Chapter XIX: The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights (2)

Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

In this passage, whether he knew it or not--and _we_ know not how he knew things,--Shakespeare soars to the heights of Plato's dreams, in the "Phædrus" and the "Symposium". Did he go beyond the appreciation of "the groundlings" in such passages? Did they find mirth in the passion of the Jew, and fail to fathom Shakespeare's deep sympathy with the oppressed? Probably he gave them more and other things than he seemed to give; to them Shylock's may have appeared as a comic part, but indeed we cannot judge that strange Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare knew what they wanted, horrors, ghosts, revenges, manslayings. He gave them these things in "Lear" and "Hamlet," but gave with them the deepest and subtlest thoughts, the most magical poetry, treasures of wit, and all this they could enjoy, as they could follow every point, pass, and parry in the wit-combats.

It seems probable that Shakespeare's fame as a poet rested, for a while, rather on his verses, "Venus and Adonis" (published 1593) and "Lucrece" (1594), than on all the treasures of his plays. The two poems, the only works of Shakespeare's which he himself saw through the press, are dedicated, in brief terms, to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, then a lad of twenty, fond of pleasure, art, and letters. The dedications are not fulsome, when we consider the manner of addressing patrons in that age. The second address, of some ten lines, says "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours." It seems that Southampton had behaved with generosity to the poet, and it looks as if the poet's "love" were more than the trick-phrase of a person obliged.

The poems themselves, "Venus and Adonis" in a six line stanza, "Lucrece" in a seven line stanza, are remarkable for fluent mastery of verse and rhyme, for lusciousness of description of physical beauties, and for the compassionate passage on the poor hunted hare, and the vigorous description of a horse. Shakespeare manifestly loved a good horse, and probably felt compunctions about riding to harriers. But as to the poetry; it certainly is not superior to the luscious descriptions in Spenser; the verse is by no means superior to, nor, to some tastes, equal to Spenser's; and, if we lost Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," the misfortune would be as great as if we lost "Venus" and "Lucrece". The two compositions show us Shakespeare exercising himself on a fashionable class of themes, and with an overflow of fashionable conceits; _sufflaminandus erat_, says Ben Jonson; "the drag needed to be put on". Had we nothing else of Shakespeare's, we could make no guess at his greatness.

Indeed his contemporaries could hardly do so, till his plays were pirated and printed, because all their innumerable merits could not be fully appreciated till the plays were meditatively and frequently perused. By 1598, Francis Meres, comparing English with ancient poets, names Shakespeare and others with Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, also Ausonius and Claudian. But he places Warner in the same good company (in "Palladis Tamia," or "Wit's Treasury," 1598).

The plays named by Meres are "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Comedy of Errors," "Love's Labours Lost," "Love's Labour's Won" (?), "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Merchant of Venice," both "Richards," "Henry IV," "King John," "Titus Andronicus," and "Romeo and Juliet". "The soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets, among his private friends." (Not published till 1609.)

Gullio, in the Cambridge comedy, "The Return from Parnassus" (about 1599-1602) is a farcical ignorant braggart who says "let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare," for his "Venus and Adonis". He also quotes "Romeo and Juliet," and the University wits manifestly despised Shakespeare, as no scholar and not a University man. They bade Ben Jonson go back to his brick-making; _he_ was not a University man!

Meanwhile Shakespeare, with his share in the company and what he received for his written plays, and from patrons, was thriving, while his father struggled with debt and difficulties. None the less, probably aided pecuniarily and advised by Shakespeare, he applied to the College of Arms for a grant of armorial bearings (1596). A memorandum exists in which John Shakespeare is said to have "lands and tenements of good wealth and substance". The grant was not made till 1599, and the heralds appear to have been very good-natured in permitting these Shakespeares to write themselves gentlemen. The financial basis, however, was supplied when, in 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place, a large house in the town of Stratford, and two gardens. Sir Sidney Lee reckons his income, allowing for the altered values of money, at £1040 in our currency.

In short, like Scott, Shakespeare lived to found a family of gentility, though Scott naturally inherited the gentility and heraldic quarterings, which Shakespeare did not. He prospered continually; he held, later, shares in the Globe theatre, and there is abundant proof that in money, acres, and goods he throve to an extent that denotes careful living. He appears as a strict exactor of debts: in nothing was he careless and indifferent except as regarded the immortal works, which, after his death, his 'stage friends, Heming and Condell, published as best they might (1623, the first folio).

Shakespeare seems, in fact, to have had even more than Scott's indifference to his literary fame, unless we suppose him to have been firmly persuaded that his works, once given to the stage, must secure their own immortality. Even so, he might have employed the leisure of his last years in preparing a correct text for the press.

