAMA

ENGLISH drama began as a labour of love, the product
of simple piety. Probably the traditional mysteries
St. George and Dragon mummeries, sword and may-
pole dances and the like; games rather than plays, but
none the less factors in the formation of the national
taste for drama (and so eventually of the drama itself)
originated in pre-Christian, pre-Roman local religious
ceremonies. Certainly the earliest English plays proper,
quite independently of these folk traditions, were pro-
duced in the Church, by the Church, for the (higher)
purposes of the Church. History could hardly have
repeated itself more pointedly than in the parallel
between the evolution of Greek tragedy out of primi-
tive pagan ritual and the gradual emergence of our
mystery plays out of the liturgical tropes of the early
Christian Cnurch. It is no part of our present purpose
to pursue the implications of this striking connection
between religion and dramatic art, but it is important
to emphasise that drama arose in England (as in
Christendom generally for the practice began
wherever the Latin tongue was spoken in prayer) as a
spiritual, rather than a convivial, feature of communal
life. The intrusion of profane influences on its exclu-
sively spiritual properties was an inevitable matter of
time. The representation of sacred history (in medieval
Europe as in ancient Athens) provided material and
5

6 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

scope for spectacles calculated to attract a congregation,
as well on their own merits as from higher motives;*
and indeed the Church, catholic in more than a
technical sense, would not if it could have kept
laughter indefinitely outside its precincts. For all its
exacting discipline, there was a schoolboy spirit imma-
nent throughout its personnel, and if, on this analogy,
we regard the central ecclesiastical authorities
generally unsympathetic to the development of
dramatic activities as a kind of headmaster, severe
and indulgent by turns, we may consider the periodical
outbreaks of official " rags " such as the Feast of Fools
(some of the excesses of which would probably have
shocked the English-speaking habitues of the Folies-
Bergeres) as no more than natural lapses in the dignity
of the school prefect. Under such conditions, the
Mystery drama, from a mere amplification of divine
service, proceeded by stages to shed its essential
mystery, and, as the vernacular English at long last
came into its kingdom, characterisation and dialogue
(awkwardly, in rhymed verse) began to break through
the stiff Latin formulae, and prepare the way, indeed
divers ways, for humanist development. The scope of
the productions was gradually extended in respect of
(a) subject-matter, from the representation of purely
biblical or apocryphal scenes to " miracles " or episodes
in the lives of the saints, (ti) accommodation, from the
confines of the church to adjacent or neighbouring
premises, and (c) participants; the admittance of
" amateur " laymen supplementing what we may

* A contemporary account of a Resurrection play in
the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, Yorkshire, in
1220, refers (in Latin) to a large crowd assembled,
" some for the sake of mere pleasure or wonder, others
for the holy purpose of stimulating their devotional
feelings" (quoted in Gayley's Plays of Our Fore-
fathers).

FROM THE CHURCH f O THE STEWS 7

without offence describe as the professional eccle-
siastical talent available. Plays for which orthodox
festivals and saints' days provided the most convenient
pretext began to assume an ever-larger place in the
life of the people, expanding on occasion into cycles
lasting four or five days, under royal patronage.
Finally the institution of Corpus Christi Day (the
original of our Whitsuntide Bank Holiday) in 1264 led
to the inauguration of a definite annual dramatic
festival throughout England, as in other countries.

While the plays themselves, throughout the four-
teenth century during which the movement attained
its zenith remained confined to scriptural or sacred
subject-matter, the organisation of the productions in
the larger cities had come to be taken over by the
town-guilds, or local trades unions, each of which
would make itself responsible for an episode in a
composite cycle comprising, for example, in York, in
the year 1415, as many as fifty-four episodes. Of the
village and parochial productions we know little save
that they were prolific. Clerkenwell appears to have
been the original Mecca of London playgoers. Some
of the provincial records are fairly detailed, and we
have picturesque accounts of the festival performances
in Chester and York, doubtless typical of the larger
cities generally. Deriving from a form of processional,
each show was mounted on a wheeled car of two
storeys (technically known as a " pageant "), which, at
the end of a performance, moved, in the manner of
our progressive games, from one pre-appointed station
to the next, wealthy householders bidding against each
other (in contributions to the expenses) for the honour
of an allocation before their windows. Collected copies
of three fairly complete processional cycles forty-nine
York mysteries, twenty-five from Chester, thirty-two
from Wakefield and of one non-processional cycle of
forty-two Coventry plays, as well as various isolated
pieces from other towns and villages, have been pre-

8 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

served out of what must have been a prodigal output.
Their authorship is anonymous, and was doubtless in
many cases of a composite character. They are full
of archaic touches of realism, snatches of comedy
mingling not incongruously with their essentially
devotional character. Five of the Wakefield plays
stand in a class apart as the work of a definitely
creative mind of trie first English dramatist. The so-
called " second Shepherd's play " from this cycle
(dating from about 1350) exhibits particular originality
in its contrivance of a bogus nativity to precede the con-
frontation of three homely rustics with the wonder 'of
the authentic Virgin and babe. We are apt to think of
our drama as an exclusively metropolitan concern, and
of modern provincial repertory as a novel and slightly
daring departure from immemorial custom. The York-
shireman, in the centre of this new movement, by a
throw-back to his natural inheritance, may be excused
a smile at the Cockney cheek of our patronage.

A tract of the late fourteenth century already sounds
a note, too soon to become familiar, pregnant
with evil omen for our story. An obscure Wycliffian,
anticipating the later Puritans, protests against the
demoralising effect of these public exhibitions. Cer-
tainly at this period the religious-minded had little
cause to lament the growing popularity of the drama.
Untainted by commerce, with love interest yet to be
discovered, plays were intimately identified with the
cause of religion. The ultimate eclipse of the religious
drama may indeed be said to be partly attributable to
a growing propensity to " rub in " its message to
assume a didactic role prohibitive of the emotional
appeal which is the drama's safeguard. This tendency
was facilitated by the development, out of mystery-
miracle plays, of the Morality : in effect the dramatisa-
tion of a sermon by means of personified allegorical
abstractions Experience, Patience, Pride and the like
development again in common with other Chris-

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 9

tian countries, but peculiarly congenial to English
taste, as we may judge from the prevalence of allegory
in our cultural nistory from Piers Plowman to the
vogue of Watts. The more enduring contributions of
the Morality arc appreciable at a glance. Foremost, its
stimulus to the invention of original plots, as distinct
from the dramatisation of historical or mythical sagas;
next, its system of characterisation by types a prin-
ciple that, in comedy at any rate, persisted ostensibly,
even to the retention of characteristic names for the
dramatis personte, as late as Sheridan (with his Puffs,
Surfaces, Backbites, etc.); finally, its simplification of
ethical problems, its practice of rewarding virtue, and
damning, while somenow endearing to us for all time,
the Vice (part stage villain, part clown), who estab-
lished himself as perhaps the most popular figure on
both Tudor and Elizabethan stages, achieving a kind
of transfiguration in lago, and found to this day, sans
humour, swaggering along the trail of his latter-day
Lyceum glories. Its artistic possibilities it would ill
become the countrymen of Bunyan to decry, and we
have at least one example of its power and beauty on
the stage when handled with discretion and a degree
of subtlety. Everyman (before 1495, whether we accord
priority to the English or the Dutch version) is in the
genuine tradition of tragedy, true to its genesis out of
the Church as a specifically religious mystery, a matter
of communion between man and his Maker. In a
sense it is the last English play in that tradition, or at
least the last pre- Victorian Play for Puritans. The
Morality, in its historical relation, is important as
marking a definite parting of the wavs. One road
inclined upwards to Everyman and ended tfcere : the
other, by an easy descent from the " moral interlude "
to the " merry interlude," led to Ralph Roister Doister
and thence along a hundred and one fruitful primrose
paths.

The Mystery-Miracle drama declined to a slow death

10 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

as a result of the Reformation. The Morality as such
was killed more abruptly by excess of zeal arising out
of the same spiritual upheaval. Under the fillip of the
frenzied religious controversies of the Tudor regime
it degenerated into a mere vehicle for doctrinal propa-
ganda. The temptation to confute the enemy publicly
and authoritatively, as in The Three Laws (1538),
through the mouthpiece of a Christian Faith, who
does not mince his words *

"In no case follow the ways of Reginald Pole,
To his damnation he, doubtless, playeth the fool "

was more than the human nature of an ardent and
gifted theologian could resist. The theologian in ques-
tion, " bilious " Bishop Bale (1495-1563), for all that
the five surviving specimens of his twenty-two plays
exhibit considerable dramatic sense, was hardly a
" natural born mountebank," and could not stave off
the extinction of this early discussion-drama. The ex-
tension of the field of discussion to civil politics (a
necessary consequence of the new inter-dependence of
Church and State) hastened the inevitable end. To
find a counterpart to Respublica (1553) with its
" Oppression (alias Reformation)," " Avarice (alias
Policy),'* its plain-speaking People, and its dictatorial
if unproletarian Nemesis, we must turn to Soviet
Russia, where the uses of this species of drama have
been officially explored and exploited. Rcspublica
appeared in trie " First Year of the Most Prosperous

* Leaving nothing to chance, the author appends to
the printed play the following concise directions as to
" the apparelling of the six vices, or fruits of Infi-
delity : Let Idolatry be decked like an old witch,
Sodomy like a monk of all sects, Ambition like a
bishop, Covetousness like a pharisee or spiritual
lawyer, False Doctrine like a Popish doctor, and
Hypocrisy like a grey friar."

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 11

Reign of Queen Mary." In the first year of the reign
of Queen Elizabeth a royal edict prohibited dramatic
treatment of " either matters of religion or of the
governauncc of the estate of the common weale." We
may find something sinister in this initiation of
dramatic censorship, or with our eyes still on Russia
we may smile at the naivete of a ruler who was
content to suppress counter-revolutionary propaganda
without attempting to utilise the growing resources of
dramatic publicity for her own political ends. The
historical fact likewise, for what it is worth, the
so-called Elizabethan drama remains.*

II. THE SECULARISATION OF THE STAGE

We have been following the development of the
" legitimate " English stage. It here becomes neces-
sary to glance aside at the sister institution, " variety,"
the origin of which extends to a considerably remoter
past and, by bar sinister, to a highly distinguished
connection. The pedigree of the modern music-hall
may, indeed, be traced as far back as the great
classical drama of Athens, through its degenerate
Roman offshoot. In the twilight of the ancient world,
when tragedy had declined into ballet or pantomime,
and comedy into the obscene buffoonery called miming,
our friend the free-lance artiste made his first bow;
and he emerged out of the ruins of that old world,
still smiling, to " keep the pot boiling " throughout
the dark ages, contriving, whether singly or in small
troupes, to earn more kicks than halfpence in an
endless tour of the European road. In medieval

* For convenience, the term " Elizabethan " will be
employed frequently in the pages that follow, to
denote an epoch which extended roughly down to the
Civil War, comprising the reigns of James I. and
Charles I. as well as that of Elizabeth.

12 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

England we find him hob-nob&ing with the native
minstrel, equally fallen on evil days, casual protege's
of the sporting nobility, bugbears of the " highbrow "
prelatry, hail-fellow-well-met of town and country-
side. For an adequate consideration of the possible
influence of the " turns " of these and sundry other
independent " outsiders " on the technique of drama,
the reader must refer to the encyclopaedic The
Medieval Stage of Sir E. K. Chambers. We are
here concerned with the definite and tremendous
social effect of the absorption of the more enterprising
of these strolling players into the developing art of
the theatre; for as morality superseded miracle in
popular favour, individual players here and there
would lend an expert hand, until later, interludes
becoming ever more common, whole bodies of pro-
fessionals, often under distinguished patronage, took
the plunge, with consequences which, for good or
evil, completely revolutionised the status of drama.
The outlawry of all unlicensed "Fencers, Beare-
wardes, Comon Players in Enterludes and Minstrels,
not belonging to any Baron or other honorable per-
sonage of greater Degree " as " Roges Vagaboundes
and Sturdy Beggars," in the year 1572, illuminating
as it is for our purposes, was in effect hardly more
than an incident in the long ding-dong warfare
between these old stagers and the civic authorities.
Of more radical significance was the resultant clean-
cut breach between the dramatists and a body that,
having conceived and given birth to the English
drama a matter of mutual advantage was for three
centuries and more to set its countenance and its
influence against plays in any shape or form. That
body, the Church, stands as a symbol for the vast
middle-class population for whom, throughout the
period under discussion, the study of the Bible and
a resultant preoccupation with the problems of good
and evil provided an interest at least as intense, if

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 13

not as ostentatious, as the craze for drama. When
we allude to the " national drama " of Elizabethan
England, we should remember that it was never
wholly representative of the subjects of the Tudor
and Stuart regimes. Of the Puritans and Puritanism
it spoke with no little feeling. It never spoke for the
movement derided under that designation a move-
in^ that, working obscurely behind the scenes, was
yet powerful enough in its own time to produce a
Milton and a Bunyan, as well as an Oliver Cromwell.
The emancipation of drama from its religious or
ethical purpose was proceeding by degrees, before the
combined effect of the extinction in bathos of the
didactic morality, and the invasion of the professional
actor, precipitated the tendency, sharply dividing
the rival camps. The period of transition is marked
in the work of a group of men associated with Sir
Thomas More, whose personal enthusiasm for the
budding secular art* was aptly celebrated some
fifty years later in the biographical play bearing his
name (more famous for the three pages of a unique
manuscript copy now generally believed to be in the
handwriting of Shakespeare). Foremost among these
pioneer playwrights was John Hey wood (1497-*:. 1580),
v4iose lively mind was doubtless stimulated by
familiarity with the soties or farces of the contemporary
French authors (represented at their best in the world-
famed Maitre Pathcliri), as well as by the spirit of
Chaucer. His Play of the Wether and The Foure P's
(palmer, pardoner, 'pothecary and pedlar), while full
of fun, are, as neo-moralities, formally edifying and
long-winded. " A mery flay between Johan Johan
the Husbande, Tyb his tvyfe, and Sir Jhan the freest "

* And let us remember that this great English-
man the author of Utopia was to oHe (in 1575) a
martyr in the cause of enlightenment, himself a figure
in the true sacred tradition.

I 4 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

(attributed to him) shows more clearly which way
the wind is blowing. It is alike a-moralising and
a-moral. Henry Medwall's earlier play Fulgens and
Lucres, written probably before the close of the
fifteenth century, is actually the first conventionally
" romantic " play known to us, but as it was only
brought to light by chance in 1919, it is possible that
some missing link will ultimately displace it from
that precedence. Its story is borrowed, directly or
indirectly, from one of trie Italian humanists.

