Enter Rollo. By one of Fletcher"s sudden conversions, he has changed to a subtle hypocrite and appears humble, repentant, begging for pity and love,
"in whiteness of my wash"d repentance, In my heart"s tears and love of truth to Edith, In my fair life hereafter."
Edith, surprised and unnerved, gradually forgets her purpose, and as she informs the audience in several asides, is yielding; when--Enter Hamond and the guard.
Hamond, a brave blunt soldier, is seeking revenge on Rollo because the tyrant has killed his brother and outraged him by commanding him to murder the n.o.ble Audrey. Hamond announces that he has come to kill Rollo, who seizes Edith and interposes her as a defense. She, aroused now to Rollo"s real nature, draws her dagger, but he s.n.a.t.c.hes it from her. In the struggle that follows Rollo and Hamond are both killed.
All this occupies only one hundred and fifty lines of verse and must be accounted a most skillful bit of playmaking, a scene such as only Fletcher among the Elizabethans could contrive. But there is neither truth to life nor dramatic logic; on the contrary, there are two improbable conversions of character. It is not tragedy, it is hardly serious drama, it is theatrical claptrap; yet Fletcher"s poetry is as fine, and, for all that one can see, as sincere as in the scene of genuine pa.s.sion. Such dramatic impossibilities as this Fletcher faced with eager recklessness, and gayly spurred his Pegasus for the leap.
"The b.l.o.o.d.y Brother" further ill.u.s.trates the union of the material and methods of the Beaumont-Fletcher romances with the conventions of the tragedy of revenge and l.u.s.t. That union, manifest also in Fletcher"s "Valentinian," is henceforth characteristic of the tragedy of the age. The dramatists belonged to a late period of an artistic development and had many examples both native and foreign to draw upon. They were men of talent or even genius whose creations were independent and original but rarely without large indebtedness to their predecessors. While Shakespeare and Jonson were often borrowed from, the majority of the tragedies clung to the examples of Webster and Tourneur or mingled revenge and horrors with the romantic plots and novel technic of Beaumont and Fletcher. A marked similarity consequently exists in the plays of men of different temperaments and purposes. l.u.s.tful tyrants and their intriguing favorites, love crossed by honor and often allied with revenge, illicit and abnormal pa.s.sion, romantic princes and princesses, an action confined to the rooms of a palace, situations involving seduction or temptation, stage-effects whether by horrors or by masques and pageants, and a style more equable, less fantastic than in the early drama,--these are the ingredients which characterize tragedy for the quarter century after Shakespeare"s death.
Middleton"s tragedies and tragicomedies came late in his career, following a period of realistic comedies, in which his observant and satirical imagination found free play. Though affected by Beaumont and Fletcher"s romanticism, he preserved most of the traits of the tragedy of revenge in its late development, including such penetrating a.n.a.lysis of character swayed by evil as we have found in Marston and Webster. In some of his romantic dramas, as the tragicomedy "The Witch," there is little of this serious purpose. The various revenge motives--of the d.u.c.h.ess on the duke who has compelled her to drink from the skull of her murdered father, of the lover upon the husband who has married his betrothed, and of the jealous husband upon his wife--are all treated with melodramatic insincerity though with an ingenious accompaniment of spectacular and supernatural interference on the part of the witches. Attempted murder results in wounds that easily heal; the deadly potion proves harmless; the duke discovered dead comes to life. In the single tragedy written by Middleton alone, "Women Beware Women," the revenge species appears unadulterated. Isabella"s illicit relation with her uncle, the use of a masque to bring about the final slaughter, the scenes of seduction, and the abominable wickedness of all the persons, are elements that recall the Tourneurian group. The fluency and eloquence of Middleton"s style and his admirable delineation of character by rapid dialogue are best shown in the early scenes; after the old mother, so beautifully and truly drawn, has disappeared from the action, the rest is unrelieved murder and l.u.s.t.
