It should not have been left to a later hand--it should surely have been the privilege of Lamb"s or Hazlitt"s, and perhaps rather Hazlitt"s than even Lamb"s--to unearth and to transcribe the quaint and spirited description of Thames watermen "howling, hollowing, and calling for pa.s.sengers, as if all the hags in h.e.l.l had been imprisoned, and begging at the gate, fiends and furies that (G.o.d be thanked) could vex the soul but not torment it, yet indeed their most power was over the body, for here an audacious mouthing-randing-impudent-scullery-wastecoat-and-bodied rascal would have hail"d a penny from us for his scullerships."
Could Rabelais himself have described them better, or with vigor of humorous expression more heartily and enjoyably characteristic of his own all but incomparable genius?
The good old times, as remote in Shakespeare"s day as in our own, were never more delightfully described than by Rowley in this n.o.ble and simple phrase: "Then was England"s whole year but a St. George"s day."
Webster wished that what he wrote might be read by the light of Shakespeare: an admirer of Rowley might hope and must wish that he should be read by the light of Lamb. His comedies have real as well as realistic merit: not equal to that of Dekker"s or Middleton"s at their best, but usually not far inferior to Heywood"s or to theirs. The first of them, "A New Wonder: A Woman Never Vext," has received such immortal honor from the loving hand of Lamb that perhaps the one right thing to say of it would be an adaptation of a Catholic formula: "Agnus locutus est: causa finita est." The realism is so thorough as to make the interest something more than historical: and historically it is so valuable as well as amusing that a reasonable student may overlook the offensive "mingle-mangle" of prose and verse which cannot but painfully affect the nerves of all not congenitally insensitive readers, as it surely must have ground and grated on the ears of an audience accustomed to enjoy the prose as well as the verse of Shakespeare and his kind. No graver offence can be committed or conceived by a writer with any claim to any but contemptuous remembrance than this debas.e.m.e.nt of the currency of verse.
The character of Robert Foster is so n.o.ble and attractive in its selfless and manful simplicity that it gives us and leaves with us a more cordial sense of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator than we could feel if this gallant and homely figure were withdrawn from the stage of his invention. The female Polycrates who suffers under the curse of inevitable and intolerable good-fortune is an admirable creature of broad comedy that never subsides or overflows or degenerates into farce.
"A Match at Midnight" is as notable for vivid impression of reality, but not so likely to leave a good taste--as Charlotte Bronte might haye said--in the reader"s mouth. Ancient Young, the hero, is a fine fellow; but Messrs. Earlack and Carvegut are hardly amusing enough to reconcile us to toleration of such bad company. It is cleverly composed, and the crosses and chances of the night are ingeniously and effectively invented and arranged: there is real and good broad humor in the parts of the usurer and his sons and the attractive but unwidowed Widow Wag.
And I am not only free to admit but desirous to remark that a juster and more valuable judgment on such plays as these than any that I could undertake to deliver may very possibly be expected from readers whom they may more thoroughly arride--to use a favorite phrase of the all, but impeccable critic, the all but infallible judge, whose praise has set the name of Rowley so high in the rank of realistic painters and historic naturalists forever.
The copies of two dramatic nondescripts now happily preserved and duly treasured in the library of the British Museum bear inscribed in the same old hand, at the head of the first page and again on the last page under the last line, the same contemptuous three words--"silly old story." And I fear it can hardly be maintained that either Chapman, when writing "The Blind Beggar of Alexandria," or Rowley, when writing "A Shoemaker, a Gentleman," was engaged in any very rational or felicitous employment of his wayward and unregulated powers. "The Printer" of the play last named a.s.sures "the Reader" of 1638, whom he a.s.sumes to be a member of the gentle craft, that "as plays were then, some twenty years agone, it was in the fashion." A singular fashion, the rare modern reader will probably reflect: especially when he remembers how far finer and how thoroughly charming a tribute of dramatic and poetic celebration had been paid full eighteen years earlier to the same favored craft by the sweeter and rarer genius of Dekker. This quaintly apologetic a.s.surance of by-gone popularity in subject and in style will remind all probable readers of Heywood"s prologue to "The Royal King and Loyal Subject," and his dedicatory address prefixed to "The Four Prentices of London." It happily was not, however, in the printer"s power to aver that such impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once breaks ground with was ever in fashion with any of his famous fellows. Nothing can be worse than the headlong and slipshod stumble of Dekker"s at its worst; but his were the faults of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped work: Rowley"s, if I mistake not, is the far graver error of a preposterous theory that broken verse, rough and untunable as the shock of short chopping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural speech of men and women than the rolling and flowing verse of Marlowe and of Shakespeare: which is as much liker life as it is n.o.bler and more satisfying in workmanship. In reading bad verse the reader is constantly reminded that he is not reading good prose; and this is not the effect produced by true realism--the impression left by actual intercourse or faithful presentation of it.
The hagiology of this eccentric play is more like Shirley"s in "St.
