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The Art of Letters, essay(s) by Robert Lynd |
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7. A Note On Elizabethan Plays |
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_ VII. A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was a savage," said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada." Had this been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first to show the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill" of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no _Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_. There is not even a _Winter's Tale_. If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own. One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle. Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life. His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious excess when he says of Brome: Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able
It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale. Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble circumstances. They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry. Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely dramatic work he ever wrote. One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so good a play as _The Duchess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the duchess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussy d'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines. Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_ as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Othello_ breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the base of Shakespeare's colossal statue. Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_, described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day. _ |
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