The two famous plays that were the results of Middleton"s collaboration with Rowley have somewhat different characteristics. Rowley, a playwright used to rude and fantastic comedy, and the author of "All"s Lost by l.u.s.t,"
a clumsy tragedy of revenge, wrote most of the comic scenes and had some share in the serious plots. In "The Fair Quarrel," the hesitation of Captain Ager to defend the honor of his mother unless convinced of her purity; and in "The Changeling," the entanglement of Beatrice with the loathed follower whom she has persuaded to murder her accepted suitor, offer situations novel and ingenious. In both plays, the opportunity for mere melodrama with sudden conversions of character is refused, and the series of startling situations made the basis for a study of human motive.
It is this which gives "The Fair Quarrel," in spite of its absurdities, superiority over most of the tragicomedies of the time. In "The Changeling," one may easily imagine what havoc Fletcher would have made of the characterization in order to over-emphasize situations, sensational enough in themselves; but Middleton and Rowley followed the best tradition of Webster. The rash and pampered Beatrice retains our sympathies even in her degradation, and remains convincingly alive, whether in her incipient love for De Flores or her final cry for forgiveness. De Flores, clear-headed and well-motived, is the most powerful and individual of the post-Shakespearean villains. The comic relief supplied by the mad scenes spoils the tragic unity of the play. But, except in Shakespeare and Webster, the old combination of murder, revenge, sinful love, villany, madness, and ghosts had never been made so consistently the result of human motive and so effective in its appeal to our sympathies.
Ma.s.singer"s dramatic career, ranking in productiveness with Shakespeare"s or Fletcher"s, extended from the time of Shakespeare"s withdrawal from the theatre to within a few years of the Civil War. For ten years he was mainly occupied in collaborating with Fletcher for the king"s men; and of the nineteen plays usually cla.s.sed as his own, none were acted before 1622. His work, therefore, falls roughly into two periods, the first when he was the a.s.sistant of Fletcher, the second when he had succeeded Fletcher as the main reliance of the leading London company.
Of his work with Fletcher the tragedies have already been considered. In most of the plays of the collaboration, Fletcher"s share is the more important, especially in the treatment of the dramatic crises. In plays, as "The Queen of Corinth" and "The Laws of Candy," where Fletcher"s hand is least apparent, there is an excess of melodramatic ingenuity without the Fletcherian vivacity, Ma.s.singer"s temperament reveals itself, however, from the first in the gravity of his style and the seriousness of his morality.
From Fletcher he acquired his stage-craft and his attachment to the romantic drama of thrills and surprises, but his art was meanwhile developing a responsibility and purposes all its own.
Of the plays written without the aid of Fletcher, two, "A New Way to Pay Old Debts" and "The City Madam," are domestic comedies of manners. The others are romantic dramas which can be cla.s.sified only with some difficulty as comedies, tragicomedies, and tragedies. A number of the tragicomedies are to be distinguished from the tragedies only by the happy endings and the absence of bloodshed. Nor are these always decisive. Of the tragedies, "Believe as You List" and "The Virgin Martyr" result in victory as well as death, and in the tragicomedy, "The Maid of Honor,"
suitors worthy and unworthy are rejected and the vindicated heroine enters a nunnery. The tragedies in the main deal with more serious and important actions and rely less on intrigue than the tragicomedies; but it may be said of Ma.s.singer, with even more truth than of Fletcher, that he dealt with romantic stories abounding in tragic possibilities, usually resulting in happy endings, but occasionally taking a loftier tone and a fatal conclusion.
The plays as a whole reveal a remarkable variety of stories and a treatment of sources fully as free and ingenious as Fletcher"s and often contriving a political as well as a moral lesson. Honor and religion play conspicuous parts as in contemporary Spanish drama, to which Ma.s.singer apparently owed a considerable debt; although in only one instance, "The Renegade," has direct indebtedness to a Spanish play been traced. The earlier drama is also freely drawn upon. At this date it was in fact almost impossible to compose a play without traversing motives and incidents that were familiar on the stage; and Ma.s.singer borrowed from many, from Shakespeare as freely as from Fletcher, and from minor dramatists as well. The story of the usurper Sebastian, told in "The Battle of Alcazar," is retold in "Believe as You List"; and the poisoning by kissing the painted corpse, related in "The Second Maiden"s Tragedy," reappears in his "Duke of Milan." In spite of their variety and ingenuity, his plays are very like others of the period. There are the same court and courtiers, general, favorite, rival lovers, rival mistresses, and the same trials of chast.i.ty or intrigues of l.u.s.t and malice.