Other external influences were beginning to com-
plicate the development of our comedy. The recovery
of the twelve lost plays of Plautus (1427) had, by
repercussion from the Continent, produced something
of a vogue for translations and crude adaptations
from the Latin in pedagogic circles. The anonymous
author of Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 1550) carried
the process a stage further, by adapting the Latin
form, with its elaborate development of plot, to a
simple and racy comedy of English rural life, in the
spirit of Johan Johan, to be followed a year or two
later by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) with a second
notable achievement in this genre, Ralph Roister
Doister. The former play was produced at Christ's Col-
lege, Cambridge, the latter (probably) by the boys of
Eton, of which school Udall was for seven years Head-
master. Whence, perhaps, the absence from Roister
Doister of the coarseness which in Gammer Gurton
we find present ad libitum, and which we must
expect to find, sometimes ad nauseam, in the popular
comedy developed out of the form and spirit of these
two pieces. In both alike, the traces of the old
Morality have been all but obliterated. Much of the
characterisation is fresh (a good deal is conventional),
but the dialogue is constrained in the unwieldy
rhymed metre from which as yet no master's hand
had risen to deliver our comedy. The creator of the
first dramatic prose style, -John Lyly, was born prob-

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 15

ably in 1554, possibly the same year that saw the
production of Roister Doistcr.

Academic circles and (by some queer association)
the Inns of Court had by this time become veritable
hives of dramatic industry. While one group was
experimenting with Terence and Plautus, another
with equal zest applied itself to the formidable task
of making an English tragedy out of Seneca. An
English tragedy divorced from its religious associa-
tions and married to a corpse was hardly an
auspicious foundation for fruitful activity. It was
soon found desirable to gild the pill (if we may vary
the metaphor) with a coating of romantic treacle,
and the coating became thicker as the taste for treacle
in that form developed into a craving. Purists put up
a fight for the pill, the whole pill, and nothing but
the pill, claiming for it the properties of Aristotle's
recipe for a spiritual purgative. The public was not
interested in Aristotle and continued to swallow the
new conception, which, known as Tragi-comedy, was
gradually discarding every pretence of fidelity to the
cause enshrined in the classic unities of time, space
and action. Gorboduc (1562), the joint- work of
Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, is actually
the earliest extant specimen of this form of dramatic
exercise, and has accordingly been hailed as the first
English tragedy. It also furnishes the earliest example
of how blank verse ought not to be written. We
might describe it as the first appearance of
" Savonarola Brown " in English letters. Of the dis-
ciples of Norton and Sackville the name is Legion.
Shakespeare was not among them.

Towards the end of the fifteen-sixties and through-
out the seventies, monstrosities by tragi-comedy out
of Seneca, with their garrulous ghosts, their extrava-
gances of rhetoric, their excruciating platitudes and
their fantastic horrors, became the rage, not only in
the halls of the classes educated up to their preten-

16 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

sions, but also among the general populace whose
taste for drama was moving with the times and
adjusting itself to the new conditions. The accom-
modation of the rapidly multiplying troops of players
(nominally attached to some Honorable Personage of
the requisite degree) who catered for this public, pre-
sented a problem to the actor-manager if we may
so call him as well as to the municipal authorities.
Al fresco performances in public inn-yards with their
surrounding galleries had served well enough in the
days of the Miracles and the earlier Interludes; but
the new kind of play demanded more scope, and,
moreover, attracted a new kind of audience whose
mood was not exactly calculated to enhance the inn-
keeper's reputation. On the other hand, the new
kind of play was highly congenial to the old kind
of stage, the projecting rostrum, whence with
adequate material for rant and physical violence, the
actor could conveniently address himself to the busi-
ness of putting the fear of bloody tyrants or, alter-
natively equipped, insinuating obscenity into the
surrounding assemblage. " Wyll not a fylthye playe
wyth the blast of a trumpette sooner call tnyther a
thousande than an houres tolling of a bell bring to
the sermon a hundred?" thundered the preacher (John
Stockwood) at Paul's Cross on August 24, 1578. He
was referring to an unobtrusive but specially con-
structed circular enclosure around the first fixed
apron-stage, styled simply The Theatre, that had,
some years earlier, slipped casually into the routine
of London life.

III. HARBINGERS OF SHAKESPEARE

From this point we become more interested,
perhaps, in tracing early intimations of Shakespeare
than in following the development of the drama
generally. The same year in which Stockwood's

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 17

denunciation of The Theatre shook the air, John Lyly
published his Eufhues, the Anatomy of Wit, prior to
launching upon tne stage his "euphuistic" drama, from
which the first great manner of Shakespeare derived
its impulse and no little of its art. Lyly was about
twenty-five at this time. It is noteworthy that the
immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, the cluster of
writers with whose enterprise we are now concerned
(Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd) flash across the
scene as young men, and (apart from Lyly) as a group
of young men, producing their characteristic work
much as, of recent times, successive coteries have
been responsible for movements like impressionism,
futurism, vorticism, etc. Lyly, a dilettante of genius,
stands aloof from and, in a sense, above the group.
Born a decade before Shakespeare, he survived till
1606, although his creative output appears to have
ceased after 1591 when he was thirty-seven. Kyd,
Greene and Peele, all born about 1558, died at the
ages of thirty-six, thirty-four and forty-one respectively.
Marlowe (b. 1564) died at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare
had written nothing after thirty-six (their average
effective age) we should have had no Hamlet, probably
no Twelfth Night, none of the supreme plays and
there would have been a different tale to tell. Marlowe
was twenty-four when his Doctor Faustus was given,
and he wrote Edward the Second (his last and most
satisfying play) at an age when Shakespeare was not
ashamed to identify his name with Titus Andronicus.
The ways of genius are beyond calculation, but it is
only fair to the memory or men who gave so much
more to the world than they got from it, that these
facts should be remembered.

This band of young enthusiasts, with some of
whom Shakespeare was later to associate, were, with
the exception of Kyd, all University men. That does
not mean, as probably it would mean to-day, that
their parents belonged to the well-to-do classes. The

i8 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

Universities were founded for the sons of poor men,
and in the sixteenth century the wealthy under-
graduate was still the exception rather than, as now,
the rule. Lyly was persona grata in Court circles :
Marlowe was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker.
There seems to have been, however, no lack of
camaraderie (or, for that matter as Shakespeare was
to learn -of snobbishness) among the University wits,
and indeed a glorious time they must have had in
their undergraduate days, savouring the late fruits of
the Renaissance as they were passed from one centre
of learning to the next. A very different manner of
career awaited them in the university of life. What
does that matter to us? Lyly gave us eight plays, one
(Campaspe) more or less historical, another (Mother
Bombie) more or less realistic, three of them more or
less pastoral, all more or less allegorical. FJis main
contribution to English drama was a prose style,
Italianate in origin, compound of the verbal quibbles,
puns and allusions of a subtle intellect not very
fastidious, but refined by an ear for word-music : what
we should call art for art's sake.

STELLIO : Riscio, my daughter is passing amiable,
but very silly.

RISCIO (his servant) : You meane a foole, sir.

STELLIO : Faith, I implie so much.

RISCIO : Then I applie it fit : the one shee takes of
her father, the other of her mother : now you may be
sure she is your owne . . .

STELLIO : Dost thou thinke she tooke her foolish-
nesse of mee?

RISCIO : I, and so cunningly, that she took it not
from you.

STELLIO : Well, quod natura dedit, tollere nemo
potest.

RISCIO : A good evidence to prove the fee simple of
your daughter's follic.

FROM THfc CHURCH TO THE STEWS 19
STELLIO: Why?

RISCIO : It came by nature, and if none can take it
away, it is perpetual!.

STELLIO : Nay, Riscio, shee is no naturall foole

and so on. It is the idiom in which Love's Labour s
Lost is steeped, and to which Shakespeare resorts
throughout his early works, and here and there in the
later ones. Its influence did not stop there, but has
persisted in our comedy dialogue, to be echoed as late
as in the affectations or Oscar Wilde (to be superseded
eventually, but not finally, by the clean cut and thrust
of Shavian plain English). The plays themselves are
mere pretexts for these architectonics of language,
classical in form (in so far as they have any form),
an incoherent complex of satire and sycophancy in
matter; but, with their occasional lyrics (another
feature adopted by Shakespeare), they were found
irresistible by the best minds of the day, to which
they were addressed. Lyly's associates were not so
particular. Among the surviving plays of Peele we
find a mythological, probably satirical Arraignment of
Paris, a promising Edward the First, a romantic-
biblical David and Bethsabe, and an exquisite romantic-
fantastic-pastoral Old Wives' Tale. They contain
occasional bursts of felicitous imagery legitimately
comparable to the poetic touch we call Shakespearean.
Greene, in a Scottish History of James the Fourth
and a bucolic History of Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay, developed the technique of the old horseplay
comedy and humanised characterisation, particularly
the characterisation of women. He was the first
English dramatist to give us what might be described
as one of Nature's ladies, and, through her agency, a
romance that is not an insult to the modern intelli-
gence. Shakespeare was the second. A collaboration
between Lyly and Greene might have given us a
comedy of the quality of As you Li\e It.

20 THE ENGLISH

Kyd made history with a first-class thriller, The
Spanish Tragedy, wnerein, besides supplying the last
word in obnoxious ghosts, and arranging no less than
ten violent deaths, he contrived as piece de resistance
the spectacle of the hero biting his tongue out and
flinging it from him with a gesture. He also wrote a
play (unfortunately lost) called Hamlet, which seems
to have interested Shakespeare. Kyd and Marlowe,
between them, created " Shakespearean " blank verse.

Marlowe's individual service cannot be so summarily
defined. His blank verse is relatively a detail. He first
imported genius into English drama. That genius we
cannot measure, but of its quality we can say this :
no man before or since had more profoundly in him
the stuff of tragedy infinite aspiration combined with
an insatiable thirst for truth. Fearless in thought as
the mariners of Elizabethan England in action, his
very heart's blood is in Dr. Faustus (incidentally the
first piece of self-portraiture in English imaginative
literature), the man who sold his soul to the devil not,
as the mob would see it, for vulgar voluptuousness,
but, as Goethe was apt to recognise, for a power that
pertains essentially to the ends of evolution :

" Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I'll have them fly to India for gold . . .
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings. . . ."

and later (a revealing and pathetic afterthought) :

" I'll have them fill the public schools with silk
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad."

In the age of ^Eschylus, Marlowe would have been
a heretic perhaps, but a heretic after the manner of
Euripides, master none the less of a tragedy that

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 21

ministered, as a matter of course, to the spiritual
development of the community at large. In a very
different theatre, Marlowe received credit for his
" mighty line " (a mere instrument), and, for the
tragic genius in him, was, as he is still by many,
dismissed as a notorious atheist. Autre temps, autrc
mceurs.

One would suppose that this galaxy of dramatic
adventurers, turned loose in London on the resources
of their proved wits, might have had successful careers
for the asking. Certainly there was no lack of employ-
ment for their pens. Plays had caught on with a
vengeance. There was money in plays. And there was
competition for that money. The theatre, called into
being by the activities of their predecessors, had, in
its turn, given birth to a veritable monster, that now
lured them into a seething vortex, at the peril of their
souls. James Burbage, who had built the original
Theatre circumspectly in the fields of Shoreditch (out-
side the jurisdiction of the civic authorities), appears
himself, as our first actor-manager, to have been no
better and no worse than the run of genial despots
who follow in his wake to-day. A rival impresario,
Philip Henslowe, pawnbroker by vocation, was the
man who really made the pace in the new industry.
Establishing his Rose Theatre, without any false
modesty, within the liberty of the Clink, on the
Surrey or Bank side of the Thames (the quarters of
the old stew-houses), alongside amphitheatres devoted
to the mysteries of bear- and bull-baiting, he set him-
self, in association with Edward Alleyn, to make this
traditional haunt of impious pleasure-seekers the
spiritual home of English drama. He was so far
successful that Burbage, migrating from Shoreditch in
1599, put up his Globe Theatre beside the Rose,
drawing thitner all those who may have wished to
attend first productions of Shakespeare's greatest plays.
Actors and poets alike were enlisted in a furious

22 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

campaign to " keep the pot boiling " by fair means
or foul. Most of the numerous plays produced under
these conditions, and known to us only (if as much
as) by name, were probably as little worth preserving
on their merits as most or the successes of the con-
temporary commercial drama, and we may consider
ourselves amply compensated for their loss by the
chance survival of the actual Diary kept by Henslowe
between the years 1592 and 1609, which throws
abundant light as well upon his motives in calling
the tune as upon his methods of paying the piper. A
sensational plot (for preference, a familiar one from
Bible or history, with a strong love interest), butchery
for tragedy, bawdery for comedy, these were the
simple rules of the dramatic Stews in which the
University wits, among the other hacks, were thrown
indiscriminately to the scum of the city. In the soil of
the Rose no bed of roses Marlowe pushed upwards,
blaspheming, only to be cut down in his heyday.
Greene, a year before him, had died theatrically
cursing the theatre and all its filthy works and
workers, including an " upstart crow oeautiful with
our feathers, that with his tygers head, wrapt in a
flayer s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast
out a blank verse, as the best of you; and being an
absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the
only Shake-scene in a country." William Shakespeare,
guilty of a line : "Oh Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's
hide " (from the third part of Henry VL\ aged
twenty-eight, had come to London, six years earlier
(in 1592), to make good, it would seem, after a not
very auspicious opening to his career at Stratford-on-
Avon. From holding horses outside Burbage's old
theatre (according to tradition) he had become a
Jack-of -all-trades under Henslowe,* making himself

* To desert him mysteriously and join Burbage in
a co-operative venture when the spirit moved him.

FROM THE CHURCH TO THE STEWS 23

useful as actor and play-tinker, making himself agree-
able to aristocratic patrons who might be useful to
him, and in his spare time, presumably, making him-
self familiar with the ways of the world, when he was
not experimenting with his pen. He kept his head,
and he made good in his own time. Greene lost his
head and succumbed in hysterics. Marlowe died of a
chance stab in a tavern brawl. We may at least surmise
that, but for this stroke of bad luck, his genius would
have carried him undefiled out of the mire as Shake-
speare was carried. Of his art Henslowe certainly got
more than he bargained (probably haggled) for. Any
journalist can pander to me baser passions. Marlowe
pandered to them for a living, with his tongue in his
cheek (in The Jew of Malta), with his soul trans-
figured (in patches of Tamburlaine, in Dr. Faustus,
in Edward 77.). The atmosphere of Henslowe's theatre
never extinguished the flame of his aspiration, nor
stifled his terrific imagination, nor disturbed the swell
of his utterance, nor could it prevent that sudden out-
burst, amidst the hectic braggadocio of Tamburlaine,
of a solemn, tremendous and unalterable conviction :

" If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of tneir masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they distil
From their immortal powers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human art;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest."

