A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




Shakspere, indeed, although as Ben Jonson said, 'he was not for an age but
for all time,' was in every respect a thorough Elizabethan also, and does
not escape the superficial Elizabethan faults. Chief of these, perhaps, is
his fondness for 'conceits,' with which he makes his plays, especially some
of the earlier ones, sparkle, brilliantly, but often inappropriately. In
his prose style, again, except in the talk of commonplace persons, he never
outgrew, or wished to outgrow, a large measure of Elizabethan
self-conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Elizabethan habit of
seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole of his stories, but drawing the
outlines of them from previous works--English chronicles, poems, or plays,
Italian 'novels,' or the biographies of Plutarch. But in the majority of
cases these sources provided him only with bare or even crude sketches, and
perhaps nothing furnishes clearer proof of his genius than the way in which
he has seen the human significance in stories baldly and wretchedly told,
where the figures are merely wooden types, and by the power of imagination
has transformed them into the greatest literary masterpieces, profound
revelations of the underlying forces of life.

Shakspere, like every other great man, has been the object of much
unintelligent, and misdirected adulation, but his greatness, so far from
suffering diminution, grows more apparent with the passage of time and the
increase of study.

[Note: The theory persistently advocated during the last half century that
Shakspere's works were really written not by himself but by Francis Bacon
or some other person can never gain credence with any competent judge. Our
knowledge of Shakspere's life, slight as it is, is really at least as great
as that which has been preserved of almost any dramatist of the period; for
dramatists were not then looked on as persons of permanent importance.
There is really much direct contemporary documentary evidence, as we have
already indicated, of Shakspere's authorship of the plays and poems. No
theory, further, could be more preposterous, to any one really acquainted
with literature, than the idea that the imaginative poetry of Shakspere was
produced by the essentially scientific and prosaic mind of Francis Bacon.
As to the cipher systems supposed to reveal hidden messages in the plays:
First, no poet bending his energies to the composition of such masterpieces
as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving
into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems
are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever
can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been
discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove'
far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the
verbal coincidences on which the cipher systems rest are no more numerous
than the law of mathematical probabilities requires. Aside from actually
vicious pursuits, there can be no more melancholy waste of time than the
effort to demonstrate that Shakspere is not the real author of his reputed
works.]

NATIONAL LIFE FROM 1603 TO 1660. We have already observed that, as
Shakspere's career suggests, there was no abrupt change in either life or
literature at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603; and in fact the
Elizabethan period of literature is often made to include the reign of
James I, 1603-1625 (the Jacobean period [Footnote: 'Jaco'bus' is the Latin
form of 'James.']), or even, especially in the case of the drama, that of
Charles I, 1625-1649 (the Carolean period). Certainly the drama of all
three reigns forms a continuously developing whole, and should be discussed
as such. None the less the spirit of the first half of the seventeenth
century came gradually to be widely different from that of the preceding
fifty years, and before going on to Shakspere's successors we must stop to
indicate briefly wherein the difference consists and for this purpose to
speak of the determining events of the period. Before the end of
Elizabeth's reign, indeed, there had been a perceptible change; as the
queen grew old and morose the national life seemed also to lose its youth
and freshness. Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland (James I
of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under his rule the perennial Court
corruption, striking in, became foul and noisome. The national Church,
instead of protesting, steadily identified itself more closely with the
Court party, and its ruling officials, on the whole, grew more and more
worldly and intolerant. Little by little the nation found itself divided
into two great factions; on the one hand the Cavaliers, the party of the
Court, the nobles, and the Church, who continued to be largely dominated by
the Renaissance zest for beauty and, especially, pleasure; and on the other
hand the Puritans, comprising the bulk of the middle classes, controlled by
the religious principles of the Reformation, often, in their opposition to
Cavalier frivolity, stern and narrow, and more and more inclined to
separate themselves from the English Church in denominations of their own.
The breach steadily widened until in 1642, under the arbitrary rule of
Charles I, the Civil War broke out. In three years the Puritan Parliament
was victorious, and in 1649 the extreme minority of the Puritans, supported
by the army, took the unprecedented step of putting King Charles to death,
and declared England a Commonwealth. But in four years more the
Parliamentary government, bigoted and inefficient, made itself impossible,
and then for five years, until his death, Oliver Cromwell strongly ruled
England as Protector. Another year and a half of chaos confirmed the nation
in a natural reaction, and in 1660 the unworthy Stuart race was restored in
the person of the base and frivolous Charles II. The general influence of
the forces which produced these events shows clearly in the changing tone
of the drama, the work of those dramatists who were Shakspere's later
contemporaries and successors.