Yet the independence of Ma.s.singer"s invention and the truth of his conceptions of human motive are by no means small. In "The Bashful Lover"
there is a presentation of idealizing and self-sacrificing love, far surpa.s.sing the courtly compliments of Fletcher and rivaling the magnanimity of Browning"s conceptions. In such themes, just removed from the exaltation and the horror thought necessary for tragedy, yet serious and exalted above the average of comedy, Ma.s.singer is at his best. An outline of his "Maid of Honor" may serve to ill.u.s.trate both the independence of his imaginative conceptions and the careful integration of his structure.
Act i opens at the court of Roberto, King of Sicily, who, after much eloquent solicitation, permits his natural brother Bertoldo to lead an expedition against Gonzaga, a knight of Malta, who is relieving Sienna, captured by Ferdinand, Duke of Urbin, in his effort to win the d.u.c.h.ess by force. Camiola, the maid of honor, after some buffoonery on the part of Sylli, a Malvolio-like wooer, has a parting interview with Bertoldo and confesses that his vow as a knight of Malta is the only bar to her acceptance of his offers of marriage. In act ii, after some further buffoonery by Sylli, who serves throughout as a comic contrast to Camiola"s other suitors, Fulgentio, the King"s minion, solicits Camiola, but is tartly repulsed, and threatens to slander her. The scene changes to Sienna, the camp of Gonzaga, and then to the citadel held by Ferdinand.
Bertoldo and his followers are defeated and made prisoners, Gonzaga tearing the cross from Bertoldo"s breast. In act iii all the prisoners are released by ransom, except Bertoldo, who thereupon bewails the falseness of his brother the King. The scene changing to Sicily, Adorni, a faithful follower of Camiola"s father, soliloquizes on his love for her and his intention to take vengeance on Fulgentio. Later he appears wounded before Camiola and presents the minion"s recantation, but is blamed by her for his presumption in a.s.suming a task proper only for her lover. Upon the arrival of news of Bertoldo"s plight, Camiola, who is as energetic as loyal, decides to sacrifice her fortune to pay her lover"s ransom, and summons Adorni to act as her agent in freeing Bertoldo.
Adorni dutifully undertakes the mission that promises to ruin his hopes. In act iv the d.u.c.h.ess Aurelia arrives at Sienna and Ferdinand surrenders. Bertoldo in prison reads Seneca, soliloquizes on suicide, falls on the ground, and threatens to rend the bowels of the earth, quite in Kydian fashion. Adorni enters, and Bertoldo, upon hearing of Camiola"s sacrifice, blesses her name and promises marriage. It is now Adorni"s turn to soliloquize on suicide. Bertoldo is brought before Aurelia, who, suddenly enamored, offers him herself and duchy. After some resistance he yields. Adorni now begins to hope. In Sicily Camiola has convinced the King of Fulgentio"s worthlessness. In act v Camiola receives from Adorni the news of Bertoldo"s fickleness, but she still scorns Adorni and resolves to seek redress from the King. Accordingly, at the marriage of Bertoldo and Aurelia, she breaks in, states her case with eloquence and temper, and appeals to the King.
Aurelia suddenly feels all her love quenched, and Bertoldo pleads for pity. All await the fulfillment of Camiola"s promise that she will declare whom she will marry, and are astonished when Father Paula announces that she has decided to become the bride of the church.
Before taking the veil, she obtains Fulgentio"s pardon, gives one half of her wealth to the faithful Adorni, and commands Bertoldo to resume the cross of Malta.