Patrick for Ireland" than Dekker"s and Ma.s.singer"s in "The Virgin Martyr." a.s.suredly there is here nothing like the one incomparably lovely dialogue of Dorothea with her attendant angel. But there is the charm of a curious simplicity and sincerity in Rowley"s straightforward and homely dramatic handling of the supernatural element: in the miracle of St. Winifred"s well, and the conversion of Albon into St. Alban by "that seminary knight," as the tyrant Maximinus rather comically calls him, Amphiabel Prince of Wales. The courtship of the princely Offa, while disguised as the shoemaker"s apprentice Crispinus, by the Roman Princess Laodice, daughter of Maximinus, is very lively and dramatic: the sprightliest scene, I should say, ever played out on the stage of Rowley"s fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St.
Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable grossness.
This play is a perfect repertory of slang and quaint phrases: as when the master shoemaker, who has for apprentices two persecuted princes in disguise, and is a very inferior imitation of Dekker"s admirable Simon Eyre, calls his wife Lady d"Oliva--whatever that may mean, and when she inquires of one of the youngsters, "What"s the matter, boy? Why are so many chancery bills drawn in thy face?" _Habent sua fala libelli_: it is inexplicable that this most curious play should never have been republished, when the volumes of Dodsley"s _Old Plays_, in their very latest reissue, are enc.u.mbered with heaps of such leaden dulness and such b.e.s.t.i.a.l filth as no decent scavenger and no rational nightman would have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and smell of any possible reader.
But it is or it should be inconceivable and incredible that the masterpiece of Rowley"s strong and singular genius, a play remarkable for its peculiar power or fusion of strange powers even in the sovereign age of Shakespeare, should have waited upward of three hundred years and should still be waiting for the appearance of a second edition. The tragedy of "All"s Lost by l.u.s.t," published in the same year with Shakespeare"s great posthumous torso of romantic tragedy, was evidently a favorite child of its author"s: the terse and elaborate argument subjoined to the careful and exhaustive list of characters may suffice to prove it. Among these characters we may note that one, "a simple clownish Gentleman," was "personated by the poet": and having noted it, we cannot but long, with a fruitless longing, for such confidences as to the impersonation of the leading characters in other memorable plays of the period. There is some really good rough humor in the part of this honest clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative reader will doubt that the author"s heart was in the work devoted to the tragic and poetic scenes of a play which shows that the natural bent of his powers was toward tragedy rather than comedy. Alike as poet and as dramatist, he rises far higher and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his flight is toward the effects of imaginative terror and pity than when it is confined to the effects of humorous or pathetic realism. In the very first scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and imminent evil provoked by coalition rather than collision of the will of man with the doom of destiny; and the king"s defiance of prophecy and tradition is so admirably rendered or suggested as a sign of brutal and egotistic rather than chivalrous or manful daring as to prepare the way with great dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent scenes of attempted seduction and ultimate violation. With these the underplot, interesting and original in itself, well conceived and well carried through, is happily and naturally interwoven. The n.o.ble soliloquy of the invading and defeated Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to all true lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of England. Nothing can be livelier and more natural than the scenes in which a recent bridegroom"s heart is won from his loving and low-born wife by the offered hand and the sprightly seductions of a light-hearted and high-born rival. But the crowning scene of the play and the crowning grace of the poem is the interview of father and daughter after the consummation of the crime which gave Spain into the hand of the Moor. The vivid dramatic life in every word is even more admirable than the great style, the high poetic spirit of the scene. I have always ventured to wonder that Lamb, whose admiration has made it twice immortal, did not select as a companion or a counterpart to it that other great camp scene from Webster"s "Appius and Virginia" in which another outraged warrior and father stirs up his friends and fellow-soldiers to vindication of his honor and revenge for his wrong. It is surely even finer and more impressive than that selected in preference to it, which closes with the immolation of Virginia.
The scenes in which the tragic underplot of Rowley"s tragedy is deftly and effectively wound up are full of living action and pa.s.sion; that especially in which the revenge of a deserted wife is wreaked mistakingly on the villanous minion to whose instigation she owes the infidelity of the husband for whom she mistakes him. The gross physical horrors which deform the close of a n.o.ble poem are relieved if not beautified by the great style of its age--an age unparalleled in wealth and variety of genius, a style unmatchable for its union of inspired and imaginative dignity with actual and vivid reality of impa.s.sioned and lofty life.
No comparison is possible, nor if possible could it be profitable, between the somewhat rough-hewn English oak of Rowley"s play and the flawless Roman steel of Landor"s great Miltonic tragedy on the same subject. The fervent praise of Southey was not too generous to be just in its estimate of that austere masterpiece; it is lamentable to remember the injustice of its ill.u.s.trious author to the men of Shakespeare"s day. I fear he would certainly not have excepted the n.o.ble work of his precursor from his general condemnation or impreachment of "their b.l.o.o.d.y bawdries"--a misjudgment gross enough for Hallam--or Voltaire when declining to the level of a Hallam. Landor was as headlong as these were hidebound, as fitful as they were futile; but not even the dispraise or the disrelish of a finer if not of a greater dramatic poet could affect the credit or impair the station of one on whose merits the final sentence of appreciation has been irrevocably p.r.o.nounced by the verdict of Charles Lamb.