Whether Marlowe would have achieved success
personally is, perhaps, beside the point. He saw to it

24 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

that English drama made good. As a man, he is
sufficiently honoured for us in Shakespeare's afiect-
tionate tribute to his " dead shepherd " (As You Life
It, Act III., Scene 5). And Shakespeare knew.

CHAPTER II
PROM SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY

I. SHAKESPEARE'S PLACE

To reflect that not much more than three decades
elapsed between the relatively barbaric Gammer
Gurton's Needle (1566) and Hamlet (c. 1601) gives
one a sense of wonderment such as might have been
experienced fifty years ago at the idea of a human
being traversing the Atlantic in thirty-six hours. A
kind of wireless-electric mental energy was evidently
at work throughout renascent Europe, but all our
learned explanation, plausible up to a point, of this
influence and that inspiration, does not really amount
to much more than a recording of the circumstance
that the kiss of the Prince did in fact awaken the
Sleeping Beauty. At the back of History is always the
Fairy Tale.

Perhaps the outstanding practical significance of
Shakespeare's achievement lies in his establishment
in a sense, his rescue of the respectability of the
drama as a profession, as well as an art. In the hands
of the pedants, a certain literary dignity had attached
to it. Reduced to the level of an opposition side-show
to the bear-garden, there would seem to have been
nothing to prevent its degradation to the status at
which it reposed (for it could sink no lower) in the
latter days of the Roman Empire. Shakespeare was
not to become the Shakespeare of the class-room and
of the literary society without incredibly hard work
and irresistible force of character.

We like to think of the " spacious days " as a time
of happy-go-lucky joie de vivrc. We remember the
glorious exploits of Raleigh and Drake, the defeat of

26 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

the Armada, the brilliant social pageant, the genius of
Merrie England. There was another side to the
picture :

" Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscaird simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill :
Tired with all these "

And, abruptly, Shakespeare would round it off with
a banal compliment to his friend and patron, grit his
teeth, and proceed to write his play.

The most comprehensive study of Shakespeare's life
and work, in the opinion of the present writer, is that
of the late Georg Brandes.

Of the facts of his life, " all we know with any
degree of certainty is that he was born at Stratford-
upon-Avon, married and had children there; went to
London, where he commenced as actor, and wrote
poems and plays; returned to Stratford, made his will,
died, and was buried."* There is no man that ever
lived of whom quintessentially we know more, from
whose intimate personal experience (whether actual or
imaginative matters not a whit) more is to be learnt.
Already in his first " original " play (Love's Labour's
Lost, c. 1592), he has noted the fallacy in the then-
fashionable philosophy of taking life for granted.

* George Steevens.

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 27

Biron the irresponsible is put in his place with the
severity of a guilty conscience :

". . . the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks . . .
To weed mis wormwood from your fruitful brain . . .
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick. . . .

. . . and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile."

In the earliest of his " refined " comedies (As You
Li1{ It, c m . 1599) he warns us against the other extreme.
There is a point at which earnestness becomes ridicu-
lous it is marked by " the melancholy Jacques "; and
the lesson is pressed home in the succeeding comedy
(Twelfth Night), wherein Olivia and Orsino are seen
to have grown morbid through taking life too
seriously. And so we may trace Shakespeare's pro-
gress or reaction from phase to phase through
Hamlet to Timon, and out of that cul de sac, till " At
last " to follow the imaginary apostrophe of a young
poet confronted with the master at New Place, Strat-
ford-on-Avon, in 1616, the year of his death " in The
Tempest I watch you making peace with your fellows,
forgiving them their evil, and looking out on the
world with a lantern of wonder in your hand." We
know Shakespeare in relation to how many other
things: his country and its history, great ambitions
and mean ambitions, nature and art. We know the
man in him, but, in addition and it is this which
lifts him above his fellows, so that when we speak of
Elizabethan drama, we tacitly exclude the thirty-six
odd plays in which this unique Elizabethan will live
for ever we know the God in him. There are moods
in which, as a loyal man of the theatre, he is as airily
facetious at the expense of the official enemy in the

28 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

" ra gg m g " f Malvolio, for instance as Ben Jonson
or Fletcher, or the anonymous author of that scathing
satire The Puritan, at one time attributed to him.
There arc other moods the mood of Brutus, moods
of Hamlet (" Get thee to a nunnery : why wouldst
thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent
honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things
. . ."), and of Prospero, moods in which a humble
man follows the light of his conscience, and has love
for all other men. That light and that love im-
personal things raise him above his own multiform
now Pagan, now Pantheist personality. And from
this standpoint, finding a fitness in the tradition that
in his latter days he entertained a Puritan preacher at
his own home at Stratford, we may esteem it his
especial distinction, alone among his fellow-pariahs
from the Church, to have returned good for evil, to
have given us the essential tragedy as well as the
comedy and the history of the world, of the two
worlds, we live in.

Of all but universal appeal (Tolstoy, for one, was
insensible to it), responsive at one or another of his
" periods " to practically every perceptible nuance in
the gamut of human nature, he developed the English
language, in verse from Marlowe, in prose from Lyly,
to attain a mastery without parallel in either medium,
to express a vaster and a deeper and a richer spirit
than has issued from any other mind in any art.

We may " ask and ask," analyse and reanalyse,
classify (so far as we are able to classify) his technical
devices, admiring this masterly preparation for a s&ne
h jaire or that infinitely subtle effect of characterisa-
tion, marvelling at his inexhaustible resources for
holding the spectator's interest, and, when all is said,
and we have noted every brick in the mighty edifice,
the fabric of his vision is not " melted into air."

Shakespeare's place in our drama need not de-
tain us.

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 29

II. BEN JONSON, His

" I remember, the players have often mentioned
it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing
(whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a
line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted
a thousand." " RARE " BEN JONSON (1573-1637).

Nowadays it may seem strange that a mere mortal
could have pretended to the rank of Shakespeare's
rival in any capacity. As dramatists, it would be
patently ridiculous to make a comparison between the
author of King Lear and the author of The Silent
Woman, although we may concede that The Silent
Woman was probably as far above the powers of any
other dramatist of that time as it is below the
standard of Shakespeare at his best.* As a person-
ality, Ben Jonson was almost certainly the more
successful, the more winning of the two men. He
was what we should call a " character." Shakespeare
might be loved by the discriminating in his day as in
ours, but Jonson was universally felt, even when he
was feared, as a dynamic force, a person to be
reckoned with. And he was good company. We
recognise him as the spiritual ancestor of Dr. Johnson
and of our own G. K. Chesterton, autocrats of the
Coffee House and the Bar of Fleet Street as he was of
the Mermaid, a little to the north-east. His person-

* To preserve our perspective of the period, we
should remember that not only was Jonson, in the
estimation of many besides himself, the better artist
of the two, but that yet another poet, whose rivalry
would appear from the Sonnets to have given Shake-
speare sleepless nights, has been identified with that
lesser Jonson (dramatically speaking), George Chap-
man.

30 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

ality, like theirs, stands four square against all
vicissitudes of fortune pedant cum volcano cum wit
cum creator on a basis of that essential integrity
that we call character. In Dr. Johnson's day, social
life was an end in itself, and the force of his person-
ality achieved the paradox of making his daily con-
versation undying. Chesterton has never really
troubled to break himself of the habit of journalistic
controversy, but once, by chance to amuse Shaw, it
is said he wrote a play, and Magic is not quite like
any other play, while it is uncannily like G. K.
Chesterton : it is pedantry made palatable by wit and
imagination and a sort of bad temper. In that respect
it is like the plays of Ben Jonson. Only to Jonson
playwriting became second nature, and the vehicle
for conveying the full force of that enragement at
the follies of the rest of mankind that made him the
terror of his age, and would have made him the pet
of ours. He delighted to talk about himself which
is the reason we have so much more information
about him than about Shakespeare and a good
talker never had a better subject. He was in turn
bricklayer and soldier (seeing active service) before a
zest for learning, irrepressible high spirits and
poverty (with " a shrew, though honest," as he calls
nis wife, and children to maintain) drove him in-
evitably into the charmed circle of Henslowe's hacks.
In 1598 he fought a fellow-actor in -Hoxton Fields,
and, profiting from Marlowe's fate, took care to kill
his man in self-defence, to Henslowe's intense annoy-
ance (apparently the deceased was the more useful
servant). The consequent branding of " T " (for
Tyburn) on his left thumb, and the forfeiture of his
(probably negligible) goods, appear in no wise to
have curbed his inveterate pugnacity. After the
success of his first characteristic comedy, Every Man
in his Humour (1598), he threw his whole weight
into a furious literary quarrel or poetamachia, the

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 31

whys and wherefores of which have never to this day
been rightly determined, but which provoked him to
waste three years' creative work on three massive con-
troversial plays, of which only one, The Poetaster, a
marvellous reconstruction of the Roman Augustan
age, is just not ruined by its copious unintelligible
scurrilities. As with Shakespeare, his personality
pervades his work : unlike Shakespeare, he never rises
above it save in occasional lyrics, and in the
fragmentary pastoral, The Sad Shepherd, which he
wrote near his end. Throughout the main body of
his work the style is consistently the man. For the
conventional, deferential epilogue, he substituted a
more robust note :

" By 'tis good, and if you like 't, you may,"

and this sturdy, uncompromising spirit lends an
English gusto to his prose, that sweeps away the
cobwebs and the continental fal-lals of euphuism :

CLERMONT : Why, what should a man do?

TRUEWIT : Why, nothing : or that which, when 'tis
done, is as idle. Hearken after the next horse-race or
hunting-match, lay wagers, praise Puppy, or Pepper-
corn, Whitefoot, Franklin; swear upon Whitemane's
party; speak aloud that my lords may hear you; visit
my ladies at night, and be able to give them the
character of every bowler or better on the green.
These be the things wherein your fashionable men
exercise themselves, and I for company.

A little toning-down, and we are in the stylised
plain speech of the later Comedy of Manners. The
Comedy of Humours Jonson's darling invention
in principle as well as in form, was its parent, and,
some may think, its better. It was perhaps not quite
as novel as it appeared in his own fond eyes. Strip

32 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

the old Morality of its ecclesiastical atmosphere, and
you have the scheme in embryo the interplay of
types representing conflicting elements in human
nature. In Jonson's philosophy, Every Man is the
subject of a pathological bias that determines his
addiction to one or other of the common human
weaknesses. From this satirical standpoint it re-
mained for him to contrive appropriate settings in
which assortments of caricatured " humours " might
be released for the edification of a world of ignor-
amuses. After great straining and labouring such
labour that one is almost hypnotised into admiring
an abortion like Every Man Out of His Humour
he achieved by inspiration a sort of crystallised
brilliance in three masterpieces, The Fox (1605), The
Silent Woman (1609) and The Alchemist (1610). The
sheer virtuosity of each of these dizzy flights of comic
fancy almost takes one's breath away, but elates one
in the process, unless the nerves quail before an
absoluteness of comedy that might in these days be
mistaken for rank inhumanity. Here and there we
are reminded of Aristophanes, but in the perfect
balance of the action flowing steadily from divers
points to be united and carried in one torrential sweep
towards the catastrophe, they are not only unsur-
passed, they stand in a class apart. Bartholomew Fair
(1614) is Jonson's second best, realistic where the big
three are wildly fantastic, but conspicuously superior
to the numerous similarly Hogarthian pictures of
London manners executed by minor Elizabethans,
and consummate in its comic portraiture, thanks to a
flexibility of language that marks the culminating
point 01 its author's stylistic development.

Enter ZEAL-OF-THE-LAND-BUSY.

DAME PURECRAFT : O Brother Busy ! Your help here,
to edify and raise us up in a scruple : my daughter
Win-the-fight is visited with a natural disease of

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 33

women, called a longing to eat pig. . . . And I
would be satisfied from you, religiously-wise, whether
a widow of the sanctified assembly, or a widow's
daughter, may commit the act without offence to the
weaker sisters.

BUSY: Verily, for the disease of longing, it is a
disease, a carnal disease or appetite, incident to
women; and as it is carnal and incident, it is natural,
very natural : now, pig, it is a meat, and a meat that
is nourishing and may be longed for, and so con-
sequently eaten; it may be eaten; very exceeding
well eaten; but in the Fair, and as a Bartholomew
pig, it cannot be eaten; for the very calling it a
Bartholomew pig, and to eat it so, is a spice of
idolatry, and you make the Fair no better than one
of the high-places. This, I take it, is the state of the
question : a high-place.

The " Humour," be it observed, has undergone a
subtle metamorphosis into something very like a
human being. Note again the individual note in the
Rabbi's relentment.*

BUSY : In the way of comfort to the weak, I will
go and eat. I will eat exceedingly, and prophesy;
there may be a good use made of it too, now I think
on' t : by the puolic eating of swine's flesh, to profess
our hate ana loathing of Judaism, whereof the
brethren stand tax'd. I will therefore eat, yea, I will
eat exceedingly.

Not content with comic laurels, the bricklayer-poet,
equipped with another kind of formula, historical
fidelity, sought to hew his way to the summit of
tragedy, producing in Scjanus (1603) and Catiline

* Zeal-of-the-land-Busy was created exactly fifty
years before Moliere's Tartuffe.

34 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

(1611) two monuments of erudition and wasted
energy. That way was not open to his will. Certainly
he could lay down the law convincingly enough, but
in applying it, all too faithfully the pedant stifles the
volcano. Tragic exaltation we could never have ex-
pected : Jonson had not the entree into that Holy of
Holies, nor would he have thought of looking for a
key that is to be found only in the heart of every
man in the appropriate " humour."

The volcano gradually declined in force, but there
were minor eruptions almost to the end, chiefly in
the form of the Masque, or rather of libretti for that
exotic entertainment. Jonson had thrown off some
of these pieces d'occasion at intervals after the
accession of James L, and, with the waning of his
dramatic power, was glad to fall back on the reputa-
tion they had gained for him not to speak of the
perquisites. In virtual collaboration with Inigo Jones,
whose elaborate dtcor provided the major attraction
of the show, he finally liberates from almost inveterate
inhibition the lyric side of his. genius; but, chafing
against the misalliance, interrupts his own swan-
song to enter into a furious squabble with the scenic
artist, remaining intransigent to the end.