Yet who knows that Shakespeare did _not_ dream of doing what was unprecedented, of revising and collecting his plays for publication? Playwrights seldom printed their dramas, for reasons already given. But, in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson published his "works" (he was laughed at for calling them "works") in a tall and stately folio. It may have been in Shakespeare's mind to do the same thing: but "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow"! He may have contemplated the difficult task, he may even have made fair copies of some of his manuscripts of his many unprinted plays,--the papers which his friends, the actors, say had "scarce a blot". But his older manuscripts may have been tattered and worn, and altered for better or worse. To collect and revise all was a serious labour for a retired, perhaps a weary man. He was but 52 when he died; he may, we repeat, have dreamed of a task which he put off from day to day: there is no mystery in delays so natural when the custom of play writers was not to publish.

The Sonnets.

It is difficult or impossible to date Shakespeare's Sonnets. As we know from Meres, "sugared sonnets" of his were circulating in manuscript in 1598: the book of Sonnets was (piratically?) published in 1609 with a dark dedication to "Mr. W. H.," by the pirate, or procurer of piracy, Thorpe, "To the only begetter of these sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T.T.". T.T. did not wish to be understood. The two most popular theories are that Mr. W. H. is William Herbert, in 1601 Earl of Pembroke; before his accession to the Earldom, he was known by "courtesy title" as Lord Herbert. To him then, about 1598-1601, the Sonnets to a man are addressed.

The second theory lays stress on Shakespeare's known devotion to the Earl of Southampton; certainly his patron, and assured of his love in the dedications of "Venus" and "Lucrece," in 1593, 1594. The Sonnets are therefore dated about 1594, whereas, by the Pembroke theory, they are dated about 1598-1601.

It is not possible, in this place, to criticize the two theories. The matter is of no importance in itself, but some partisans of the Pembroke theory represent Shakespeare as embittered almost to madness by the affair, constantly alluded to in the Sonnets, of a double betrayal by his mistress, the Dark Lady, and by his adored friend the Earl of Pembroke. Henceforth we are to suppose, he revealed his passions in his tragedies, and was a fevered creature, dreaming of "bloody vengeance".

There is not a shadow of proof for the hypothesis that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was a Maid of Honour, Mary Fitton, whose portraits demonstrate that she was of a fair complexion, with grey eyes and brown hair. We have not the slightest reason to believe that, in 1597-1601, when he was building up an estate, Shakespeare was mad with love of Mary, and jealousy of her lovers who, after 1601, are unknown, till, in 1606, she committed a fault, in the country. Of the two Earls, Southampton, rather more probably than Pembroke, was, if either of them was, the beloved friend of the Sonnets.[7]

The Sonnets are not in the Italian or Petrarchian form of recurring rhymes, but are in three verses of four lines, with a rhyming couplet to conclude. In many respects they resemble the sonnets fashionable at the time, with praise of a patron whom the poet loves and who is the inspiration of the poet. The accustomed conceits of Petrarch and his French followers, des Portes, Ronsard, and many others, are transfigured by the poet's genius. It was usual to applaud the beauty of the patron, and to exaggerate the love of the poet.

This was matter of common form, but the sonnets of Shakespeare reflect the actual passion of love, or of friendship "passing the love of women," yet always respectful. People wrote thus to Elizabeth in her old age, but Shakespeare conveys an impression of sincerity, whether because he felt what he expresses, or whether his genius makes real and glowing that which was, with other writers, mere matter of compliment. He may be "unlocking his heart," in either case, for he must have known, for some one, the passion which, on the second theory, he dramatically employs to glorify his young inspirer. Yet again, he could imitate and express "all thoughts, all passions": his "sweetest nature" can scarcely have known the emotions of Shylock!

However we may try to distinguish between what is conventional and what is _felt_ in the Sonnets, they apparently refer to real persons and real situations. Sonnets I-XVII urge marriage on the beautiful young patron and friend: his beauties and virtues must live in his children as well as in verse. Sonnets XXXIII-XXXVI hint at some measure of estrangement, some wrong done to the poet by the friend.

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done.

Sonnets XL-XLIII suggest that the friend has drawn away the poet's mistress.

I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty.

Such are

The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.

The suffering poet appears to bear no malice, it must be admitted. Thenceforward there are regrets for the absence of the friend, beautiful reflections, promises of immortality in verse, till (LXVII) the poet hears that the friend keeps bad company, and though (LXX) this may be an envious slander, the poet has his doubts. In LXVIII-XCIII the poet feels that the patron is preferring other minstrels, and one of these he applauds for

the proud full sail of his great verse.

This singer is inspired by

that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.[8]

Here are personal allusions to some facts, or jests, which we cannot hope to discover: the rival poet has been guessed at as Barnabe Barnes ("Parthenope and Parthenophil," 1593), who certainly wrote a sonnet on the inspiration of Southampton's eyes. Others think that George Chapman, the translator of Homer, is the rival whom Shakespeare writes of admiringly. In XCV-XCVI the poet recurs to the stories which "spot the beauty of thy budding name". In CIV he has loved his friend for three years,

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned.