THOMAS HEYWOOD
If it is difficult to write at all on any subject once enn.o.bled by the notice of Charles Lamb without some apprehensive sense of intrusion and presumption, least of all may we venture without fear of trespa.s.s upon ground so consecrated by his peculiar devotion as the s.p.a.cious if homely province or demesne of the dramatist whose highest honor it is to have earned from the finest of all critics the crowning tribute of a sympathy which would have induced him to advise an intending editor or publisher of the dramatists of the Shakespearean age to begin by a reissue of the works of Heywood. The depth and width of his knowledge, the subtlety and the sureness of his intuition, place him so far ahead of any other critic or scholar who has ever done any stroke of work in any part of the same field that it may seem overbold for any such subordinate to express or to suggest a suspicion that this counsel would have been rather the expression of a personal and a partly accidental sympathy than the result of a critical and a purely rational consideration. And yet I can hardly think it questionable that it must have been less the poetic or essential merit than the casual or incidental a.s.sociations of Heywood"s work which excited so exceptional an enthusiasm in so excellent a judge. For as a matter of fact it must be admitted that in one instance at least the objections of the carper Hazlitt are better justified than the commendations of the finer and more appreciative critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the upper cla.s.ses of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of Heywood"s most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords, Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and n.o.ble characters are the finest and surest witnesses to the n.o.ble and beautiful nature of their designer"s, observes that "Heywood"s characters, his country gentlemen, etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in life." But such country gentlemen as his Actons and Mountfords are surely of a worse than the worst kind; more cruel or more irrational, more base or more perverse, than we need fear to see in life unless our experience should be exceptionally unfortunate. Lamb indeed is rather an advocate than a judge in the case of his fellow-Londoners Thomas Heywood and William Rowley; but his pleading is better worth our attention than the summing up of a less cordial or less competent critic.
From critics or students who regard with an academic smile of cultivated contempt the love for their country or the faith in its greatness which distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge and Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet whose devotion to his homestead was not merely that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner, no less fond and proud of his city than of his country. The quaint, homely, single-hearted munic.i.p.al loyalty of an old-world burgess, conscious of his station as "a citizen of no mean city," and proud even of the insults which provincials might fling at him as a c.o.c.kney or aristocrats as a tradesman, is so admirably and so simply expressed in the person of Heywood"s first hero--the first in date, at all events, with whom a modern reader can hope to make acquaintance--that the n.o.bly plebeian pride of the city poet is as unmistakably personal as the tenderness of the dramatic artist who has made the last night of the little princes in the Tower as terribly and pathetically real for the reader as Millais has made it for the spectator of the imminent tragedy. Why Shakespeare shrank from the presentation of it, and left to a humbler hand the tragic weight of a subject so charged with tenderness and terror, it might seem impertinent or impossible to conjecture--except to those who can perceive and appreciate the intense and sensitive love of children which may haply have made the task distasteful if not intolerable: but it is certain that even he could hardly have made the last words of the little fellows more touchingly and sweetly lifelike.
Were there nothing further to commend in the two parts of the historical play or chronicle history of "King Edward IV.," this would suffice to show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was not unjustified of its early and perilous venture: but the hero of these two plays is no royal or n.o.ble personage, he is plain Matthew Sh.o.r.e the goldsmith. We find ourselves at once in what Coleridge would have called the anachronic atmosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a champion c.o.c.kney, whose interest is really much less in the rise and fall of princes than in the homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the st.u.r.dy gallantry of their apprentices. The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: the homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date and of the cla.s.s to which these plays must be referred. The parts of the rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers of Heywood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were still in abeyance or in embryo. Pathos there is of a true and manly kind in the leading part of Sh.o.r.e; but it has little or nothing of the poignant and intense tenderness with which Heywood was afterward to invest the similar part of Frankford. Humor there is of a genuine plain-spun kind in the scenes which introduce the King as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his surroundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are presented with a comic and cordial fidelity which the painter of Falstaff"s "villeggiatura," the creator of Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and conceivably have approved. It is rather in the more serious or ambitious parts that we find now and then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of manner. The recurrent burden of a jingling couplet in the cajoleries of the procuress Mrs. Blague is a survival from the most primitive and conventional form of dramatic writing not yet thoroughly superseded and suppressed by the successive influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and of Jonson; while the treatment of character in such scenes as that between Clarence, Richard, and Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for a rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and simple part of Ayre, a character worthy to have been glorified by the mention and commendation of Heywood"s most devoted and most ill.u.s.trious admirer, is typical of the qualities which Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the representative characters of his favorite playwright.
