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pistol from him." Marston's total abstinence from literature during the last twenty years of his life is not explained.

sonneteers.

One of Marston's favourite butts, both in his Satires and in his plays, was the puling sentimentality of enamoured He goes beyond himself in the invention of mad indignities, coarse and subtle, overt and sly, for these forlorn creatures; parodies them and scoffs at them; buffets them, as it were, tweaks their noses, stealthily pulls out hairs and puts in pins, kicks them out of his presence.

"Sweet-faced Corinna, deign the riband tie
Of thy cork-shoe, or else thy slave will die :
Some puling sonnet tolls his passing bell;
Some sighing elegy must ring his knell.
Unless bright sunshine of thy grace revive
His wambling stomach, certes he will dive
Into the whirlpool of devouring death,

And to some mermaid sacrifice his breath."

I have endeavoured to show that Shakespeare cooperated with this derision of forced love-sighs, writing certain of his sonnets in ridicule of their windy suspiration. But Shakespeare himself was not always above the contempt of the predestined cynic. 'Venus and Adonis' was singled out by Marston as the type of dangerously voluptuous poetry, and unmercifully parodied in his "Pygmalion and Galatea," the arts of the goddess to win over the cold youth being coarsely paralleled in mad mockery by the arts of Pygmalion to bring his beloved statue to life. The risk in all such parodies is that they be taken as serious productions. This has been the fate of Shakespeare's sonnet parodies; and Marston either feared or had actually incurred a similar calamity.

"Curio, know'st my sprite, Yet deem'st that in sad seriousness I write

Such nasty stuff as is Pygmalion?

O barbarous dropsy noll!

Think'st thou that genius that attends my soul,

And guides my fist to scourge magnificoes,

Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows?"

Marston seems to have had rather a fancy for parodying Shakespeare: he more than once has a fling at "A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" and in "The Malcontent" he has several hits at passages in Hamlet, including "Illo, ho, ho, ho, art there, old Truepenny ?" and a parody on Hamlet's reflection, "What a piece of work is man!" But he also paid the great dramatist the compliment of imitating from him. In "The Malcontent," the conception of the villain Mendozo is indebted in several particulars to Richard III. And the hinge of the plot is borrowed indirectly from "Hamlet." A banished Duke of Genoa returns to court in the disguise of Malevolo, an illconditioned cynic, who deliberately uses his reputation for craziness as a licence to tell people of their vices in very surly terms face to face. This origin of the idea of Malevolo might not have occurred to us but for the parodies of Hamlet in the play: and it has a certain value as showing Marston's notion of the feigned madness of Hamlet.

Marston's plays are very remarkable and distinctive productions. They are written with amazing energy-energy audacious, defiant, shameless, yet, when viewed in the totality of its manifestations, not unworthy to be called Titanic. They make no pretence to dramatic impartiality; they are written throughout in the spirit of his satires; his puppets walk the stage as embodiments of various ramifications of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, side by side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigorous life they are much more forcible and distinct personalities than Chapman's characters. But though Marston brings out his characters sharply and clearly, and puts them in lifelike motion, they are too manifestly objects of their creator's liking and disliking: some are caricatured, some are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. From one great fault Marston's personages are exceedingly free: they may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are seldom dull-their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. And all his serious creations have here and there put into

their mouths passages of tremendous energy. Charles Lamb has gathered from Marston, for his 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' extracts of passionate declamation and powerful description hardly surpassed in all that rich collection.

As we read Marston's plays, too, the conviction gains ground upon us that, after all, he was not the ill-conditioned, snarling, and biting cur that he would have us believe himself to be, but a fairly honest fellow of very powerful intellect, only rude and rugged enough to have a mad delight in the use of coarse paradox and strong language. He was not a self-satisfied snarler, girding freely at the world, but tender of his own precious personality. His plays convince us that there was a touch of sincere modesty in his prayer to Oblivion :

"Accept my orison,

My earnest prayers, which do importune thee
With gloomy shade of thy still empery

To veil both me and my rude poesy.

Far worthier lines, in silence of thy state,
Do sleep securely, free from love or hate."

