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 STUDIES IN THE 
 ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
WORKS BY ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 Cities {Illustrated) 
 
 Cities of Italy 
 
 Introduction to tbe Study of Browniug 
 
 {New Edition) 
 Plays, Acting and Music 
 The Romantic Movement in English Poetry 
 Spiritual Adventures 
 Studies in Prose and Verse 
 Studies in Seven Arts 
 William Blake 
 Figures of Several Centuries 
 Colour Studies In Paris {Illustrated) 
 The Symbolist Movement in Literature 
 
 {Revised and Enlarged Edition) 
 Studies in the Elizabethan Drama 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
STUDIES IN THE 
 ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR SYMONS 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 Cities of Italy," " Plays, Acting and Music, 
 
 "The Romantic Movement in English Poetry,". 
 
 "Studies in Seven Arts," "Colour Studies 
 
 IN Paris," "The Symbolist Movement 
 
 in Literature," etc., etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 Fifth Avenue 
 
Copyright, 1919, by 
 E. P. DUTTON & CO. 
 
 All Bights Reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 M iQim 
 
 ^.CU52925l 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTKB PAQB 
 
 I. Antony and Cleopatra .... 1 
 
 II. Macbeth 21 
 
 III. Twelfth Night 35 
 
 IV. Measure for Measure .... 44 
 
 V. The Winter's Tale 53 
 
 VI. Titus Andronicus and the Tragedy 
 
 OF Blood 61 
 
 VII. The Question of Henry VIII . . 88 
 
 VIII. Romeo and Juliet 117 
 
 IX. Cymeeline 132 
 
 X. Troilus and Cressida .... 147 
 
 XI. Philip Massinger 161 
 
 XII. John Day 195 
 
 XIII. Middleton and Rowley .... 211 
 
STUDIES IN THE 
 ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
STUDIES IN 
 THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 I. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonder- 
 ful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays, and 
 it is so mainly because the figure of Cleo- 
 patra is the most wonderful of Shakespeare's 
 women. And not of Shakespeare's women 
 only, but perhaps the most wonderful of 
 women. The queen who ends the dynasty 
 of the Ptolemies has been the star of poets, 
 a malign star shedding baleful light, from 
 Horace and Propertius down to Victor Hugo; 
 and it is not to poets only that her name has 
 come to be synonymous with all that one can 
 conceive of the subtlety of beauty. Before 
 the thought of Cleopatra every man is an 
 Antony, Shakespeare no less than another, 
 though in the play he holds the balance quite 
 
2 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 steadily. The very name calls up everything 
 that one has read or thought or known of 
 " the world well lost," the giving up of all for 
 love, the supreme surrender into the hands of 
 Lilith, and the inevitable penalty. Probably 
 Shakespeare had had his Cleopatra, though, 
 fortunately for us and for him, he stopped 
 short of the choice of Antony, when 
 
 Entre elle et I'univers qui s'offraient a la fois 
 II h^sita, lachant le monde dans son choix. 
 
 But unless we adopt the surely untenable 
 theory that the Sonnets, with their passionate 
 sincerity of utterance, the curiously individual 
 note of their complex harmonies, are merely 
 passion according to the Italian Opera, is it 
 not possible that the dark woman, the " woman 
 coloured ill," of whom they show us such 
 significant hints of outline, may have turned 
 his thoughts in the direction of Plutarch's 
 story of Antony and Cleopatra? It is possible; 
 and if so, Shakespeare must have felt a 
 singular satisfaction in putting thus to use an 
 experience bought so sorrowfully, with so 
 much ''expense of spirit;" must have felt that 
 he was repaid, more than repaid. 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 3 
 
 In the conduct of this play, dealing with so 
 typical a story of passion, and with lovers so 
 unrestrained, it is curious to note how much 
 there is of restraint, of coolness, how carefully 
 the style everywhere is heightened, and how 
 much of gravity, in the scenes of political 
 moment, comes to hinder us from any sense 
 of surfeit in those scenes, the central ones of 
 action and interest, in which the heady pas- 
 sion of Cleopatra spends itself. Never was 
 a play fuller of contrasts, of romantic elements, 
 of variety. The stage is turbulent with move- 
 ment; messengers come and go incessantly, 
 troops are passing over, engaging, and now in 
 flight; the scene shifts, carrying us backward 
 and forward with a surprising rapidity. But 
 one has a feeling that contrast is of the essence 
 of the piece, and that surprise is to be expected ; 
 and not even the variety of the play is more 
 evident than its perfect congruity. Some of 
 this comes about, there can be little question, 
 from the way in which Shakespeare has con- 
 structed his play on the very lines of Plutarch, 
 following his authority with a scrupulousness 
 not unlike that of a modern Realist for his 
 " human documents," and no doubt for the 
 
4 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 same reason. Plutarch was, for Shakespeare, 
 the repository of actual fact; in those pages he 
 found the liveliest image attainable of things 
 as they really happened, and in the comments, 
 outlining the characters, something far more 
 likely to be right than the hazard of any guess 
 of his, so long after. And so fully aware 
 was he of the priceless value of every hint 
 art can extort from nature, of the priceless 
 value of all we can get of real nature, that he 
 was content here to copy merely, to recon- 
 struct after a given plan, and almost without 
 altering a single outline. He gave the outlines 
 life, that was all; and it is a real Antony, a 
 real Cleopatra, that come before us on the 
 romantic stage. 
 
 While the main interest of the play is of 
 course centred in the personages who give it 
 name, Shakespeare has not here adopted the 
 device, used in Macbeth, for instance, of care- 
 fully subordinating all the other characters, 
 leaving the two principal ones under a strong 
 light, and in a salient isolation. He has rather 
 developed these characters through the me- 
 dium of a crowd of persons and incidents, 
 giving us, not a small corner of existence 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 5 
 
 burningly alive with tremendous issues, but a 
 lover's tragic comedy played out in the sight 
 of the world, on an eminence, and with the 
 fate of nations depending upon it; a tragic 
 comedy in whose fortunes the arrival of a 
 messenger may make a difference, and whose 
 scenes are timed by interviews with generals 
 and rulers. It is the eternal tragedy of love 
 and ambition, and here, for once, it is the love 
 which holds by the baser nature of the man 
 who is the subject of it, the ambition which 
 is really the prompting of his nobler side. 
 Thus the power of Cleopatra is never more 
 really visible than in the scenes in which she 
 does not appear, and in which Antony seems 
 to have forgotten her. For by the tremendous 
 influences which in these scenes are felt to 
 be drawing him away from her, by all that we 
 see and hear of the incitements to heroic 
 action and manly life, we can measure the force 
 of that magic which brings him back always; 
 from Csesar, who might be a friend, from 
 Octavia, who would be a wife, from Pompey, 
 a rival; to her feet. Such scenes are, besides, 
 a running comment of moral interpretation, 
 and impress upon us a sane and weighty 
 
6 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 criticism of that flushed and feverish existence, 
 with what is certainly so tempting in it, 
 which is being led by these imperial lovers on 
 terms of such absolute abandonment of every- 
 thing to the claims of love. This criticism 
 is singularly definite, leaving us in no doubt 
 as to the moral Shakespeare intended to draw, 
 a moral still further emphasized by the reti- 
 cent quietude of Octavia, the counterpoise to 
 Cleopatra; a character of delicate invention, 
 surprising us by the precise and attractive 
 image she leaves upon a play where she is 
 mainly silent. The ambiguous character of 
 Enobarbus is still further useful in giving the 
 point of irony which appears in all really true 
 and fine studies of a world in which irony 
 seems, after all, to be the final word with the 
 disinterested observer. Enobarbus acts the 
 part of chorus. He is neither for nor against 
 virtue; and by seeming to confound moral 
 judgments he serves the part of artistic 
 equity. 
 
 " Antonius being thus inclined, the last and 
 extremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love 
 of Cleopatra) lighted upon him, who did waken 
 and stir up many vices yet hidden in him, 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 7 
 
 and were never seen of any: and if any spark 
 of goodness or hope of rising were left him, 
 Cleopatra quenched it straight, and made it 
 worse than before." So Plutarch, in the pic- 
 turesque version of Sir Thomas North, 
 '' Shakespeare's Plutarch," gives the first 
 distinct sign of the finally downward course 
 of Antony. Of Antony as he had been, we 
 read a little above: " Howbeit he was of 
 such a strong nature, that by patience he would 
 overcome any adversity: and the heavier 
 fortune lay upon him, the more constant 
 showed he himself." When the play opens, 
 this Antony of the past is past indeed; the 
 first words strike the keynote: ''Nay, but this 
 dotage of our general's." Yet in the character 
 as it comes before us, one finds, broken indeed 
 yet there though in ruins, the potent nature of 
 the man, standing out now and again suddenly, 
 though with but little result in action. See, 
 for example, in the second scene, the scarcely 
 perceptible flash, in the jesting colloquy 
 with Enobarbus: "No more light words!" 
 and the sudden change which comes about„ 
 He can still, when Antony is Antony, com- 
 mand. And observe again, in the meeting 
 
8 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 between the jarring triumvirs, how gravely 
 and well he holds his own, and especially that 
 scrupulous care of his honour, evidently so 
 dear to him, and by no means a matter of 
 words only. But the man, as we see him, 
 is wrecked; he has given himself wholly over 
 into the hands of a woman, '' being so ravished 
 and enchanted of the sweet poison of her love, 
 that he had no other thought but of her." 
 It is in studying Cleopatra that we shall best 
 see all that is important for us to see of Antony. 
 In the short scene which serves for prelude 
 to the play, we get a significant glimpse of 
 the kind of power wielded by Cleopatra, and 
 the manner in which she wields it. We see 
 her taming with an inflection of frivolous 
 irony the man who has conquered kingdoms; 
 and we see, too, the unerring and very femi- 
 nine skill, the finesse of light words veiling a 
 strong purpose, by which she works the 
 charm. From the second scene we perceive 
 something of the tremors incident to a con- 
 quest held on such terms: the fear of that 
 " Roman thought " which has taken Antony, 
 the little touch of anxiety at his leaving her 
 for a moment. So long as the man is in her 
 
ANTONY AND CLEPOATRA 9 
 
 presence she knows he is safe. But she has 
 always to dread the hour of departure. And 
 now Antony is going. She plays her spells 
 admirably, but with a knowledge that they 
 will be for once in vain. Her tongue still 
 bites with the scourge of Fulvia: "What 
 says the married woman?" the sneer, a little 
 bitter to say, which comes from a conscious- 
 ness of the something after all worth having 
 in mere virtue, turned desperately into a 
 form of angry and contemptuous mockery, 
 Antony is not yet dead to honour; he feels 
 his strength, feels that he can break away 
 from the enchantress, as Tannhauser breaks 
 away from Venus. But Cleopatra knows 
 well that, like Tannhauser, her lover must 
 come back and be hers for ever. 
 
 One sees from the scene which follows how 
 deeply Cleopatra loves, not alone her con- 
 quest, but her lover. Hers is a real passion, 
 the passion of a woman whose Greek blood 
 is heated by the suns of Egypt, who knows, 
 too, how much greater is the intoxication of 
 loving than of being loved. There is a pas- 
 sage in one of the Lettres Portugaises, and no 
 passage in that little golden book is more 
 
10 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 subtly true, in which the " learned nun/' so 
 learned in the ways of love, pities her incon- 
 stant lover for the " infinite pleasures he has 
 lost " if he has never really loved her. '' Ah, 
 if you had known them," she says, '' vous 
 auriez ^prouve qu'on est beaucoup plus heu- 
 reux, et qu'on sent quelque chose de bien 
 plus touchant quand on aime violenunent 
 que lorsqu'on est aime." Cleopatra knew 
 this as she knew everything belonging to the 
 art of which she was mistress. '' Us who trade 
 in love," she speaks of frankly, but with per- 
 fect self-knowledge; a saying, however, which 
 does her injustice if it leads us to confound her 
 with the Manon Lescauts, exquisite, faithless 
 creatures who keep for their lovers an entirely 
 serviceable kind of affection, changing a lover 
 for a calculated advantage. Love is a " trade " 
 in which she never calculates; wily by nature, 
 and as a loving woman is wily who has to 
 humour her lover, she follows her blood, fol- 
 lows it to distraction, and her fits and starts 
 are not alone played for a purpose, before 
 Antony, but are native to her, and break out 
 with the same violence before her women. 
 She is a woman who must have a lover, but 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 11 
 
 she is satisfied with one, with one at a time; 
 and in Antony she finds her ideal, whom she 
 can call, in her pride, and truly: 
 
 The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm 
 And burgonet of men. 
 