We began by quoting Jonson's strictures on the art
of his greater contemporary. Let us recall as equally
characteristic, that he " had not told posterity " these
lamentable truths concerning Shakespeare, but, among
other reasons, " to justify mine own candour : for I
loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this
side idolatry, as much as any."

May we not, mutatis mutandis, return the honest
compliment?

* Imported from. Italy in early Tudor days to be
cultivated in the hot-house of successive Court
regimes.

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 35

III. THE CAVALIER DRAMA

" Shakespeare apart, was it really an age of
great drama? . . . Shakespeare apart, what
playwright . . . would compare in point of
intellect with half-a-dozen men who are now
writing for the stage? Ben Jonson will, of
course, be thrust into the breach . . . but a
thinker he was not . . . Thus the days of
Elizabeth and James present the surprising spec-
tacle of one towering world-genius rubbing
shoulders with, and scarcely, if at all, distin-
guished from, a group of writers . . . deplor-
ably infested with the crudities and brutalities
of their period. ... I do not see how any un-
prejudiced student can deny that the minor
Elizabethan drama ... is an essentially bar-
barous product." (WILLIAM ARCHER, in The
Old Drama and the New.)

William Archer was, by general consent, the
greatest of modern English dramatic critics. He was
what the Elizabethans would have called a Puritan.
We have been at some pains to give expression to
the point of view he represented, because Puritanical
sentiment, in some degree, is to-day, as it has been
from time immemorial, an element that counts
that counts more than it* shows in England. For
close upon a century after the decline of the Restora-
tion Theatre, the body of Elizabethan drama
remained under a cloud, alike for the purposes of
the study and of the stage. The cloud lifted under
Elia's gentle persuasion (in 1808), and a new vogue
was fostered in literary circles; but it had hardly
extended bevond, despite Swinburne's pcrfcrvid
advocacy, before a new reaction set in against what
William Archer called "the Elizabethan legend."
That reaction is still operative.

36 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

The profuseness of the minor Elizabethan drama
positively bewilders the unprejudiced student who is
fortunate enough to appreciate its dramatic quality
and its imaginative grandeur. Was it a batrbarous
age? Ben Jonson was yet a thinker on a colossal
scale. We are all of us miserable sinners, or, if you
prefer it, deplorably infected with the crudities and
brutalities of our animal nature. Even a barbarous
product a lion, for example, or a palm tree may
stimulate the imagination, if it serve no higher pur-
pose. And great drama is always great drama.

Let us make no pretence or apology. Let us name
names. Chapman (?-i634), Defyer (1570 ?-i637 - ? )>
Middlcton (1570 ?-i627), (Thomas) Heywood (?-
1650 ?), Fletcher (1579-1625), Massinger (1583-1640),
Beaumont (1584-1616), Tourneur (1575 ?-i626),
Webster (1580 ?-i625 ?), Ford (?-?) all these men,
and some half-dozen more, bequeathed, as it were, a
deposit of the Elizabethan spirit in a few hundred
plays distinguished in general (naturally, in varying
degrees) for brilliantly colourful atmosphere, intense
psychological interest, fascinating craftsmanship, and,
above all, superbly fluent and vivid dialogue. The
prospect of compressing even their salient character-
istics into the compass of this volume sufficiently
brings home to the writer the immensity of their
common achievement. To consider the contribution
of each man singly and comparatively is out of the
question. A kind of impressionistic survey must be
attempted with an acute consciousness of its inevit-
able shortcomings.

Neither Shakespeare nor Jonson was the real leader
even a real representative of the movement now-
adays, hardly conceivable apart from their names a
movement that, from its sordid associations in the
days of Marlowe, passed rapidly into the forefront of
fashionable social activity, becoming increasingly
bound up with the gay life of the Court, until, in the

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 37

eyes of its Roundhead opponents, it was identified
with the whole cause of the monarchy, Shakespeare,
as we have seen, was not really an anti-Puritan. Ben
Jonson was essentially an intellectual snob. This is
not to say that either of them was a prig, or stood
socially aloof from his fellows; on the contrary, they
participated freely and humanly in the wear and tear
of the common life, with its cliques and feuds and
its haphazard collaborations; and by allegiance at
any rate, Shakespeare, like Jonson, was as thorough-
going a Royalist as the worst of them. But the really
typical Elizabethan, or rather, as we may more fairly
call him in retrospect, the complete Cavalier, was as
far removed from the sensitive spiritual essence of the
one, as he was from the high-horseplay of the other,
and it was reserved for John Fletcner, the most
prolific as well as the freest (alike from moral and
artistic scruples) of the circle, to do fullest justice to
the genius that, for good or ill, made England what
she once was. Light-hearted and stout-hearted,
romantic (in the sense of approving all fair in love
and war) by whim, as casually and characteristically
matter-of-fact, he rises at the crest of the wave, and
rides it triumphantly to its fall. The technique at his
finger-ends, he dashes of! plays with the sporadic
intensity of a Drake embarking on a new exploit in
the Western Main, or scotching the Spanish Armada,
or (as the case may be) finishing his game of bowls.
His forte was the tragi-comedy with no nonsense
about it, that, after the decline of Shakespeare's great
tragic period, won and for long held the first place
in the playgoer's favour. Unlike lesser practitioners in
this genre, however, he has no taste for mere sound
and fury, never indulges in " sob-stuff " (well, hardly
ever), and wears his poetry straightforwardly as he
lived. Shakespeare's later and longer blank verse, in
his hands, runs often into a bubbling overflow of
rhythmic prose, in which, again, we seem to catch

38 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

the true accent of the age. If we must call his vices
Cavalier vices, let us give due credit to the same
national party for his no less conspicuous, though
largely unacknowledged, virtues. "Give me dying,"
cries the Duke in The Chances,

" As dying ought to be, upon mine enemy,
Parting with man-kind, by a man that's manly :
Let 'em be the world, and bring along
Cain's envy witn 'em, I will on!"

Was the gay Cavalier's philosophy ever more
happily expressed? Or more wittily than in this
snippet from the same play?

DON FREDERICK : If she be not found we must

fight.
DON JOHN: I am glad on 't. I have not fought a

great while.

DON FREDERICK : If we dye

DON JOHN : There's so much money saved in

lecherie.

Barbaric, maybe; but in its magnificent response to
the eternal challenger, in its frank fearlessness and
essential zest for life, docs it carry no lesson for us
of this generation?

It was a sure instinct that led Fletcher to set so
many of his quasi-heroic comedies in the colourful
countries of Southern Europe, of Spain in particular.
The English cavalier derived no little of his code
from the chivalrous Don of the best Habsburg
period. Spain at this time was cultivating a drama
of her own, with Lope de Vega at the height of his
glory, and the great Calderon preparing to put him
in tnc shade. Fletcher, who probably knew the lan-
guage, helped himself freely from this as from native
sources, demonstrating (with Beaumont) in The

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 39

Knight of the Burning Pestle, that Cervantes' ridicule
of the excesses of chivalry was as congenial to English
ears as in the home of the original Don Quixote.
But in the most vital social relation his attitude
towards his womankind Fletcher's Englishman was
a law unto himself. With all his virile manhood
(and he could hardly be accused of effeminacy) he
was anything but a " Sheik." Nor, per contra, was
his lady a mere Shrieking Sister. We attach, perhaps,
the wrong kind of significance, in this connection, to
the " moral " of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.
We have no warrant for regarding Petruchio's brutal
treatment of Katharine so disconcerting to the
devotees of gentle Shakespeare as illustrating a
common or even a recognisable feature of the domestic
conventions of the period.* Is not the whole point
of the tour de force precisely the extravagance of the
idea of an Elizabethan shrew submitting to the
domination of a mere male? If so, Fletcher rather
unkindly skims the cream of the joke in his " dramatic
sequel " (as St. John Hankin called his own experi-
ments of this kind), The Tamer Tamed, wherein the
same Petruchio, embarking on a second marriage,
finds his match in " a chaste witty lady " of no un-
certain humour:

MARIA : By the faith I have
In mine own noble will, that childish woman
That lives a prisoner to her husband's pleasure,
Has lost her making, and becomes a beast
Created for his use, not fellowship. *

LIVIA : His first wife said as much.

* In Shakespeare generally, as most commentators
have noted, the " hero " cuts a poor figure beside the
" heroine," but Shakespeare's women idealised
whether as Cleopatra or Miranda must have been
" caviare to the general."

40 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

MARIA: She was a fool,
-And took a scurvy course; let her be nam'd
'Mongst those that wish for things, but dare not

do 'em;
I have a new dance for him.

And the hussy is as good as her word, her creator
being manifestly unacquainted with that " state of
marked social inequality of the sexes " predicated in
Meredith's famous Essay as one of the handicaps of
the comic poet. Middleton's and Dekker's Roaring
Girl of Cheapside was drawn from a real character of
the period, suggesting that this breezy feminism was
at least as likely to have derived from the Gloriana of
history as from any poet's imaginings. Fletcher is
whole-hearted in the cause, and if his women, like
his men, are distinctly aware of their bodies, they
are probably no more obsessed with sex than the Vic-
torian ingenue, while their manners, which so scan-
dalised Coleridge, may perhaps be set on a par with
those of our latest Georgian dramatic models.

We return to Fletcher, to glance off in another direc-
tion. A capacious sponge in his absorption of subject-
matter, he was equally impartial in his methods of
discharging the overflowing fluid-stuff of drama so
accumulated. If his work teems with Shakespearean
tit-bits, Shakespeare may be said to have returned the
compliment by trespassing on his preserves in the
tragi-comedies of his last period, as well as by actually
collaborating with him in Henry VIII and (probably)
in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher was not tied
to tragicomedy, and was game for an experiment at
anv time in company with any man. He was the
collaborator par excellence. The half-dozen plays in
which he lent a hand to the more sophisticated Beau-
mont form so matchless a blend that, from their
popularity, the legend "Beaumont and Fletcher"
was automatically assigned, and has attached ever

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 4;

since, to the whole of his output,* of fifty odd plays.
Four of these joint productions are in the tragic vein,
and if we say that, after Shakespeare, they are as
great plays and as nearly good tragedies as the limi-
tations or the Elizabethan drama permit, we are using
words advisedly, and not necessarily qualifying
admiration. In the matter of tragedy, not all the vast
possibilities of poetic expression bequeathed by Mar-
lowe, not all the inspiration of Shakespeare's conver-
sion of those possibilities into impossibilities, could
compensate for the absence of the soil in which alone,
saving miracles, anything essentially justifying the
name could be expected to spring. Of this soil, as we
have noted, the anti-Theatre party had a monopoly.
The principles governing the motivation of the
Thames-side drama remained to the end" the simple
economic laws of demand and supply. The demand
was for entertainment, and while tne provision of
entertainment is consistent as a matter of course with
a comedy of any school and any standard, it is by
no means as a matter of course consistent with the
aim of tragedy, which is spiritual enlightenment. The
Elizabethan playgoer had no wish to be spiritually
enlightened. Tne entertainment sought in, and
derived from, his tragic drama corresponded at bottom
to the attraction of the popular thriller of the present
day, with a difference (as between a masterpiece like
The Maid's Tragedy and the latest Edgar Wallace),
that, shall we say, is all but fundamental. It is a
difference of taste rather than of temper. Flesh and
blood are the principal constituents of the newer as
of the older brew. (True tragedy transcends flesh and
blood.) The quality of flesh varies in degree of
sublimation. The *' Wood " interest has changed with
the years almost beyond identification. An Eliza-

* To find Fletcher in the Encyclopedia Britannica,
one must refer to " Beaumont and Fletcher."

42 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

bcthan audience, from groundlings upwards, de-
manded blood for blood's sake blood neat in physical
action, heart's-blood in " sob-stuff," blood in lan-
guage (which is poetry). It was one of the tricks of
the trade of Beaumontj Fletcher and Co., to contrive,
as a grand finale to the evening's sensation, a general
holocaust of guilty and innocent this constituting,
in their journalese, a " tragic " in ours, a " Sadistic "
ending. " Sadistic " is certainly nearer the mark.
Granted that these are not tragedies, let us give due
thanks for the major bloody-ending plays of the minor
Elizabethans. We have noticed Ben Jonson's heavy
Roman histories in this vein. A similar quality of
laboured pedantry mars, for us, the " proud full sail "
of the great verse of his disciple Chapman, although
his Bussy D'Ambois and his two topical plays about
the French Duke Byron were great favourites in their
day. The serious plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are,
of their kind, supreme. If only they could have fol-
lowed Shakespeare a little further but the little more
. . . and when we come to Philaster, which has been
compared with Hamlet, we are reminded how much
it is. The spirit of Shakespeare, indeed, is doomed to
walk through the quasi-tragedies of Beaumont,
Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton, and their followers,
with devastating effect. For one first-rate lago (De
Flores in Middleton's Changeling) we must suffer how
many second-rate Othellos and Brutuses, and corrupt
imitations of Viola and Isabella, and echoes of choice
passages such as the quarrel-scene from Julius Caesar.
The two parts of The Honest Whore by Dekker
(with incidental assistance from Middleton) stand out
with an unaffected tenderness as sharply distinct from
the elaborate brilliance of this school as a Pre-
Raphaelite from the elegant art of the Pitti Palace.
The work is perhaps too uneven to justify the tide
of masterpiece, but, if we may qualify our own
generalisation, we would hail as a unique minor

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 43
Elizabethan tragedy a play which perversely does not
claim to be more than a romantic comedy.

It is important to bear in mind, when we pass
judgment on these plays, that many of the incidents
that appear so extravagant to us were suggested by, if
not directly founded on, events of current social
history. If Seneca was responsible for most of the
horrors of the earlier pieces, the Court intrigues of
the latter years of Queen Elizabeth typified in the
Essex conspiracy, with its sanguinary denouement
and the wholesale corruption and depravity of the
Stuart menage furnish facts as hair-raising as any old-
world fictions, and conveniently adaptable to the
routine of the more picturesque Borgia and Medici
palaces. It would seem, indeed, that mere lust and
violence, with their train of seductions and adulteries
and vendettas, gradually became stale news, and that
a popular demand for more novel sensations inspired
the subtler shocks of the school associated primarily
with the names of Webster, Ford, and Tourneur. It
is a far cry from Titus Andronicus, with its straight-
forward rapes and limb-chopping, and its inevitable
ghosts, to Webster's Duchess of Malfi, where the
horrors of the madhouse are exploited with every
device of ultra-sophisticated Grand Guignol, and
Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, a variation on the
theme of Romeo and Juliet, with a brother and sister
as the ill-fated paramours. These men achieved a
definite intensification of interest, not only by special-
ising in abnormal vices and crimes, but by a closer
approximation to naturalism in their art, which, as
art, reaches the high-water mark of the dramatic
development of the period. The trial scene from
Webster's The White Devil remains the perfect poetic
idealisation of a sordid cause cclcbrc, of a spectacle as
familiar to us as to Webster's contemporaries a
thoroughbred lady arraigned before a masculine court
of justice, her woman's wit pitted against all the

44 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

resources of the trained intellect, holding her own
gamely to the end. The following excerpts may give
some idea of the quality of these " decadent " post-
Shakespeareans :

MONTICELSO : Stand to the table, gentlewoman.