Yet he goes on in the old strain of love and praise, though

What's new to speak, what new to register?

In CX-CXI he perhaps laments his own profession as a player; perhaps he refers to changes in his affections. Taking the whole of this and the preceding sonnet together, the second seems the more natural interpretation. In Sonnet CXI, Fortune is blamed

That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.

The name of actor was, indeed, branded as no better than that of vagabond, while the play-writers constantly called the players "apes," and "mimics". Here Shakespeare does seem to speak of his profession:--

I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view.

With CXXVII begin Sonnets addressed to a woman, a dark lady, but (CXXX) not very beautiful.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.

This may be a mere criticism of the absurd hyperboles of admiration by contemporary sonneteers. In CXXXIII the poet seems to upbraid the lady for taking his friend from him, and through three sonnets this plaint is poured out with obscure puns on "will" and "Will," his name, and--some think--his friend's name. The poet is (CXLIV) placed between "two spirits that suggest me still", One good, is a man; one evil, a woman.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil.

In addressing the woman, the poet is much more outspoken than when addressing the man on

The pretty wrongs that liberty commits.

The poet, like Catullus with Lesbia, loves against his reason and his knowledge of the woman's true nature (CXLVII),

Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

If all this be in earnest, we have a tragedy of the heart, whether in 1594, or in 1598-1601, or in neither. Again and again, in his plays, Shakespeare mocks at sonnets and sonneteers; and though _his_, in parts, are personal, the depth of their significance, and the persistence of his emotions, must be left to the literary instinct of the reader. We cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's self out of his works, lyrical or dramatic. Had the sonnets been recognized as reflecting a scandalous episode in society, it could scarcely have followed that "no sequence of such poems was received more coldly". Those of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Constable, were often reprinted. Shakespeare's had not even a second edition till 1640.[9]

It is unfortunate that literary history can scarcely pass by, leaving these strange guesses about a strange matter unnoticed. The sonnets in themselves are a book of golden verse, shining with gems of beautiful phrases,

The stretched metre of an antique song.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

This beautiful poem (CVII) most manifestly refers to Shakespeare's forebodings about "my true love," who was "supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" (Southampton, in 1601, was sentenced to captivity for life). But "The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured," that is Elizabeth, Cynthia, is dead, "Luna's extinct," as contemporary versifiers said. "In this most balmy time," Peace "proclaims olives of endless age," that is the accession of James VI and I put an end to fears of wars of a disputed succession. On 10 April, 1603, James released Southampton.[10] The Sonnets, like "the floor of heaven," are "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,".never to be dimmed by mists of conjecture, or nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual sycophantic snob, mad with jealousy and foiled desire.

Later Plays.

Returning to the plays, we find, between 1597 and 1601, Shakespeare in his second period, with "Henry IV," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Henry V," "Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night," and "Julius Cæsar". Such was the astonishing harvest of five years. Probably "Henry IV" is the play which we would retain, could we keep but one, so delightful is Falstaff, the fat knight, the embodiment of the richest humour. He "has given us medicines to make us love him," and even the delightful characters of Hotspur, the Mercutio of the history, and of Lady Percy, take a far lower place. We would banish all, and keep honest Jack. Many cannot bear to see Falstaff have much the worse of the jest, as in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," said to have been composed in a fortnight, at the desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see that impossibility, Falstaff in love. The characters of Shallow, Slender, Sir Hugh, even the transient Anne Page, and all the broad humours of life in an English country town, do not console us for the defeat of the hero.

It is in "Henry V" that Shakespeare not only emphasizes his love of England, nobly expressed by John of Gaunt in "Richard II," but makes it the mainspring of the drama. The yeomen soldiers in the play frankly tell the disguised king that they doubt the justice of his cause--and well they may, for no man ever had a worse, and Shakespeare must have known it,--but "our country, right or wrong," must be the motto of the playwright, and he puts into Henry's mouth the speeches that still stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet. Much has been written on Henry's hardness to Falstaff, whose heart he broke,--but Henry at least acts in accordance with his actual character, a brave, able, ruthless, and hard man, always convinced of his own righteousness. Pistol's braggart humour is as good as ever, and that learned man of the sword, Fluellen, is a forerunner of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty.

"Much Ado about Nothing," "As You Like It," and "Twelfth Night" (1599-1600) are the three central stars in the crown of Shakespeare's comic Muse. More humorous than "Henry IV" they cannot be, but in them is no admixture of history, and the women in the three are ladies, whereas in "Henry IV" Lady Percy is the chief contrast with Falstaff's Mrs. Quickly, and her crew. Shakespeare cannot, we may suppose, have lived in the intimate society of the ladies of Elizabeth's Court; he must have divined and created Beatrice ("a star danced, and under that was she born") and Hero, sweetly bearing the accusations of her intolerable lover, Claudio:--

I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand shames
In angel whiteness beat away these blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.