 And she loves him with passion real of its kind, 
 an intense, an exacting, an oppressive and over- 
 whelming passion, wholly of the senses and 
 wholly selfish: the love which requires pos- 
 session, and to absorb the loved one. Before 
 Antony she is never demonstrative: " the way 
 to lose him!" She knows that a man like 
 Antony is not to be taken with snares of mere 
 sweetness, that neither for her beauty nor for 
 her love would he love her continuously. 
 She knows how to interest him, to be to him 
 everything he would have in woman, to 
 change with or before every mood of his as it 
 changes. And this is her secret, as it is the 
 secret of success in her kind of love. " So 
 sweet was her company and conversation that 
 a man could not possibly but be taken," we 
 read in Plutarch. And Shakespeare has ex- 
 pressed it monumentally in the lines which 
 bring the whole woman before us: 
 
12 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Age cannot wither her nor custom stale 
 Her infinite variety: other women cloy 
 The appetite they feed; but she makes hungry 
 Where most she satisfies: for vilest things 
 Become themselves in her. 
 
 In the fifth scene of the second act we have 
 what is perhaps the most wonderful revelation 
 that literature gives us of the essentially 
 feminine; not necessarily of woman in the 
 general, but of that which radically, in looking 
 at human nature, seems to differentiate the 
 woman from the man. It is a scene with the 
 infinite variety of Cleopatra: it is as miracu- 
 lous as she: it proves to us that the woman 
 who was "cunning past man's thought" 
 could not be cunning past the thought of 
 Shakespeare. We realize from this scene, 
 more clearly than from anything else in the 
 play, the boundless empire of her caprice, the 
 incalculable instability of her moods, and how 
 natural to her, how entirely instinctive, is 
 the spirit of change and movement by which, 
 partly, she fascinates her lover. The scene 
 brings out the tiger element in her, the union, 
 which we find so often, of cruelty with volup- 
 tuousness. It shows us, too, that even in 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 13 
 
 the most violent shock of real emotion she 
 never quite loses the consciousness of self, that 
 she cannot be quite simple. Even at the 
 moment when the blow strikes her, the news 
 of the marriage with Octavia, she has still the 
 posing instinct: "I am pale, Charmian!" 
 Then what a world of meaning, how subtle 
 a touch of insight into the secrets of the hearts 
 of women, there is in that avowal: 
 
 In praising Antony, I have dispraised Caesar. 
 
 I am paid for 't now. 
 
 But when at last, exhausted by the violence 
 of her battling and uncontrollable emotions, 
 she surprises us by those humble words, so 
 full of real pathos: 
 
 Pity me, Charmian, 
 But do not speak to me; 
 
 one becomes aware of how deeply the blow has 
 struck, how much there is in her to feel such a 
 blow. Certainly, in this as in everything, she 
 can never be quite simple. There is wounded 
 vanity as well as wounded love in her cry. 
 But it is the proudest as well as the most 
 pitiless of women who asks for pity; and one 
 can refuse her nothing, not even that. 
 
14 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 It is significant of the magic charm of the 
 "queen, whom everything becomes," and of 
 the magic of Shakespeare's art, that she 
 fascinates us even in her weakness, dominating 
 derision, and winning an extorted admira- 
 tion from the very borders of contempt. In 
 the scene which follows the flight from Actium, 
 Shakespeare puts forth his full power. There 
 are few more effective groupings than this of 
 Cleopatra sitting silent over against Antony, 
 neither daring to approach the other; he, 
 crushed into an unspeakable shame which 
 can never be redeemed; she, incapable of 
 shame, but seeing it in the eyes of Antony, 
 and conscious that she has done him a deed 
 which can never be forgiven. She is here, as 
 ever, cunning. Excuses can but be useless, 
 and she attempts none, none but the faintest 
 murmur: 
 
 I never thought 
 You would have followed! 
 
 It is a mere broken sob of " Pardon, pardon!'* 
 The tears are at hand, tears being with her the 
 last weapon of all her armoury. They cannot 
 but conquer, and the lover, who has given the 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 15 
 
 world for love, says, not without the saddest 
 of irony, as he takes her kiss: " Even this 
 repays me." 
 
 It is in the recoil from a reconciliation felt 
 to be ignoble that Antony bursts out into such 
 coarse and furious abuse, the first really angry 
 reproaches he has addressed to her, at the 
 mere sight of Caesar's messenger kissing her 
 hand. Despair and self-reproach have pricked 
 him into a state of smarting sensitiveness. 
 One sees that, as Enobarbus says, " valour 
 preys on reason"; he is "frighted out of 
 fear." Well may Csesar exclaim: " Poor 
 Antony!" Is there really a cause for his sus- 
 picion of Cleopatra? Did she really betray 
 him to Csesar? Plutarch is silent, and Shake- 
 speare seems intentionally to leave it a little 
 vague. But I think the suspicion wrongs 
 her. Merely on the ground of worldly pru- 
 dence she had more to hope from Antony than 
 from Csesar. And there is nothing in all she 
 says to Antony which comes with a more 
 genuine sound than that reproachful question: 
 "Not know me yet?" and then, "Ah, dear, 
 if I be so!" 
 
 I have said that Cleopatra has the instinct 
 
16 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 of posing. But in Antony, too, there is almost 
 always something showy, an element of some- 
 what theatrical sentiment. Now, preparing 
 for his last battle, and really moved himself, 
 he cannot help posturing a little before his 
 servants, exerting himself to win their tears. 
 It is not a simple leave-taking; it comes as if 
 prepared beforehand. And next morning, how 
 stagily, and yet with what a real exhilaration 
 of spirits, does he arm himself and go forth, 
 going forth gallantly, indeed, as Cleopatra 
 says of him! Experience has taught him so 
 little that he thinks even now that he may 
 conquer. It has been so much his habit, as it 
 has been Cleopatra's (caught perhaps from her) 
 to believe what he pleases! His treatment of 
 Enobarbus shows him still capable of a gener- 
 ous act; a little ostentatious, as it may per- 
 haps be. And the effect of that generous and 
 forbearing tolerance shows that his fascination 
 has not left him even in his evil fortune. He 
 can still conquer hearts. And Cleopatra's? 
 His, certainly, is still hers; and when, raging 
 against the woman who has wrought all his 
 miseries, he learns the news of her pretended 
 death, it is with words full of the quiet of 
 
ANTONY AND CLEPOATRA 17 
 
 despair that he takes the blow which releases 
 him: 
 
 Unarm me, Eros; the long day's task is done, 
 And we must sleep. 
 
 Love, as it does always when death has freed 
 us from what we had felt to be a burden, 
 returns; and he stabs himself with the sole 
 thought of rejoining her. When, this side of 
 the grave, he does rejoin her, not a syllable of 
 regret or reproach falls from his lips. In the 
 presence of death he becomes gentle: the 
 true sweetness of the man's nature, long 
 poisoned, comes back again at last. Nothing 
 now is left him but his love for Cleopatra, love 
 refined to an oblivious tenderness; that, and 
 the thought that death is upon him, and that 
 he falls not ignobly: 
 
 a Roman by a Roman 
 Valiantly vanquished. 
 
 And so the fourth act ends on the magnificent 
 words of Cleopatra over the dead body of 
 the lord of the world and of her. The thought 
 and the spectacle of death, of such a death, 
 call out in her a far-thoughted reflection on 
 the blindness of Fate, the general hazard of 
 the world's course, with a vivid sense of the 
 
18 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 emptiness of all for which one takes thought. 
 Death takes Antony as a mean man is taken; 
 her, too, he leaves unqueened, a mere woman 
 who has lost her lover. Then " all's but 
 nought," the world is left poor, the light of 
 it gone out; and it is with real sincerity, with 
 a feeling of overwhelming disaster now irre- 
 trievably upon her, that she looks to " the 
 briefest end." 
 
 In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain 
 elevation: the thought of the death she pre- 
 pares for herself intoxicates (while it still 
 frights) her reason. It gives her still a 
 triumphant sense of her mastery over even 
 Csesar, whom she will conquer by eluding; 
 over even Destiny, from which she will escape 
 by the way of death. After all, the keenest in- 
 citement to her choice comes from the thought 
 of being led in triumph to Rome ; of appearing 
 there, little and conquered, before Octavia. 
 She has lived a queen; in all her fortunes there 
 has been, as she conceived it, no dishonour. 
 She will die now, she would die a thousand 
 times, rather than live to be a mockery and 
 a scorn in men's mouths. How significant is 
 her ceaseless and panging remembrance of 
 
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 19 
 
 Octavia! a touch of almost petty spite, the 
 spite of a jealous woman. Petty, too (but, 
 inexhaustible as she is in resources, turned, 
 with the frank audacity of genius, into a final 
 triumph) is the keeping back of the treasures. 
 But craft is as natural to her as breath. It is 
 by craft that she is to attain her end of dying. 
 The means of that attainment, a poor man 
 bringing death in his basket of figs, the very 
 homeliness of the fact, comes with an added 
 effect of irony in the passing of this imperial 
 creature. She is a woman to the last, and it 
 is in no heroic frame of mind that she com- 
 mends the easiness of the death by which she 
 is to die. Yet, too, all her greatness gathers 
 itself, her love of Antony (the one thing that 
 had ever been real and steadfast in the deadly 
 quicksand of her mind) her pride and her 
 tenderness, and, at the last, her resolution. 
 
 I am fire and air; my other elements 
 I give to baser life. 
 
 So she dies, undisfigured in death, the signs of 
 death barely perceptible, lying 
 
 As she would catch another Antony 
 In her strong toil of grace. 
 
20 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 And the play ends with a touch of grave pity 
 over "a pair so famous," cut off after a Ufe so 
 full of glory and of dishonour, and taking with 
 them, in their passing out of it, so much of the 
 warmth and colour of the world. 
 
 1889. 
 
II. MACBETH 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, Macbeth is 
 the simplest in outline, the swiftest in action. 
 After the witches' prelude, the first scene 
 brings us at once into the centre of stormy 
 interest, and in Macbeth's first words an am- 
 biguous note prepares us for strange things to 
 come. Thence to the end there is no turning 
 aside in the increasing speed of events. 
 Thought jumps to action, action is overtaken 
 by consequence, with a precipitate haste, as 
 if it were all written breathlessly. And in the 
 style (always the style of Shakespeare's matu- 
 rity) there is a hurry, and impatient condensa- 
 tion, metaphor running into metaphor, thought 
 on the heels of thought, which gives (apart 
 from the undoubted corruption of the text as 
 it comes to us) something abrupt, difficult, 
 violent, to the language of even unimportant 
 characters, messengers or soldiers. Thus, the 
 play has several of those memorable condensa- 
 tions of a great matter into a little compass, of 
 
 21 
 
22 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 which Macduff's ''He has no children!" is per- 
 haps the most famous in literature; together 
 with less than usual of mere comment on life. 
 If here and there a philosophical thought meets 
 us, it is the outcry of sensation (as in the mag- 
 nificent words which sum up the vanity of life 
 in the remembrance of the dusty ending) 
 rather than a reflection, in any true sense of 
 the word. Of pathos, even, there is, on the 
 whole, not much. In that scene from which 
 I have just quoted the crowning words, there 
 is, I think, a note of pathos beyond which 
 language cannot go; and in the scene which 
 leads up to it, a scene full of the most 
 delicate humour, the humour born of the 
 unconscious nearness of things pitiful, there 
 is something truly pathetic, a pathos which 
 clings about all Shakespeare's portraits of 
 children. But elsewhere, even in places 
 where we might expect it, there is but little 
 sign of a quality with which it was not in 
 Shakespeare's plan to lighten the terror or 
 soften the hardness of the impression one re- 
 ceives from this sombre play. Terror: that 
 was the effect at which he seems to have aimed ; 
 terror standing out vividly against a back- 
 
MACBETH 23 
 
 ground of obscure and yet more dreadful mys- 
 tery. The "root of horror," from which the 
 whole thing grows, has been planted, one be- 
 comes aware, in hell: do the supernatural 
 solicitings merely foreshow, or do they really 
 instigate, the deeds to which they bear wit- 
 ness? Omens blacken every page. An ''Old 
 Man" is brought into the play for no other 
 purpose than to become the appropriate mouth- 
 piece of the popular sense of the strange dis- 
 turbance in the order of nature. Macbeth 
 is the prey to superstition, and it seems really 
 as if a hand other than his own forces him for- 
 ward on the road to destruction. In no other 
 play of Shakespeare's, not even in Hamlet, is 
 the power of spiritual agencies so present with 
 us; nowhere is Fate so visibly the handmaid 
 or the mistress of Retribution. In such a play 
 it is no wonder that pathos is swallowed up in 
 terror, and that the only really frank aban- 
 donment to humour is in an interlude of ghastly 
 pleasantry, the Shakespearean authorship of 
 which has been doubted. 
 