Now, Signior,
Fall to your plea.

LAWYER : Domine ]udex, convene oculos in hanc
pcstem, mulierum corruptissimam.

VITTORIA : What's he?

FRANCISCO DE MEDICI : A lawyer that pleads against
you.

VITTORIA : Pray, my lord, let him speak his usual

tongue :
I'll make no answer else.

FRANCISCO : Why, you understand Latin.

VITTORIA : I do, sir; but amongst this auditory
Which come to hear my cause, the half or more
May be ignorant in 't.

FRANCISCO (to the lawyer) : Go on, sir.

VITTORIA (persisting) : By your favour,
I will not have my accusation clouded
In a strange tongue; all this assembly
Shall hear what you can charge me with.

She gains her point. The lawyer is ordered to
change his language.

LAWYER (furious) : Well,' then, have at you !
VITTORIA : I am at the mark, sir : I'll give aim to

you,
And tell you how near you shoot.

He immediately over-shoots the mark, and is glad
enough, before long, to give place to the Cardinal.

MONTICELSO : I shall be plainer with you, and point
out

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 45

Your follies in more natural red and white
Than that upon your cheek. . . .

VITTORIA : Honourable my lord,
It does not suit a reverend Cardinal
To play the lawyer thus

MONTICELSO : O, your trade instructs your language.
You see, my lords, what goodly fruit she seems;
Yet like those apples travellers report
To grow where Sodom and Gomorrah stood
I will but touch her and you straight shall see
She'll fall to soot and ashes.

VITTORIA : O poor charity !

Thou art seldom found in scarlet.

MONTICELSO : Who knows not how, when several

night by night

Her gates were choked with coaches, and her rooms
Outbraved the stars with several kind of lights;
When she did counterfeit a prince's court
In music, bouquets, and most riotous surfeits?
This whore, forsooth, was holy.

VITTORIA : Ha ! Whore ! What's that !

MONTICELSO : Shall I expound whore to you ? Sure,

I shall;
I'll give their perfect character.

He proceeds to do so forcibly in a matter of twenty-
four lines.

VITTORIA : This character scapes me. . . .
MONTICELSO : You know what whore is. Next the

devil adultery
Enters the devil murder.

FRANCISCO DE MEDICI (weightily) : Your unhappy

husband is dead.
VITTORIA (who arranged the murder) : O he's a

happy husband :
Now he owes nature nothing.

46 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

The gruesome detail of the crime is recalled to her.

MONTICELSO : And look upon this creature was his

wife.

She comes not like a widow; she comes armed
With scorn and impudence : is this a mourning habit?
VITTORIA : Had I foreknown his death, as you

suggest,
I would have bespoke my mourning.

The tension grows as Vittoria warms to her defence,
but the net closes about her. Never for a moment
does her magnificent bluff desert her.

MONTICELSO : If the devil
Did ever take good shape, behold his picture.

VITTORIA : You have one virtue left,
You will not flatter me.

FRANCISCO DE MEDICI : Who brought this letter?

VITTORIA : I am not compelled to tell you.

MONTICELSO : My lord duke (her far amour) sent to

you a thousand ducats
The twelfth of August.

VITTORIA : 'Twas to keep your cousin (her murdered

husband)
From prison. I paid use for 't.

MONTICELSO : I rather think

'Twas interest for his lust.

VITTORIA : Who says so

But yourself? If you be my accuser
Pray cease to be my judge : come from the bench.

All her arts and wiles will not avail her. The case
is clear. She is sentenced to confinement in a house of
convertites.

VITTORIA: A house of convertites! What's that?
MONTICELSO (brutally) : A house of penitent whores.

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 47

VITTORIA (who will have the last word) : Do the

noblemen in Rome (she is a Venetian)
Erect it for their wives, that I am sent
To lodge there?

Can such dialogue be called " an essentially barbarous
product"? Is it not, in point of drama, as impressive
as, shall we say, the trial scene from St. Joan ? Always
remembering that St. Joan is a real tragedy.

Vittoria Corombona, despite her name and her
setting, is English to the core, and was presumably
recognised as such. We call the play a poetic idealisa-
tion. There is a type of mind that must take every-
thing literally, and it may be that even in those days,
when imagination was, as it were, second nature,
there were people who refused to waste their sym-
pathies on " a lot of foreigners." For their benefit
(upon this supposition) the so-called Domestic Tragedy
found a place in the repertory. Two plays of this
class, Arden of Fevcrsham and The Yorkshire
Tragedy, are among those that from time to time
have been ascribed to Shakespeare. Arden might well
have been drawn by the hand that created Othello
if Shakespeare haa been in the habit of repeating
himself. The Domestic Tragedy practically confined
itself to the study of bourgeois Othellos and their
wives, guilty or innocent. Thomas Heywood, its most
distinguished exponent, produced a new kind of sensa-
tion with his masterpiece A Woman Kitted with
Kindness, in which the hero-raisonneur, convinced of
his wife's infidelity, deliberately refrains from taking
the " unwritten law " into his own hands. (As the
title of the play indicates, his spouse, anticipating the
second Mrs. Tanqueray, did not survive the treat-
ment.) Already we miss the colour, as we recognise
the modern cunning, of this embryonic problem play.
There is something incongruous, too, in such austere
treatment of the plain man and woman of that period.

48 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

We are reminded that the Elizabethans, while dis-
regarding the technical rules of classical drama, con-
formed in general to Aristotle's assertion of one (tragic)
law for the nobility, another (comic) for the lower
orders.

Comedy is necessarily cruel, but there are limits to
its cruelty. The squalid domestic interiors of the lower
orders of those days were certainly no laughing matter.
The realistic comedy, which flourished from the
beginning to the end of the period, and which deals
so intimately with the lives of the poor, is notable for
its scenes set in places of public resort in streets and
fields and taverns where private woes could be dissi-
pated in a hectic sociability or drowned in sack.
Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor already shows
this predilection for the open air in a cleaner and
countrified community. Porter's Two Angry Women
of Abingdon is even more vivid as a portrayal of
rustic manners. But London was of course the main
inspiration. The doctrinaire comedv of humours might
well have evaporated in words, out for its gradual
establishment on this terra firma. It was a hazardous
enterprise to take Ben Jonson as literally as he took
himself at his word. Chapman alone of the immediate
disciples may be said to have justified his courageous
loyalty to his master's opinions; certainly in All Fools
and May Day he reproduced Jonson 's formula as
brilliantly as in The Widow's Tears he aired his own
native frenzy of cynicism. But the metropolitan scene
drew even Jonson in the end; his superb panoramic
view of Bartholomew Fair crowns the achievement of
the London group of comedies. Chapman and Marston
collaborated with him in the looser composition of
Eastward Ho, a friendly counter-blast to Dekker's and
Webster's Westward Ho, and which in turn called
forth a Northward Ho by the same authors. Dekker,
solo, contributed his immortal Shoemaker's Holiday,
endearing himself to us in a personal sense achieved

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 49

by no other of Shakespeare's fellows. In collaboration
with Middleton, he further enriched our realistic
London comedy with The Roaring Girl, already re-
ferred to. Miadleton, wanting his restraining hand,
gave us in A Chaste Maid in Cheap side perhaps a
little too much of the seamy side of a good thing. But
it seems ungrateful to cavil. These plays give us some-
thing more than drama, more than art they are docu-
ments of the first social-historical significance; a potted
life of the times. Old London is brought before the
mind's eye more vividly than any phono-film could
have rendered it. Yet we must note that it was never
a mere " slice of life " reproduction; it was a vehicle
for the communication of vital satirical ideas.

We seem to have strayed far from Fletcher, but one
Elizabethan dramatist leads easily enough to almost
any other, and proceeding now to Massinger by way
of the curiously impersonal Middleton, it occurs to us
that we might as fitly have introduced this great name
as one with which Fletcher was associated more fre-
quently if not more fruitfully than with Beaumont.
Massinger collaborated with Middleton (and Rowley)
in a play The Old Law, the theme of which could
hardly have been conceived by any of his comrades.
We are here lifted above realities into a realm of fan-
tastic ideas; but neither fantasy nor the ideas intrude
on the artistically convincing story of a society where
the common notion that old fogeys are a nuisance is
carried to the logical extreme of simply killing off
everybody at a fixed age limit. The simplicity of it is
the Massinger touch. No idea seems too extravagant
for Massinger to exploit with a straight face, and a
persuasive imagination. As a contriver of plots on a
gigantic scale, not even Shakespeare can match him,
and there is mental meat in those plots. His easy-
flowing verse hurries us past the wildest improbabili-
ties, but it is all very stimulating and even enlighten-
ing up to a point. He appears himself to have been

50 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

possessed of considerable moral courage. He even dared
to air his Catholic sympathies in his plays, but artistic-
ally he shirks the issue again and again, and nearly
every one of his surviving plays* leaves one witn
a sense of vaguely frustrated purpose, as though he
had to make his stones just too good to be serviceable
to Truth. But the temptation must have been difficult
to resist. He has such wonderful brain-waves : a night-
mare vision some might call it prophetic of a prole-
tarian revolution (The Bondman) : a demonstration,
forestalling Pirandello, of the relativity of dramatic fact
and fiction (The Roman Actor) : the evocation of the
old crusading spirit in the opposition of romantic
Christian and picturesque Mohammedan ideas (The
Renegado) : the reflection of the economic-social
kaleidoscope through distorted mirrors (The City
Madam). The most popular of his plays, A New Way
to Pay Old Debts, with its superb portrait of Sir Giles
Overreach, the profiteer, held the stage well into the
nineteenth century. Mr. Archer does not fail to note
that Massinger had " a cleaner, saner mind " than
some of his contemporaries. And yet, paradoxically, in
one play at least, The Virgin Martyr, he is guilty of a
departure from clean-mindedness which some may
hold to be more reprehensible than the frank porno-
graphy of the more typical Elizabethans. The play may
be described as an essay in that modern speciality,
sexual suggestiveness. The offence is aggravated by
its origin in a pseudo-religious subject-matter (the
martyraom of St. Dorothea). Fletcher's pseudo-
pastoral, The Faithful Shepherdess so subtly con-

* Unique manuscript copies of a number of Mas-
singer's plays were, with many others, collected by one
Warburton, a bourgeois gentilhomme of the middle
eighteenth century, whose historic cook appropriated
the lot for use as dish covers. Three out of some fifty
plays were ultimately recovered.

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 51

trivcd that, had the authorship been anonymous, it
might have been accepted at its face value as a naive
plea for chastity is the only other notable example of
this aberration. Both are latish products, presaging the
dissolution of a " barbaric " age into the elements of a
fine-mannered civilisation.

For as suddenly it had flared up, so, gradually, the
flame of drama weakened till it flickered. In James
Shirley (1596-1666), the last of the big pre-Civil War
dramatists, we find signs of exhaustion and corruption
alike in comedy and in the other thing. There arc
echoes everywhere, and situations that suddenly fall
flat. The language is toning down; we may read whole
passages of dialogue without being arrested by a single
splendid image or striking word-coin. But, indeed,
drama itself had become vieux jeu. Mr. Ivor Brown,
in his Parties to the Play, has shown how by a sort of
tri-partite see-saw, the failure of the supply of fresh
drama automatically raises the status of either actor or
producer. We have seen how Ben Jonson, in his old
age, had succumbed to the lure of the fashionable
Court masque which depended at least as much on the
novel contrivances of the scenic artist as on the draw
of his lyrical powers, or even of his great name. The
drama reduced to this pass is as a Samson shorn of his
locks. Its strength has evaporated.

A Samson shorn of his locks, with the Philistine at
the gate. Or have the roles been reversed? The
ferociously militant righteousness of the Puritans was
surely no Philistine force. The Lord was on their side,
in their word as in His deed. The issue had become
clearly defined; Cavalier and Roundhead were^prepar-
ing for the inevitable day, with the theatre as a
practical bone of contention between them. The
Puritan Prynne, on 'the appearance (1632) of his
Histriomastix, a manifesto of prodigious length,
denouncing the stage and all its practices, had been
punished with a savagery that nothing less than war-

52 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

fever could justify. But swiftly the tables were to be
turned. On the outbreak of the Civil War, under party
pressure that they could not have resisted if they
would, Parliament proceeded to suppress the theatre
under penalties which were correspondingly vindictive.
It is customary to lament this act of fanatical tyranny,
but a sudden death stroke at least saved the glorious
age from simply petering out. The best days of the
Cavalier drama were long behind. If we must criticise
the policy that put it out of its misery, we can only
lament that the Roundheads, instead of closing the
theatres, did not decide to give us a Roundhead drama
for a change.