In that prodigious monument of learning and labor, Mr. Fleay"s _Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama_, the common attribution of these two plays to Heywood is impeached on the aesthetic score that "they are far better than his other early work." I have carefully endeavored to do what justice might be done to their modest allowance of moderate merit; but whether they be Heywood"s or--as Mr. Fleay, on apparent grounds of doc.u.mentary evidence, would suggest--the work of Chettle and Day, I am certainly rather inclined to agree with the general verdict of previous criticism, which would hardly admit their equality and would decidedly question their claim to anything more than equality of merit with the least admirable or memorable of Heywood"s other plays. Even the rough-hewn chronicle, "If you know not me you know n.o.body," by which "the troubles of Queen Elizabeth" before her accession are as nakedly and simply set forth in the first part as in the second are "the building of the Royal Exchange" and "the famous victory" over the Invincible Armada, has on the whole more life and spirit, more interest and movement, in action as in style. The cla.s.s of play to which it belongs is historically the most curious if poetically the least precious of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood in earnest or by Shakespeare in jest as popular or ambitious of popularity on the stage for which they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or caricature, more or less ineffectually trammelled by the chance or the likelihood of prosecution and repression, is common under various forms to various ages and countries; but the serious introduction and presentation of contemporary figures and events give to such plays as these as mixed and peculiar a quality as though the playwright"s aim or ambition had been to unite in his humble and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or patriotic historian and a political or social caricaturist; a poet and a pamphleteer on the same page, a chronicler and a jester in the same breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else omnivorous appet.i.te of censure so humble an example of such obsequious and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next to none. In Thomas Drue"s play of "The d.u.c.h.ess of Suffolk," formerly and plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part of the same ground is gone over in much the same fashion and to much the same effect; but the subject, a single interlude of the Marian persecution, has more unity of interest than can be attained by any play running on the same line as Heywood"s, from the opening to the close of the most hideous episode in our history. That the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should have been "staged to the show" for the edification and confirmation of her half-sister"s subjects in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than that the same hopelessly improper topic for historical drama should in later days have been selected for dramatic treatment by English writers and on one occasion by a great English poet. As there are within the range of any country"s history, authentic or traditional, periods and characters in themselves so naturally fit and proper for transfiguration by poetry that the dramatist who should attempt to improve on the truth--the actual or imaginary truth accepted as fact with regard to them--would probably if not certainly derogate from it, so are there others which cannot be transfigured without transformation. Such a character is the last and wretchedest victim of a religious reaction which blasted her kingdom with the h.e.l.l-fire of reviving devil-worship, and her name with the ineffaceable brand of an inseparable and d.a.m.ning epithet. If even the genius of Tennyson could not make the aspirations and the agonies of Mary as acceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic point of view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could make the sufferings of such poor wretches as their Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be expected that the humbler if more dramatic genius of Heywood should have triumphed over the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily repulsive: but it is curious that both should have attempted to tackle the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle history" of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare"s self attempted it, could scarcely have been other--if we may judge by our human and fallible lights of the divine possibilities open to a superhuman and infallible intelligence--than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or poetic point of view. The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have been to invent, to devise, to create; not to modify, to adapt, to adjust. b.l.o.o.d.y Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and poetic malefactress: but only by the most audacious and magnificent defiance of history and possibility. Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia (to use the proper ceremonial style adopted for the exquisitely tender and graceful dedication of the "Asolani") died peaceably in the odor of incense offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin verse of such accomplished poets and acolytes as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi. Nothing more tragic or dramatic could have been made of her peaceful and honorable end than of the reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history. The greatest poet and dramatist of the nineteenth century has chosen to immortalize them by violence--to give them a life, or to give a life to their names, which history could not give. Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the creation of a living and eternal truth. One thing may be registered to the credit, not indeed of the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the man and the Englishman: the generous fair play shown to Philip II. in the scene which records his impartial justice done upon the Spanish a.s.sa.s.sin of an English victim. There is a characteristic manliness about Heywood"s patriotism which gives a certain advent.i.tious interest to his thinnest or homeliest work on any subject admitting or requiring the display of such a quality. In the second and superior part of this dramatic chronicle it informs the humbler comic parts with more life and spirit, though not with heartier devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious and comparatively though modestly high-flown close of the play: which is indeed in the main rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced and formal interludes of historical pageant or event, than a regular or even an irregular historical drama. Again the trusty c.o.c.kney poet has made his hero and protagonist of a plain London tradesman: and has made of him at once a really n.o.ble and a heartily amusing figure. His better-born apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan Gil Bias or Gusman d"Alfarache, would be an excellent comic character if he had been a little more plausibly carried through to the close of his versatile and venturous career; as it is, the farce becomes rather impudently cheap; though in the earlier pa.s.sages of Parisian trickery and buffoonery there is a note of broad humor which may remind us of Moliere--not of course the Moliere of Tartuffe, but the Moliere of M. de Pourceaugnac. The curious alterations made in later versions of the closing scene are sometimes though not generally for the better.
Lamb, in a pa.s.sage which no reader can fail to remember, has declared that "posterity is bound to take care" (an obligation, I fear, of a kind which posterity is very far from careful to discharge) "that a writer loses nothing by such a n.o.ble modesty" as that which induced Heywood to set as little store by his dramatic works as could have been desired in the rascally interest of those "harlotry players" who thought it, forsooth, "against their peculiar profit to have them come in print."