The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, endear the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," like the ends of many of the plays; Claudio is lightly taken back into favour, with Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He can scarcely ever bring himself to punish one of his rogues, such as Lucio and Parolles, and is as clement to the less deserving Claudio.

The mirth of "Twelfth Night" might border on the farcical, if Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the light people, were not so delightfully human and living, like their butt, Malvolio; and did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite grace. Meanwhile, in "As You Like It," we fleet our time carelessly as they did in the golden world, under the greenwood tree, in the enchanted company of Rosalind, Touchstone, the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy and humorous Jaques, the contemplator.

Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation of Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, he now produced "Julius Cæsar," in which the chief personages are Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus appears as the virtuous and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic conscience which pushes him on to the slaying of great Cæsar. All readers note Shakespeare's way of placing a man of nature more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis which demands decision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great examples. It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute, and that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. He simply, chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where would be the interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone straight to his mark and slain the king "at sight"? There would have been no play! How could we endure a Brutus who, in his relations with Cæsar, mobbed and stabbed the greatest of mortals, in a forthright business manner, with no hesitations? If there were not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman him, he would be a vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could design men as true to their single aim as Richard III and Iago. Tragedy requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a fatal blemish; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles to the Aias and Œdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, a deed, to reverse his own words, "to make whole men sick," when in contemplation, would not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep; but, once resolved, his heart is steeled, nor does the ghost of Cæsar fright him, as the spectres of his fancy appal Macbeth.

The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played on by the rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to the people, but the mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again and again.

"Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost drama of 1589, perhaps by Kyd; the original source is the "History of the Danes" by Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French version by Belleforest. Of Shakespeare's play there are three versions, a hopelessly imperfect text in a pirated quarto of 1603; abetter, "enlarged to almost as much again" (1604); and the Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as a text; and the inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an admixture of the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript.

Of "Hamlet" it is vain to speak briefly, and more than enough of speaking at large has been done by a myriad of commentators. The young prince, full of good qualities, is bound with knots which a real Dane of the Saga time would have cut with the short sword. But Hamlet has "the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming" of life, and death, and love, and contrary duties. Thus he, like Œdipus in the Greek tragedy, becomes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil Eye; and while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus Shakespeare has left to the world a marvel of subtle and penetrative thought, of tenderness, of humour; to the critics a wrangle over psychological problems.

The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same gloomy vision of life, and, in "King Lear," another study of true and of feigned madness, inspire "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello," the last the most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error of a wavering hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Macbeth, by portents and prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of a creature in human form, Iago, that "breaks, and brings down death" on the most innocent of victims, Desdemona. "The pity of it" is too awful: the sense of _wyrd_, of masterful destiny, is too cruel.

Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them on the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, it was inevitable that, as he wrote, he should have regarded life as he does, and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel fate. Æschylus could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of the materials of the "Agamemnon" and "Eumenides". He, to be sure, tried to justify the ways of the gods to men, and Shakespeare makes no such effort. His characters, in the immortal words of Nicias to his doomed Athenian army, "have done what men may, and endure what men must". "The rest is silence."

Of Troilus and Cressida (1603), printed 1609, we can only say that Shakespeare when he wrote it "was for one hour less noble than himself". The piece makes mockery--save for Odysseus,--of the heroes of Homer, and of Cressida, whom Chaucer treats with such fine chivalry. Thersites is merely loathsome, Aias a fool, Achilles a treacherous procurer of the death of Hector. Shakespeare made an impossible blend of Homer (of whom he clearly knew a little),[11] of Ovid, and of the mediaeval forms of the Tale of Troy. The elements are wholly incompatible, and the mood of the poet, whether he wrote the play early or late, was unenviable.

"Unpleasantness" is also the not undeserved charge against "Measure for Measure"; but Cinthio's Italian tale, on which it is founded, was "a sordid record of lust and cruelty". Shakespeare, altering the plot, redeemed it by the figure of Isabella, and by the sad Mariana in her "moated grange".

It cannot be denied that when Shakespeare added "Timon of Athens," the tragedy of a misanthrope, to "Troilus," and then produced the extremely unpleasant scenes in "Pericles" (which is not in the Folio of 1623, the first edition of his collected plays) he was selecting topics that encourage the belief in his own bitterness of spirit, while in "Antony and Cleopatra" the magnificent study of "the serpent of old Nile," and of the ruin she wrought, he continues his vein of thought on the accidents that bring courage and greatness to the dust.

In "Coriolanus" he contrasts the fickleness of the mob with an heroic soul ruined by its relentless exaggeration of its own merits and overweening greatness; the tragedy of Napoleon is a modern instance. Dating the play in 1608-1609, critics derive the character of the mother of Coriolanus from Shakespeare's thoughts of his own mother, who died in 1608. Of her character, of course, we know absolutely nothing.

