CHAPTER VIII.

THE SHAKSPEARIAN DRAMATISTS.

1. BEN JONSON. His life. § 2. His tragedies and comedies. § 3. His masques and other works. § 4. BEAUMONT and FLETCHER. § 5. MASSINGER. § 6. FORD. 7. WEBSTER. § § 8. CHAPMAN, DEKKER, MIDDLETON, MARSTON, and other minor Dramatists. § 9. SHIRLEY. § 10. Remarks on the Elizabethan drama.

§ 1. THE age of Elizabeth and James I. produced a galaxy of great dramatic poets, the like of whom, whether we regard the nature or the degree of excellence exhibited in their works, the world has never seen. In the general style of their writings, they bear a strong family resemblance to Shakspeare; and indeed many of the peculiar merits of their great prototype may be found scattered among his various contemporaries, and in some instances carried to a height little inferior to that found in his writings. Thus intensity of pathos hardly less touching than that of Shakspeare may be found in the dramas of Ford, gallant animation and dignity in the dialogues of Beaumont and Fletcher, deep tragic emotion in the sombre scenes of Webster, noble moral elevation in the graceful plays of Massinger; but in Shakspeare, and in Shakspeare alone, do we see the consummate union of all the most opposite qualities of the poet, the observer, and the philosopher.

The name which stands next to that of Shakspeare in the list of these illustrious dramatists is that of BEN JONSON (1573-1637), a vigorous and solid genius, built high with learning and knowledge of life, and whose numerous works, dramatic as well as other, possess an imposing and somewhat monumental weight. He was born in 1573, and was consequently nine years younger than Shakspeare. His career was full of strange vicissitudes. Though compelled by a step-father to follow the humble trade of a bricklayer, he succeeded in gratifying an intense. thirst for learning He passed some short time, probably with the assistance of a patron, at the University of Cambridge, and there, as well as after leaving college, continued to study with a diligence that certainly rendered him one of the most learned men of his age age fertile in learned men. He is known to have served some time as a soldier in the Low Countries, and to have distinguished himself by his Courage in the field; but his theatrical career seems to have begun when he was about twenty years of age, when we find him attached as an actor to one of the minor theatres, called the Curtain. His success as a performer is said to have been very small, arising most probably from want of grace and beauty of person; and there is no reason to suppose that his theatrical career differed from the almost universal type of the actor-dramatists of that age. While still a very young

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man he fought a duel with one of his fellow-actors, whom he had the misfortune to kill, receiving at the same time a severe wound; and for this infringement of the law, which at that particular period was punished with extreme severity, the poet was condemned to death, though afterwards pardoned. Among other vicissitudes of life, Jonson is related to have twice changed his religion, having been con verted by a Jesuit to the Roman Catholic faith, and to have afterwards again returned to the bosom of his mother-Church, on which last occasion he is said, when receiving the Sacrament on his reconversion to have drunk out the whole chalice, in sign of the sincerity of his recantation.

His first dramatic work, the Comedy of Every Man in his Humor, is assigned to the year 1596. This piece, the action and characters of which were originally Italian, failed in its first representation; and there is a tradition, far from improbable in itself, that Shakspeare, who was then in the full blaze of his popularity, advised the young aspirant to make some changes in the piece and to transfer its action to England. Two years afterwards the comedy, with considerable alterations, was brought out a second time, at Shakspeare's theatre of the Globe, and then with triumphant success. One of the few parts which Shakspeare is known to have personated on the stage is that of Old Knowel, the jealous merchant, in this comedy. Thus was probably laid the foundation of that warm and solid friendship between Jonson and Shakspeare, which appears to have continued during their whole lives, and the existence of which is proved not only by many pleasant anecdotes recording the gay and witty social intercourse of the two great poets, but by the enthusiastic, and yet discriminating, eulogy in which Jonson. — who was not a man to give light or unconsidered praise — has honored the memory and described the genius of his friend. From the moment of this second representation of his comedy Ben Jonson's literary reputation was established; and during the remainder of his very active career, though the success of particular pieces may have fluctuated, Jonson undoubtedly occupied a place at the very head of the dramatic authors of his day. His social and generous, though coarse and somewhat overbearing character, the extraordinary power and richness of his conversation, contributed to make him one of the most prominent figures in the literary society of that day. His "witcombats" at the famous taverns of the Mermaid, the Devil, and the Falcon, have been commemorated in many anecdotes; and he even appears to have been regarded at last as a sort of intellectual potentate, much as nis great namesake Samuel Johnson was afterwards, and to have conferred upon his favorites the title of his sons; "sealing them," as he says in one of his epigrams, "of the tribe of Ben."