But I am not sure that it was altogether a n.o.ble or at all a rational modesty which made him utter the avowal or the vaunt: "It never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read." For, eight years after this well-known pa.s.sage was in print, when publishing a "Chronographicall History of all the Kings, and memorable pa.s.sages of this Kingdome, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles," he offers, on arriving at the accession of Elizabeth, "an apologie of the Author" for slurring or skipping the record of her life and times in a curious pa.s.sage which curiously omits as unworthy of mention his dramatic work on the subject, while complacently enumerating his certainly less valuable and memorable other tributes to the great queen"s fame as follows: "To write largely of her troubles, being a princesse, or of her rare and remarkable Reigne after she was Queen, I should but feast you with dyet twice drest: Having my selfe published a discourse of the first: from her cradle to her crowne; and in another bearing t.i.tle of the nine worthy Women: she being the last of the rest in time and place; though equall to any of the former both in religious vertue, and all masculine magnanimity." This surely looks but too much as though the dramatist and poet thought more of the chronicler and compiler than of the truer Heywood whose name is embalmed in the affection and admiration of his readers even to this day; as though the author of "A Challenge for Beauty," "The Fair Maid of the West," and "A Woman Killed with Kindness," must have hoped and expected to be remembered rather as the author of "Troja Britannica," "Gynaikeion,"
"The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels," and even this "Life of Merlin, sirnamed Ambrosius. His Prophesies, and Predictions Interpreted; and their truth made good by our English Annalls": undoubtedly, we may believe, "a Subject never published in this kind before, and deserves"
(_sic_) "to be knowne and observed by all men." Here follows the motto: "Quotque aderant Vates, rebar adesse Deos." The biographer and chronographer would apparently have been less flattered than surprised to hear that he would be remembered rather as the creator of Frankford, Mountferrers, and Geraldine, than as the chronicler of King Brute, Queen Elizabeth, and King James.
The singular series of plays which covers much the same ground as Caxton"s immortal and delightful chronicle of the "Histories" of Troy may of course have been partially inspired by that most enchanting "recuyell": but Heywood, as will appear on collation or confrontation of the dramatist with the historian, must have found elsewhere the suggestion of some of his most effective episodes. The excellent simplicity and vivacity of style, the archaic abruptness of action and presentation, are equally noticeable throughout all the twenty-five acts which lead us from the opening of the Golden to the close of the Iron Age; but there is a no less perceptible advance or increase of dramatic and poetic invention in the ten acts devoted to the tale of Troy and its sequel. Not that there is anywhere any want of good simple spirited work, homely and lively and appropriate to the ambitious humility of the design; a design which aims at making popular and familiar to the citizens of Elizabethan London the whole cycle of heroic legend from the reign of Saturn to the death of Helen. Jupiter, the young hero of the first two plays and ages, is a really brilliant and amusing mixture of Amadis, Sigurd, and Don Juan: the pretty scene in which his infant life is spared and saved must be familiar, and pleasantly familiar, to all worthy lovers of Charles Lamb. The verse underlined and immortalized by his admiration--"For heaven"s sake, when you kill him, hurt him not"--should suffice to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer.
I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals, could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism. There is spirit of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of war and adventure that follow: Heywood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn and the t.i.tans very human and simple figures, whose doings and sufferings are presented with child-like straightforwardness in smooth and fluent verse and in dialogue which wants neither strength nor ease nor propriety. The subsequent episode of Danae is treated with such frank and charming fusion of realism and romance as could only have been achieved in the age of Shakespeare. To modern readers it may seem unfortunate for Heywood that a poet who never (to the deep and universal regret of all competent readers) followed up the dramatic promise of his youth, as displayed in the n.o.bly vivid and pathetic little tragedy of "Sir Peter Harpdon"s End," should in our day have handled the story of Danae and the story of Bellerophon so effectively as to make it impossible for the elder poet either to escape or to sustain comparison with the author of "The Earthly Paradise"; but the most appreciative admirers of Morris will not be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to the admirable qualities displayed in Heywood"s dramatic treatment of these legends. The naturally sweet and spontaneous delicacy of the later poet must not be looked for in the homely and audacious realism of Heywood; in whose work the style of the Knight"s Tale and the style of the Miller"s Tale run side by side and hand in hand.
From the Golden Age to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood"s dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation or degradation of the cla.s.sical four ages. "The Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; in "The Silver Age" the process of evolution is already visible at work. Bellerophon and Aurea cannot certainly be compared with the Joseph and Phraxanor of Charles Wells: but the curt and abrupt scene in which they are hastily thrust on the stage and as hastily swept off it is excellently composed and written. The highest possible tribute to the simple and splendid genius of Plautus is paid by the evidence of the fact that all his imitators have been obliged to follow so closely on the lines of his supernatural, poetical, and farcical comedy of Amphitryon. Heywood, Rotrou, Moliere, and Dryden have sat at his feet and copied from his dictation like school-boys. The French pupils, it must be admitted, have profited better and shown themselves apter and happier disciples than the English. I cannot think that even Moliere has improved on the text of Rotrou as much, or nearly as much, as he has placed himself under unacknowledged obligation to his elder countryman: but in Dryden"s version there is a taint of greasy vulgarity, a reek of obtrusive ruffianism, from which Heywood"s version is as clean as Shakespeare"s could have been, had he bestowed on the "Amphitruo" the honor he conferred on the "Menaechmi." The power of condensation into a few compact scenes of material sufficient for five full acts is a remarkable and admirable gift of Heywood"s.