 In this brief and rapid play, where the 
 action has so little that is superfluous, and all is 
 ordered with so rigid a concentration, the in- 
 
24 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 terest is still further narrowed and intensified 
 by being directed almost wholly upon two 
 persons. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth fill the 
 stage. In painting them Shakespeare has 
 expended his full power. Lie has cared to do 
 no more than sketch the other characters. As 
 in one of Michelangelo's sketches, the few 
 lines of the drawing call up a face as truly 
 lifelike as that which fronts us in the com- 
 pleted picture. But in the play these subor- 
 dinate figures are forgotten in the absorbing 
 interest of the two primary ones. The real 
 conflict, out of which the action grows, is the 
 conflict between the worse and better natures 
 of these two persons; the real tragedy is one 
 of conscience, and the murder of Duncan, the 
 assassination of Banquo, the slaughters with 
 which the play is studded, are but the out- 
 ward signs, the bloody signatures, of the ter- 
 rible drama which is going on within. 
 
 When Macbeth, returning victorious from' 
 the field of battle, is met by the witches' pre- 
 diction: "All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king 
 hereafter!" is it not curious that his thoughts 
 should turn with such astonishing promptitude 
 to the idea of murder? The tinder, it is evi- 
 
MACBETH 25 
 
 dent, is lying ready, and it needs but a spark 
 to set the whole fire aflame. We learn from his 
 wife's analysis of his character that he is am- 
 bitious, discontented, willing to do wrong 
 in order to attain to greatness, yet, like so 
 many of the unsuccessful criminals, hampered 
 always in the way of wrong-doing by an incon- 
 venient afterthought of virtue. He has never 
 enough of it to stay his hand from the deed, 
 but he has just sufficient to sicken him of the 
 crime when only half-way through it. He 
 may plan and plot, but at the last he acts 
 always on impulse, and is never able to pur- 
 sue a deliberate course coolly. He knows him- 
 self well enough to say, once: 
 
 No boasting like a fool: 
 This deed I'll do before the purpose cool. 
 
 Before the purpose cool! that is always the 
 danger to fear, in a nature of this unstable sort. 
 He can murder Duncan, but he cannot bring 
 himself to return and face his work, though his 
 own safety depends upon it. It is the woman 
 who goes back into the fatal chamber, to which 
 he dares not return. No sooner has he done 
 the deed than he wishes it undone. His con- 
 
26 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 science is awake now, awake and maundering. 
 With the dawn courage returns; he is able to 
 play his part with calmness, a new impulse 
 having taken the place of the last one. Re- 
 morse, for the present, is put aside. He plots 
 Banquo's death deliberately, and is almost gay 
 in hinting it to his wife. Now, his feeling 
 seems to be, we shall be safe : no need for more 
 crime! And then, perhaps, there will be no 
 more of the "terrible dreams." 
 
 When Banquo's ghost appears, Macbeth's 
 acting breaks down. He is in the hold of a 
 fresh sensation, and horror and astonishment 
 overwhelm all. After having thought himself 
 at last secure ! It is always through the super- 
 stitious side of his nature that Macbeth is 
 impressible. His agitation at the sight of the 
 ghost of Banquo is not, I think, a trick of the 
 imagination, but the horror of a man who sees 
 the actual ghost of the man he has slain. Thus 
 he cannot reason it away, as, before the fancied 
 dagger (a heated brain conjuring up images 
 of its own intents) he can exclaim: "There's 
 no such thing!" The horror fastens deeply 
 upon him, and he goes sullenly onward in the 
 path of blood, seeing now that there is no re- 
 
MACBETH 27 
 
 turning by a way so thronged with worse than 
 memories. 
 
 Since his initiate step in this path, Mac- 
 beth has never been free from the mockery of 
 desire to overcome his fears, to be at peace in 
 evil-doing, to "sleep in spite of thunder." 
 But his mind becomes more and more divided 
 against itself, and the degradation of his 
 nature goes on apace. When we see him 
 finally at bay in his fortress, he is broken down 
 by agitation, and the disturbance of all within 
 and without, into a state of savage distraction, 
 in which the individual sense of guilt seems to 
 be lost in a sullen growth of moody distrust 
 and of somewhat aimless ferocity. He is in 
 that state in which ''the grasshopper is a bur- 
 den," and every event presents itself as an 
 unbearable irritation. His nerves are un- 
 strung; he bursts out into precipitate and 
 causeless anger at the mere sight of the mes- 
 senger who enters to him. One sees his mental 
 and bodily collapse in the impossibility of con- 
 trolling the least whim. He calls for his 
 armour, has it put on, pulls it off, bids it be 
 brought after him. He talks to the doctor 
 about the affairs of war, and plays grimly on 
 
28 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 medical terms. He dares now to confess to 
 himself how weary he is of everything beneath 
 the sun, and seeks in vain for what may "min- 
 ister to a mind diseased." When, on a cry of 
 women from within, he learns that his wife is 
 dead, he can speak no word of regret. ''She 
 should have died hereafter;" that is all, and a 
 moralization. He has "supped full with hor- 
 rors," and the taste of them has begun to pall. 
 There remains now only the release of death. 
 As prophecy after prophecy comes to its ful- 
 filment, and the last hope is lost, desperation 
 takes the place of confidence. When finally, 
 he sees the man before him by whom he knows 
 that he is to die, his soldier's courage rises at a 
 taunt, and he fights to the end. 
 
 Nothing in his life 
 Became him like the leaving it. 
 
 The " note," as it may be called, of Macbeth 
 is the weakness of a bold mind, a vigorous 
 body; that of Lady Macbeth is the strength 
 of a finely-strung but perfectly determined 
 nature. She dominates her husband by the 
 persistence of an irresistible will; she herself, 
 her woman's weakness, is alike dominated 
 
MACBETH 29' 
 
 by the same compelling force. Let the effect 
 on her of the witches' prediction be contrasted 
 with the effect on Macbeth. In Macbeth 
 there is a mental conflict, an attempt, however 
 feeble, to make a stand against the temp- 
 tation. But the prayer of his wife is not for 
 power to resist, but for power to carry out, the 
 deed. The same ambitions that were slumber- 
 ing in him are in her stirred by the same spark 
 into life. The flame runs through her and pos- 
 sesses her in an instant, and from the thought 
 to its realization is but a step. Like all 
 women, she is practical, swift from starting- 
 point to goal, imperious in disregard of hin- 
 drances that may lie in the way. But she is 
 resolute, also, with a determination which 
 knows no limits; imaginative, too (imagina- 
 tion being to her in the place of virtue) and it 
 is this she fears, and it is this that wrecks her. 
 Her prayer to the spirits that tend on mortal 
 thoughts shows by no means a mind steeled 
 to compunction. Why should she cry: 
 
 Stop up the access and passage to remorse! 
 
 if hers were a mind in which no visitings of pity 
 had to be dreaded? Her language is fervid. 
 
30 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 sensitive, and betrays with her first words the 
 imagination which is her capacity for suffer- 
 ing. She is a woman who can be '' magnifi- 
 cent in sin," but who has none of the callous- 
 ness which makes the comfort of the criminal; 
 not one of the poisonous women of the Renais- 
 sance, who smiled complacently after an assas- 
 sination, but a woman of the North, in whom 
 sin is its own " first revenge." She can do the 
 deed, and she can do it triumphantly; she can 
 even think her prayer has been answered; 
 but the horror of the thing will change her 
 soul, and at night, when the will, that sup- 
 ported her indomitable mind by day, slumbers 
 with the overtaxed body, her imagination 
 (the soul she has in her for her torture) will 
 awake and cry at last aloud. On the night 
 of the murder it is Macbeth who falters; it 
 is he who wishes that the deed might be un- 
 done, she who says to him 
 
 These deeds must not be thought 
 After these ways; so, it will make us mad; 
 
 but to Macbeth (despite the "terrible dreams") 
 time dulls the remembrance from its first 
 intensity; he has not the fineness of nature 
 
MACBETH 31 
 
 that gives the power of suffering to his wife. 
 Guilt changes both, but him it degrades. 
 Hers is not a nature that can live in degrada- 
 tion. To her no degradation is possible. 
 Her sin was deliberate; she marched straight 
 to her end; and the means were mortal, 
 not alone to the man who died, but to her. 
 Macbeth could as little comprehend the depth 
 of her suffering as she his hesitancy in a deter- 
 mined action. It is this fineness of nature, 
 this over-possession by imagination, which 
 renders her interesting, elevating her punish- 
 ment into a sphere beyond the comprehension 
 of a vulgar criminal. 
 
 In that terrible second scene of Act II, per- 
 haps the most awe-inspiring scene that Shake- 
 speare ever wrote, the splendid qualities of 
 Lady Macbeth are seen in their clearest light. 
 She has taken wine to make her bold, but there 
 is an exaltation in her brain beyond anything 
 that wine could give. Her calmness is indeed 
 unnatural, over-strained, by no means so 
 composed as she would have her husband 
 think. But having determined on her pur- 
 pose, there is with her no returning, no thought 
 of return. It is with a burst of real anger, of 
 
32 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 angry contempt, that she cries " Give me the 
 daggers!" and her exaltation upholds her as 
 she goes back and faces the dead man and the 
 sleeping witnesses. She can even, as she 
 returns, hear calmly the knocking that speaks 
 so audibly to the heart of Macbeth, taking 
 measures for their safety if anyone should 
 enter. She can even look resolutely at her 
 bloody hands, and I imagine she half believes 
 her own cynical words when she says: 
 
 A little water clears us of this deed: 
 How easy is it then! 
 
 Her will, her high nature (perverted, but not 
 subdued) her steeled sensitiveness, the intoxi- 
 cation of crime and of wine, sustain her in a 
 forced calmness which she herself little sus- 
 pects will ever fail her. How soon it does fail, 
 or rather how soon the body takes revenge 
 upon the soul, is seen next morning, when, 
 after overacting her part in the famous 
 words, "What, in our house?" she falls in a 
 swoon, by no means counterfeit, we may be 
 sure, though Macbeth, by his disregard of it, 
 seems to think so. After this, we see her but 
 rarely. A touch of the deepest melancholy 
 
MACBETH 33 
 
 (" Nought's had, all's spent!") marks the few 
 words spoken to herself as she waits for Mac- 
 beth on the night which is, though unknown 
 to her, to be fatal to Banquo. No sooner 
 has Macbeth entered than she greets him in 
 the old resolute spirit; and again on the 
 night of the banquet she is, as ever, full of 
 bitter scorn and contempt for the betraying 
 weakness of her husband, prompt to cover 
 his confusion with a plausible tale to the guests. 
 She is still mistress of herself, and only the 
 weariness of the few words she utters after 
 the guests are gone, only the absence of the 
 reproaches we are expecting, betray the change 
 that is coming over her. One sees a trace of 
 lassitude, that is all. 
 
 From this point Lady Macbeth drops out of 
 the play, until, in the fifth act, we see her for 
 the last time. Even now it is the body rather 
 than the soul that has given way. What 
 haunts her is the smell and sight of the blood, 
 the physical disgust of the thing. ''All the 
 perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little 
 hand." One hears the self-pitying note with 
 which she says the words. Even now, even 
 when unconscious, her scorn still bites at the 
 
34 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 feebleness of her husband. The will, in this 
 shattered body, is yet unbroken. There is no 
 repentance, no regret, only the intolerable 
 vividness of accusing memory; the sight, the 
 smell, ever present to her eyes and nostrils. 
 It has been thought that the words " Hell is 
 murky!" the only sign, if sign it be, of fear 
 at the thought of the life to come, are probably 
 spoken in mocking echo of her husband. 
 Even if not, they are a passing shudder. It 
 is enough for her that her hands still keep the 
 sensation of the blood upon them. The 
 imagination which stands to her in the place 
 of virtue has brought in its revenge, and 
 for her too there is left only the release of death. 
 She dies, not of remorse at her guilt, but 
 because she has miscalculated her power of 
 resistance to the scourge of an over-acute 
 imagination. 
 
 1889. 
 