In his six tragedies there is less of romantic love and more of the blacker pa.s.sions. "The Unnatural Combat," "The Duke of Milan," "The Fatal Dowry"
(in collaboration with Field), and "The Roman Actor" deal with l.u.s.t and revenge in the quant.i.ty and quality long prescribed. In the last named, however, Ma.s.singer broke away from the conventional treatment and made his protagonist neither the cruel tyrant nor the l.u.s.tful queen, but a dignified and n.o.ble representative of the actor"s profession, and took the opportunity of effectively expanding the old device of a play within a play. The other two tragedies present still more originality of conception and treatment: "Believe As You List," dealing with the fortune of a rightful claimant to the crown, and "The Virgin Martyr," perhaps a revision of an early play by Dekker, returning to the old material of the Miracles, the story of a martyrdom that converts the persecutors. In each of these tragedies, as in "The Maid of Honor," a number of stories are organized into a single action, introduced by admirable exposition, and usually carried through with direct and logical progress. In the treatment of catastrophe, always heightened, prolonged, and sometimes full of surprise after Fletcher"s fashion, Ma.s.singer is less competent. Ma.s.singer could not keep to the inevitable development of character as did Shakespeare, nor could he sacrifice character to situation as light-heartedly as did Fletcher. In consequence he falls between two stools; and his fifth act is usually clumsy and unconvincing.
Ma.s.singer"s art was not only less reckless than Fletcher"s; it was linked to a serious moral view of human affairs. He always worked under a sense of responsibility both as a dramatic artist and as a preacher of political and personal morality. Neither the heedlessness of Fletcher nor the perversion of Ford is discoverable in his plays. Bad and good are clearly differentiated, despite the improbabilities of the romantic vicissitudes; and poetic justice is administered with decision. Following his venturesome and nimble master, he pursues his pathway gravely, judicially, somewhat heavily. His careful art and sincere morality lack the leaven of dramatic genius. The orator and the rhetorician are always elbowing the dramatist off the scene. His style, never splendid, never excessively figurative, is always contained and clear. At its best in sustained declamation, it often descends to a tone approaching prose and rarely rises to the more stirring or impelling emotions. His abundant inventiveness also fails him in the great crises of pa.s.sion. Again and again when the heroine is at bay, or the hero within the jaws of ruin, Ma.s.singer resorts to oratory. As in "The Maid of Honor," eloquence is the _deus ex machina_ which solves the difficulties of the plot. In consequence, the characterization, though involving subtle and penetrating conceptions of human nature, and often logical and consistent, rarely results in living beings. An exception must be made of some of his men, whose virility and dignity are akin to his own temper and can be made real through his favorite rhetorical means. The women, with few exceptions, of whom Camiola is chief, are, for reverse reasons, bad failures. Chast.i.ty cannot be revealed by an oratorical appeal, and the evil women only grow impossible when they add rhetoric to l.u.s.t.
The pa.s.sing of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama is manifest in Ma.s.singer as in his contemporaries. He retains, to be sure, most of the external characteristics of his predecessors; he writes constantly in the light of their achievements; he would restrain Fletcher"s theatricality by a more cautious and responsible art. Like Shakespeare he maintains a moral standard despite the exigencies of a romantic plot. But the old fervor as well as the old extravagance of diction have gone; and a careful dramaturgy now finds itself incompetent to meet the requirements of great tragic crises. His tragedies recapitulate what has been done before, without important advance or departure, and without attaining one unforgettable phrase or one moment that electrifies the reader with an undeniable conviction of its dramatic truth.
In Ford the results of servile imitation and original genius were curiously combined. The first dramatist to feel the overshadowing effect of Shakespeare"s tragedies, he borrowed freely from "Lear," "Oth.e.l.lo," and "Romeo and Juliet," and he was hardly less indebted to Beaumont and Fletcher and the school of Webster. As a playwright he was, in fact, usually imitative and often unskillful. As a poet his consciousness of the greatness of earlier dramatists now chilled him to bald copying and now incited him to a unique development of some of the old tragic motives. With Dekker and Rowley he collaborated on "The Witch of Edmonton," a tragicomedy dealing with a contemporary crime and linking itself with the domestic tragedies. "Perkin Warbeck," a revival of the chronicle history, is without battles or pageants, and is less concerned with the scenic presentation of history than with the delineation of the character of the claimant. His other tragedies, "Love"s Sacrifice," "The Broken Heart," and ""Tis Pity She"s a Wh.o.r.e," are at once both more in accord with prevailing modes in the drama and more characteristic of Ford"s imaginative temperament. In spite of their worthless comic scenes, their conventional material, and their melodramatic situations, they present tragic pa.s.sion with an intensity and truth possible only to dramatic genius.