After the really dramatic episode in which he had the advantage of guidance by the laughing light of a greater comic genius than his own, Heywood contentedly resumes the simple task of arranging for the stage a mythological chronicle of miscellaneous adventure. The jealousy of Juno is naturally the mainspring of the action and the motive which affords some show of connection or coherence to the three remaining acts of "The Silver Age": the rape of Proserpine, the mourning and wandering and wrath of Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a pa.s.sage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. The second of the five plays composing it closes with the rescue of Proserpine by Hercules, and the judgment of Jupiter on "the Arraignment of the Moon."
In "The Brazen Age" there is somewhat more of dramatic unity or coherence than in the two bright easy-going desultory plays which preceded it: it closes at least with a more effective catastrophe than either of them in the death of Hercules. However far inferior to the haughty and daring protest or appeal in which Sophocles, speaking through the lips of the virtuous Hyllus, impeaches and denounces the iniquity of heaven with a steadfast and earnest vehemence unsurpa.s.sed in its outspoken rebellion by any modern questioner or blasphemer of divine providence, the simple and humble sincerity of the English playwright has given a not unimpressive or inharmonious conclusion to the same superhuman tragedy. In the previous presentation of the story of Meleager, Heywood has improved upon the brilliant and pa.s.sionate rhetoric of Ovid by the introduction of an original and happy touch of dramatic effect: his Althaea, after firing the brand with which her son"s life is destined to burn out, relents and plucks it back for a minute from the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite from torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength and spirit, before she rekindles it. The pathos of his farewell has not been overpraised by Lamb: who might have added a word in recognition of the very spirited and effective suicide of Althaea, not unworthily heralded or announced in such verses as these:
This was my son, Born with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast, Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love; His youth my pride; his honor all my wishes; So dear, that little less he was than life.
The subsequent adventures of Hercules and the Argonauts are presented with the same quiet straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious that the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly as it is humorously and dramatically presented. The rivalry of Omphale and Deianeira for their hero"s erratic affection affords a lively and happy mainspring--not suggested by Caxton--for the tragic action and pa.s.sion of the closing scenes.
At the opening of "The Iron Age," nineteen years later in date of publication, we find ourselves at last arrived in a province of dramatic poetry where something of consecutive and coherent action is apparently the aim if not always the achievement of the writer. These ten acts do really const.i.tute something like a play, and a play of serious, various, progressive, and sustained interest, beginning with the elopement and closing with the suicide of Helen. There is little in it to suggest the influence of either Homer or Shakespeare: whose "Troilus and Cressida"
had appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered admiration of an eternally mystified world, just twenty-three years before. The only figure equally prominent in either play is that of Thersites: but Heywood, happily and wisely, has made no manner of attempt to rival or to reproduce the frightful figure of the intelligent Yahoo in which the sane and benignant genius of Shakespeare has for once antic.i.p.ated and eclipsed the mad and malignant genius of Swift. It should be needless to add that his Ulysses has as little of Shakespeare"s as of Homer"s: and that the brutalization or degradation of the G.o.d-like figures of Ajax and Achilles is only less offensive in the lesser than in the greater poet"s work. In the friendly duel between Hector and Ajax the very text of Shakespeare is followed with exceptional and almost servile fidelity: but the subsequent exchange of gifts is, of course, introduced in imitation of earlier and cla.s.sic models. The contest of Ajax and Ulysses is neatly and spiritedly cast into dramatic form: Ovid, of course, remains unequalled, as he who runs may read in Dryden"s grand translation, but Heywood has done better--to my mind at least--than Shirley was to do in the next generation; though it is to be noted that Shirley has retained more of the magnificent original than did his immediate precursor: but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a burlesque to pa.s.s muster even as a blasphemous travestie of the sacred text of Sophocles. In the fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope with no such matchless models or precursors; and it is perhaps the brightest and most interesting of the five. Sinon is a spirited and rather amusing understudy of Thersites: his seduction of Cressida is a grotesquely diverting variation on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of the typical traitress; and though time and s.p.a.ce are wanting for the development or indeed the presentation of any more tragic or heroic character, the rapid action of the last two acts is workmanlike in its simple fashion: the complicated or rather acc.u.mulated chronicle of crime and retribution may claim at least the credit due to straightforward lucidity of composition and sprightly humility of style.
In "Love"s Mistress; or, The Queen"s Masque," the stage chronicler or historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet: his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity and spirit, simplicity and vivacity. The framework or setting of these five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue: the story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Moliere and Corneille; though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless Theophile"s. The fortunes of Psyche in English poetry have been as curious and various as her adventures on earth and elsewhere. Besides and since this pretty little play of Heywood"s, she has inspired a long narrative poem by Marmion, one of the most brilliant and independent of the younger comic writers who sat at the feet or gathered round the shrine of Ben Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutchman"s poet laureate, than which nothing more portentous in plat.i.tude ever crawled into print, and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wooden verse evoked from Shadwell"s great predecessor in the office of court rhymester an immortalizing reference to "Prince Nicander"s vein"; a magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty example of metrical romance by Morris.
