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has far more than surpassed them all. Others may have been as sublime; others may have been more pathetic; others may have equalled him in grace and purity of language, and have shunned some of his faults; but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out of the human heart, whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It is, if not entirely wanting, yet very little manifested in comparison with him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent period.

"These dramatists are hardly less inferior to Shakspeare in judgment. To this quality I particularly advert; because foreign writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed an extraordinary barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong indeed to an age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its entertainments, and are of course to be classed with what is called the romantic school, which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach. But no one who has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare, or contemporary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing of the theatres in the civil wars, will pretend to deny that there is far less irregularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be desired, in a large proportion of these, (perhaps in all the tragedies,) than in his own. We need only repeat the names of The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excellently constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But, even where an analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is generally an unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter's Tale is not a model to follow; but we feel that the Winter's Tale is a single story; it is even managed as such with consummate skill." 11*

THE MINOR DRAMATIC POETS.

19. When we look away from Shakspeare to his dramatic contemporaries, we find it needless to revert farther than the commencement of the second stage in his history. The fact that was characteristic of the earlier part of the period which then began, was the predominating influence exercised by him, not over those dramatists only who were avowedly his pupils and imitators, but also over those who probably believed that they were quite independent of him. The effects of this influence are not traceable merely in style, in the repetition of scattered reflec

*Hallam: Introduction to the Literature of Europe.

tions and images, or in the imitation, designed or undesigned, of characters and incidents. They show themselves still more in community of sentiment, in general resemblance of plan, and in those finer points of analogy which are more readily felt than described.

It would have been well if there had been as decided a likeness in the moral aspect. Although it cannot seriously be maintained of Shakspeare, that he keeps always before him the highest sanctions of conduct, it is yet true that, if his works were weeded of a very few obnoxious passages, they might be pronounced free from all gross moral taint: while it is likewise the fact, that hardly any imaginative writings, not avowedly religious in structure, are so strongly suggestive as many of his are, of solemn and instructive meditation. In regard to almost all the other dramatists of the time, it must be said, that, if they do teach goodness, they teach it in their own despite and of the men of eminent genius, Ben Jonson alone deserves the praise of having had a steady respect for moral distinctions; while even with him there is an occasional coarseness not reconcilable with his general practice. The licentiousness began in the earlier years of the seventeenth century; and it increased with accelerated speed, till dramatic composition came to an enforced pause. Writings having such a character must, in a course of study like ours, be passed over very cursorily. The pleasure which their genius gives can be safely enjoyed only by minds mature and well trained; unless in such purified specimens, as those which have been placed at the disposal of youthful readers by a man of letters in our own time."*

d. 1625. (

11. Highest by far in poetical and dramatic value stand the b. 1576. works bearing the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. A b. 1586. great many of these are said to have been written by the d. 1615. two poets jointly, a few by the former alone, and a larger number by the latter after he had lost his friend. Beaumont, the younger of the two, died before he was thirty years old. Alliances of this kind have taken place in no kind of poetry but the dramatic; there they have been common; they were especially so in England at the time now in question, and were often prompted merely by the necessities of the writers. The association of these two poets seems to have been the effect of friend

* Charles Lamb's "Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets." Lamb gives no quotations from Shakspeare's dramas. Nor are any inserted here: the noblest passages may be read in very many books; and inferior ones would do injustice to the great poet.

ship; but it was soon dissolved: and it is not easy to mark any decisive change of literary character in the works which were certainly Fletcher's, and written after he had been left alone. It is too certain, however, that the looseness of fancy which deformed all those dramas from the beginning, degenerated afterwards into confirmed and deliberate licentiousness: and it is a circumstance not to be overlooked, that the moral badness which was common to all works of the kind then written, is nowhere so glaring as in these, which were the most finely and delicately imaginative dramas of their day, and are poetically superior to everything of the sort in our language except the works of Shakspeare. There may be quoted from them many short passages, and some entire scenes, as delightful as anything in the range of poetry; sometimes pleasing by their rich imagery, sometimes by their profound pathos, and not infrequently by their elevation and purity of thought and feeling. But there are very few of the plays whose stories could be wholly told without offence; and there is none that should be read entirely by a young person.*

*

*FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER.

The Prince's description of his Page Bellario, in the play of “Philaster.”
Hunting the buck,

I found him sitting by a fountain's side,

Of which he borrowed some to quench his thirst,
And paid the nymph as much again in tears.
A garland laid him by, made by himself,
Of many several flowers bred in the bay,
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness
Delighted me: but, ever when he turned
His tender eyes upon them, he would weep,
As if he meant to make 'em grow again.