BEN JONSON. The second place among the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists
is universally assigned, on the whole justly, to Ben Jonson, [Footnote:
This name is spelled without the _h_.] who both in temperament and in
artistic theories and practice presents a complete contrast to Shakspere.
Jonson, the posthumous son of an impoverished gentleman-clergyman, was born
in London in 1573. At Westminster School he received a permanent bent
toward classical studies from the headmaster, William Camden, who was one
of the greatest scholars of the time. Forced into the uncongenial trade of
his stepfather, a master-bricklayer, he soon deserted it to enlist among
the English soldiers who were helping the Dutch to fight their Spanish
oppressors. Here he exhibited some of his dominating traits by challenging
a champion from the other army and killing him in classical fashion in
single combat between the lines. By about the age of twenty he was back in
London and married to a wife whom he later described as being 'virtuous but
a shrew,' and who at one time found it more agreeable to live apart from
him. He became an actor (at which profession he failed) and a writer of
plays. About 1598 he displayed his distinguishing realistic style in the
comedy 'Every Man in His Humour,' which was acted by Shakspere's company,
it is said through Shakspere's friendly influence. At about the same time
the burly Jonson killed another actor in a duel and escaped capital
punishment only through 'benefit of clergy' (the exemption still allowed to
educated men).

The plays which Jonson produced during the following years were chiefly
satirical attacks on other dramatists, especially Marston and Dekker, who
retorted in kind. Thus there developed a fierce actors' quarrel, referred
to in Shakspere's 'Hamlet,' in which the 'children's' companies had some
active but now uncertain part. Before it was over most of the dramatists
had taken sides against Jonson, whose arrogant and violent
self-assertiveness put him at odds, sooner or later, with nearly every one
with whom he had much to do. In 1603 he made peace, only to become involved
in other, still more, serious difficulties. Shortly after the accession of
King James, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston brought out a comedy, 'Eastward
Hoe,' in which they offended the king by satirical flings at the needy
Scotsmen to whom James was freely awarding Court positions. They were
imprisoned and for a while, according to the barbarous procedure of the
time, were in danger of losing their ears and noses. At a banquet
celebrating their release, Jonson reports, his 'old mother' produced a
paper of poison which, if necessary, she had intended to administer to him
to save him from this disgrace, and of which, she said, to show that she
was 'no churl,' she would herself first have drunk.

Just before this incident, in 1603, Jonson had turned to tragedy and
written 'Sejanus,' which marks the beginning of his most important decade.
He followed up 'Sejanus' after several years with the less excellent
'Catiline,' but his most significant dramatic works, on the whole, are his
four great satirical comedies. 'Volpone, or the Fox,' assails gross vice;
'Epicoene, the Silent Woman,' ridicules various sorts of absurd persons;
'The Alchemist' castigates quackery and its foolish encouragers; and
'Bartholomew Fair' is a coarse but overwhelming broadside at Puritan
hypocrisy. Strange as it seems in the author of these masterpieces of frank
realism, Jonson at the same time was showing himself the most gifted writer
of the Court masks, which now, arrived at the last period of their
evolution, were reaching the extreme of spectacular elaborateness. Early in
James' reign, therefore, Jonson was made Court Poet, and during the next
thirty years he produced about forty masks, devoting to them much attention
and care, and quarreling violently with Inigo Jones, the Court architect,
who contrived the stage settings. During this period Jonson was under the
patronage of various nobles, and he also reigned as dictator at the club of
literary men which Sir Walter Raleigh had founded at the Mermaid Tavern (so
called, like other inns, from its sign). A well-known poetical letter of
the dramatist Francis Beaumont to Jonson celebrates the club meetings; and
equally well known is a description given in the next generation from
hearsay and inference by the antiquary Thomas Fuller: 'Many were the
wit-combats betwixt Shakspere and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a
Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war: Master Jonson, like the
former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his
performances; Shakespere, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but
lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take
advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.'