Love is the theme, and an excess of sentiment and pa.s.sion in conflict with friendship, right, or natural law, is the particular province that Ford makes his own. A favorite in love with the wife of his lord, a brother in love with a sister, are the situations over which his genius casts an oppressive melancholy that lasts until the final heart-breaks. The monarch, his favorite, a buffoon or two, and lords and ladies, love-sick or pa.s.sion-inflamed, play with the casuistry of love and mingle dances and revels with bloodshed and horror. Villany and revenge appear but are not very essential. The seeds of fatal pa.s.sions have been already sown when the play begins; it is the stifling hothouse in which they luxuriate. The end is inevitable, though it may be long held in suspense and attained through some surprise in the final act.
"The Broken Heart" is the most healthy of his plays. Orgilus, whose life has been blighted because Penthea has married Ba.s.sanio through the intervention of her brother, the great General Ithocles, pursues his revenge upon Ithocles in spite of much delay and apparent reconciliation.
Finally he stabs Ithocles to death just as Ithocles is to be married to the princess Calantha, and just as Penthea dies of madness and starvation. The familiar round of revenge, madness, and torture here reappears, but it is told in a story full of romantic sentiment and human pa.s.sion, and not without sunshine as well as shadow. It is the final scenes, however, which every reader remembers. Calantha is dancing when the tidings of the deaths of her father and her lover are brought to her, and she dances on, hiding her grief and playing her part n.o.bly, until, duty accomplished, her heart is free to yield to its bursting sorrow.
It is in scenes like these, showing pa.s.sion restrained or overborne for the moment, or the strain and suspense preceding the crash, that Ford is at his best. The marvelous parting scene between brother and sister in ""Tis Pity"
is perfection itself. His imagination dissolves the horrible story into the very language of the breaking heart. His verse, lacking both the old rhetorical artificiality and the vivacity and adaptability of Fletcher"s, possesses a restraint and moderation of language and a complex and beautiful melody all its own. At times it is the thinnest of translucent veils "through which pa.s.sion is burning as the radiant lines of morning."
One may find in him somewhat of the perverse inquisitiveness of Donne. A wayward and solitary searcher in the realms of poetry, he voyaged only to regions unexplored or forbidding. But, as we have seen, his imagination, wayward though it was, took direction from his contemporaries, and he was representative of much in current tragedy. Though Ford"s ethical att.i.tude is perhaps more non-committal than that of any of his contemporaries, yet his casuistical interest in moral problems, and the emphasis which he places on such problems at the expense of his stories, are traits common in the drama of the time, and especially in the collaborative work of Middleton and Rowley. His absorption with questions of s.e.x, his searching for new sensation, his attempt to bestow on moral perversion the enticements of poetry correspond with what is most decadent in Fletcher and Shirley. Like his fine-spoken and well-mannered courtiers and impulsive ladies, Ford imagined in an atmosphere of unhealthy emotion. His plays are immoral because their pa.s.sion is so often morbid and their sentiment mawkish. His power to reveal character and pa.s.sion, which rank him with the greatest of the Elizabethans, was discovered in his searching the by-paths of the abnormal and pathological. Pathos for him was a flower plucked from a poisonous exotic.
Beginning about 1625 and extending to the Civil War, Shirley"s dramatic career overlapped and continued Ma.s.singer"s as Ma.s.singer"s did Fletcher"s.
After leaving the university he took orders, but shortly became converted to Catholicism, and then, after a volume of poems, turned to the public theatres for employment. The last of the brilliant series of poets who made the London stage the home of poesy and contributed to the great period of the English drama, at the closing of the theatres he was the dean of his profession. His thirty odd plays, while naturally continuing the methods and types of Ma.s.singer and of Fletcher, his avowed master, and while reminiscent of much in earlier writers, especially Webster and Shakespeare, also reflect about all the characteristics manifest in the drama during the reign of Charles I.
Shirley"s remarkable talents challenge comparison with his predecessors. He had a share of Ma.s.singer"s seriousness of purpose and painstaking art, and of Fletcher"s freshness of fancy and sprightliness of style. In invention he is hardly less ingenious than either, and in careful construction and theatrical craftsmanship he approaches Ma.s.singer"s undoubted mastership.