IV. THE AFTERMATH CALLED RESTORATION

It was not really death at all rather an operation
necessitating a prolonged period of relative inactivity,
which, as it happened, gave the patient a new lease of
life. The Cavalier spirit was no more killed by the
suppression of its traditional histrionic outlet than by
the axe that severed the head of its reigning symbol.
The existing theatres would probably have closed for
all effective purposes without the intervention of
Parliament, for its denizens, Royalist to a man, were
ready enough to serve their king in the field of action
proper. But peace or war, theatres or no theatres,
drama never quite dies. For fourteen years it was
without a home in England. No churcn opened its
portals to receive a prodigal offspring that might well
have turned over a new leaf, or at least have re-
turned an old one. Plays continued to be produced
sporadically and privately in Royalist circles by refugee
groups of players; and drama issued in increasing
volume from the printing-press, encouraging a habit
of reading plays that presently grew into a fashionable
craze, to be superseded only by the vogue of the
eighteenth-century novel. Regular stage history has no

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 53

single item to record between the years 1642 and 1656,
and the effect of this hiatus was a definite snapping
of the theatrical tradition. The clouds lifted on a new
London, with Bankside left in the shade; the home of
a generation of fervent Cavaliers without a Cavalier
training Cavaliers (or Conservatives) who had just
made a revolution. There are capacities in which every
man is a Conservative; his digestion is conservative,
and enforces his allegiance for the ritual of eating and
drinking. So, too, with the ritual of theatrical fare.
The English public was never so self-consciously con-
servative as in the ardour with which, reacting from
the regime of the Commonwealth, it clamoured for
the good old days and the good old ways; but where
the senses were concerned the theatrical sense in
particular there was no foundation of personal
experience from which the passion to conserve could
derive impetus, and so the reactionary became pioneer
in spite of himself. One important reform, almost
immediately instituted, illustrates the point. There
was no reason why women's parts should not, in
Shakespeare's day or, for that matter, in the preced-
ing Tudor age have been played, and ably played, by
women; no reason, unless prejudice (which is one side
of tradition) be accounted a reason. There must have
been ample feminine talent among the old irregular
troupes of variety artistes whose partial initiation into
the mystery of me interlude player had so drastically
diverted the trend of the drama; but there was never
any question of enlisting that talent : public opinion
would not have countenanced so violent a break with
the ecclesiastical convention that clung about {he least
and lewdest of its stage pieces. It was a matter of
habit rather than of principle. The reopening of the
theatres involved a reopening of the question. In the
upshot, male impersonators of female parts were
adjudged unnecessary, even objectionable, and the
professional actress stepped into the breach without

54 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

any fuss, making herself indispensable almost from

the beginning.

The moving spirit in the revival of dramatic activity,
Sir William Davenant (1605-1668), was himself a
veteran poetaster, a link, if a very loose link, with the
old theatre. Under the first Stuart kings, he had dis-
tinguished himself in contributions to the precious
Court masque. Already before the restoration of
Charles II. he had obtained leave to present some
compositions of his own in emulation of the latest
Continental novelty, the Italian opera. How this
bastard art found favour and developed native off-
shoots in the form of Ballad Opera and Comic Opera
belongs to another story. Davenant's enterprise,
inspired by foreign models, culminated in the
establishment of two licensed playhouses, the originals
of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, artificially lighted
and equipped with the modern proscenium that com-
pletes the break with the traditions of the Elizabethan
apron-stage. New and compelling influences from
abroad obscured from the first, if they did not
obliterate, the memory of the old Bankside regime.
While in England monarchy and drama alike had
been temporarily under eclipse, a genius among kings,
Louis XlV. or France, was cultivating, under his
personal supervision, that essentially exclusive product
the neo-classical, heroic drama of Corneille. The
master's " arrival " with Le Cid in 1636, twenty years
after the death of Shakespeare, some nine months
before the death of Ben Jonson, ushered in the great
epoch of the French Theatre. And as the French
Court ;was the natural focus of English Royalist
aspirations, its drama was accepted as a model for all
patriotic promoters of Restoration revelry. In French
eyes the Elizabethan drama was irretrievably damned
by its deliberate violation of the law and order of the
academic Hellenic. We have seen how this very issue
had been fought out in the days that preceded the

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 55

emergence of Marlowe, and how the classicists had
been routed by sheer weight of popular taste. Popular
taste was no longer the criterion in a theatrcland con-
sisting of two monopolised and ultra-fashionable
houses, with corresponding prices of admission. The
plebeian spectator (m so far as he was privileged to
join the charmed circle) was disposed to defer to the
judgment of his social betters, especially as his own
marked predilection for vulgar fare was indulged by
continual revivals of old favourites. The poets con-
formed religiously to the mood and mode of the
Court. For the nrst decade of the new era, we may
learn almost everything* worth learning about the con-
temporary theatre from the impressions of that naive
and catholic playgoer, Samuel Pepys. During the
years of his Diary (1659-1669), he reports performances
of twelve of Shakespeare's plays, twenty-seven plays of
which Fletcher was sole or part author, seven of Ben
Jonson's, eight of Shirley's, and a number of other
minor Elizabethan works. He saw during the same
period five translations from Corneille, and for new
native fare of note, several " heroic tragedies," in
imitation of Corneille, by John Dryden (1631-1700),
the first official poet laureate and the outstanding
literary figure of the age. If the old Adam had to be
appeased by Elizabethan revivals, Dryden was deter-
mined that for the future, at any rate, English
dramatists would never again make themselves
ridiculous (in Versailles) by resorting to the laxity
of form and content that had satisfied the old Globe
audiences. If this sounds incredible, we can only refer
the reader to Dryden's explicit apology for the plays
of his predecessors in a preface to one of his own :
" Malice and partiality set apart, let any man who
understands English, read diligently the works of
Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that
he will find in every page either some solecism of
speech or some notorious flaw in sense. ... I suppose

56 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

I need not name . . . the historical plays of Shake-
speare : besides many of the rest, as the Winter's Talc,
Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, which were
either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly
written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth,
nor the serious part your concernment" . . . and so on.
It remains for us to remark that of the various original
features with which Dryden a great man, as men go
endowed the drama of his day, this practice of
writing a preface to each play as it was published is
the one that has stood him in best stead with posterity.
His prefaces are still readable.

The " heroic couplet," with which he sought to
improve on the free and easy blank verse of his for-
bears, had its hour upon the stage, and then was heard
no more. His desperate endeavour to impose formality
on the erratic English language may indeed be termea
heroic; it was wasted. As with the dialogue, so with
the texture of his plays, which, conceived in the spirit
of the French Court, remain mere exercises in dramatic
decorum. When we compare (as we are bound to)
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with Dryden's
handling of the same material in All for Love, we are
left marvelling at the naivete of the man's ambition
to interpret lire in terms of polite society. His tragedy
was, however, to make dramatic history in another
connection. The Rehearsal of the Duke of Bucking-
ham mercilessly exposed the whole bag of tricks; and
a century later was transformed by Sheridan into The
Critic, perhaps the funniest play in the English
language.

A cause of mirth in others, Dryden is for us less
successful as a comic poet on his own account. Aiming
higher than the more famous comic dramatists of the
age, his pieces, though freely leavened with both wit
and obscenity, suffer from a self-conscious addiction
to a hypothetical refinement, producing continual jars
on our enjoyment. We prefer the wit and obscenity

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 57

undiluted, or at any rate blended with more congenial
concomitants, as in the more representative writers of
the Comedy of Manners, presently to be con-
sidered.

The reaction against Dryden's self-styled Reforma-
tion of the stage is marked in the work of the dramatic
poets who emerge in the years following the close of
Pepys' diary. The case against the Elizabethans was
gradually exploded. To put the clock back was another
kind of problem. A mediocrity, Thomas Shadwell
(1640-1692), who succeeded to the laureateship, for-
feited by Dryden at the Revolution, aspired to institute
a new Jonsonian comedy of humours. His Bury Fair,
the best of a series of regular annual tributes to the
master, is attractive enough in its way, but comedy
was settling into a new groove, and ne laboured in
vain. Tragedy never really settled anywhere. Both
Thomas Otway (1652-1685) and Nathaniel Lee (1653-
1692), after commencing in the pseudo-classic-heroic
vein, were drawn irresistibly into the old ways, and
their more successful works were written in frank
emulation of the form, as well as in the blank verse, of
the pre-Civil War theatre. Through them, as through
Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), who followed them, the
back-wash of the great age throws up its last master-
pieces. Otway's Venice Preserved is pure Elizabethan.
His Orphan and Lee's Casar Borgia, if less pure, are
also less decadent than many of the plays that had
preceded the close of the period to which they properly
belonged. Rowe's Jane Shore and Lady Jane Grey,
fine plays both of them, are almost Victorian in feeling,
and the Elizabethan technique has been subtly* meta-
morphosed before its effacement in the deluge that
followed.

On the other side of the Channel, the mande of
Corneille had fallen on Racine, in default of an
English candidate, but the entente cordiale was
strengthened by the emergence, under the same

58 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

benign Royal patronage, of a comic genius, more
infectious and more cosmopolitan in appeal, indeed
the Good European par excellence. Moliere's human-
istic transfiguration of the old Roman comedy was the
admitted model alike of Goldoni in Italy, of Holberg
in Denmark, and of Griboyedov in Russia. That our
own comic poets of the period derived inspiration from
the same source can hardly be disputed, although the
extent of the obligation remains a matter of dispute.
Sir George Etherege (1636-1694), whose Love in a Tub
(1664) is generally regarded as the first Comedy of
Manners, was certainly one of the earliest admirers of
Moliere, just as certainly 'as he was steeped in the old
cavalier spirit of Ben Jonson and Fletcher. It is claimed
by John Palmer in his book The Comedy of Manners
that the school initiated by Etherege is as distinct from
the one as from the other influence by virtue of a
subjective element, a trick of endowing the central
character or characters with the author's own per-
sonality real or affected and so of conveying his
particular reaction to the society in which he moved,
and to the limits of which his comedy is restricted.
Moliere's characters, to be sure, were carefully selected
types; so, we have seen, were the representative
" humours " of Ben Jonson. But we have also seen
that Elizabethan comedy in general, and Fletcher's in
particular, achieved its most striking effects precisely
from a distinctive personal bias, functioning, however,
for the most part in brilliantly imaginative settings,
and expanded to embrace almost unlimited relations
with life. When Etherege initiates us into cultured
leisured English society after the Restoration, we are
charmed to discover a piece of genuine " period," pre-
served for all time, as is the life of Elizabethan London
in the cycle of realistic comedies noticed in the previous
section. When Love in a Tub is followed by She
would if she could (1667), our delight is intensified
by the increasing cunning of the process, and (need we

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 59

say?) we are tickled by the novelty of a prurience more
refined (in the literal sense of the word) than the naive
salacity of the older dramatists. In William Wycherlcy
(1640-1715) the art is developed on all sides. Love in
a Wood (1671) is followed by two free adaptations
from Moliere, The Country Wife and The Plain
Dealer. The dialogue and (within its restricted range)
the characterisation are here positively dazzling in
their brilliance, but, with all allowance for the " man-
liness " of their author, Mr. Horner, of the former
play, and Mr. Manly, of the latter, are a pair of cads,
if the word has any meaning in our dictionary.
Wycherley's best is surpassed by the best of William
Congreve (1670-1729). The Way of the World (1700)
has a perfection of style that makes it, from whatever
standpoint it is viewed, one of the great plays of the
English language. But before we have reached it by
way of his earlier plays, The Old Bachelor, The Double
Dealer, and Love for Love, and of the robuster plays
notably The Provoked Wife of Sir John Vanbrugh
(1666-1726), the freshness has worn off, the paftern has
become monotonous. If we obtain an occasional
glimpse into an unhappy, but at least a human situa-
tion, it is straightway turned with a witty line as in
Sir John Brute's " Why did I marry? I married
because I had a mind to lie with her, and she would
not let me " whence we pass on to the next witty
line: "Why did you not ravish her?" with its train
of further laughs. The early cuckoo enchants us, but
we grow impatient of his notes long before the end of
the season; even so, we weary of these caged songsters*
everlasting cuckoldoodledum. We are tired of the
sniggering, posturing crew of good-for-nothings the
truewits and the dapperwits and the semi-wits, and
their butts, and their animal mistresses and their
pathological hoydens; of their risqul jests and gibes
that, long before Queen Anne is dead, have become
chestnuts. We pine for the freedom of the Eliza-

6o THE ENGLISH DRAMA

bcthans, to whom manners were mere "humours";
for whom Mirabel and Millamant (the beaux ideals of
the new school) would have been a pair of nice lovers,
of subsidiary interest to some tale of arresting human
interest.

In their defence we must remember that none of
these writers really took himself seriously, or regarded
his art as more than a kind of social accomplish-
ment. Etherege was conspicuously of Horseback Hall.
Wycherley's ambition was satisfied by the conquest of
one of Charles II.'s mistresses by means of an audacious
ditty in his first play. Vanbrugh was by profession an
architect as it nappens, a great one. Congreve, on
being informed that Voltaire wished to call on him to
pay his respects, insisted that he would be visited on
no other footing than as a gentleman. On the failure
of The Way of the World, he vowed he would write
no more plays and, though he survived for twenty-nine
years, he kept his vow.

George Farquhar (1678-1707), the last of the line,
has been accused of killing the Comedy of Manners
by insinuating a degree of morality into an essentially
immoral art-medium. He was the traitor that sold the
pass. At least, he might have been tempted to do so.
Unlike his predecessors, he was dependent on his pen
for the maintenance of a home. He died at the age of
thirty, leaving a beloved wife and child without a
penny. Difficult indeed it must have been, with the
wolf at the door, to sustain the note of irresponsible
swagger throughout five acts of ado about nothing.
Whatever the cause, the " pert, low " fellow, with his
Irish temperament, did undoubtedly betray some
genuine feeling, if not too much. It is more to the
point that he let fresh air into the theatre. Towards
the end of the late war, the (London) Stage Society,
by an inspiration, gave a performance of his first play,
The Recruiting Officer, and those who were present
will not easily forget the clean sweep it made of the

SHAKESPEARE TO POLITE SOCIETY 61

cobwebs of multitudinous cares, and particularly the
exhilarating effect of its country scenes and characters.
There is something of the same hearty quality in parts
(only) of his second best play, The Beaux Stratagem.
If we must shed tears over Farquhar, let it not be for
the aesthetic shortcomings of his brief and infinitely
promising achievement.

But the Comedy of Manners was doomed before
Farquhar appeared on the scene. The shrill voice of
the Puritan, stifled in the prolonged mafficking of the
Restoration, had become articulate in Jeremy Collier's
Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the
English Stage, issued broadcast in 1698.* Unlike
Prynne's ill-rated diatribe, it was relatively brief and
to the point, and the response was immediate and
epoch-making or, more accurately, epoch-unmaking.
Playgoers rubbed their eyes as though awakened from
some Puck-inspired freak of hallucination. The
dramatists, surprised into a stammering self-conscious-
ness, knew not which way to turn in self-defence.
They might as well have spared their efforts to turn
in any direction. The tide of public opinion had
turned, irresistibly to submerge them. Once again the
Roundheads were masters of the situation. Once
again, alas, the Roundhead genius neglected to take
advantage of that situation.

The first golden opportunity of capturing the theatre
for spiritual purposes had been lost when the Round-
heads had chosen to- suppress the theatre. The results
of that policy were to be discerned perhaps in the
excesses that followed the inevitable restoration of the
theatre, which excesses had, in turn, provoked this
fresh mobilisation of outraged public opinion. A
second closure was hardly a matter of practical politics.
The power behind Collier may, however, be said to

* The more impressive in that Collier was not a
Puritan at all, but a Tory and a High Churchman.