The "tranquillity" of "Cymbeline" so rich in poetry, and so recklessly constructed; of the "Winter's Tale," where the poetry is yet more divine, and the plot is as heaven pleases; and of "The Tempest" (1613), where much of the "local colour" is derived from the adventures of English sea-men in the Bermudas (1609-1610), is explained by the resignation of increasing years.

We cannot reason thus with much confidence. Shakespeare could only have produced "The Tempest" in the plenitude of his genius, but he might have created it as it stands at any date after 1596, when he happened to take up the materials.

"Henry VIII" was being played in 1613 when the Globe Theatre was burned. That parts are by Shakespeare, parts by Fletcher, is a theory resting on the elusive internal evidence of style and quality.

From 1611 till his death in 1616, Shakespeare is thought to have lived mainly at home, at Stratford, where his daughters married men in their own situation of life. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. By 1623 his monument in Stratford Church had been erected.

Ben Jonson wrote, "I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature."

Shakespeare, in accordance with Greek and Roman wisdom, had chosen the _fallentis semita vitæ_; in his private course he was studiously obscure. His all-embracing and unparalleled genius was exhibited only in his art, and in his profession by which he lived and prospered. He had carried blank verse from the point at which Marlowe left it to a never equalled pitch of various perfection; while his lyrics are worthy of "all the angels singing out of heaven". His creations of character are in number, variety, and excellence, unrivalled; he touched with the surest hand every chord in the human heart; he explored every height and depth, and despite the inevitable stains left by his age, and the haste necessitated by his profession, his work attains the high-water mark of human genius.

Jonson.

Ben Jonson (born 1572-73) is believed to have been descended from the Annandale border clan of the Johnstones. His father, after suffering troubles under Mary Tudor, became a Protestant preacher. Ben was a posthumous child, his mothers second husband was a bricklayer or builder. The boy was educated at Westminster school, under Camden, the antiquarian and historian, to whom he more than once expressed his gratitude. His name as an undergraduate is not found in the records of either Oxford or Cambridge. Jonson did not long practise his stepfather's useful art: he served through a campaign in Flanders, and told Drummond of Hawthornden that he slew, in single combat, a champion of the enemy. He had more than a literary acquaintance with the fencing terms which his Captain Bobadil uses with so much gusto. Returning to England he fell among actors and playwrights, is mentioned as a tragedian by Meres ("Palladis Tamia") in 1598, was challenged by an actor, Gabriel Spencer, whom he slew in fair fight; was imprisoned; turned Catholic, not for long; and, on his release, married. By 1596 he had worked with very minor playwrights at forgotten plays, and had tinkered at "The Spanish Tragedy ". He now wrote "Every Man in His Humour," an early form of the play, which he revised; removing the scene from Florence to London, for its repetition in 1598, when Shakespeare's company were the players. In the Prologue he ridiculed, as Sidney had done, the reckless early dramas, in which the hero lives a long life on the stage, while "three rusty swords" furnish forth a stage army, and squibs and stage thunder delight the audience. He aims at good-humoured comedy of everyday life, laughs at "such errors as you'll all confess," and in Master Stephen draws a shadowy Shallow, a predecessor of Bob Acres, while that stock-figure, the poltroon bragging copper-Captain Bobadil, survives in loving memory as an excellent study in a familiar "character-part," the "Miles Gloriosus," of the Roman comedian.

The personages are citizens of the day, the anxious father; the downright squire; a "Town Gull," or dupe, Master Matthew, to match the country gull, the melancholy and gentlemanlike Master Stephen; while Kitely illustrates the humours of jealousy. The characters are types, each with his "humour," or ruling passion of foible, and the standing butt is Hieronymo in Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy". As the author parodies forgotten plays, and makes use of forgotten catch-words, it may justly be said that "much of his humour still remains in obscurity". In Shakespearean humour, with its sweet tolerance, enduring quality, and sympathy and gentle melancholy, Ben is totally deficient. His "humours" are idiosyncrasies or "fads" or "ruling passions" carried into ludicrous extremes.

The success of "Every Man in His Humour" prompted "Every Man out of His Humour," acted in 1599, by Shakespeare's company, and printed, "Containing more than hath been publicly spoken or acted," in 1600. Jonson was as eager to print his plays as Shakespeare was indifferent. The comedy was much too long, and had been "cut" severely by the players. It has a kind of chorus of spectators and critics, and is an exhibition of "humours" (the word was then a piece of popular slang), or types. Sogliardo is an amusing _bourgeois gentilhomme_, who, like Shakespeare, "lacks" what he calls a "cullisen" (scutcheon) and will stick at no expense to purchase one. The romantic and euphuistic humours of Puntarvolo and his lady are excellent fooling; Macilente, the bitterly envious, suggests, in a more tragic style, his contemporary, Scott's Sir Mungo Malagrowther (in "The Fortunes of Nigel"); the coxcomb, Fastidious Brisk, is an agreeable rattle, especially in his account of his duel and his dresses, boots, hat, and jewellery; and the compliment by Macilente to the Queen is charmingly courtly, coming from that blustering mountain of a man, the author. But the play was not a success. For this, or for any other reason (perhaps because they cut down his plays into manageable size), Ben quarrelled with the actors, Shakespeare's company, and began to write satirical plays on the players, and on the poets who were more successful than himself, or who had theories that were not his about how plays should be written, about "art," in his favourite phrase. In different moods he spoke differently about Shakespeare's "art," now saying that he had none; now that without art and labour Shakespeare could not have produced his "true-filed" phrases.