His verse seems modeled on Fletcher"s, but it often has a spontaneity of movement and a richness of decoration that recall Elizabethan style in its early flights. Little of early aphorism, however, or of the later obscurity and confusion remains; these are replaced, sometimes indeed by a hackneyed declamation, but often by natural and fluent dialogue.
Yet, in spite of his talents, Shirley"s own position and his contribution to the drama are difficult of definition, because he is so constantly reminiscent of his predecessors and so constantly approaching, though never quite equaling, their preeminent models. His plays, like Ma.s.singer"s, seem to the reader of to-day repet.i.tions of one another. Each coalesces in the mind with other comedies of manners, or other tragedies of blood, or with the tragicomedies of Ma.s.singer and Fletcher. Whatever the species, love is the theme, l.u.s.t is pursuing, chast.i.ty is tried by intrigue and by declamation; but the real interest is in the plot, the tricks, disguises, subterfuges, villains, and surprises that end--as the case may be--in the discomfiture of the fools, or the marriage of the lovers, or the downfall of a dynasty.
The drama had become conventionalized. The dramatists were no longer searching for new themes and characters in a wide range of stories; they were inventing their plots but were restricted in their materials. The ingredients of early plays served Shirley"s purpose, and by a few new devices or changes in motive he gave his fashionable ladies, his l.u.s.tful monarchs, scheming favorites, and exiled heroes new names and adventures, and so produced a play. The cleverness of the plot occupies your attention, or occasionally a beautiful pa.s.sage or a fine conception of character arrests the mind, but at the close you are at a loss to separate the play from a dozen similar ones.
In Shirley, as in Ma.s.singer, the most representative plays, and certainly those most satisfactory to our taste, are the tragicomedies. Bloodshed and horror and grossness of language and situation may all be absent, and the story of love and intrigue, even if it does not exalt the mind or purify the pa.s.sions, may be altogether delightful. In "The Royal Master," one of the best, the role of the l.u.s.tful monarch is a.s.sumed for a single scene, only to cure a really charming heroine of her infatuation for royalty; and the intriguing favorite is foiled, the banished n.o.ble vindicated, and two love matches completed with gracefulness of language and dexterity of plot.
Unfortunately Shirley"s land of romance is rarely so wholesome as here or the inhabitants so agreeable.
His tragedies mainly conform to the hackneyed models, no matter what the sources may be or how large his own invention may seem. The earliest, "The Maid"s Revenge," relating a Spanish story of the rivalry in love of two sisters that ends in a fatal duel between brother and lover, is wholly in the tone of romantic melodrama. "The Politician," a more ambitious effort, combines the villain play with the Beaumont-Fletcher romance. Gotharius, the politician, is the villain; Marpisa, the evil woman, is his mistress and about to be married to the king; Albina, the loyal and long-suffering heroine, is the villain"s wife; Turgesius is the prince and hero; and Olaus, a blunt soldier, is his faithful friend. There is an insurrection, as so often in Fletcher; and after a long intrigue the villain and the evil woman perish, and the prince marries the heroine. In "Love"s Cruelty," a more original conception is worked out with telling realism and a good deal of dramatic truth. Clariana becomes infatuated with her husband"s friend Hippolito; and, even after the guilty lovers have been permitted to go unpunished by the husband, her pa.s.sion continues until her jealousy at her lover"s approaching marriage to Eubella drives her to his murder. Rarely elsewhere in the Elizabethan drama is the story of illicit love told with less of glamour and more veracity. These merits are perhaps counterbalanced by the extreme realism of the language and the stage action.
In this play the deceived husband dies of grief, but Eubella, who had earlier resisted the l.u.s.tful duke, is solaced after the death of her betrothed by a promise of marriage from the duke himself. Both "The Politician" and "The Duke"s Mistress," a tragedy along hackneyed lines, end with reward for the virtuous and punishment only for the vicious. Such application of poetic justice had been earlier expounded by Ben Jonson in defense of the punishments inflicted in his comedy, "Volpone." The applications of the doctrine in Shirley and Ma.s.singer were, however, probably due not so much to theoretical criticism as to the popular preference for the restriction of the catastrophe to the bad, a preference recorded by Aristotle and evidently shared by a generation in which romantic tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic form.