The last dozen years of Jonson's life were unhappy. Though he had a pension
from the Court, he was sometimes in financial straits; and for a time he
lost his position as Court Poet. He resumed the writing of regular plays,
but his style no longer pleased the public; and he often suffered much from
sickness. Nevertheless at the Devil Tavern he collected about him a circle
of younger admirers, some of them among the oncoming poets, who were proud
to be known as 'Sons of Ben,' and who largely accepted as authoritative his
opinions on literary matters. Thus his life, which ended in 1637, did not
altogether go out in gloom. On the plain stone which alone, for a long
time, marked his grave in Westminster Abbey an unknown admirer inscribed
the famous epitaph, 'O rare Ben Jonson.'

As a man Jonson, pugnacious, capricious, ill-mannered, sometimes surly,
intemperate in drink and in other respects, is an object for only very
qualified admiration; and as a writer he cannot properly be said to possess
that indefinable thing, genius, which is essential to the truest greatness.
But both as man and as writer he manifested great force; and in both drama
and poetry he stands for several distinct literary principles and
attainments highly important both in themselves and for their subsequent
influence.

1. Most conspicuous in his dramas is his realism, often, as we have said,
extremely coarse, and a direct reflection of his intellect, which was as
strongly masculine as his body and altogether lacking, where the regular
drama was concerned, in fineness of sentiment or poetic feeling. He early
assumed an attitude of pronounced opposition to the Elizabethan romantic
plays, which seemed to him not only lawless in artistic structure but
unreal and trifling in atmosphere and substance. (That he was not, however,
as has sometimes been said, personally hostile to Shakspere is clear, among
other things, from his poetic tributes in the folio edition of Shakspere
and from his direct statement elsewhere that he loved Shakspere almost to
idolatry.) Jonson's purpose was to present life as he believed it to be; he
was thoroughly acquainted with its worser side; and he refused to conceal
anything that appeared to him significant. His plays, therefore, have very
much that is flatly offensive to the taste which seeks in literature,
prevailingly, for idealism and beauty; but they are, nevertheless,
generally speaking, powerful portrayals of actual life.

2. Jonson's purpose, however, was never unworthy; rather, it was distinctly
to uphold morality. His frankest plays, as we have indicated, are attacks
on vice and folly, and sometimes, it is said, had important reformatory
influence on contemporary manners. He held, indeed, that in the drama, even
in comedy, the function of teaching was as important as that of giving
pleasure. His attitude toward his audiences was that of a learned
schoolmaster, whose ideas they should accept with deferential respect; and
when they did not approve his plays he was outspoken in indignant contempt.

3. Jonson's self-satisfaction and his critical sense of intellectual
superiority to the generality of mankind produce also a marked and
disagreeable lack of sympathy in his portrayal of both life and character.
The world of his dramas is mostly made up of knaves, scoundrels,
hypocrites, fools, and dupes; and it includes among its really important
characters very few excellent men and not a single really good woman.
Jonson viewed his fellow-men, in the mass, with complete scorn, which it
was one of his moral and artistic principles not to disguise. His
characteristic comedies all belong, further, to the particular type which
he himself originated, namely, the 'Comedy of Humors.' [Footnote: The
meaning of this, term can be understood only by some explanation of the
history of the word 'Humor.' In the first place this was the Latin name for
'liquid.' According to medieval physiology there were four chief liquids in
the human body, namely blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, and an excess
of any of them produced an undue predominance of the corresponding quality;
thus, an excess of phlegm made a person phlegmatic, or dull; or an excess
of black bile, melancholy. In the Elizabethan idiom, therefore, 'humor'
came to mean a mood, and then any exaggerated quality or marked peculiarity
in a person.]