"Cynthia's Revels" (1600) was acted by "the children of the Royal Chapel," and printed in 1601. (New scenes were added in the Folio edition of 1616). A lively prologue is acted by the boys, who quarrel for the privilege of speaking it. One of them mimics a coxcomb spectator, with three sorts of tobacco to smoke on the stage. Among the humours of the Court, Crites is taken to represent the author himself, "this Crites is sour". The exquisite song (_ex forti dulcedo_) "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," outlives the humours, and the satire, which was personal, for the gentlemen of the press and stage, then, as now, liked personal controversy, "it is such easy writing".

The "Poetaster"(1601) runs amuck against actors. "They forget that they are in the statute" (against vagabonds) "the rascals; they are blazoned there... they and their pedigrees; they need no other heralds, I wis." This was an anachronism, at the Court of Augustus, the scene of the play, but appropriate to Shakespeare's new scutcheon. The loves of Ovid and Julia, Virgil reading the "Æneid" to Augustus, are mixed with contemporary satire to which Dekker replied in "Satiro-Mastix, or the untrussing of the Humorous Poet" (acted by Shakespeare's company, 1602).

Marston (Crispinus) was also assailed, and war raged on the lower slopes of the Muses' hill. Since the beginnings of the theatre, play-writers have parodied and mocked each others' works, as Aristophanes caricatured Euripides, as ancient Pistol parodied Marlowe's "jades of Asia," and Molière made mirth of the tragedies played by the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. But Ben, though a huge, noisy, and truculent adversary, was placable, and he and Marston became friends. Much ingenuity has been spent in detecting hits at Shakespeare in Ben's plays and epigrams; very probably some of his cutting allusions are aimed at his successful rival, but it needs two to make a quarrel.

When James VI of Scotland came to the English throne, and lived no longer on the allowance of £3000 a year from Elizabeth, he spent very largely on elaborate masques, courtly entertainments, not unlike the ballets in which Louis XIV later danced his parts. The hosts of Greek mythology were let loose on the stage, all the sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, for example, floating in a shell of mother-of-pearl, among Tritons better schooled in their parts than honest Mike Lambourn in "Kenilworth". The dresses scenery, and decorations, "the bodily parts, were of Master Inigo Jones his design and act" (see "The Masque of Blackness," 1605). The Queen and the Court ladies acted, or at least appeared as sea-nymphs, and Ben produced the words, which were deeply learned, and the exquisite songs. Unrefined as he was, he became intimate with hospitable and generous lords and ladies. Their gifts and his payment from the Royal coffers in pensions were of more profit to him than his plays, for which he said that he received only £200. It is hardly necessary to add that he had bitter quarrels with Inigo Jones.

Jonson's Roman tragedy, "Sejanus" (1603) on the fortunes and fall of that favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, is deeply learned. The author, in the printed version, gave references in footnotes, to his authorities, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, and many others, as if he had been writing a severe work of history. Nothing can be less like Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, with his free handling of North's translation of Plutarch, with his wild mobs, and murder done openly. Ben was classical and accurate; his Romans speak a stately blank verse: his Tiberius, slow, formal, hypocritical, and deceitful above all things, is the Tiberius of Tacitus; his all-daring Sejanus is a less candid Richard III; and though Ben admitted that the ancient Chorus, with its chants, was impossible on the English stage, he was, in other respects, conscientiously classical. The whole heavy air of Rome, the terror, the duplicity, the political influence of women, their passion, the servility and the discontent, live in the somewhat ponderous blank verse, of which Ben first wrote the matter in prose, an uninspired method.

The "Catiline and His Conspiracy," acted 1611, "did not please the populace," nor the Court much, as Ben admits in a quotation from Horace: in these "jig-given times" he asked Pembroke's patronage for "a legitimate poem". In fact Jonson with all his amazing energy, vigour, and appreciation of character--that of Cicero is excellent--was too pedantic, and the orations of his Cicero were too long for the stage. The odes of the Chorus were not apt to increase the pleasure of the audience.

Ben's recognized comic masterpieces were "The Fox (Volpone)" first acted at the Universities, then at the Globe, 1605; "The Silent Woman" (1609), "The Alchemist" (1610), and "Bartholomew Fair" (1614). Both in "The Fox" and "The Alchemist," there is something that reminds us of Marlowe. The Fox, Volpone, a Venetian magnifico, a childless man, for years pretends to be dying, surrounded by his little court of obscene depravities, and aided by his parasite, Mosca, gulls men who, each in his degree, is an incarnation of cruel greed.