62 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

have effected more lasting damage than the Puritans
of the Long Parliament. The hated theatre had been
discredited, was in disruption. The enemy the
essential enemy left the theatre to stew in its own
juice : which it did for the best part of the succeeding
two hundred years.

CHAPTER III

THE RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD
DRAMA

I. INTERREGNUM

IT would be fanciful to pretend that Puritanical resist-
ance, whether active or passive, provided the sole or
even the major grounds of the slump that followed
the collapse of the last great Cavalier effort in
dramatic self-expression. At first glance, it would
certainly appear that, so far from repudiating the
inevitably chastened theatre,* the Puritans, through
the agency of artistic mediocrities, actually facilitated
its descent to bathos. Moral plays were not wanting
in the reaction that followed Jeremy Collier's Short
View. Those who witnessed Mr. Nigel Playfair's
recent revival (1927) of Lillo's celebrated George
Barn well (1731) will have appreciated a nice adjust-
ment between artistic, ethical and box-office prin-
ciples. Better plays of the same school have passed
more completely into oblivion; plays of competent
workmanship, occasional sincerity, even earnestness,
but utterly lacking inspiration. The one play of the
period that did not lack inspiration, Addison's Cato
(1714), achieved a record run oy reason of its apposite-
ness to current political issues much as, by a similar
chance, a fine modern play, Abraham Lincoln^ suc-
ceeded in spite of its merits. Cato (face most modern

* By the theatre we mean, of course, the theatrical
management. The Comedy of Manners was dead.
An alternative drama had to be manufactured, fail-
ing a spontaneous supply.
63

64 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

stage historians) might, in a more generous social en-
vironment, have inaugurated a new school of English
tragedy. It proved a mere flash in the pan. Its Roman
body went marching on through innumerable doggerel
rechauffes, while its soul dissolved into the elements.
Perhaps it is not for us to assign causes for the ebbs
any more than for the flows in the art tides. The Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away. One explanation
of the decline in question has at least the virtue
of deserving to be the truth, and the appearance
of presenting at least a facet of the truth. Henry
Fielding, a literary genius of the supreme order
the first to appear since Shakespeare made his
mark as a playwright of budding ideas and ideals.
His playwriting activity, with its promise of a new
era in English drama, was abruptly checked by a
Government whose notorious corruption was chal-
lenged by those ideas and ideals. The Licensing
Act of 1737, establishing the stage censorship that is
still in force, was rushed through for the specific
purpose. Fielding, effectually banished from the stage,
embarked on the less hazardous highway of narrative
fiction, encouraged by the sensational success of
Richardson's Pamela, and founded a dynasty of great
novelists. Imaginative writers followed his lead, as,
before him, they had followed Shakespeare's. This is
not the place to enter into the question of the cam-
parative merits of the novel and the play, but it may
not be irrelevant to point out that the form of the
novel was no more a novelty in the time of Fielding
than in the time of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, with a
wide reading, not alone of English fiction from Chaucer
to Lodge but of continental novelli sufficiently
attested oy his pickings from them elected the play
for his medium and found it adequate for all his
purposes. If we are not justified in conjecturing how
far he might have been tempted into other paths
under the provocation that occasioned Fielding's de-

RESTORATION OP ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 65

fcction, we are at least justified in submitting the facts
and pointing the implications.

Drama as a live force died out. The theatres carried
on. Failing the dramatist, interest in the stage was
kept alive by the players, and for that we should be
duly grateful to the players. We are a little grudging
in our gratitude. Are the mice to blame for the cats'
absence? Perhaps not, but we may deplore their
devastating incursions into the cats' preserves. As the
text of Shakespeare was mutilated for the aggrandise-
ment of the Dully Bottoms that ruled the theatre
during the period under survey, so new plays were
fashioned to meet their exclusively histrionic require-
ments. To the old moral obloquy that had been the
heritage of the dramatists from the time of Marlowe,
was gradually added a new kind of prejudice an
intellectual contempt; the notion that play writing is a
mere knack, to be acquired by any fool with the sort
of happy accident that enables a man to dabble in
sleight-of-hand or ventriloquism.

If we seem to be drifting into a discussion of the
contemporary theatre it is only because, in essential
features, the West End London stage of to-day has
changed very little from the stage described by Collcy
Gibber (1671-1757) in his ingenuous apology for a
theatrically significant but dramatically negligible
career, or from the stage satirised by Sheridan some
years later in The Critic. Sir Fretful Plagiary wrote
tragedies because the actor-managers of Sheridan's day
still liked to feature themselves as heroes of pseudo-
Elizabethan melodramas.

Sheridan himself (1751-1816), in his famous trilogy
of masterpieces, and Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) in
the equally famous She Stoops to Conquer posthu-
mous issue of the neo-Restoration comedy of Farquhar
provided the only considerable dramatic literature
between the early eighteenth and the later nineteenth
centuries. The perennial inquiry into what's wrong with

3

66 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

the theatre dates from the Jeremy Collier period, and
not, as is popularly supposed, from a time whereof the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary. It was
not originally a mere silly-season topic. Students of
drama must have felt indeed that all was lost when
the divorce between poetry and drama was, as it were,
made absolute by the emergence of the " dramatic
poem " and the " poetic drama," whereby the author
sought to distinguish his work, for the information
of the cultured public, from the kind of piece that
merely ministered to the virtuosity of popular stage
players. It would have been a little awkward to ex-
plain to an Elizabethan exacdy what was meant by
a " play for the study." These freak products of
tmigrt drama, without which the collected editions of
most of our great poets are obviously not complete,
tell their own story. There arc scenes in Byron's
Manfred that touch the heights of great drama, to
descend abruptly into passages that no earthly audience
could sit out, and, while we may try to believe on
principle that, but for the folly of the censor, Shelley's
Ccnci could be relied upon to " bring the house
down," we must confess on a closer searching of the
heart, that it lacks, despite its magnificent qualities,
the touch of the practised playwright, the touch that
a Webster or a Massinger could have supplied without
mental exertion. Born in a more auspicious age, what
might not Browning and Swinburne have given to
the theatre! Their adventures on a Tom Tiddler's
ground, ruled, in fealty to their Lordships of the
Theatre, by a Mrs. Inchoald and a Sheridan Knowles,
belong to the chronicles of square pegs in round holes.
With Stephen Phillips (1868-1915) we arc already on
the threshold of the new era. After a sudden and
short vogue (to the credit of Beerbohm Tree), he was
cold-shouldered out of a theatre that is not yet ready
for a poetry distinguishable from fat parts for actor-
managers.

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 67

The body of this interregnum drama, to be studied
in its due perspective, should be read (assuming our
eyesight is equal to the strain) in the format of a series
in wnich it was preserved for the benefit of stage-
devotees. Dice's Penny Plays, a folded broadsheet,
closely filled in microscopic type, provides an appro-
priate setting for the tags and gags of the prc-
Robertsonian theatre. It is difficult for us in these days
to realise the measure in which the earlier pioneers of
our now renascent drama had to pay for this legacy
of penny dreadfuls. It is recorded of the late W. S.
Gilbert, a considerable man of letters in his way,
that he was apt to take offence on being classified
as a "playwright," instead of the more dignified
" dramatist " a pathetic symptom of the inferiority
complex produced by nearly two centuries of a patently
inferior drama.

II. REGENERATION

SIR WILLIAM : Sit down, Trafalgar. This gentleman
is about to read a comedy. A cheer! (Testily) Are
there no cheers here ! (ROSE brings a chair.) Sit down.

Miss SOWER (sitting, bewildered) : William, is all
this quite ?

SIR WILLIAM : Yes, Trafalgar, quite in place quite
in place. (To TOM, referring to GADD and COLPOYS,
who swagger in at the door) Friends of yours?

TOM : Yes, Sir William.

SIR WILLIAM : Sit down (imperatively). Sit down
and be silent. (GADD and COLPOYS seat themselves on
the sofa, lit(c men in a dream. ROSE sits on the dress
basket.)

AVOMA (opening the door slightly in an anxious
voice) : Rose

SIR WILLIAM : Come in, ma'am, come in I (AVONIA,
still in her pantomime dress, enters) Sit down,
ma'am, and be silent!

(AVONIA sits beside ROSE, next to Miss GOWER.)

68 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

Miss GOWER (in horror) : Oh-h-h-h !

SIR WILLIAM (restraining her) : Quite in place,
Trafalgar, quite in place. (To TOM) Now, Sir !

TOM (opening his manscript and reading) : Life, a
Comedy by Thomas

Quite in place, this curtain scene from Sir Arthur
Pinero's ever-memorable Trelawney of the Wells; and
the missing word is " Robertson." Thomas Robertson
{1829-71) brought our drama triumphantly out of the
long tunnel into the daylight of life. Not the full
daylight; this had to be accomplished by stages. In
Robertson we view the daylight through rose-coloured
windows. Quite in place that the achievement should
be celebrated by one who so ably and loyally carried
on the good work; quite in place that the portrait
should DC executed in the master's own manner,
against a background of true love destined to live
happily ever after. There is another, a later, manner
in which the story might have been treated with
greater fidelity to historical fact. John Galsworthy,
who actually carried Robertson's technique to its
logical conclusion, has ventured to " place " poor Tom,
with an irony that seems a litdc unkind, by the in-
genious interpolation (in The Eldest Son) of a scene
from Caste, in rehearsal by a company of patrician
amateurs, among whom the problem of Caste is
resolving itself in the light of real life. Robertson's
own real life was anything but a fairy tale. Success
came to him only after a heart and health breaking
grind. It is fashionable to ridicule his work. We know
so much better these days. He did not labour in
vain.

There is an irresistible charm about his plays, which,
like all good plays, read well, despite the shorthand
abracadabra of stage directions in which the printed
dialogue is embedded. The characters convey some-
thing of the naivete of figures in Dresden porcelain.

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 69

Every now and then they lapse into lifclessncss. We
become conscious of a first-class compartment that jolts
a little dangerously in the morning twilight . . . and
of the effort of keeping natural after such ages and
ages in that horrid tunnel, with the fumes still about
the throat. . . . Till presently they open their eyes,
the breath returns, and we have another joyous little
prattle over the cups and saucers. . . . Tne last of
them, War (1871), was a fiasco. (The reality of the
Franco-Prussian War exposed the obvious limitations
of his art.) Tom, aged forty-one, was on his death-bed,
but the cause was winning all along the line. What
cause? it may be asked. Perfect Propriety cum
Romance in the middle of the reign of Queen Vic-
toria : Coals in Newcastle ! The cause was Naturalism
in the Theatre, and it was a hard-won victory of the
first round. Both the Romance and the Propriety were
to go by the board before the final victory if indeed,
any victory in the theatre is final.

Arthur Wing Pinero consolidated the gains, and
was joined presendy by a young hothead, Henry
Arthur Jones, fresh from an early triumph in the
enemy's camp. They carried the Old Guard of
dramatic critics along by easy progressions in light
comedy and satire. " Only a simple story of London
life . . . only a tale of man's sure trust and woman's
gentle confidence . . . with its alternate ripples of
honest laughter and its tears of sympathy, with its
genuine humour and its wholesome, manly senti-
ment," cooed Clement Scott, the doyen of the circle,
referring to Sweet Lavender. Side by side, feeling their
way carefully, the pair gradually extended their scope.
The seamy side of romance was exhibited in J<5nes's
Saints and Sinners (1884) and Pinero's Profligate
(1889), plays that ought to have been melodramas, but
somehow were not. The conventions of melodrama
were presendy discarded altogether. The common-
places of the " advanced " novel transferred to the

70 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

realistic stage settings of Tom Robertson, discussed in
unequivocal language, produced a tremendous sensa-
tion. The Old Guard, with a new sense of responsi-
bility, pronounced them daring, and added a caution.
" Daring " was the word that echoed at every late-
Victorian dinner-table. Pinero and Jones found them-
selves in the full glare of our modern limelight. Oscar
Wilde (1856-1900) kept them company for a while
before giving full rein to his irresponsible genius in
the immortal comedy of late Victorian manners, The
Importance of Being Earnest. Jones went " all out "
for the sins of society in Judah (1891). Pinero countered
three years later with The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a
sentimental-serious, psychological study of erring
womanhood. A leap in the dark, but it landed him in
safety. Jones, seeking in his turn to go one better, was
not so fortunate. In Michael and His Lost Angel,
certainly a better play than Pinero's, he overstepped
the mark. A minister of the Church of England, suc-
cumbs to the charms of another man's wife, confesses
his sin from the pulpit (a stage pulpit !), but does not
quite whole-heartedly repent it. " Daring " in sex was
one thing : " Hands off Religion !" thundered the Old
Guard. There were two dissentients. One was William
Archer; the other his friend "G. B. S." of The Saturday
Review. Their voices carried no weight against the
clamour; the play was withdrawn after ten perform-
ances. Jones tried desperately to retrieve his faux pas.
Did the public favour vainly repentant female sinners?
He would give them a Defence of Mrs. Dane every
whit as stimulating as Pinero's Woman Killed
with Kindness; disclose a " past," nay, a single slip,
under" poignantly extenuating circumstances, bearing a
retribution immeasurably more cruel than mere death.
Pinero, with his finger-ends on the public pulse, went
from triumph to triumph. A discreet experiment with
a religious motif might have served as an object lesson
to his rasher rival. The Notorious Mrs. Eobsmith is

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 71

not only an adulteress, but an atheist to boot. In a
climax of moral abandon she deliberately hurls a Bible
into the fire. But it does not stay there. A minute
later, in the nick of time, she is grovelling before the
grate to bring down the curtain on the rescue of her
author's reputation. The experiment was not repeated.
The same " G. B. S." became curiously eloquent on the
subject of Mrs. Ebbsmith, and his word was beginning
to carry weight, at least with the intelligentsia. Pincro
took trie hint, and returned to the more congenial
Divorce Courts.