III. TWELFTH NIGHT 
 
 The play of Twelfth Night, coming midway 
 in the career of Shakespeare, perhaps just 
 between As You Like It, the Arcadian comedy, 
 and AlVs Well That Ends Well, a comedy in 
 name, but kept throughout on the very edge 
 of tragedy, draws up into itself the separate 
 threads of wit and humour from the various 
 plays which had preceded it, weaving them all 
 into a single texture. It is in some sort a 
 farewell to mirth, and the mirth is of the finest 
 quality, an incomparable ending. Shakespeare 
 has done greater things, but nothing more 
 delightful. One might fancy that the play 
 had been composed in a time of special comfort 
 and security, when soul and body were in per- 
 fect equipoise, and the dice of circumstance 
 had fallen happily. A golden mean, a sweet 
 moderation, reigns throughout. Here and 
 there, in the more serious parts of the dialogue, 
 we have one of Shakespeare's most beautiful 
 touches, as in the divine opening lines, in 
 
 35 
 
36 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Viola's story of the sister who "never told her 
 love," and in much of that scene; but in 
 general the fancy is moderated to accord with 
 the mirth, and refrains from sounding a very 
 deep or a very high note. Every element 
 of the play has the subtlest links with its fellow. 
 Tenderness melts into a smile, and the smile 
 broadens imperceptibly into laughter. With- 
 out ever absolutely mingling, the two streams 
 of the plot flow side by side, following the same 
 windings, and connected by tributary currents. 
 Was there ever a more transparently self- 
 contradictory theory than that which removes 
 one or two minute textual difficulties by the 
 tremendous impossibility of a double date? 
 No characteristic of the play is more unmis- 
 takable than its perfect unity and sure swift- 
 ness of composition, the absolute rondure of 
 the of Giotto, done at a single sweep of the 
 practised arm. It is such a triumph of con- 
 struction that it is hard, in reading it, to get 
 rid of the feeling that it has been written at 
 one sitting. 
 
 The protagonist of the play, the center of 
 our amused interest, is certainly Malvolio, 
 but it is on the fortunes of Viola, in her rela- 
 
TWELFTH NIGHT 37 
 
 tions with the Duke and OHvia, that the action 
 really depends. The Duke, the first speaker 
 on the stage, is an egoist, a gentle and refined 
 specimen of the class which has been summed 
 up finally in the monumental character of Sir 
 Willoughby Patterne. He is painted without 
 satire, with the gentle forbearance of the 
 profound and indifferent literary artist ; shown, 
 indeed, almost exclusively on his best side, 
 yet, though sadly used as a lover, he awakens 
 no pity, calls up no champion in our hearts. 
 There is nothing base in his nature; he is 
 incapable of any meanness, never harsh or 
 unjust, gracefully prone to the virtues which 
 do not take root in self-denial, to facile kind- 
 ness, generosity, sympathy; he can inspire a 
 tender love; he can love, though but with a 
 desire of the secondary emotions; but he is 
 self-contemplative, in another sense from Mal- 
 volio, one of those who play delicately upon 
 life, whose very sorrows have an elegant melan- 
 choly, the sting of a sharp sauce which re- 
 freshes the palate cloyed by an insipid dish: 
 a sentimental egoist. See, for a revealing 
 touch of Shakespeare's judgment on him, 
 his shallow words on woman's incapacity for 
 
38 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 love, so contradictory to what he has said 
 the moment before, an inconsistency so ex- 
 quisitely characteristic; both said with the 
 same lack of vital sincerity, the same experi- 
 mental and argumentative touch upon life. 
 See how once only, in the fifth act, he blows 
 out a little frothy bluster, a show of manli- 
 ness, harsh words but used as goblin tales to 
 frighten children; words whose vacillation in 
 the very act comes out in the '' What shall I 
 do?", in the pompous declaration, "My 
 thoughts are ripe in mischief", in the side- 
 touches, like an admiring glance aside in 
 the glass at his own most effective attitude, 
 ** a savage jealousy that sometime savours 
 nobly," and the like. When he coolly gives 
 up the finally-lost Olivia, and turns to the 
 love and sympathy he knows are to be found 
 in Viola (as, in after days. Sir Willoughby will 
 turn to his Lsetitia) the shallowness of his 
 nature reveals itself in broad daylight. 
 
 Olivia is the complement to Orsino, a tragic 
 sentimentalist, with emotions which it pleases 
 her to play on a little consciously, yet capable 
 of feeling, of a pitch beyond the Duke's too 
 loudly-speaking passion. Her cloistral mourn- 
 
TWELFTH NIGHT 39 
 
 ing for her brother's death has in it something 
 theatrical, not quite honest, a playing with the 
 emotions. She makes a luxury of her grief, 
 and no doubt it loses its sting. Then, when a 
 new face excites her fancy, the artificial con- 
 dition into which she has brought herself 
 leaves her an easy prey, by the natural re- 
 bound, to a possessing imagination. She 
 becomes violently enamoured, yet honestly 
 enough, of the disguised Viola, and her passion 
 survives the inevitable substitution. Shake- 
 speare has cleansed her from the stains of the 
 old story, as he cleansed the heroine of Measure 
 for Measure: the note of wantonness is never 
 struck. She is too like the Duke ever to care 
 for him. She has and she fills her place in the 
 play, but the place is a secondary one, and she 
 is without power over our hearts. 
 
 We turn to Viola with relief. She is a 
 true woman, exquisitely gracious in that silent 
 attendance upon a love seeming to have been 
 chosen in vain ; yet we can find for her no place 
 in the incomparable company of Shakespeare's 
 very noblest women. She has a touch of the 
 sentimental, and will make a good wife for 
 the Duke; she is without the strength of 
 
40 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 temperament or dignity of intellect which 
 would scorn a delicately sentimental egoist. 
 She is incapable of the heroism of Helena, of 
 Isabella; she is of softer nature, of slighter 
 build and lowlier spirit than they, while she has 
 none of the overbrimming life, the intense and 
 dazzling vitality, of Rosalind, Her male 
 disguise is almost unapparent; she is covered 
 by it as by a veil; it neither spurs her lips to 
 sauciness, as with Rosalind, nor tames her 
 into infinite dainty fears, as with Imogen; 
 she is here, as she would be always, quiet, 
 secure, retiring yet scarcely timid, with a 
 pleasant playfulness breaking out now and 
 then, the effect, not of high spirits, but of a 
 whimsical sense of her secret when she feels 
 safe in it, coming among women. Without 
 any of the more heroic lineaments of her sex, 
 she has the delicacy and tender truth that we 
 all find so charming: an egoist supremely, 
 when the qualities are his for possessing. 
 She represents the typical female heart offer- 
 ing itself to the man: an ingenuous spectacle, 
 with the dew upon it of early morning. She is 
 permitted to speak the tenderest words in 
 which pathos crowns and suffuses love; and 
 
TWELFTH NIGHT 41 
 
 once, under the spell of music, her small voice 
 of low and tender changes rings out with im- 
 mortal clearness, and for the moment, like the 
 words she says, 
 
 It gives a very echo to the seat 
 Where love is throned. 
 
 Of Malvolio all has been said, and but little 
 shall be said of him here. He is a DonsQuixote 
 in the colossal enlargement of his delusions, 
 in the cruel irony of Fate, which twists topsy- 
 turvy, making a mere straw in the wind of 
 him, an eminently sober and serious man of the 
 clearest uprightness, unvisited by a stray 
 glimpse of saving humour. He is a man of 
 self-sufficiency, a noble quality perilously near 
 to self-complacency, and he has passed the 
 bounds without knowing it. His unbend- 
 ing solemnity is his ruin. Nothing presents 
 so fair a butt for the attack of a guerilla- 
 fighting wit. It is indeed the most generally 
 obnoxious of all tolerable qualities; for it is 
 a living rebuke of our petty levities, and it 
 hints to us of a conscious superior. Even a 
 soldier is not required to be always on drill. 
 A lofty moralist, a starched formalist, like 
 
42 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Malvolio, is salt and wormwood in the cakes 
 and ale of gourmand humanity. It is with the 
 nicest art that he is kept from rising sheer 
 out of comedy into a tragic isolation of atti- 
 tude. He is restrained, and we have no 
 heartache in the laughter that seconds the most 
 sprightly of clowns, the sharpest of serving- 
 maids, and the incomparable pair of royster- 
 ers, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. 
 
 Shakespeare, like Nature, has a tenderness 
 for man in his cups, and will not let him come 
 to grief. Sir Toby's wit bubbles up from no 
 fountain of wisdom; it is shallow, radically 
 bibulous, a brain-fume blown from a mere 
 ferment of wits. His effect is truly and purely 
 comic ; but it is rather from the way in which 
 the playwright points and places him than from 
 his own comic genius; in this how unlike 
 Falstaff, who appears to owe nothing to cir- 
 cumstances, but to escape from and dominate 
 his creator. Sir Toby is the immortal type of 
 the average " funny fellow " and boon-com- 
 panion of the clubs or the alehouse; you may 
 meet him any day in the street, with his 
 portly build, red plump cheeks, and merry 
 eyes twinkling at the incessant joke of life. 
 
TWELFTH NIGHT 43 
 
 His mirth is facile, contagious, continual; 
 it would become wearisome perhaps at too long 
 a dose, but through a single comic scene it is 
 tickling, pervasive, delightful. Sir Andrew 
 is the grindstone on which Sir Toby sharpens 
 his wit. He is an instance of a natural fool 
 becoming truly comic by the subtle handling 
 in which he is not allowed to awaken too 
 keenly either pity or contempt. In life he 
 would awaken both. He is a harmless sim- 
 pleton, an innocent and unobtrusive bore, 
 ''a Slender grown adult in brainlessness;" 
 and he is shown in all his fatuity without a note 
 or touch of really ill-natured sarcasm. Shake- 
 speare's humour plays round him, enveloping 
 him softly; his self-esteem has no shock; 
 unlike Malvolio, he is permitted to remain 
 undeceived to the end. It is to his credit 
 that he is not without glimmerings that he is 
 a fool. The kindness, is, that the conviction 
 is not forced upon him from without. 
 
 1889. 
 
IV. MEASURE FOR MEASURE 
 
 Measure for Measure is neither the last 
 of the comedies nor the first of the tragedies. 
 It is tragedy and comedy together, inextri- 
 cably interfused, coexistent in a mutual con- 
 tradiction; such a tangled web, indeed, as 
 our life is, looked at by the actors in it, on the 
 level of its action; with certain suggestions, 
 open or concealed, of the higher view, the 
 aspect of things from the point of view of a 
 tolerant wisdom. The hidden activity of 
 the Duke, working for ends of beneficent jus- 
 tice, in the midst of the ferment and corrup- 
 tion of the seething city; this figure of per- 
 sonified Providence, watchfully cognizant of 
 act and motive, has been conceived by Shake- 
 speare (not yet come to his darkest mood, 
 in which man is a mere straw in the wind of 
 Destiny) to give a sense of security, centred 
 within even such a maze as this. It is not from 
 Isabella that we get any such sense. Her 
 very courage and purity and intellectual light 
 
 44 
 
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 43 
 
 do but serve to deepen the darkness, when we 
 conceive of her as but one sacrifice the more. 
 Just as CordeUa intensifies the pity and terror 
 of King Lear, so would Isabella's helpless 
 virtues add the keenest ingredient to the cup 
 of bitterness, but for the Duke. He is a 
 foretaste of Prospero, a Prospero working 
 greater miracles without magic ; and he guides 
 us through the labyrinths of the play by a 
 clue of which he has the secret. 
 
 That Measure for Measure is a "painful" 
 play (as Coleridge called it) cannot be denied. 
 There is something base and sordid in the 
 villany of its actors; a villany which has noth- 
 ing of the heroism of sin. In Angelo we have 
 the sharpest lesson that Shakespeare ever 
 read self-righteousness. In Claudio we see 
 a " gilded youth " with the gilding rubbed 
 off. From Claudio's refined wantonness we 
 sink deeper and deeper, through Lucio, who 
 is a Claudio by trade, and without even the 
 pretence of gilding, to the very lowest depth 
 of a city's foulness and brutality. The ''hu- 
 mours" of bawd and hangman and the cus- 
 tomers of both are painted with as angry a 
 hand as Hogarth's; bitten in with the etcher's 
 
46 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 acid, as if into the very flesh. Even Elbow, 
 " a simple constable," a Dogberry of the 
 lower dregs, struts and maunders before us 
 with a desperate imbecility, in place of the 
 engaging silliness, where silliness seemed a 
 hearty comic virtue, of the " simple constable " 
 of the earlier play. In the astonishing por- 
 trait of Barnardine we come to the simply 
 animal man; a portrait which in its savage 
 realism, brutal truth to nature, cynical insight 
 into the workings of the contended beast in 
 man, seems to anticipate some of the achieve- 
 ments of the modern Realistic novel. In the 
 midst of this crowd of evil-doers walks the 
 Duke, hooded body and soul in his friar's 
 habit; Escalus, a solitary figure of broad and 
 sturdy uprightness; Isabella, " a thing enskied 
 and sainted," the largest-hearted and clearest- 
 eyed heroine of Shakespeare; and apart, 
 veiled from good and evil in a perpetual loneli- 
 ness of sorrow, Mariana, in the moated grange. 
 In the construction of this play Shakespeare 
 seems to have put forth but a part of his 
 strength, throwing his full power only into the 
 great scenes, and leaving, with less than his 
 customary care (in strong contrast to what we 
 
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 47 
 
 note in Twelfth Night) frayed ends and edges 
 of action and of characterization. The con- 
 clusion, particularly, seems hurried, and the 
 disposal of Angelo inadequate. I cannot but 
 think that Shakespeare felt the difficulty, the 
 impossibility, of reconciling the end which his 
 story and the dramatic conventionalities re- 
 quired with the character of Angelo as shown 
 in the course of the play, and that he slurred 
 over the matter as best he could. With 
 space before him he might have convinced us, 
 being Shakespeare, of the sincerity of Angelo's 
 repentance and the rightfulness of his remis- 
 sion; but as it is, crowded as all this convic- 
 tion and penitence and forgiveness necessarily 
 is into a few minutes of supplementary action 
 one can hardly think that Coleridge expressed 
 the natural feeling too forcibly in declaring 
 "the strong indignant claim of justice" to 
 be baffled by the pardon and marriage of 
 Angelo. Of the scenes in which Angelo appears 
 as the prominent actor (the incomparable 
 second and fourth scenes of the second act, 
 the first the temptation of Angelo, the second 
 Angelo's temptation of Isabella) nothing can 
 be said but that Shakespeare may have 
 
48 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 equalled, but has scarcely exceeded them, 
 in intensity and depth of natural truth. 
 These, with that other scene between Claudio 
 and Isabella, make the play. 
 