Volpone is a voluptuary in his devilish delight in human corruption. The aged Corbaccio he tempts to disinherit his son; the madly jealous Corbino he tempts to prostitute his wife, from the avaricious Volt ore and from all of them he wrings rich presents. It is a masque of the Deadly Sins, and behind them stands Murder, hesitating between poison, the dagger, and the smothering pillow, for all the fortune-hunters would slay their tormentor if they dared.

The scene with the English Lady Would-be, an affected literary lady, who tires Volpone to death with literary chatter, is more than the rest in the true spirit of comedy. Celia, the suffering wife of Corbino, and Bonario, the young son of the evil dotard, Corbaccio, alone represent the soul of good in things evil. The plot is ingeniously entangled and untied, and justice can scarcely add to the torments which the characters owe to their own insatiate greed.

In "The Alchemist," three scoundrels, occupying by connivance of a servant an empty house, and captained by Subtle, an alchemist, play on the greed and lust of many "coneys". These each, in Jonson's way, represent a "humour". Sir Epicure Mammon, the City Knight, is all for unlimited lust, secured by the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. He is as eager as Faustus for the unlimited, and as learned in his gloating discourses as Jonson himself, who, in Subtle, displays all his knowledge of the jargon of alchemy. Dol Common, the decoy, the Fairy Queen, has an extensive and peculiar knowledge of Billingsgate; Abel Drugger, the tobacconist, hopes to prosper in his trade by magical spells; the gamester, Pertinax Surly, strong in his own marked cards and loaded dice, has a salutary scepticism; and the two puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, are ready for anything which will supply finance for their godly crew of Anarchists at Amsterdam. Ben well understood these extreme fanatics, "a sect of dangerous consequence that will have no king, but a presbytery," said Queen Elizabeth. They were soon to put an end to "merry England," and, when we look at the quality of much of the mirth in the later Jacobean plays, we are not enamoured of either party in the conflict. The play, with its constant bustle was and long remained popular. So did "Bartholomew Fair," a colossal exhibition of a London festival, with all the humours of the joyous populace, interrupted by Rabbi Busy, the fanatic, who has eaten more roast pig than any one, and rushes about denouncing all the other "Dagons" and "idols," like a bloated English Tartuffe, _le pauvre homme._ The stocks do not daunt him, his tongue remains as free as Mause Headrigg's. In an introduction to this enormous burlesque Jonson throws scoffs at "The Tempest" of Shakespeare.

"The Silent Woman" is truly a roaring farce on a singular subject, Morose, a gentleman as impatient of noise, and as certain that all silence except his own was golden, as the Sage of Chelsea. How he is saddled with a wife who, from being "mim as a mouse" becomes the most vociferous of Roaring Boys, and, indeed to the confusion of some boastful gallants, _is_ a boy pranked up for the practical jokes whereby Morose's nephew extracts Morose's money, may be read, with much other mirthful noisy matter, by the curious.

"The Devil is an Ass" (1616) is a satire on conjurers, crystal-gazers, projectors, or, as we say, "promoters" of bubble enterprises, and their gulls and "coneys".

A walking tour to Scotland (1618-1619), where Jonson was entertained by Drummond of Hawthornden, had for its fruit Drummond's brief notes of his conversation and literary opinions. He did not care much for Drummond's Petrarchian sonnets, "cross-rhymes"; and, as to Shakespeare (whom Drummond himself does not seem to have appreciated), merely said that "he wanted art," and that, in his geography, he was wrong when he gave Bohemia a sea-coast. Happily Ben left splendid tributes other-where (in verses attached to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, "The Folio" (1623), and in prose), to Shakespeare's genius and character. Drummond's estimate of Ben as a braggart about himself, and a contemner of others, as jealous and vindictive, is only true in part. No man had more or more admiring friends; at taverns he reigned, among the great wits "Sealed of the Tribe of Ben," like an earlier Dryden.

His last plays "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," were badly received: in an Ode he

left the loathèd stage
And the more loathsome age;

he lost his place of Masque-maker in 1632, but was still befriended by Charles I. He died on 6 August, 1637, before the troubles of the Covenant came to a head.

His great collection of books and his treatise on the "Poetics" of Aristotle and the "Art of Poetry" of Horace had already been destroyed by a fire. Many of his beautiful lyrics exhibit that grace, delicacy, and, in the best sense, _poetry_ which are not conspicuous in his plays. "His throne is not with the Olympians but with the Titans," and Tennyson could not endure the gloom which he found in Jonson's comedies.