Shirley"s tragic masterpieces, however, offered no alleviation of horror and bloodshed. "The Traitor" and "The Cardinal" are plays of revenge, l.u.s.t, intrigue, and villany, in which all the accretions of this kind of tragedy from Kyd and Marlowe down to Webster and Ma.s.singer seem to be represented.
The villains are as black as Barabas and as crafty as those of Webster; plots are as intricately entangled with counterplots as in Tourneur; and surprises follow as rapidly as in Fletcher. The corpse kissed by the repentant duke is again presented; there is attempted rape and a.s.sumed madness; in each play a bridegroom is murdered as he takes his place in the wedding procession; and in each revenge strews the final scene with the dead. But the old motives still had power to convey poetic inspiration, and the examples of all his predecessors summoned Shirley to his best efforts.
Perhaps in no other plays does he so constantly recall their work; certainly in no others do the poetic quality of his language, the vigorous delineation of character, and the dramatic depiction of pa.s.sion so worthily maintain what were even for men of his day the great traditions of English tragedy.
Tragedies by minor writers during the years from 1620 to 1642 offer little that is distinctive. Occasionally, as in the anonymous "Nero" of 1624, we have a play spontaneous in phrase and lifelike in characterization, worthy of the best days of the drama; but in the main the plays only repeat what is to be found in Ma.s.singer, Ford, and Shirley. In spite of the vogue of tragicomedy, tragedy was by no means neglected, nearly fifty tragedies being preserved from the twenty years, in addition to those by the authors mentioned. These include several by Suckling, Glapthorne"s pastoral tragedy, "Argalus and Parthenia," and his worthless "Wallenstein," May"s plays on cla.s.sical history, and others by Killigrew, Davenant, Carlell, Heming, Davenport, and less known men.
The large majority conform to the later type of revenge play as exemplified in Ma.s.singer and Shirley. Sometimes the romantic love element supersedes the intrigue and horrors, but oftener the horrors have full sway. A double plot, usually with an elaborate surprise in the fifth act, revolves about l.u.s.t and revenge with some attention to untarnished honor and unconquered chast.i.ty. The l.u.s.tful duke and his intriguing favorite, or the tyrannical usurper and the rightful prince alternate at the centre of the stage along with the evil woman, perhaps a Lady Potiphar, and a distressed maiden, likely to be disguised as a boy. Madness is frequently represented, eyes are plucked out, brains dashed upon the stage, and many of the old horrors reproduced, but ghosts rarely appear. The action consists largely of adultery, seduction, and rape; and these are represented with a horrid detail that rivals Marston. When chast.i.ty is preserved it is often by a device similar to that used in "Measure for Measure," although occasionally there is an exchange of men instead of women. Tragedy is for the most part confined to stories of crime. The monstrous politicians and libertines differ from their sixteenth century predecessors chiefly in the greater ingenuity and complexity of their intrigue, their subordination of ambition or other motives to those of love or l.u.s.t, and in the prosaic flatness of their blank verse.
Often there are manifest borrowings, and occasionally a dramatist evidently strove to include everything that had ever been known on the tragic stage.
"The Rebellion," by Thomas Rawlins, presents Machiavel, a villain, whose soliloquies might be burlesques on Barabas and Richard III, two mad scenes, a nurse from "Romeo and Juliet," a Moor, who is another villain, attempted rape, and frequent bursts of poetry:--
"The lazy moon has scarcely trimm"d herself To entertain the sun; she still retains The slimy tincture of the banish"d night."
On the other hand, the usual type of tragedy, with reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, sometimes shows a genuine poetic gift, as notably in Lord Falkland"s "The Marriage Night." The most marked trait, however, of these minor tragedies is their eagerness to out-Herod Herod and to make good their weakness in dramatic truth by means of stage horrors or rant.
"The Valiant Scot," a tragedy dealing with the career of Wallace, represents the cutting out of the tongue of one English amba.s.sador and the putting out of the eyes of another. In "Mirza" the protagonist kills his seven-year-old daughter,--"Takes Fatima by the neck, breaks it, and swings her about." The taste for atrocities seems to have been most highly developed at Oxford, where the students acted Goffe"s outrageous plays and a Samuel Harding published "Sicily and Naples," a medley introducing revenge for a father, a maiden disguised as a boy, a villain-favorite, the Mariana device, and combining rape, murder, madness, and incest in a fashion not equaled since "t.i.tus Andronicus."