 It is part of the irony of things that the 
 worst complication, the deepest tragedy in 
 all this tortuous action, comes about by the 
 innocent means of the stainless Isabella; who 
 also, by her steadfast heroism, brings about 
 the final peace. But for Isabella, Claudio 
 would simply have died, perhaps meeting his 
 fate, when it came, with a desperate flash of 
 his father's courage; Angelo might have lived 
 securely to his last hour, unconscious of his 
 own weakness, of the fire that lurked in so 
 impenetrable a flint. Shakespeare has some- 
 times been praised for the subtlety with which 
 he has barbed the hook for Angelo, in making 
 Isabella's very chastity the keenest of tempta- 
 tions. The notion is not peculiar to Shake- 
 speare, but was hinted at, in his scrambling 
 and uncertain way, by the writer of the old 
 play on which Measure for Measure is founded. 
 In truth, I do not see what other course was 
 open to either in dealing with a situation which 
 was not original in Shakespeare or in Whet- 
 
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 49 
 
 stone. Angelo, let us remember, is not a 
 hypocrite: he has no dishonourable intention 
 in his mind; he conceives himself to be 
 firmly grounded on a broad basis of rectitude, 
 and in condemning Claudio he condemns a 
 sin which he sincerely abhors. His treatment 
 of the betrothed Mariana would probably 
 be in his own eyes an act of frigid justice; it 
 certainly shows a man not sensually-minded, 
 but cold, calculating, likely to err, if he errs 
 at all, rather on the side of the miserly virtues 
 than of the generous sins. It is thus the 
 nobility of Isabella that attracts him; her 
 freedom from the tenderest signs of frailty, 
 her unbiassed intellect, her regard for justice, 
 her religious sanctity; and it is on his noblest 
 side first, the side of him that can respond 
 to these qualities, that he is tempted. I know 
 of nothing more consummate than the way 
 in which his mind is led on, step by step, 
 towards the trap still hidden from him, the 
 trap prepared by the merciless foresight of 
 the chance that tries the professions and the 
 thoughts of men. Once tainted, the corrup- 
 tion is over him like leprosy, and every virtue 
 withers into the corresponding form of vice. 
 
50 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 In Claudio it is the same touchstone, Isabella's 
 unconscious and misdirected Ithuriel-spear, 
 that reveals the basest forms of evil. A great 
 living painter has chosen the central moment 
 of the play, the moment when Claudio, having 
 heard the terms on which alone life can be 
 purchased, murmurs, ''Death is a fearful 
 thing," and Isabella, not yet certain, yet 
 already with the fear astir in her of her brother's 
 weakness replies, ''And shamed life a hate- 
 ful;" it is this moment which Holman Hunt 
 brings before us in a canvas that, like his scene 
 from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is not only 
 a picture but an interpretation. Against the 
 stained and discoloured wall of his dungeon, 
 apple-blossoms and blue sky showing through 
 the grated window behind his delicate di- 
 sheveled head, Claudio stands; a lute tied 
 with red ribbons hangs beside him, a rose 
 has fallen on the dark garments at his feet, 
 one hand plays with his fetters (with how 
 significant a gesture!) the other hand pinches, 
 idly affectionate, the two intense hands that 
 Isabella has laid upon his breast; he is think- 
 ing, where to debate means shame, balancing 
 the arguments; and with pondering eyes, 
 
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 51 
 
 thrusting his tongue towards the corner of his 
 just-parted lips with a movement of exquisite 
 naturalness, he halts in indecision : all his mean 
 thoughts are there, in that gesture, in those 
 eyes; and in the warm and gracious youth 
 of his whole aspect, passionately superficial 
 and in love with life, there is something of the 
 pathos of things " sweet, not lasting," a fragile, 
 an unreasonable, an inevitable pathos. Isa- 
 bella fronts him, an embodied conscience, 
 all her soul in her eyes. Her eyes read him, 
 plead with him, they are suppliant and judge; 
 her intense fearfulness, the intolerable doubt 
 of her brother's honour, the anguish of hope 
 and fear, shine in them with a light as of tears 
 frozen at the source. In a moment, with 
 words on his lips whose far-reaching imagina- 
 tion is stung into him and from him by the 
 sharpness of the impending death, he will have 
 stooped below the reach of her contempt, 
 uttering those words. " Sweet sister, let me 
 live!" 
 
 After all, the final word of Shakespeare in 
 this play is mercy; but it is a mercy which 
 comes of the consciousness of our own need 
 of it, and it is granted and accepted in humilia- 
 
52 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 tion. The lesson of mercy taught in The 
 Merchant of Venice is based on the mutual 
 blessing of its exercise, the graciousness of 
 the spirit to which it is sign and seal. 
 
 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
 Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest; 
 It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. 
 
 Here, the claim which our fellow-man has on 
 our commiseration is the sad claim of mutual 
 guiltiness before an absolute bar of justice. 
 
 How would you be 
 If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
 But judge you as you are? 
 
 And is not the " painfulness," which im- 
 presses us in this sombre play, due partly to 
 this very moral, and not alone to the circum- 
 stances from which it disengages itself? For 
 it is so '' painful " to think that we are no 
 better than our neighbours. 
 
 1890. 
 
V. THE WINTER'S TALE 
 
 The Winter's Tale is a typically romantic 
 drama, a "winter's dream, when nights are 
 longest," constructed in defiance of proba- 
 bilities, which it rides over happily. It has 
 all the licence, and all the charm, of a fairy 
 tale, while the matters of which it treats 
 are often serious enough, ready to become 
 tragic at any moment, and with much of 
 real tragedy in them as it is. The merciful 
 spirit of Shakespeare in his last period, grown 
 to repose now after the sharp sunshine and 
 storm of his earlier and middle years, the 
 delicate art which that period matured in 
 him, seen at its point of finest delicacy in this 
 play and in The Tempest, alone serve to restrain 
 what would otherwise be really painful in the 
 griefs and mistaken passions of the perturbed 
 persons of the drama. Something, the very 
 atmosphere, the dawning of light among the 
 clouds at their blackest, at first a hint, then 
 
 53 
 
54 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 distinctly a promise, of things coming right 
 at last, keeps us from taking all these dis- 
 tresses, genuine as they are, too seriously. 
 It is all human life, but life under happier 
 skies, on continents where the shores of 
 Bohemia are washed by "faery seas." An- 
 achronisms abound, and are delightful. That 
 Delphos should be an island, Giulio Romano 
 contemporary with the Oracles, that Puritans 
 should sing psalms to hornpipes, and a sudden 
 remembrance call up the name of Jove or 
 Proserpina to the forgetful lips of Christian- 
 speaking characters: all this is of no more 
 importance than a trifling error in the count 
 of miles traversed by a witch's broomstick 
 in a minute. Too probable figures would 
 destroy the illusion, and the error is a separate 
 felicity. 
 
 It is quite in keeping with the other romantic 
 characteristics of the play, that, judged by the 
 usual standard of such a Romantic as Shake- 
 speare himself, it should be constructed with 
 exceptional looseness, falling into two very 
 definite halves, the latter of which can again, 
 in a measure, be divided. The first part, 
 which takes place in Sicilia, is a study of 
 
THE WINTER'S TALE 55 
 
 jealousy; the whole interest is concentrated 
 upon the relations of the ''usual three, husband 
 and wife and friend:" Leontes, Hermione, 
 and Polixenes. The jealousy is in possession 
 when we first see Leontes; it bursts forth, 
 flames to its height, almost at once; in its 
 furious heat runs through its whole course with 
 the devouring speed of a race-horse; and then 
 has its downfall, sudden and precipitate, and 
 so dies of its own over-swiftness. Act III, 
 Scene 2, ends the first part of the play; and 
 with the third scene begins the second part, 
 taking us from Sicilia, where the widowed and 
 childless king is left mourning, to Bohemia, 
 where the children, not long born when we last 
 saw Sicilia, are now come to years of love. 
 Then, all through the fourth act, we are with 
 Florizel and Perdita; a sweet pastoral, varied 
 with the dainty knaveries of a rogue as light- 
 hearted as he is light-fingered; the pastoral, 
 too, coming to a sudden and disastrous end, 
 not without a doubtful gleam of hope for the 
 future. With Act V we return to Sicilia, 
 having from the beginning a sense that things 
 are now at last coming to a desired end. 
 Leontes' proved faithfulness, his sixteen years' 
 
56 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 burden of '* saint-like sorrow" gives him the 
 right, one feels, to the happiness that is so 
 evidently drawing near. All does, indeed, 
 fall well, as the whole company comes together 
 at the court of Sicilia, now re-united at 
 last, husband with his lost wife (another 
 Alcestis from the grave) father and mother 
 with child, lover with lover (the course of true 
 love smooth again) friend with friend, the faith- 
 ful servants rewarded with each other, the 
 worthless likable knave, even, in a good way of 
 getting on in the world. 
 
 The principal charm in The Winter^s Tale, 
 its real power over the sources of delight, lies 
 in the two women, true mother and daughter, 
 whose fortunes we see at certain moments, the 
 really important crises of their lives. Her- 
 mione, as we have just time to see her before 
 the blow comes, is happy wife and happy 
 mother, fixed, as it seems, in a settled happi- 
 ness. Grave, not gay, but with a certain quiet 
 playfulness, such as so well becomes stately 
 women, she impresses us with a feeling, partly 
 of admiration, partly of attraction. It is 
 with a sort of devoted reverence that we see 
 her presently, patient, yet not abject, under the 
 
THE WINTER'S TALE 57 
 
 dishonouring accusations of the fool lier lius- 
 band. " Good my lords," she can say, 
 
 I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
 Commonly are ; the want of which vain dew 
 Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have 
 That honourable grief lodged here which burns 
 Worse than tears drown. 'Beseech you all, my lords 
 With thoughts so qualified as your charities 
 Shall best instruct you, measure me: and so 
 The king's will be performed. 
 
 All Hermione is in those words, no less than 
 in the calm forthrightness of her defence, 
 spoken afterwards in the Court of Justice. 
 She has no self-consciousness, is not aware 
 that at any time in her life she is heroic; ''a 
 very woman," merely simple, sincere, having 
 in reverence the sanctity of wifehood and in 
 respect the dignity of queenship. In Perdita, 
 the daughter so long lost and in the end so 
 happily restored to her, we see, in all the 
 gaiety of youth, the frank innocence and the 
 placid strength of Hermione. She is the in- 
 carnation of all that is delightful and desir- 
 able in girlhood, as her mother incarnates for 
 us the perfect charm of mature woman. 
 And, coming before us where she does, a shep- 
 herdess among pastoral people, "the queen of 
 
58 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 curds and cream," she seems to sum up and 
 immortalize, in one delicious figure, our holi- 
 day loves, our most vivid sensations of country 
 pleasures. It is the grace of Florizel that he 
 loves Perdita; he becomes charming to us 
 because Perdita loves him. In these young 
 creatures the old passion becomes new; and 
 for an hour we too are as if we had never loved, 
 but are now in the first moment of the unique 
 discovery. 
 