His first comedy was followed in the succeeding year by Every Man Out of his Humor, and his literary activity continued to be very great, for in 1603 he gave to the world his tragedy of Sejanus, and in 1605 he appears to have had some share, with Chapman, Marston, Dekker, and other dramatists, in the piece of Eastward Hoe.! a comedy

which called down upon all connected with it a severe persecution fron the Court, which was bitterly offended by certain satirical allusions to the favor then accorded by King James to his Scottish countrymen. Jonson was involved in this persecution; and there is a story that the guilty wits having been condemned to have their noses slit, Jonson generously refused to abandon his associates, and that his mother had prepared for herself and him "a strong and lusty poison," to enable him to escape the ignominy of such a disfigurement. With the frank and violent character of Jonson it was impossible that he could escape continual quarrels and disputes, so difficult to avoid in a literary career and particularly in the dramatic profession. Thus we have notices o violent feuds between him and Dekker, Chapman, Marston, and others, as well as Inigo Jones, the Court architect and arranger of festivities and masques, whose favor seems to have given great umbrage to the proud and self-confident nature of old Ben. Many of these literary quarrels may be traced in the dramatic works of Jonson and his contemporaries, who used the stage as a vehicle for mutual attack and recrimination. In rapid succession between 1603 and 1619 followed some of Jonson's finest works, Volpone, Epicene, the Alchemist, and the tragedy of Catiline. In the latter year he was appointed Laureate or Court poet, and was frequently employed in getting up those splendid and fantastic entertainments called masques, in which magnificence of scenery, decoration, and costume, ingenious, allegorical, and mythological personages, exquisite music, dancing, and declamation were made the instruments for paying extravagant compliments to the king and the great personages of the Court, on occasion of any festivity at the palace or in the mansions of the great. These charming compositions, in which Jonson exhibited all the stores of his invention and all the resources of his vast and elegant scholarship, were represented sometimes by actors, but often by the ladies and gentlemen of the Court, and were performed, not in the public theatres, but in palaces and great houses, both in London and the country. Many of Jonson's later picces were entirely unsuccessful, and in one of the last, the New Inn, acted in 1630, the poet complains bitterly of the hostility and bad taste of the audience. Towards the end of his life Ben Jonson appears to have fallen into poverty, aggravated by disappointment and ill health, the latter probably caused by his too great fondness for copious libations of sack. He died in 1637, in the twelfth year of the reign of Charles I., and was buried, it is said, in a vertical position, in the churchyard of Westminster, the stone over his grave having beer. inscribed with the excellent and laconic words, "O rare Ben Jonson."

§ 2. The dramatic as well as the other works of this great poet are 60 numerous that I must content myself with a very cursory survey of them. They are of various degrees of merit, ranging from an excellence not surpassed by any contemporary excepting Shakspeare, to the lowest point of laborious mediocrity. Two of them are trage dies, the Fall of Scjanus and the Conspiracy of Catiline. The subject:

of both these plays are borrowed from the Roman historians, and the dialogue and action in both may be regarded as a mosaic of striking and brilliant extracts from the Latin literature, reproduced by Jonson with such a consummate force and vigor that we may call him a Roman author who composed in English. Nothing can exceed the minute ac curacy with which all the details of the Roman manners, ceremonies, religion, and sentiments are reproduced; and yet the effect of the whole is singularly stiff and unpleasing, partly perhaps from the absence of pathos and tenderness which characterizes Jonson's mind, and partly from the unmanageable nature of the subjects, the hero in both cases bing so odious that no art can secure for his fate the sympathy of the reader. Many of the scenes, however, particularly those of a declamatory character, as the trial of Silius and Cremutius Cordus before the abject Senate, the appearance of Tiberius, and the magnificent oration in which Petreius describes the defeat and death of Catiline, are of extraordinary power and grandeur. Of comedies, properly so called, Jonson composed fifteen, the best of which are incontestably Every Man in his Humor, Volpone, Epicene or the Silent Woman, and the Alchemist. The plots or intrigues of Jonson are far superior to those of the gener ality of his contemporaries: he always constructed them himself, and with great care and skill. Those of Volpone and the Silent Woman for example, though some of the incidents are extravagant, are admirable for the constructive skill they display, and for the art with which each detail is made to contribute to the catastrophe. The general effect, however, of Jonson's plays, though abundantly satisfactory to the reason, is hard and defective to the taste. The character of his mind was eminently analytic; he dissected the vices, the follies, and the affectations of society, and presented them to the reader rather like anatomical preparations than like men and women. His observation was extensive and acute; but his mind loved to dwell rather upon the eccentricities and monstrosities of human nature than upon those universal features with which all can sympathize, as all possess them. His mind was singularly deficient in what is called humanity; his pc of view is invariably that of the satirist, and thus, as he fixed his attention chiefly upon what was abnormal, many of his most elaborately-draw portraits are a sort of dry, harsh, abstruse caricatures of absurdities which were peculiar to the manners and society of that day, and appear to us as strange and quaint as the pictures of our ancestors in their stiff and fantastic dresses. The satiric tendency of Jonson's mind, too, nduced him to take his materials, both for intrigue and character, from odious or repulsive sources; thus the subject of two of his finest pieces, Volpone and the Alchemist, turns entirely upon a series of ingenious cheats and rascalities; all the persons, without exception, being either ❝coundrels or their dupes. Nevertheless, in spite of these peculiarities, the knowledge of character displayed by Jonson is so vast, the force and vigor of expression are so unbounded, he has poured forth into his dialogue such a wonderful wealth of iliustration drawn from men as well as books, that his comedies form a study eminently substantial

In some of them, as in Poetaster, Bartholomew Fair, and the Tale of a Tub, Jenson has attacked particular persons and parties, as Dekker in the first, the Puritans in the second, and Inigo Jones in the third; but these pieces can have but little interest for the modern reader. The tone of morality which prevails throughout Jonson's works is high and manly, and he is particularly remarkable for the lofty standard he invariably claims for the social value of the poet, the dramatist, and the satirist. Though he has too often devoted his great powers to the delineation of those oddities and absurdities which were then called humors, and which may be defined as natural follics and weaknesses exaggerated by affectation, he has traced more than one truly comic personage, the interest of which must be permanent; thus his admirable type of coward braggadocio in Bobadill will always deserve to occupy a place in the great gallery of human folly. The want of tenderness and delicacy which I have ascribed to Jonson will be especially perceived in the harsh and unamiable characters which he has given to his female persons. Without stamping him as a woman-hater, it may be saiċ that there is hardly one female character in all his dramas which is represented in a graceful or attractive light, while a great many of them are absolutely repulsive from their coarseness and their vices.

§ 3. It is singular that while Jonson in his plays should be Jistin guished for that hardness and dryness which I have endeavored to point out, this same poet, in another large and beautiful category of his works, should be remarkable for the elegance and refinement of his invention and his style. In the Masques and Court Entertainments which he composed for the amusement of the king and the great nobles, as well as in the charming fragment of a pastoral drama entitled The Sad Shepherd, Jonson appears quite another man. Everything that the richest and most delicate invention could supply, aided by extensive, elegant, and recondite reading, is lavished upon these courtly compliments, the gracefulness of which almost makes us forget their adulation and servility. This servility, it should be remarked, was the fashion of the times; and was carried quite as far towards the pedantic and imbecile James as it had been towards his great predecessor, Elizabeth. Of such masques and entertainments, Jonson composed about thirty-five, many of which exhibit a richness and playfulness of invention which have never been surpassed. These productions were, of course, generally short, and depended in a great measure for their effect upon the scenes, machinery, costumes, dances, and songs, with which they were thickly interspersed. The magnificence sometimes displayed in these spectacles was extraordinary, and forms a striking contrast with the beggarly mise en scène of the regular theatres of those days. Among the most beautiful of these masques we may mention Paris Anniversary, the Masque of Oberon, and the Masque of Queens. In the dialogue of these slight pieces, as well as in the lyrics which are frequently introduced, we see how graceful and melodious could become the genius of this great poet, though generally attuned to the severer notes of the satiric

miuse.

Besides his dramatic works Jonson left a very large quantity of