Aiming in these plays to flail the follies of his time, he makes his chief
characters, in spite of his realistic purpose, extreme and distorted
'humors,' each, in spite of individual traits, the embodiment of some one
abstract vice--cowardice, sensualism, hypocrisy, or what not. Too often,
also, the unreality is increased because Jonson takes the characters from
the stock figures of Latin comedy rather than from genuine English life.

4. In opposition to the free Elizabethan romantic structure, Jonson stood
for and deliberately intended to revive the classical style; though with
characteristic good sense he declared that not all the classical practices
were applicable to English plays. He generally observed unity not only of
action but also of time (a single day) and place, sometimes with serious
resultant loss of probability. In his tragedies, 'Sejanus' and 'Catiline,'
he excluded comic material; for the most part he kept scenes of death and
violence off the stage; and he very carefully and slowly constructed plays
which have nothing, indeed, of the poetic greatness of Sophocles or
Euripides (rather a Jonsonese broad solidity) but which move steadily to
their climaxes and then on to the catastrophes in the compact classical
manner. He carried his scholarship, however, to the point of pedantry, not
only in the illustrative extracts from Latin authors with which in the
printed edition he filled the lower half of his pages, but in the plays
themselves in the scrupulous exactitude of his rendering of the details of
Roman life. The plays reconstruct the ancient world with much more minute
accuracy than do Shakspere's; the student should consider for himself
whether they succeed better in reproducing its human reality, making it a
living part of the reader's mental and spiritual possessions.

5. Jonson's style in his plays, especially the blank verse of his
tragedies, exhibits the same general characteristics. It is strong,
compact, and sometimes powerful, but it entirely lacks imaginative poetic
beauty--it is really only rhythmical prose, though sometimes suffused with
passion.

6. The surprising skill which Jonson, author of such plays, showed in
devising the court masks, daintily unsubstantial creations of moral
allegory, classical myth, and Teutonic folklore, is rendered less
surprising, perhaps, by the lack in the masks of any very great lyric
quality. There is no lyric quality at all in the greater part of his
non-dramatic verse, though there is an occasional delightful exception, as
in the famous 'Drink to me only with thine eyes.' But of his non-dramatic
verse we shall speak in the next chapter.

7. Last, and not least: Jonson's revolt from romanticism to classicism
initiated, chiefly in non-dramatic verse, the movement for restraint and
regularity, which, making slow headway during the next half century, was to
issue in the triumphant pseudo-classicism of the generations of Dryden and
Pope. Thus, notable in himself, he was significant also as one of the
moving forces of a great literary revolution.

THE OTHER DRAMATISTS. From the many other dramatists of this highly
dramatic period, some of whom in their own day enjoyed a reputation fully
equal to that of Shakspere and Jonson, we may merely select a few for brief
mention. For not only does their light now pale hopelessly in the presence
of Shakspere, but in many cases their violations of taste and moral
restraint pass the limits of present-day tolerance. Most of them, like
Shakspere, produced both comedies and tragedies, prevailingly romantic but
with elements of realism; most of them wrote more often in collaboration
than did Shakspere; they all shared the Elizabethan vigorously creative
interest in life; but none of them attained either Shakspere's wisdom, his
power, or his mastery of poetic beauty. One of the most learned of the
group was George Chapman, whose verse has a Jonsonian solidity not
unaccompanied with Jonsonian ponderousness. He won fame also in
non-dramatic poetry, especially by vigorous but rather clumsy verse
translations of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' Another highly individual figure
is that of Thomas Dekker, who seems to have been one of the completest
embodiments of irrepressible Elizabethan cheerfulness, though this was
joined in him with an irresponsibility which kept him commonly floundering
in debt or confined in debtor's prison. His 'Shoemaker's Holiday' (1600),
still occasionally chosen by amateur companies for reproduction, gives a
rough-and-ready but (apart from its coarseness) charming romanticized
picture of the life of London apprentices and whole-hearted citizens.
Thomas Heywood, a sort of journalist before the days of newspapers,
produced an enormous amount of work in various literary forms; in the drama
he claimed to have had 'an entire hand, or at least a maine finger' in no
less than two hundred and twenty plays. Inevitably, therefore, he is
careless and slipshod, but some of his portrayals of sturdy English men and
women and of romantic adventure (as in 'The Fair Maid of the West') are of
refreshing naturalness and breeziness. Thomas Middleton, also a very
prolific writer, often deals, like Jonson and Heywood, with sordid
material. John Marston, as well, has too little delicacy or reserve; he
also wrote catch-as-catch-can non-dramatic satires.