 This charm of womanhood, this purely 
 delightful quality, of which the play has so 
 much, though it remains, I think, our chief 
 memory after reading or seeing the course of 
 action, is not, we must remember, the only 
 quality, the whole course of the action. Be- 
 sides the ripe comedy, characteristic of Shake- 
 speare at his latest, which indeed harmonizes 
 admirably with the idyl of love to which it 
 serves as background, there is also a harsh 
 exhibition, in Leontes, of the meanest of 
 the passions, an insane jealousy, petty and 
 violent as the man who nurses it. For sheer 
 realism, for absolute insight into the most 
 cobwebbed corners of our nature, Shake- 
 speare has rarely surpassed this brief study, 
 
THE WINTER'S TALE 59 
 
 which, in its total effect, does but throw out 
 in brighter relief the noble qualities of the 
 other actors beside him, the pleasant qualities 
 of the play they make by their acting. With 
 Othello there is properly no comparison. 
 Othello could no more comprehend the work- 
 ings of the mind of Leontes than Leontes 
 could fathom the meaning of the attitude of 
 Othello. Leontes is meanly, miserably, de- 
 gradedly jealous, with a sort of mental alien- 
 ation or distortion, a disease of the brain like 
 some disease of vision, by which he still " sees 
 yellow " everywhere. The malady has its 
 course, disastrously, and then ends in the only 
 way possible: by an agonizing cure, suddenly 
 applied. Are those sixteen years of mourning 
 we may wonder, really adequate penance for 
 the man? Certainly his suffering, like his 
 criminal folly, was great ; and not least among 
 the separate heartaches in that purifying 
 ministry of grief must have been the memory 
 of the boy Mamillius, the noblest and dearest 
 to our hearts of Shakespeare's children. When 
 the great day came (is it fanciful to note?) 
 Hermione embraced her husband in silence; 
 it was to her daughter that she first spoke. 
 
60 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 The end, certainly, is reconciliation, mercy; 
 mercy extended even to the unworthy, in a 
 spirit of something more than mere justice; 
 as, in those dark plays of Shakespeare's great 
 penultimate period, the end came with a sort 
 of sombre, irresponsible injustice, an outrage 
 of nature upon her sons, wrought in blind 
 anger. We close The Winter^s Tale with a 
 feeling that life is a good thing, worth living; 
 that much trial, much mistake and error, 
 may be endured to a happier issue, though the 
 scars, perhaps, are not to be effaced. This 
 end, on such a note, is indeed the mood in which 
 Shakespeare took leave of life; in no weakly 
 optimistic spirit, certainly, but with the air 
 of one who has conquered fortune, not fallen 
 under it; with a wise faith in the ultimate 
 wisdom of events. 
 
 1890. 
 
,VI.-. TITUS ANDRONICUS AND THE 
 TRAGEDY OF BLOOD 
 
 In considering the main question in regard 
 to Titus Andronicus, the question of its 
 Shakespearian or non-Shakespearian author- 
 ship, it is well to set clearly before us at the 
 outset the actual external evidence which we 
 have. There is, first, the fact that no edition 
 of the play was published during Shakespeare's 
 lifetime with his name on the title-page. On 
 the other hand, it was admitted into the First 
 Folio in company with the mass of his un- 
 doubted work. Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, 
 published in 1598, refers to it as a genuine 
 play of Shakespeare: "Witness ... for trag- 
 edy, his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., 
 King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo 
 and Juliet." But Ravenscroft, who revived 
 and altered the play in the time of James II., 
 says in his preface to an edition published in 
 1687: "I have been told by some anciently 
 conversant with the stage that it was not 
 
 61 
 
62 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 originally his [that is, Shakespeare's], but 
 brought by a private author to be acted, and 
 he only gave some master-touches to one or 
 two of the principal characters." 
 
 These conflicting statements have been re- 
 peatedly brought into harmony by believers in 
 Shakespeare's entire authorship, part-author- 
 ship, and non-authorship, so as to prove that 
 Shakespeare did and did not write the whole 
 play, and that he wrote some part of it. The 
 fact is, they are at the mercy of every theorizer, 
 and can be easily bent to the service of any 
 predetermined hypothesis. The absence of 
 Shakespeare's name from the title, from one 
 point of view a strong proof of an un-Shake- 
 spearian authorship, may be met by the ob- 
 vious cases of Richard II., Richard III., and 
 other unsigned first editions of undoubtedly 
 genuine plays. The attribution of the play 
 to Shakespeare by Meres and the editors of 
 the First Folio, apparently a still stronger 
 proof that he really wrote it, may be almost as 
 easily explained by supposing Ravenscroft's 
 tradition to be true, namely, that Shakespeare 
 revised for the stage a play written by someone 
 else, and that his name thus came to be more 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 63 
 
 and more closely associated with it, until in 
 time it was supposed to be entirely his work. 
 It is on the internal evidence, and the internal 
 evidence alone, that the burden of proof really 
 rests; all that we can require of a hypothesis 
 intelligibly constructed from the evidence 
 of the play itself, is that it shall not be at 
 variance with the few external facts, on a 
 rational interpretation of them. 
 
 We know, almost to a certainty, that Shake- 
 speare's earliest dramatic work consisted in 
 adapting to the stage old plays in the stock of 
 his players' company, and very probably in 
 revising new works by unknown and unskil- 
 ful playwrights. The second and third parts 
 of King Henry VI are examples to our hand 
 of the former manner of work: Titus Androni- 
 cus may with some probability be conjectured 
 to be an instance of the latter. I shall try 
 to show that such a supposition is the least 
 violent and fanciful that we can well make; 
 accepting Ravenscroft's tradition, not from 
 any particular reliance on its probable authen- 
 ticity, but because, in the absence of any 
 definite information to the contrary, it supplies 
 me with a theory which most nearly agrees 
 
64 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 with my impressions after a careful examina- 
 tion of the text itself. 
 
 Titus Andronicus is a crude and violent, yet 
 in certain respects superior, study in that pre- 
 Shakespearian school which Symonds distin- 
 guishes as "The Tragedy of Blood." This 
 Tragedy of Blood, loud, coarse, violent, ex- 
 travagantly hyperbolical, extravagantly real- 
 istic, was the first outcome of a significant type 
 of Elizabethan character, a hardy boisterous- 
 ness of nature, a strength of nerve and rough- 
 ness of taste, to which no exhibition of horror 
 or cruelty could give anything but a pleasur- 
 able shock. A popular audience required 
 strong food, and got it. 
 
 In the early days of the drama, when play- 
 wrights were as yet new to their trade, and 
 without much sense of its dignity as an art, 
 this popular style of tragedy, in the hands of 
 its popular manufacturers, was merely horrible. 
 There were blood and vengeance, strong pas- 
 sions and unrestrained wantonness, but as 
 yet there was no conception of the difference 
 between the horrible and the terrible. Later 
 on, in the hands of Shakespeare and Webster, 
 the old rank Tragedy of Blood, the favourite 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 65 
 
 of the people, became transformed. The 
 horrible became the terrible, a developed art 
 guided the playwright's hand in covering with 
 a certain magnificence the bare and grim 
 outlines of malevolence and murder. It was 
 the same thing, and yet new. The plot of 
 Hamlet is the plot of a Tragedy of Blood of 
 the orthodox school, it has all the elements of 
 The Spanish Tragedy, but it is fused by 
 imagination, humanized by philosophy, while 
 the ungainly melodrama of Kyd is a mere 
 skeleton, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, but 
 without flesh and blood, without life. 
 \ A careful examination of the plays left to us 
 of the period at which Titus Andronicus must 
 have been written will show us the exact nature 
 of this species of bloody tragedy, its frequency, 
 and its importance and influence. There may 
 be traced a foreshadowing of it in the copious 
 but solemn blood-shedding of the very first 
 English dramas, the pseudo-classical Gorhoduc 
 and The Misfortunes of Arthur. In these plays, 
 behind the cold and lengthy speeches of the 
 dramatic personages, a wonderful bustle is 
 supposed to be going on. In the argument to 
 Gorhoduc we read: "The sons fell to division 
 
66 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and dissension. The younger killed the elder. 
 The mother . . . killed the younger. The 
 people . . . rose in rebellion and slew both 
 father and mother. The nobility assembled 
 and most terribly destroyed the rebels." 
 In The Misfortunes of Arthur, a more loath- 
 some story, filled with murder and rapine, 
 serves as plot to a tragedy of stately speeches. 
 As yet there is no attempt to move by thrilUng; 
 a would-be classical decorum is preserved in 
 the midst of carnage, and the sanguinary 
 persons of the drama comment on their actions 
 with singular gravity. But while the barbar- 
 ous violence of action is reported as having 
 happened, with a steady suppression of sights 
 and details of blood, it is already potentially 
 present in the background, in readiness for 
 more powerful use by more powerful play- 
 wrights. 
 
 In Jeronymo (or Hieronymo) and The Spanish 
 Tragedy, in reality a single play of colossal 
 proportions, we have perhaps the first, and at 
 once the foremost, representative of the genu- 
 ine Tragedy of Blood. The stilted and formal 
 phraseology is still employed, in a much modi- 
 fied and improved form, but there is a real 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 67 
 
 attempt to move the hardy susceptibilities 
 of an audience; the murders occur on the stage, 
 and are executed with much fierceness, and 
 the language of overblown rant is at least in- 
 tended (and was probably found) to be very 
 stirring. The action of both plays is slow, 
 dull, wearisome, without vivacity or natural- 
 ness; the language alternates from the ridicu- 
 lously trivial to the ridiculously inflated; while 
 in the way of character there are the very 
 slightest indications of here and there a mood 
 or a quality. But the play is important by 
 reason of its position at the head of a long line 
 of tragedies, containing more than one of the 
 dramas of Marlowe, and scarcely coming to an 
 end in the masterpiece of Webster. 
 
 The keynote of Kyd's conception of tragedy 
 is murder. Of that most terrible of tragedies, 
 the tragedy of a soul, he is utterly unconscious. 
 Actual physical murder, honourably in the 
 duel, or treacherously by the hand of one of 
 those wonderful villains who live and move 
 and have their being on the Elizabethan stage: 
 this is the very abracadabra of his craft. A 
 fine situation must have a murder or two in it. 
 A troublesome character must be removed by 
 
68 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 a murder, and the hero and heroine must also 
 be murdered, for the sake of pathos, and a 
 rounded termination, one after the other. 
 Last of all the villain, or the two or three 
 villains, as is more likely, meet with unexpected 
 violent endings, thereby affording a moral 
 lesson of the most practical and obvious kind. 
 In addition there should be a madness, and 
 several atrocities. Madness, only second 
 though distinctly second, to murder, is an 
 ingredient in many of these plays, notably 
 The Spanish Tragedy. It was Hieronymo's 
 madness that attracted that greater poet of 
 the famous '^ additions," Jonson or another, 
 who, finding it a thing of nought, a conven- 
 tional, frigidly rhetorical, stage lunacy, left 
 it a thing of pity and terror. ' 
 
 ' Contemporaneous with The Spanish Tragedy 
 but less representative of the movement, are 
 several other melodramas; the anonymous 
 Soliman and Perseda, and Peele's Battle of 
 Alcazar, for instance. Becoming, not more 
 human, but more artistic, the Tragedy of 
 Blood found a willing exponent in the great, 
 daring, but unballasted genius Marlowe, and 
 in the authors of LusVs Dominion, 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 69 
 
 It is to this period that Titus Andronicus 
 belongs; a period of more mature art, more 
 careful construction, more power of character- 
 ization, but of almost identical purpose. 
 These plays are distinguished from The Spanish 
 Tragedy on the one hand, but they are after all 
 still more sharply distinguished from Lear, 
 The Duches of Malfi, or even The Revenger^s 
 Tragedy, and the harsh, powerful dramas of 
 Marston, on the other. 
 
 Marlowe's Jew of Malta is the most generally 
 known of the Tragedies of Blood, and it is 
 indeed not an ill specimen of the developed 
 style. Marlowe, who originated so much, 
 cannot be said to have originated this manner. 
 It was popular before his time, but, finding in 
 it a certain affinity with his own genius, he 
 attempted it, once, perhaps twice, and in 
 stamping it in his own mint raised its currency. 
 The Jew of Malta belongs distinctly to the 
 school of Kyd, but it is raised above its pre- 
 cursors, not only by reason of the frequent 
 splendour of its poetry, but still more by the 
 presence of a finely-imagined character, an 
 idealizing of the passion of greed. The play 
 is Barabas; with his entrance and exit the 
 
70 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 good in it comes in and goes out. The cap- 
 tains, brutes, and bullies, the shadowy Abigail, 
 all the minor characters, are hasty sketches, 
 rank if not bodiless, mere foils to the malevo- 
 lent miser. Barabas himself, as it ha»s been 
 so often pointed out, is a creation only in 
 the first two acts, where he foreshadows 
 Shylock; in all the later portion of the play 
 he is only that " monster with a large painted 
 nose " of whom Lamb has spoken. Marlowe 
 and Shakespeare, it is sad to recollect, alike 
 degraded their art, Marlowe more than once, 
 Shakespeare at least once, to please the ears of 
 the groundlings. The intentional debasement 
 of Barabas, in the latter half of The Jew of 
 Malta, from a creation into a caricature, is 
 only equalled, but it is equalled, by that similar 
 debasement of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, from the prophet and philosopher 
 of this world's cakes and ales into an imbecile 
 buffoon, helpless, witless, and ridiculous. 
 