"Inexplicable and eccentric as were the moods and fashions of dramatic poetry in an age when Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything so singular in its composition and so mysterious in its motive as "Troilus and Cressida," the most eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or perhaps of any time, is probably "The Rape of Lucrece."" This may naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the party-colored scenes of a really n.o.ble tragedy, crossed and checkered with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce.
But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than cla.s.sical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or essentially to the third rather than to the second of the four sections into which Heywood"s existing plays may be exhaustively divided, which stands on the verge between them with something of the quaintest and most graceful attributes of either. The fine instinct and the simple skill with which the poet has tempered the villany of his villains without toning down their atrocities by the alloy of any incongruous quality must be acknowledged as worthily characteristic of a writer who at his ethical best might be defined as something of a plebeian Sidney.
There are touches of criminal heroism and redeeming humanity even in the parts of s.e.xtus and Tullia: the fearless desperation of the doomed ravisher, the conjugal devotion of the hunted parricide, give to the last defiant agony of the abominable mother and son a momentary tone of almost chivalrous dignity. The blank verse is excellent, though still considerably alloyed with rhyme: a fusion or alternation of metrical effects in which the young Heywood was no less skilful and successful, inartistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success may seem to modern criticism, than the young Shakespeare.
The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of Heywood"s work which with all their great and real merit have least in them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of his genius: those qualities of which when we think of him we think first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most naturally a.s.sociate with his name. As a historical or mythological playwright, working on material derived from cla.s.sic legends or from English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the sweet-tempered manliness, the n.o.ble kindliness, which won the heart of Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something of his humor: but if this were all we had of him we should know comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories or his legendary complications and variations on the antique. The famous and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading "The Four Prentices of London." Externally the most extravagant and grotesque of dramatic poems, this eccentric tragicomedy of chivalrous adventure is full of poetic as well as fantastic interest. There is really something of discrimination in the roughly and readily sketched characters of the four crusading brothers: the youngest especially is a life-like model of restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when incarnate in a hot-headed English boy; unlike even in its likeness to the same type as embodied in a French youngster such as the immortal d"Artagnan. Justice has been done by Lamb, and consequently as well as subsequently by later criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which breaks out by flashes in this quixotic romance of the City, with its serio-comic ideal of crusading counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowledge been observed that in the scene "where they toss their pikes so," which aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood, the future object of Dryden"s ignorant and pointless insult, antic.i.p.ated with absolute exact.i.tude the style of Dryden"s own tragic bl.u.s.terers when most busily bandying tennis-b.a.l.l.s of ranting rhyme in mutual challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean epigram.[1]
[Footnote 1: Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue in "Tyrannic Love" or "The Conquest of Granada":
"Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play?
Look down, ye G.o.ds, this combat to survey."
"Rapier and pike this combat shall decide: G.o.ds, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride."
"I"ll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be, And feign to do my cunning after me."
This will remind the reader not so much of the "Rehearsal" as of Butler"s infinitely superior parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and Puss.]
It is a pity that Heywood"s civic or professional devotion to the service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in the transfiguration of the idealized prentice: it is a greater pity that we cannot exchange all Heywood"s extant masques for any one of the two hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he "had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger." The literary department of a Lord Mayor"s show can hardly be considered as belonging to literature, even when a poet"s time and trouble were misemployed in compiling the descriptive prose and the declamatory verse contributed to the ceremony.
Not indeed that it was a poet who devoted so much toil and good-will to celebration or elucidation of the laborious projects and objects both by water and land which then distinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs, pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas Brothers and their most ingenious parent were employed in a more honorable capacity than the subordinate function of versifier or showman--an office combining the parts and the duties of the immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr.
Shum. Lexicographers might pick out of the text some rare if not unique Latinisms or barbarisms such as "prestigion" and "strage": but except for the purpose of such "harmless drudges" and perhaps of an occasional hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such const.i.tutions as could survive and a.s.similate a diet of Martin Tupper or Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood"s or Shakespeare"s time there is something comparatively not contemptible; the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a simple historic purity and dignity of its own; the dulness is not so dreary as the dulness of mediaeval prosers, the commonplace is not so vulgar as the commonplace of more modern scribes.
"The Trial of Chivalry" is a less extravagant example of homely romantic drama than "The Four Prentices of London." We owe to Mr. Bullen the rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and verification of its authorship. In style and in spirit it is perfect Heywood: simple and n.o.ble in emotion and conception, primitive and straightforward in construction and expression; inartistic but not ineffectual; humble and facile, but not futile or prosaic. It is a rather more rational and natural piece of work than might have been expected from its author when equipped after the heroic fashion of Mallory or Froissart: its date is more or less indistinctly indicated by occasional rhymes and peculiar conventionalities of diction: and if Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may now and then suggest to his reader the figure of Sancho Panza in his master"s armor, his pedestrian romance is so genuine, his modest ambition so high-spirited and high-minded, that it would be juster and more critical to compare him with Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements of his esquire.
d.i.c.k Bowyer, whose life and death are mendaciously announced on the catch-penny t.i.tle-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol") "does _not_ die," is a rather rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff British soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to better advantage in other plays of Heywood and his fellows. That this must be cla.s.sed among the earlier if not the earliest of his works we may infer from the primitive simplicity of a stage direction which recalls another in a play printed five years before. In the second scene of the third act of "The Trial of Chivalry" we read as follows: "Enter Forester, missing the other taken away, speaks anything, and exit." In the penultimate scene of the second part of "King Edward IV." we find this even quainter direction, which has been quoted before now as an instance of the stage conditions or habits of the time: "Jockie is led to whipping over the stage, speaking some words, but of no importance."