Absurd plays of this sort were common enough from the days of "Cambyses,"
and cannot be fairly taken as evidences of the drama"s decadence. Nor do the main differences that are apparent between tragedy after 1620 and that of the early or of the Shakespearean period point to decadence as unmistakably as critics are wont to a.s.sume. There is a waning of poetic power; blank verse descends to prose, and its flowers have a jaded air; but there is poetic imagination in Glapthorne as well as in Shirley, n.o.ble rhetoric in Ma.s.singer, and sheer poetry in Ford. The ethical tone has in general suffered deterioration. The moral insight of Shakespeare or even of Webster is not maintained; courtly and sophisticated ideals ring false; the language becomes gross; the vulgarities of the early plays are replaced by mawkish sentimentality or lewd suggestiveness. There seems to be increasing difficulty in presenting persons normally good. The reiteration of scenes of rape and seduction bespeak an unhealthy moral atmosphere. Yet tragedy, though at tunes perverse or forgetful, still clings to its moral standards.
It still endeavors to expose and chastise sin and to incite to virtue.
Decadence is more manifest in the restriction and conventionalizing of the material of tragedy. The love for the impossible, the craving for stupendous emotions and supernormal pa.s.sions had given place to theatrical court intrigues. The daring attempts of Marlowe and Shakespeare to depict the great round of the emotions had given way to a continual harping on illicit love. Dramatists were no longer striving to give beautiful expression to the terrible, heroic, or pitiable in story, but seeking to construct acting plays out of stock situations and stock characters. There was a lack of fresh impulse. French romance and Spanish drama seem to have encouraged no marked innovations, and French cla.s.sicism was only just making itself heard at the closing of the theatres. A man of original genius like Ford staggered under the recognition of the greatness of earlier achievement and turned to the abnormalities and excesses of pa.s.sion for his themes. Shirley, more typical of the period, devoted talents of a high order to repeating familiar models.
Yet there was progress as well as stagnation. Dramatists had shaken off the medieval adherence to sources and learned to invent, though their invention unhappily followed current theatrical fashions rather than fresh creative impulses. The art of making plays had advanced, not as Shakespeare had pointed the way, by making construction dependent upon character, but as Beaumont and Fletcher had fashioned, by making character subordinate to a varied and rapid action. There is more complication, more coherence in plot, more ingenuity in situation, and a far greater use of surprise than in the early plays, but no great gain in consistent motivation. Yet many of the early absurdities have disappeared; and in discovering what is to be acted and what not, in the quick excitement of the spectator"s interest, and in the careful integration of the various lines of action, the dramaturgy is, in comparison with the period before Shakespeare, noticeably modern.
The differences which distinguish the different periods do not conceal the essential unity of the entire development from 1562 to 1642. The changes that take place in the prevailing types are of degree and not of kind.
Nearly all the tragedies might be called tragedies of blood, for nearly all deal with crime and bloodshed. A narrower division like that of the tragedy of revenge keeps its integrity from Kyd onward, the hesitation motive finding transformation in "Hamlet," the union of revenge, intrigue, and madness finding a different development in Webster and others, and remaining until the end the most prevalent type of tragedy. A majority of Elizabethan plays are romantic rather than cla.s.sical or realistic, though the romance is of many kinds and drawn from many widely different sources, as Boccaccio, D"Urfe, or Lope de Vega. For a time it is mainly confined to romantic comedy, but it soon enters into tragedy and tragicomedy. In tragedy it plays a fitful part, but in tragicomedy it conquers the theatres. The course of tragedy from its inception in an amalgamation of medieval and cla.s.sical elements, through its establishment by Marlowe, its development of types and methods, the transformation of these by Shakespeare into a dramatic form that changed and enlarged the meaning of tragedy for the centuries since then, the further development of types and methods under the innovations of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the splendid contribution that tragedy still received from Webster, Middleton, Ford, and Ma.s.singer,--all this was comprised within a single century; all that was most significant, within a single lifetime.