 Lust's Dominion, a play issued under the 
 name of Marlowe, but assigned by Mr. Collier, 
 with great probability, to Dekker, Haughton, 
 and Day, is a play of the same class as The 
 Jew of Malta, overloaded to an inconceivable 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 71 
 
 extent with the most fiendish crimes, but in 
 several scenes really beautiful and fanciful, 
 and containing, like The Jew of Malta, a single 
 predominant character, the villain Eleazar, 
 drawn with abundant strength and some 
 precision. This play is the very quintessence 
 of the Tragedy of Blood; crammed from end 
 to end with the most ingeniously atrocious 
 villanies, but redeemed from utter vulgarity 
 by a certain force and even delicacy of ex- 
 pression, and a barbaric splendour of horror 
 not untinged with ferocious irony. It is a 
 work of art, if of a gross and immature kind, 
 in a sense in which The Spanish Tragedy is 
 not. The old outlines remain, but they are 
 filled in with bold but glaring colouring, 
 with coarsely-painted human figures, and are 
 set in a distinct, though loud, key of colour. 
 The thing is revolting, but it is no longer con- 
 temptible. 
 
 Between these two plays, but rather in 
 company with the former than the latter, I 
 would place Titus Andronicus. Like The 
 Jew of Malta and Lust's Dominion, it con- 
 tains the full-length portrait of a villain; 
 like The Spanish Tragedy, its most powerful 
 
72 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 scenes are devoted to the revengeful madness 
 of a wronged old man. 
 
 I In construction Titus Andronicus belongs 
 distinctively to the Tragedy of Blood: it is 
 full of horrors and of bloodthirsty characters. 
 There are, if I remember rightly, thirteen 
 murders and executions, besides various out- 
 rages and mutilations, in the course of the play. 
 More than half, including a torture and a 
 banquet of human flesh, are enacted on the 
 stage. As regards the characters, there is 
 in Titus a fine note of tragic pathos, in Aaron 
 a certain vigour and completeness of wicked- 
 ness, in Tamora a faint touch of power, but in 
 Lavinia, in Bassianus, in Saturninus, in the 
 sons of Titus and Tamora, scarcely the sem- 
 blance of an attribute. The powerful sketch 
 of Aaron is a good deal indebted to the Barabas 
 of Marlowe. There is much the same compre- 
 hensive malevolence, feeding on itself rather 
 than on any external provocation; a malevo- 
 lence even deeper in dye, if less artistic in 
 expression. Both have a delight in evil, 
 apart from the pleasure anticipated from an 
 end gained: they revel in it, like a virtuous 
 egoist in the consciousness of virtue. Eleazar, 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 73 
 
 in LusVs Dominion, is a slightly different type 
 of the complete villain. His is a cold, calcula- 
 ting wickedness, not raving nor furious, but 
 set on a certain end. He enjoys his villany, 
 but in a somewhat sad and sober fashion. 
 He is supremely ambitious; to that ambition 
 all other qualities of evil bow, his lust, his 
 cruelty, his spite, his pride; everything. He 
 uses his passions and the passions of others as 
 trained servants; and he sets them tasks, 
 always for his advancement. The three vil- 
 lains, Barabas, Aaron, and Eleazar, are three 
 of the earliest, three primary types, of that long 
 series in which the Elizabethan dramatists 
 attempted to read the problem of Renaissance 
 Italy : of wickedness without moral sense, with- 
 out natural conscience, wickedness cultivated 
 almost as an aesthetic quality, and attaining 
 a strenuous perfection. 
 
 The character of Titus is on a higher plane 
 than that of Aaron; it has more humanity, 
 and a pathos that is the most artistic quality of 
 the play. Titus is the one character, absolutely 
 the only one, who moves us to any sympathy 
 of emotion. The delineation is unequal, there 
 are passages and scenes of mere incoherency 
 
74 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and flatness, speeches put into his mouth of 
 the most furious feebleness, but at its best, 
 in the later scenes of half real and half pre- 
 tended madness, the character of Titus is 
 not so very much below the Hieronymo of the 
 *' additions." At its worst it sinks to almost 
 the level of the original Hieronymo. Such 
 curious inequality is not observable in any 
 other person of the play. Aaron and Tamora 
 are the Aaron and Tamora of a single con- 
 ception, worked out with more or less skill on 
 a level line. The dummies of the play are 
 consistent dummies. Lavinia is a single and 
 unmixed blunder. But Titus, by his situa- 
 tion the most interesting character of the play, 
 is at one time fine, at another foolish, in a way 
 for which it is difficult to account if a single 
 author wrote the whole play. 
 
 Lavinia, I have said, is a single and un- 
 mixed blunder. There is no other word for it. 
 I can never read the third scene of the second 
 act without amazement at the folly of the 
 writer, who, requiring in the nature of things 
 to win our sympathy for his afflicted heroine, 
 fills her mouth with the grossest and vilest 
 insults against Tamora, so gross, so vile, so 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 75 
 
 unwomanly, that her punishment becomes 
 something of a retribution instead of being 
 wholly a brutality. There is every dramatic 
 reason why the victim should not share the 
 villain's soul, every dramatic reason why her 
 situation should be one of pure pathos. Noth- 
 ing but the coarseness of nature of the man 
 who first wrote it can explain the absurdity. 
 And this is Shakespeare's first heroine, the 
 first of the series which ends with Imogen, in 
 the opinion of those critics who assign the whole 
 of Titus Andronicus to the young Shakespeare! 
 The character of Lavinia is alone enough to 
 disprove this opinion; and the character of 
 Lavinia only belongs to the general concep- 
 tion of the play, which is not at all better than 
 might be expected of a clever follower of ap- 
 proved models, a disciple of Marlowe in his 
 popular melodrama. But when we have said 
 this, we have not said everything. The beauty 
 and force of certain passages, and the impres- 
 siveness of certain scenes, are so marked, 
 and so markedly above the level of the sur- 
 rounding work, that we may well hesitate to 
 deny to Shakespeare all part or lot in it. 
 Two positions I think we are justified in 
 
76 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 assuming. First, that Titus Andronicus is so 
 absolutely unlike all Shakespeare's other early 
 work, that it is, to say the least, improbable 
 that the whole play can be his; and second, 
 that the assumption of a revision by him of 
 another man's work is, on the face of it, quite 
 probable and likely. Shakespeare's first origi- 
 nal plays were bright, fanciful, witty, dainty 
 comedies, touched with the young joy of 
 existence, full of irreflective gaiety and playful 
 intellect; nowhere dwelling on things horrible 
 and unpleasant, but rather avoiding the very 
 approaches of anything so serious as tragedy. 
 It was the Court Comedies of Lyly rather than 
 the Bloody Tragedies of Kyd which influenced 
 the earliest dramatic writings of Shakespeare. 
 Romeo and Juliet, a romantic drama with a 
 tragical ending, but not a tragedy in the sense 
 in which King Lear is a tragedy, shows us 
 very distinctly the manner in which Shake- 
 speare, even at a much later period than the 
 latest assignable to Titus A7idronicus, dealt 
 with the sadnesses and incongruities of life, 
 with sorrow, loss, death, affliction, wrong. 
 There is not a touch, not a tone of horror; 
 all sorrow resolves itself into ''tears of perfect 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 77 
 
 moan;" all tragedy dies upon a song. It is 
 exquisitely pathetic, but there is little hint of 
 the unspeakable pathos of Lear. Now Titus 
 Andronicus is full of gross horror, sickening 
 with the scent of blood, materially moving. 
 It seems nothing less than impossible that the 
 same hand should have written, first this play, 
 in which the playwright revels coarsely in 
 blood and horror; then Romeo and Juliet, in 
 which a tragic story is treated with only a 
 lyrical rendering of the tragedy; then King 
 Lear, burdened with an almost intolerable 
 weight of terror, but kept sweet, and pure, and 
 fair by the twin quality of pity. Unless 
 Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus he never 
 touched tragedy without making it either 
 lyrically pathetic or piteously terrible. And 
 it is only natural to suppose that he never did, 
 and never could have done so. 
 
 On the other hand, taking into consideration 
 the differences of workmanship traceable in 
 the play, and the comparative force and beauty 
 of certain parts, it is not impossible that Shake- 
 speare had, if not a hand, at least some finger 
 in it. It is known that he was at one time the 
 "Johannes-fac-totum" of a players' company 
 
78 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and that he was employed in furbishing up 
 old plays for fresh performance. Suppose a 
 new play, by a ''private author," written, 
 somewhat clumsily, in a popular style, to be 
 offered to the theatre: what would be more 
 likely than that the thing should be handed 
 over to the dramatic journeyman, young 
 Shakespeare, for brief revision and rectifica- 
 tion? Young Shakespeare, little as he may 
 care for the style, of course must hold himself 
 subservient to the ideals of the original play- 
 wright; but he heightens, where he can, the 
 art of the delineations, inserts some passages 
 of far more impressive significance, perhaps 
 almost some scenes, and touches the dead level 
 of the language into something of grace and 
 freshness. Thus we have a stupid plot, a 
 medley of horrible incidents, an undercurrent 
 of feeble language; and, in addition, some 
 powerful dramatic writing, together with bright 
 passages here and there, in which a fresh and 
 living image is expressed finely. 
 
 Coleridge's fancy or theory as to Shake- 
 speare's way of dealing with a play in revising 
 it; beginning indifferently, adding only a line 
 here and there, but getting more interested 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 79 
 
 as he went on, applies very well to Titus 
 Andronicus. All the first act is feeble and 
 ineffectual; here and there a line, a couplet, 
 a short passage, such as the touch on mercy, 
 or the speech of Titus (I. i. 187-200) puts a 
 colour on the pale outline, and permits us for 
 a moment to think of Shakespeare. But the 
 "purple patches" are woefully far apart. 
 Such entire brainlessness as goes to the making 
 of the very important piece of dialogue be- 
 tween the 270th and the 290th lines of the 
 first scene of the first act, is scarcely to be 
 found throughout the whole play. All the 
 business of the act is confused and distorted; 
 lengthy where it should be short, short where 
 it ought to be extended. There is not a touch 
 in it, probable or possible, of the shaping hand 
 of Shakespeare; of itself the act is enough to 
 disprove his authorship of the complete 
 play. 
 
 With the second act there is a decided im- 
 provement. Aaron, the notable villain of the 
 piece makes his first appearance; Tamora 
 blossoms out into Qg full flower of wicked- 
 ness; and in the mouths of these anything 
 but idyllic personages we have some of those 
 
80 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 fine idyllic passages which seem not unlike 
 the early style of Shakespeare. For myself, 
 I can see no touch of Shakespeare in the first 
 lines of the act: 
 
 "Now climbeth Tamora Ol3mipus' top," 
 
 which some would assign to his account. They 
 are a very tolerable but entirely flagrant 
 imitation of Marlowe's most rhetorical manner; 
 by no means above the reach of the first 
 author of the play, although, in a sense, above 
 his level. But in some later passages it seems 
 not unpermissible to see the token of Shake- 
 speare's hand. The lines from 80 (''She is a 
 woman, therefore may be woo'd" ^) onward 
 through a speech or two, have unquestion- 
 ably a truer ring, a more easy flow and vigour, 
 
 ^ This adage seems to have been popular in Ehzabethan 
 times, and is by no means necessarily a Shakespearian 
 sentiment. Beside the exactly parallel passage in the First 
 Part of King Henry VI, and the partly parallel passage in 
 Richard III, there is another, tolerably close, in The Birth 
 of Merlin (I. i.) one of the so-called "Doubtful Plays," 
 but as doubtful, in an opposite sense, as Othello: 
 
 For her consent, let your fair suit go on; 
 She is a woman, sir, and will be won. 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 81 
 
 than the surrounding dialogue. Three lines, 
 a little further on : 
 
 The emperor's court is like the House of Fame, 
 The palace full of tongues, of eyes and ears : 
 The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull; 
 
 have a genuine impressiveness, and one is 
 almost inclined to refer them to Shakespeare, 
 the more so that they have so much the 
 appearance of an insertion that they could 
 be omitted without the least necessary break 
 in the sense. In the second and third scenes 
 there are several well-known passages, often 
 attributed to Shakespeare: "The hunt is up, 
 the morn is bright and gray," (1-6); the 
 companion piece of the third scene, "The 
 birds chant melody on every bush;" and, 
 again the powerful description of the " barren 
 and detested vale" (91 et seq.). None of these 
 are wholly unworthy of Shakespeare's youth. 
 The second passage (scene iii. 10-29, and not 
 by any means ending, as some would have it 
 end, at the 15th line) impresses me as the 
 most melodious and fanciful in the play, and, 
 more than that, a really beautiful interlude. 
 If there is any Shakespeare in the play, this 
 is. But the speech of Tamora (91-108) 
 
82 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 powerful as it is in some respects, is somewhat 
 less obviously Shakespearian. In the blunder- 
 ing and foolish scene between Tamora and 
 Lavinia, further on in the third scene, there is, 
 in conception and general execution, about as 
 much of Shakespeare as of Bacon; but nine 
 really pathetic lines (158-166) I should like 
 to think Shakespeare's. Lavinia says to De- 
 metrius and Chiron, referring to Tamora, 
 " Do thou entreat her show a woman pity." 
 