Scott, on the other hand, seems to have known them almost by heart, and constantly quotes them, and, indeed, the whole host of minor Elizabethan playwrights. The learning of Jonson, in Greek no less than in Latin, is a marvel,

Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,

in his prodigious activity of production. His immortal lyrics attest the delicacy and grace which seldom inspire his plays, and, indeed, are most noted in the lover; "a scholar and a gentleman," of his incoherent play "The New Inn" (1629). Ben's drama is the work of a "made" writer, the fruit of reflection on what the stage ought to be, and of ponderous industry and diligent observation. We feel that the plays, despite their richness and vigour, their masculine energy, are somewhat prolix, rather pedantic, and they do not hold the stage, like those of Shakespeare, at whom Ben scratched so often, without moving the master to reply in kind.

Jonson's Prose.

It is not easy to sympathize with the sweet enthusiasts who place Ben Jonson's "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter," above Bacon's Essays. These sayings, maxims, and very brief essays were mainly written when Ben was old, and not yet wise enough to be contented. He appears as a contemner of times present, when the poet is no longer taken at his own estimate, which, in Jonson's case, was rather high. Many of the "Discoveries" had, not infrequently or of recent date, been discovered before. Thus of Fortune, "That which happens to any man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he accounts it, and will make it." This has been put more briefly and better: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so". Nothing can be more trite than this of waste of time, but the expression is admirable, "What a deal of cold business doth a man" (and do most women) "mis-spend the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, _tendering visits_, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner." But Jonson was not profuse in venting compliments, and, with his enormous reading, can hardly have spent much time in paying calls. The sentences on the decay of taste are passed by elderly men of letters in all ages on "railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily read..." "Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn with newness than goodness," yet a poet is nothing if he has not something new in manner if not in matter.

Jonson says that his memory was once excellent, till he was past 40. Certainly it had ceased to be trustworthy: he attributes to Homer what Homer never said, and to Orpheus what Homer did say. Ben finds the new poems in his old age so bad that a man "never would light his tobacco with them". We all remember his sentences on Shakespeare: and "how there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned". He had three ways of viewing Shakespeare: one when he had well drunk, and was magnificent, as Howell tells us, about himself and his Muse. Thus he said to Hawthornden that Shakespeare "wanted art," and did not know that Bohemia lacks a sea-coast. The second way is that of his "Discoveries". The third and excellent way is in his poem, in which he speaks of Shakespeare as the mind of the great world does,

He was not for an age but for all time,

was greater than

the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome,
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

To the oratory of Bacon he gives the same praise in the same noble measure. "I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself..." Against Machiavel's "a Prince should exercise his cruelty by his ministers and not by himself," Jonson nobly replies, "But I say he puts off man, and goes into a beast, that is cruel," though indeed beasts are not wittingly cruel, and the man that is cruel goes into a devil. Jonson is always manly: his thoughts are ponderous and just rather than remarkable for novelty; they do not cling, like Bacon's, to the memory of the race, nor shine in so many facets with such imperishable colours.

[1] They also ran every chance of becoming desperately wicked dogs, according to Charles Kingsley in his essay, "Plays and Puritans".

[2] See an interesting discussion in Mr. Darrell Figgis's "Shakespeare" (1911), Chap. III.

[3] Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council, and "entered his appearance" on 20 May, 1593. The Council had heard of a "school of Atheists," and Marlowe appears to have been named among them. There is no hint of atheism in the fragmentary paper which Kyd said that he had from Marlowe, who was at liberty in the end of May, but was killed at Deptford, and buried on 1 June. On Whitsun Eve, 2 June, a horrible libel against Marlowe was brought to the Privy Council. The circumstances are mysterious. _Cf._ Mr. Boas, "Works of Thomas Kyd," 1901, and Mr. Ingram, "Christopher Marlowe and His Associates," 1904.

[4] The curious, almost verbal coincidences, between passages in Shakespeare and passages in the Athenian tragedians are probably due to parity of genius, not to imitation. On the other side see Mr. Churton Collins's "Studies in Shakespeare," p. 72, _et sqq._

[5] Shakespeare's other plays are based either on actual chronicles and histories; or on legends, as in "King Lear" and "Cymbeline"; or on tales, mainly Italian, founded as a rule on old traditional stories, and sometimes done by others into English novels. Earlier plays, of similar origin, are also employed. Such, too, were the usual sources of Molière, and almost all Greek tragedy rests on Achæan or Ionian myths, current in older epic poems.

[6] Saintsbury.

[7] Mr. Tyler, in his edition of the Sonnets (1890), Dr. Brandes, in his "William Shakespeare," and Mr. Harris, in "The Man Shakespeare," support the Pembroke theory. Sir Sidney Lee's "Life of William Shakespeare" contains the arguments in favour of Southampton.

[8] Ben Jonson was something of a visionary.

[9] Jusserand, "Literary History of the English People," Vol. III, p. 233.

[10] Lee, pp. 147-150.

[11] Shakespeare could read parts of Homer in Chapman's translation of Books I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, published in 1598. But certain touches indicate his acquaintance with Book XXII, 320, 321, 391-393. The drama begins with the situation in Book VII.