Seeing such pretty helpless innocence
Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story.
He told me that his parents gentle died,
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields,

Which gave him roots; and of the crystal springs,
Which did not stop their courses; and the sun,

Which still, he thanked him, yielded him his light.
Then took he up his garland, and did show
What every flower, as country people hold,
Did signify; and how all, ordered thus,

Express'd his grief; and, to my thoughts, did read
The prettiest lecture of his country art

That could be wished: so that methought I could
Have studied it. I gladly entertained him,
Who was as glad to follow; and have got
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy
That ever master kept.

b. 1574.

12. In Beaumont and Fletcher's works, those irregularities of plan, which are often made a reproach to the English drama, reach their utmost height. On the other hand, the regular classical model was approached, as closely as English tastes and habits would allow, in not a few of the writings, both tragic and d. 1637. comic, of Ben Jonson. This celebrated man deserves immortality for other reasons, besides his comparative purity of moral sentiment. He was the one man of his time, besides Shakspeare, who deserves to be called a reflective artist; the one man of his time, besides Shakspeare, who perceived principles of art and worked in obedience to them. His tragedies are stately, eloquent, and poetical; his comedies are more faithful poetic portraits of contemporary English life than those of any other dramatist of his age, the one great poet being excepted. His vigour in the conception of character has been generally allowed, and perhaps overvalued. Less justice has been rendered to the union of poetical vigour and delicacy, which pervades almost everything that he wrote. He is poetical, though not richly imaginative, not in his pastoral of The Sad Shepherd only, or in his masques, or in his beautiful lyrics. His poetry is perceptible even among the comic scenes of Every Man in His Humour, or through the half-heroic perplexities of the Alchymist and the Fox. *

*BEN JONSON.

From the Comedy of the "New Inn."

Did you ever know or hear of the Lord Beaufort,
Who serv'd so bravely in France? I was his page,
And, ere he died, his friend. I follow'd him
First in the wars; and in the times of peace
I waited on his studies; which were right.
He had no Arthurs, nor no Rosicleers,
No Knights of the Sun, nor Amadis de Gauls,
Primalions and Pantagruels, public nothings,
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,
Sent out to poison courts and infest manners:
But great Achilles', Agamemnon's acts,
Sage Nestor's counsels and Ulysses' sleights,
Tydides' fortitude, as Homer wrought them
In his immortal fancy, for examples
Of the heroic virtue:-or as Virgil,
That Master of the Epic Poëm, limn'd
Pious Æneas, his religious prince,
Bearing his aged parent on his shoulders,
Rapt from the flames of Troy, with his young son.
And these he brought to practice and to use.

He gave me first my breeding, I acknowledge;
Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours,

2

13. Jonson might be held to have written chiefly for men sense and knowledge, Fletcher and his friend for men of faron and the world. A similar audience to that of Jonson may have been aimed at in the stately, epical tragedies of Chapman. The other class of auditors, or one a step lower, would have relished better such plays as those of Middleton and Webster: the former of whom is chiefly remarkable for a few striking ideas imperfectly wrought out; while the latter, in several of his tragic dramas, is singularly successful in depicting events of deep horror.

Along with these men wrote others who, clinging to the older forms and ideas, may be regarded as having been in the main the dramatists of the commonalty. The chief of these was Thomas Heywood, an author of extraordinary industry, who boasted of having in his long life had a share in more than two hundred plays. In some of his best works there is a natural and quiet sweetness, which makes him not undeserving of the title a critic has given him, "the prose Shakspeare;" and he is one of the most moral playwriters of his time. To the same class belonged Dekker, also a voluminous pamphleteer, and known as having co-operated in several plays which appear among the works of more celebrated men, especially Massinger.

b. 1584. d. 1640.

14. The name which has last been read, introduces us to that which may be treated as the closing age of the Old English Drama. As its representatives may be taken Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Massinger is by some critics ranked next after Shakspeare. Assuredly, his skill in the representation of character is superior to that of any of the secondary dramatists except Jonson, and his poetical beauty not much less than Fletcher's; while, further, he has a quaint grace of language not known to either. Of pure comedy he gives us hardly anything; and for pure tragedy he wants depth of pathos. But his vigour of portraiture, the chivalrous turn of his stories, the inventive novelty which distinguishes many of his situations and incidents, and the melancholy dignity of his imagery and sentiment, make his finest pieces interesting in the extreme. The theatres have

That open-handed sit upon the clouds,
And press the liberality of heaven

Down to the laps of thankful men! But then,
The trust committed to me at his death
Was above all; and left so strong a tie

On all my powers, as time shall not dissolve,
Till it dissolve itself, and bury all:

The care of his brave heir and only son.

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