A further and deeper debt of thanks is due to Mr. Bullen for the recovery of "The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered," after the lapse of nearly three centuries. The singularly prophetic sub-t.i.tle of this cla.s.sic and romantic tragicomedy has been justified at so late a date by the beneficence of chance, in favorable conjunction with the happy devotion and fortunate research of a thorough and a thoroughly able student, as to awaken in all fellow-lovers of dramatic poetry a sense of hopeful wonder with regard to the almost illimitable possibilities of yet further and yet greater treasure to be discovered and recovered from the keeping of "dust and d.a.m.ned oblivion." Meantime we may be heartily thankful for the recovery of an excellent piece of work, written throughout with the easy mastery of serious or humorous verse, the graceful pliancy of style and the skilful simplicity of composition, which might have been expected from a mature work of Heywood"s, though the execution of it would now and then have suggested an earlier date.
The clown, it may be noticed, is the same who always reappears to do the necessary comicalities in Heywood"s plays; if hardly "a fellow of infinite jest," yet an amusing one in his homely way; though one would have thought that on the homeliest London stage of 1624 the taste for antiphonal improvisation of doggrel must have pa.s.sed into the limbo of obsolete simplicities. The main plot is very well managed, as with Plautus once more for a model might properly have been expected; the rather ferociously farcical underplot must surely have been borrowed from some _fabliau_. The story has been done into doggrel by George Colman the younger: but that cleanly and pure minded censor of the press would hardly have licensed for the stage a play which would have required, if the stage-carpenter had been then in existence, the production of a scene which would have antic.i.p.ated what Gautier so plausibly plumed himself upon as a novelty in stage effect--imagined for the closing scene of his imaginary tragedy of "Heliogabalus."
There are touches of pathetic interest and romantic invention in "A Maidenhead Well Lost": two or three of the leading characters are prettily sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is a graceful compromise between unambitious poetry and mildly spirited prose: but it is hardly to be cla.s.sed among Heywood"s best work of the kind: it has no scenes of such fervid and n.o.ble interest, such vivid and keen emotion as distinguish "A Challenge for Beauty": and for all its simple grace of writing and ingenuous ingenuity of plot it may not improbably be best remembered by the average modern reader as remarkable for the most amusing and astonishing example on record of anything but "inexplicable"
dumb show--to be paralleled only and hardly by a similar interlude of no less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche--"La Reine d"Espagne."
Little favor has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors to "The Royal King and the Loyal Subject": and the author himself, in committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition and versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need not shrink from comparison with Fletcher"s more elaborate, rhetorical, elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of "The Loyal Subject"; that the somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood"s hero is not more slavish or foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher"s; and that even if we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood. The humor is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality and versatility is as genuine and honest as the serious exposition of character is straightforward and sincere.
The best of Heywood"s romantic plays is the most graceful and beautiful, in detached scenes and pa.s.sages, of all his extant works. The combination of the two plots--they can hardly be described as plot and underplot--is so dexterously happy that it would do the highest credit to a more famous and ambitious artist: the rival heroes are so really n.o.ble and attractive that we are agreeably compelled to condone whatever seems extravagant or preposterous in their relations or their conduct: there is a breath of quixotism in the air which justifies and enn.o.bles it. The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit: it is the more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from Heywood. But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood"s genius at its happiest and brightest as "A Challenge for Beauty."
The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as difficult to determine in the work of Heywood as in the character of his time: the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so n.o.bly beside their n.o.ble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have been cla.s.sed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which their author"s fame must princ.i.p.ally and finally depend than among those which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his work. There is much the same fusion of interests, as there is much the same mixture of styles, in the conduct of a play for which we have once more to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at once of Heywood and of his admirers. That Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author of a play which a few years ago had never seen the light is as evident as that his estimate of the fine English quality which induced this recognition was justified by all rules of moral evidence. There can be less than little doubt that "d.i.c.k of Devonshire" is one of the two hundred and twenty in which Heywood had "a main finger"--though not, I should say, by any means "an entire hand." The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark: though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect. d.i.c.k Pike is a better study of the bluff and tough English hero than d.i.c.k Bowyer in "The Trial of Chivalry": and the same chivalrous sympathy with the chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which delights us in "A Challenge for Beauty" pervades and vivifies this long-lost and long-forgotten play. The partial sacrifice of ethical propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences of the stage is rather more startling than usual: a fratricidal ravisher and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being happy though married. The hand of Heywood is more recognizable in the presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his others, and in the n.o.ble answer of the criminal"s brother to their father"s very natural question: "Why dost thou take his part so?"