The sanity of Shakspere's plays, continuing and indeed increasing toward
the end of his career, disguises for modern students the tendency to
decline in the drama which set in at about the time of King James'
accession. Not later than the end of the first decade of the century the
dramatists as a class exhibit not only a decrease of originality in plot
and characterization, but also a lowering of moral tone, which results
largely from the closer identification of the drama with the Court party.
There is a lack of seriousness of purpose, an increasing tendency to
return, in more morbid spirit, to the sensationalism of the 1580's, and an
anxious straining to attract and please the audiences by almost any means.
These tendencies appear in the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher,
whose reputations are indissolubly linked together in one of the most
famous literary partnerships of all time. Beaumont, however, was
short-lived, and much the greater part of the fifty and more plays
ultimately published under their joint names really belong to Fletcher
alone or to Fletcher and other collaborators. The scholarship of our day
agrees with the opinion of their contemporaries in assigning to Beaumont
the greater share of judgment and intellectual power and to Fletcher the
greater share of spontaneity and fancy. Fletcher's style is very
individual. It is peculiarly sweet; but its unmistakable mark is his
constant tendency to break down the blank verse line by the use of extra
syllables, both within the line and at the end. The lyrics which he
scatters through his plays are beautifully smooth and musical. The plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher, as a group, are sentimentally romantic, often in an
extravagant degree, though their charm often conceals the extravagance as
well as the lack of true characterization. They are notable often for their
portrayal of the loyal devotion of both men and women to king, lover, or
friend. One of the best of them is 'Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding,'
while Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess' is the most pleasing example in
English of the artificial pastoral drama in the Italian and Spanish style.

The Elizabethan tendency to sensational horror finds its greatest artistic
expression in two plays of John Webster, 'The White Devil, or Vittoria
Corombona,' and 'The Duchess of Malfi.' Here the corrupt and brutal life of
the Italian nobility of the Renaissance is presented with terrible
frankness, but with an overwhelming sense for passion, tragedy, and pathos.
The most moving pathos permeates some of the plays of John Ford (of the
time of Charles I), for example, 'The Broken Heart'; but they are abnormal
and unhealthy. Philip Massinger, a pupil and collaborator of Fletcher, was
of thoughtful spirit, and apparently a sincere moralist at heart, in spite
of much concession in his plays to the contrary demands of the time. His
famous comedy, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' a satire on greed and cruelty,
is one of the few plays of the period, aside from Shakspere's, which are
still occasionally acted. The last dramatist of the whole great line was
James Shirley, who survived the Commonwealth and the Restoration and died
of exposure at the Fire of London in 1666. In his romantic comedies and
comedies of manners Shirley vividly reflects the thoughtless life of the
Court of Charles I and of the well-to-do contemporary London citizens and
shows how surprisingly far that life had progressed toward the reckless
frivolity and abandonment which after the interval of Puritan rule were to
run riot in the Restoration period.

The great Elizabethan dramatic impulse had thus become deeply degenerate,
and nothing could be more fitting than that it should be brought to a
definite end. When the war broke out in 1642 one of the first acts of
Parliament, now at last free to work its will on the enemies of Puritanism,
was to decree that 'whereas public sports do not well agree with public
calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation,' all
dramatic performances should cease. This law, fatal, of course, to the
writing as well as the acting of plays, was enforced with only slightly
relaxing rigor until very shortly before the Restoration of Charles II in
1660. Doubtless to the Puritans it seemed that their long fight against the
theater had ended in permanent triumph; but this was only one of many
respects in which the Puritans were to learn that human nature cannot be
forced into permanent conformity with any rigidly over-severe standard, on
however high ideals it may be based.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.