But " G. B. S." would not let that Bible alone. It
was excessively bad form, and, after all, he was only a
dramatic critic, but the perverse fellow kept declaring
that he was on the side of Mr. Jones's "lost angel "
and Mr. Pinero's atheist, and that these " new "
English dramatists were not worthy to tie the shoe-
latchets of an obscene foreigner, Henrik Ibsen by name,
whose plays Mr. William Archer was just then dili-
gently translating; finally and paradoxically (as it
sounded) and with great earnestness, he declared that
Bunyan was Better Than Shakespeare. The man in
the street found it a little difficult to reconcile these
pronouncements. Unashamed blasphemy in itself was
intelligible and familiar. But what had Bunyan to do
with such a cause? Bunyan had everything to do with
it. To appreciate the significance of the Shavian revo-
lution it is only necessary to re-orientate the position of
the old Cavalier and Roundhead parties under the
altered social conditions of the late nineteenth century.
The bete noire of the Puritan had ever been Con-
formity, or, in more modern parlance, Respectability.
Conformity in the days of the Tudor and Stuart
monarchs, apart from its political implication, was all
of a piece with the lax morals celebrated in the Eliza-
bethan and neo-Elizabethan dramas. Conformity in
the Victorian era involved at least lip-service to the
domestic virtues, the seventh commandment in par-

72 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

ticular, and so absorbed a good deal of the original
non-conformist element. The Respectable Victorian
found himself confronted with a dual opposition on
the one hand, the unprincipled old sinners, and, on
the other, the ultra-principled pioneers of the Higher
Life; and one of his weaknesses was an apparent
inability to distinguish between the two. To be a free-
thinker and, by consequence, a free-lover was in the
eyes of the (respectable; world to put oneself in the
company of profligates, moral degenerates, and "out-
siders " generally. This free-thinking Puritanism,,
derived from Shelley, and, stimulated under pressure
of social problems arising out of modern industrialism,
had produced a militant humanitarianism (embracing
feminism, socialism, and the " isms " generally) that
was ever seeking new ways of reaching the conscience
of the public; and that ultimately discovered the drama
by the same sure instinct that guided the makers of
the early Mystery drama (and of the earlier Mysteries
that developed into Greek tragedy). It was a religious
impulse without denomination, and it cut clean across
the traditions of the commercial theatre. Those who
were not for it were against it. Pinero's attitude was
that of the ordinary English gentleman. Jones was a
representative of the progressive side of Victorianism.
Both alike were untouched by the spirit that had
found expression in the plays of Ibsen, the originator
of this new religious drama. Shaw had commenced
his career as politician : politics were not wide enough
to contain his passion for a better world. The outburst
of vituperation that greeted Ibsen in England deter-
mined his choice of medium.* "An open drain; a
loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly;

* By one of Time's revenges, he had previously
embarked on the career of a novelist, following the
precedent established by Fielding for creative writers
of the first order.

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 73

a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open,'"
raved a transfigured Clement Scott, after the first
performance of Ghosts. It was an eye-opener for
" G. B. S." " The unpleasant play's the thing whereby
to touch the conscience," he must have murmured,,
and promptly gave us Widowers' Houses, Mrs.
Warren's Profession, and The Philanderer (complete
with caricature of Clement Scott), throwing in by way
of relief some " pleasant " plays, including the " Pre-
Raphaelite " (he meant pre-John Heywoodian) Can-
diaa: A Mystery. The first mystery of the secular
theatre.

III. SHAW AND COUNTER-SHAW

More than a quarter of a century has passed since
the Shavian clarion was first sounded. Tom Robertson
and his services to the stage have long since faded
from the playgoer's memory. Indeed, the public is
already beginning to forget, not Shaw (the public is
beginning to know him), but the reforms we owe to
the barrage of criticism, continuing over many years,,
with which he prepared the way for his assault of the
citadel, in the capacity of a creative artist. Some, still
living, have neither forgotten nor forgiven. As late as
1914, " A Playwright of the Past," a man honoured
in his generation, could write : " Mr. Shaw cannot be
passed by with a bow and a smile. It were rank
treachery and cowardice to be polite to him. He is a
public Ganger. He is out to destroy, and must be
destroyed."

If Robertson served as a vacuum-cleaner ojn the
material side, Shaw has swept the spiritual atmosphere
of the drama. The process is still at work, im-
perceptibly. The Pinero-Jones school continues to
function, thanks to the breadth and adaptability of
the technique elaborated by its founders, and extended
by assimilation in the lively minds of an H. H. Davies,

74 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

an Alfred Sutro and a Somerset Maugham. Mr.
Maugham, indeed, not infrequently leavens his
comedies with a tincture of Shavian ideology, with
incongruous results. For the Shaw and the pre-Shaw
are as the proverbial East and West.* The criterion
is the simple one of intention. The objective of the
orthodox dramatist is the box-office, via sex appeal.
Shaw and his followers, while not indifferent to
practical considerations, are moved by a religious
impulse. The ultimate greatness of Shaw lies in his
uncomprising integrity of purpose. His relations with
the theatre may be expressed in the familiar adage
about Mahomet and the mountain. Gifted with a
more dazzling and penetrating wit than was ever
known before, he could hardly have remained un-
known indefinitely. In an idiom of his own, irresistible
to the ear, he delivered, as he continues to deliver, his
message. Accepted as a crank or (alternatively) a
charlatan, but certainly no bore, the theatre offered
to meet him halfway. He held his ground. The Court
Theatre capitulated (1904-1907). Disdaining to in-
gratiate himself, he despatched his audience with
Getting Married. Three years later the Duke of York's
Theatre waited on him. He bestowed his blessing in
the yet more forbidding shape of Misalliance. This
determined refusal to cater for the people's mere
entertainment has characterised his policy from first
to last. His occasional lapses into pot-boilers or tom-
fooleries (meaning pieces however slightly flavoured
with the elements of popular appeal) have invariably
been atoned for by extravagantly uncommercial experi-
mcnts H So Pygmalion an aberration for the benefit of
Beerbohm Tree was followed by Heartbrea\ House,
and sweet St. Joan by an acidulated " metabiological
pentatcuch."

* The honest comedy of St. John Hankin may be
admitted as a borderline case.

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 75

The mountain remains a mountain still, and
Mahomet * remains Mahomet.

What of the followers of Mahomet?

To pursue the allegory, on all sides of the mountain,
little hillocks are raising themselves in the name of
Mahomet. . . .

The first English Repertory Theatre was founded
by Miss Horniman in Manchester on September 23rd,
1907. It collapsed during the war. Since the war,
under the initiative of Sir Barry Jackson, of Birming-
ham, this original enterprise has given place to a move-
ment which was aptly related to the general situation
in a recent front-page article of The Times Literary
Supplement (July 28th, 1927).*

" A student of the drama is to-day embarrassed by
contradictions. He sees outside the commercial theatres
of London abundant evidence of experimental activity,
but inside them, except on rare occasions, a condition
near to death. ... A playgoer who looks down the
current list of plays will find that nearly all ask to be
visited in the same uncritical mood in which we turn
the leaves of a magazine found in a railway train. , . .
If there were no evidence but this, a student might
well despair; but when he looks beyond the box-
offices, he finds everywhere the outward signs of a
dramatic renaissance. Throughout the country unpro-
fessional organisations are encouraging young writers
and building up a critical, instructed audience. Many
provincial towns have repertory companies of genuine
distinction. In London itself, beneath the shadow of
the commercial playhouses, experiments are . being
made, regularly and with revolutionary ardour, by
men and women who command a stage scarcely larger

* The article is anonymous, but a discerning reader
will recognise the hand and mind of Mr. Charles
Morgan, the dramatic critic of The Times.

76 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

than a pocket-handkerchief. Leagues, societies and
clubs, some useful, some extravagant, but all inspired
by enthusiasm for the drama, spring up everywhere,
from the mountains of Wales to the suburbs of
Glasgow; and printed plays appear, and are read, as
never before in the history of publishing."

It has been our endeavour to account for this
phenomenon. We arc to consider, in the brief space
that remains, the main features of the contemporary
(uncommercial) drama. After Shaw, the outstanding
figure is John Galsworthy.* Both these dramatists enjoy
an international reputation. Galsworthy " arrived " in
the third year of me Court Theatre season with The
Silver Box, a masterly exposure of the cruelty of our
social system, conceived not at all as a theatrical tour
de force, but out of the need of a spirit in travail : an
impersonal spirit. The play, like the plays that
followed it, has the simplicity of a prayer. Galsworthy,
practically alone of " advanced " English dramatists,
utters his prayer in an idiom quite unrelated to the
Shavian. Technically the last word in naturalism, his
plays show up the world we live in. But in the process
they reveal the hand and mind of God, and that is
why their place is in the repertory of the irregular
theatre of the mountebank Mahomet. The occasional
plays of John Masefield, more colourful, less direct,
have something of the same compassionate intensity.

The first-born of Shaw by the Court Theatre,
Harley Granville Barker, demonstrated in The Voysey
Inheritance that the master's spirit could be distilled

* J. M. Barrie, certainly not forgotten, has no fixable
place in the pedigree of English drama. His essence is
a magic, the source of which is hidden from us, and
which is like to be buried " certain fathoms in the
earth" after him, although Mr. A. A. Milne has
captured some of his whimsicality.

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 77
into a traditional framework, without necessarily im-
pairing its vitality. The value of this discovery may be
perceived in much of the drama that has followed,
deriving from Shaw, but avoiding the fatal mistake of
aping his unique individuality. Happily the " life
force," so permeated, allows considerable latitude in
philosophy as well as in form. Barker himself has
contributed generously in Quality, if not in quantity.
The Madras House and The Secret Life open up
each a new realm of dramatic expression. Similarly
fastidious, Allan Monkhouse has contented himself
with an occasional study of a kind of Shavian Hamlet
in conflict with hard-faced society. The pure religious
spirit, relieved by a sense of humour, finds expression
in the work of Lawrence Housman, notably in Little
Plays of St. Francis. John Drink water has made
stirring chronicle plays and Halcott Glover magnificent
historical plays, for Puritans, while C. K. Munro
expands his message into epic parables of contemporary
history. The so-called Manchester school, nurtured
by Miss Horniman's enterprise, specialists in local
problems in the light of a realistic cum Shavian
idealism, produced Stanley Houghton, whose mantle
descended on Harold Brighouse. St. John Ervine has
enriched, and it may be said, emancipated this class
of play by an infusion of colour derived from the
quasi-corresponding Abbey Theatre (Dublin) school of
dramatists rounded by the combined labours of Synce,
Yeats, and Lady Gregory.* J. R. Gregson, one of the
aposdes of the new repertory movement, continues to
extend the range of this provincial drama to meet the
needs of a new generation of Intellectuals.

The needs of a new generation. . . . The one
common need of every generation is Change. Change

* Considerations of space preclude any attempt to
place these Irish dramatists in relation to English
drama.

7 8 THE ENGLISH DRAMA

in spirit as well as in form. Whether or no the Round-
head drama has come to stay, it cannot hope to mon-
opolise even the Little Theatre that it has made for
itself in default of capturing the " real " that is, the
commercial stage. The Round Head, metamorphosed
in the High Brow, has already discovered the import-
ance of not being Shavian, and a new cause invented
by Gordon Craig has attracted many zealots by its
mystery and its unpopularity. The cause is the "art
of the theatre "of the theatre itself regarded as an
end, rather than as a means : an art, like absolute
music, independent of "programme," or ulterior
motive. Two poet-playwrights, Clifford Bax and
Ashley Dukes, narking back to old aesthetic values,
show signs of having fallen, consciously or uncon-
sciously, under the spell of Craig's ideas. Shaw is
Anti-Christ in their eyes. Yet, withal, philosophy will
keep breaking into their entertainment. Bax's Mid-
summer Madness combines pungent satire with the
authentic charm of the old commedia dcll'artc. In
The Man with a Load of Mischief Dukes reflects the
revolutionary ardour of a Beaumarchais through a
surface of polished euphuism.

There has been a breakaway in another direction.
The drama revitalised could hardly fail to recall sooner
or later its old cavalier proclivities. " I believe I'm the
humble representative of a new type," asserts the
puzzled plavwright-hero of Miles Malleson's pre-war
Youth. ' Tnc temperament of a Huxley, and the
temperament of a Byron . . ." Of a Puritan and an
Elizabethan, he means. And a Roundhcad-cwm-Cavalier
drama .is growing up, as it were, to perpetuate this
time-honoured cleavage in the national character a
drama predominantly Roundhead in Malleson, pre-
dominantly romantic-Cavalier in Howard Peacey :
at present hopelessly muddled in the enfant terrible
of die family, Noel Coward.

The Continent, having absorbed our Shaw, trans-

RESTORATION OF ROUNDHEAD DRAMA 79

mits new influences in exchange. The daemonic spirit
of Strindbcre, another religious fanatic, completing
the work of revolutionising the European theatre,
commenced by Ibsen, has inspired some strange new
forms of drama, including the much-abused " expres-
sionism." Chekhov, from Russia, discovered the art of
stimulating the human spirit by depressing it. These
tendencies, complicated by post-war disenchantment,
are reflected in the work of Hcrmon Ould and Scan
O'Cascy. Not unnaturally they have taken root more
firmly in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of America.
The resulting fine plays of Susan Glaspell and Eugene
O'Neill, heralding a new force in world-drama, are
themselves outside the scope of this survey, but their
potential influence on our common language is a
relevant consideration.

The English Drama of the immediate future will
depend upon the vision and the industry of the various
writers we have named, and if we may name some,
of many, others of Clemcnce Dane, Richard Hughes,
Elizabeth Baker, Margaret Macnamara, A. J. Talbot,
Benn W. Levy, G. D. Gribblc; and of how many more
working as yet in obscurity?

But it would be foolish as well as rash to attempt a
prophecy. Our drama, by some inherent perversity,
has achieved its highest flights .precisely when the
auspices appeared least favourable. Suffice it that
the further outlook, if unsettled, is at least not un-
hopeful.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

OF an immense literature, Professor Allardyce Nicoll's
recent " historical survey from the beginnings to the
present time " is clearly indispensable to anyone who
may wish to pursue the study of English Drama or of
any part of it in relation to the whole. This work,
British Drama (Harrap), contains incidentally a care-
fully selected bibliography, to which we refer the
interested reader. Acknowledgment has been made in
the course of the text to one or two other works to
which the author of this essay is consciously under
obligation. Such acknowledgment is due also to the
^editors of Volumes V. and VI. of The Cambridge
History of English Literature (covering the drama to
1642). For analyses of modern drama, linking up the
movement in tnis country with corresponding move-
ments on the Continent and in America, Ashley
Dukes' The youngest Drama (Benn) and Professor
Barrett Clarke's A Study of Modern Drama (Appleton)
may be recommended.

A volume of Everyman's Library contains Every-
man and eight mystery and miracle plays. Many prc-
Elizabethan plays were published by the Early English
Drama Society. The more famous plays of trie better-
known Elizabethan and Restoration dramatists are
published in the Mermaid series. Plays by modern
authors may be obtained by reference to any book'
.seller's catalogue.