In the Induction to "What You Will," he makes Doricus turn round on Philomene, who is railing against the stupidity of the public in the vein of the "Scourge of Villany," and call the strain rank, odious, and leprous-" as your friend the author. . . seems so fair in his own glass . . . that he talks once of squinting critics, drunken censure, splayfooted opinion, juiceless husks, I ha' done with him, I ha' done with him." And in the body of the same play he is hardy enough to make Quadratus fall out upon Kinsayder, his own nom de plume in his early satires :

:

"Why, you Don Kinsayder,

Thou canker-eaten, rusty cur, thou snaffle
To freer spirits."

We cannot complain of ill-treatment from a cynic so unmerciful to himself, so uncompromising in his gross ebullient humour. We are inclined to concede to him that

like his own Feliche, he "hates not man, but man's lewd qualities." There are more amiable and admirable characters in his plays than in Chapman's. He has good characters to set off the bad: the treacherous, unscrupulous Mendozo is balanced by the faithful Celso; the shamelessly frail Aurelia by the constant Maria; the cruel, boastful Piero by the noble Andrugio; the impulsive, unceremonious, warm-hearted, pert, forward, inquisitive, chattering Rossaline, by the true and gentle Mellida.

III. BEN JONSON (1573-1637).

Ben Jonson had a mind of immense force and pertinacious grasp; but nothing could be wider of the truth than the notion maintained with such ferocity by Gifford, that he was the father of regular comedy, the pioneer of severe and correct taste. Jonson's domineering scholarship must not be taken for more than it was worth it was a large and gratifying possession in itself, but he would probably have written better plays and more poetry without it. It is a sad application of the mathematical method to the history of our literature to argue that the most learned playwright of his time superseded the rude efforts of such untaught mother-wits as Shakespeare with compositions based on classical models. What Jonson really did was to work out his own ideas of comedy and tragedy, and he expressly claimed the right to do so. The most scrupulous adherence to the unity of time, and the most rigid exclusion of tragic elements from comedy, do not make a play classical. Ben Jonson conformed to these externals; but there was not a more violently unclassical spirit than his among all the writers for the stage in that generation.1 His laborious accumulation of learned details, his fantastic extravagance of comic and satirical imagination, the heavy force of his

1 His picture of the Court of Augustus, which Lamb praises so highly, was founded probably on what he saw or what he desiderated at the Court of England. Jonson seems always to have had friends among the courtiers.

expression, his study of "humours," had their origin in his own nature, and not in the models of Greece and Rome.

Jonson, according to his own account, was of Scotch extraction, his grandfather being a Johnstone of Annandale, who settled in Carlisle, and was taken into the service of Henry VIII. His father, who suffered persecution under Mary, and afterwards became "a grave minister of the gospel," died before our poet's birth. Whether or not his mother married a bricklayer as her second husband, it would seem that in his youth he was apprenticed to that trade, but not before he had received at least the rudiments of a good education at Westminster School under Camden, a patron to whom he was never backward in acknowledging his obligations. From bricklaying he went in disgust to soldiering, and served a brief campaign in the Low Countries, distinguishing himself in a single combat with a champion of the enemy, whom he killed and stripped in the sight of both camps. How he began his connection with the stage is not known. He is called "bricklayer"1 in 1598 in a letter of Henslowe's giving an account of a duel that he fought in that year with a player; but before that time he had begun to write plays. A version of his "Every Man in his Humour" would seem to have been put on the stage in 1596, and the play was published in 1598. The dates of the production of his subsequent plays, as given by Gifford, are as follows: "The Case is Altered," published 1598; "Every Man out of his Humour," 1599; "Cynthia's Revels," 1600; "Poetaster," 1601; "Sejanus," 1603; "Eastward Ho!" (written in conjunction with Chapman and Marston), 1605; "Volpone, or The Fox," 1605; "Epicone, or The Silent Woman," 1609; "The Alchemist," 1610; "Catiline," 1611; "Bartholomew Fair," 1614; "The Devil is an Ass," 1616; "The Staple of News," 1625; "The New 1 Collier's Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' p. 50. at all unlike the man to work as a bricklayer while writing for the stage. He might have enjoyed the defiance of public opinion in honest labour. This would give a literality to Dekker's taunt of "the lime-and-mortar poet." But Jonson is entered as player" in 1596. He can hardly be supposed to have returned to bricklaying.

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