 Chi. What ! would'st thou have me show myself a bastard? 
 
 Lav. 'Tis true; the raven doth not hatch a lark: 
 Yet have I heard (0 could I find it now!) 
 The lion, mov'd with pity, did endure 
 To have his princely paws par'd all away. 
 Some say the ravens foster forlorn children, 
 The whilst their own birds famish in the nest: 
 O, be to me, though thy hard heart say no, 
 Nothing so kind, but something pitiful! 
 
 The turn of these lines, particularly the last 
 two, is good; and it will be noticed that 
 Tamora's next speech, "I know not what it is: 
 away with her," might even better have come 
 directly in answer to Lavinia's first appeal: 
 
 Do thou entreat her show a woman pity. 
 
 The "it" of "I know not what it means" 
 would then naturally refer to the "pity" of 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 83 
 
 the preceding line; as it is, there is some 
 irregularity in such an answer, referring as it 
 does to nothing more direct than, *'0 be to 
 me . . . something pitiful!" The lines have 
 quite the appearance of an insertion. 
 
 The last three acts are far superior to the 
 first two. They are mainly concerned with 
 the wrongs and madness of Titus, which I 
 suspect to have been entered into by Shake- 
 speare with more sympathy than the other 
 parts of the play, and almost throughout 
 dignified and humanized by him. I do not 
 mean to say that Shakespeare wrote all, or 
 most, of the speeches assigned to Titus through- 
 out the play, or even in the last three acts. 
 The touches by which a great poet can raise 
 the work of a small poet from puerility to 
 fineness may be slight and delicate; and are, 
 indeed, far too delicate to be distinguished 
 and emphasized by the critic. Nor is the 
 service, which I suspect Shakespeare to have 
 rendered his predecessor, complete. Not a 
 few empty and rhetorical passages put into 
 the mouth of the suffering hero seem like 
 untouched fragments of the former stuff. 
 If anyone will be at the pains to compare, 
 
84 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 say the speech of Titus at line 65 (Act III) 
 with the speech of Titus at line 33, he will see, 
 I cannot but think, a considerable difference; 
 and a glance at the tawdry rant of Marcus, 
 at the close of the second act, will still further 
 emphasize the contrast if compared with, say, 
 the five lines of the same speaker at line 82 
 of the third act. In all the earlier part of the 
 play, and throughout in perhaps every char- 
 acter but Titus, such touches of Shakespeare 
 as we can distinguish are occasional, and are 
 merely brief additions and revisions of single 
 passages. But in the "magnificent lunacy" 
 of Titus (as Symonds rightly calls it) there is 
 a note of tragic pathos which seems to me 
 distinctly above the reach of an imitative 
 dramatist of the School of Blood. How much 
 of Shakespeare there is in this latter part of 
 the play it is hazardous to conjecture. We 
 cannot so much point to certain lines, as in 
 the earliest acts, and say, "This reads like 
 Shakespeare;" but we perceive a finer spirit 
 at work, and the keener sense that went to 
 the making or mending of some whole scenes, 
 or main parts of them. Swinburne has pointed 
 out that the significant arrow-scenes are written 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 83 
 
 in blank verse of more variety and vigour than 
 we find in the baser parts of the play; and 
 these, he adds, if any scenes, we may surely 
 attribute to Shakespeare. I would add Fome 
 part, by no means all, of the second scene of 
 the fifth act; especially that grimly ironical 
 passage from the 80th line onwards about 
 twenty lines. The first 60 lines of the scene, 
 powerful as they are, have no Shakespeariaa 
 quality in them: they are directly studied 
 from Marlowe, no doubt by the '' private 
 author," who was certainly a disciple of Mar- 
 lowe, and not without a measure of cleverness. 
 Again, the devilish utterances of Aaron (Act 
 V. sc. i.) some of the most noticeable speeches 
 in the play, are absolutely un-Shakespearian, 
 while distinctly in the manner of Marlowe. 
 Indeed, so closely are they imitated from the 
 confession of Barabas {Jew of Malta, Act II. 
 sc. ii.) that we can hardly be surprised at the 
 occasional attribution of the play to Marlowe; 
 worse than foolish as this is on every really 
 reasonable ground. All the ending of the play, 
 the grotesquely horrible dish of human flesh, 
 the tortures, is, of course, entirely due to the 
 original author. Nothing is more clearly and 
 
86 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 more closely connected with the model Tragedy 
 of Blood; and nothing certainly could be 
 more unlike Shakespeare. 
 
 Thus we see, on glancing through the play, 
 that Titus Andronicus, in its plot, general 
 conception, and most of its characters, belongs 
 distinctly to the Tragedy of Blood, and, being 
 in these respects inferior to the best of it, may 
 be considered the work of a disciple of the 
 school, not of an acknowledged master; 
 while in certain parts it seems to be lifted 
 above itself, vivified and dignified: a com- 
 bination which naturally suggests the revision 
 of an inferior work by a superior master. The 
 closer we examine it, the more natural does this 
 view become, and the more probable does it 
 seem that in Titus Andronicus we have the 
 work of an unknown writer revised by the 
 young Shakespeare. To consider it the work 
 of an amateur, a disciple of the School of" 
 Blood, but not a great writer, raised to its 
 present interesting and imperfect state by 
 Shakespeare's early revision (which is sub- 
 stantially the Ravenscroft tradition) seems to 
 explain the otherwise inexplicable mixture in 
 this singular play of good and bad, twaddle 
 
TITUS ANDRONICUS 87 
 
 and impressiveness; and seems to explain, on 
 the one hand, why it is so good as it is, on the 
 other, why it is no better. I do not think 
 it js very sensible to try to assign the play, 
 as originally written, to some well-known 
 author of the time, such as Greene or Marlowe, 
 rather than to the " private author." Such 
 resemblances of these writers as occur might 
 naturally be imitations; but to father on 
 Marlowe, in especial, the meaner parts of the 
 play, is a quite gratuitous insult to his memory. 
 1885. 
 
VII. THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 
 
 Henry VIII was first printed in the Folio 
 of 1623, where it ends the series of "Histories." 
 The main historical authorities were, in the 
 first four acts, Holinshed's Chronicles; in the 
 fifth, Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, 
 commonly known as The Book of Martyrs. 
 The play is a good deal indebted, directly or 
 indirectly, to a narrative then in MS., George 
 Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, largely 
 quoted by both Holinshed and Hall, though 
 the book itself was not published till 1641. 
 The play follows its authorities closely, alike 
 in the main course of incident and in the gen- 
 eral choice of language ; but there are numerous 
 deviations from the chronological order of 
 events. 
 
 So far we have dealt with facts: what re- 
 mains must be but conjecture. It is as well to 
 say frankly that we know with certainty 
 neither who wrote Henry VIII, nor when it 
 was written. I shall give, first, the scanty 
 records, the few external facts relating to the 
 
 88 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 89 
 
 play; then, the various theories which have 
 been brought forward as to its date and author- 
 ship; not having much hope of being able, 
 finally, to speak myself on all points with 
 the enviable assurance of one whose mind is 
 fully and confidently made up. 
 
 The first allusion to a play on the subject 
 of Henry VIII is found in an entry in the 
 Stationers' Registers under date February 12, 
 1604-5: '' Nath. Butter] yf he get good allow- 
 ance for the Enterlude of K. Henry 8th before 
 he begyn to print it, and then procure the war- 
 dens hands to yt for the entrance of yt, he is 
 to have the same for his copy." This play, 
 which Collier ''feels no hesitation" in sup- 
 posing to be the play which we find in the 
 Folio, may more reasonably be identified with 
 the rough and scrambling historical comedy 
 of Samuel Rowley, When you see me, you know 
 mee; or, the famous Chronicle Historie of King 
 Henrie the Eight, with the berth and vertuous 
 life of Edward Prince of Wales, which Nathaniel 
 Butter published in 1605. It is a bluff, 
 hearty, violently Protestant piece of work, 
 the Protestant emphasis being indeed the 
 most striking thing about it. The verse is 
 
90 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 formal, with one or two passages of somewhat 
 heightened quality; the characters include 
 a stage Harry, a very invertebrate Wolsey, 
 a Will Sommers whose jokes are as thin as 
 they are inveterate, a Queen Katharine of the 
 doctrinal and magnanimous order, a modest 
 Prince Edward; with minor personages of 
 the usual sort, and, beyond the usual, a Dog- 
 berry and Verges set of watchmen, with whom, 
 together with one Black Will, King Henry has 
 a ruffling scene. The play was reprinted in 
 1613, in 1621, and again in 1632. 
 
 The next allusion which we find to a play on 
 the subject of Henry VIII is in connection with 
 the burning of the Globe Theatre on June 29, 
 1613. Among the Harleian MSS. there is a 
 letter from Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas 
 Pickering, dated 'Hhe last day of June, 1613," 
 in which we read: ''No longer since than 
 yesterday, while Bourbege his companie were 
 acting at y^ Globe the play of Hen =8, and 
 there shooting of certayne chambers in way 
 of triumph, the fire catch'd." On July 6, 
 1613, Sir Henry Wotton writes to his nephew: 
 ''Now to let matters of state sleep; I will 
 entertain you at the present with what hath 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 91 
 
 happened this week at the Bank-side. The 
 king's players had a new play, called All is 
 True, representing some principal pieces of the 
 reign of Henry the Eighth, which was set 
 forth with many extraordinary circumstances 
 of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of 
 the stage; the Knights of the Order, with 
 their Georges and Garter, the guards with their 
 embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in 
 truth, within a while, to make greatness 
 very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King 
 Henry, making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's 
 house, and certain cannons being shot off at 
 his entry, some of the paper or other stuff 
 wherewith one of them was stopped, did light 
 on the thatch, where, being thought at first 
 but an idle smoke, and their eyes more atten- 
 tive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran 
 round like a train, consuming, within an 
 hour, the whole house to the very ground." 
 A ballad written on the occasion of ''The 
 Lamentable Burning of the Globe Play-House 
 on S. Peter's Day " has for the refrain of every 
 stanza: 
 
 sorrow! O pitiful sorrow! 
 And yet it AH is True; 
 
92 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 an evident allusion to the title of the play 
 whose performance ended so disastrously. 
 The ballad mentions that 
 
 The fearful fire began above 
 By firing chambers too; 
 
 and we learn from another stanza that the trial 
 of Katharine formed a part of the action: 
 
 Away ran Lady Katharine, 
 Nor waited for her trial. 
 Such trial was not in her part; 
 Escape was all she had at heart. 
 
 In the 1615 edition of Stowe's Annates, "con- 
 tinued and augmented by Edmond Howes," 
 we read under date 1613: "also upon St. 
 Peter's Day last the playhouse or theatre, 
 called the Globe, upon the Bankside, near 
 London, by negligent discharging of a piece 
 of ordnance close to the south side thereof, 
 took fire, and the wind suddenly dispersed the 
 flame round about, and in a very short spacG 
 the whole building was quite consumed, and 
 no man hurt; the house being filled with 
 people to behold the play, viz., of Henry the 
 Eighth : and the next spring it was new builded 
 in far fairer manner than before." 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 93 
 
 It will thus be seen that in 1613 a play on 
 the subject of Henry VIII was being actedjat 
 the Globe under the name of All is True, 
 It is described by Sir Henry Wotton as "a 
 new play." Further, it represented "King 
 Henry making a mask at the Cardinal Wolsey's 
 house," where chambers were discharged in 
 his honour, as in the Folio Henry VIII, i. iv. 
 (stage direction, after line 49: "Drum and 
 trumpet, chambers discharged"). It also ap- 
 parently contained a scene in which Katha- 
 rine was brought to trial. The name All is 
 True is perfectly appropriate to the play which 
 we have in the Folio, and in the Prologue there 
 are three expressions which may be taken as 
 references to such a title: line 9: "may here 
 find truth, too;" line 18: "To rank our 
 chosen truth with such a show;" and line 21: 
 "To make that only true we now intend." 
 So far, we have a certain show of evidence, 
 very slight indeed, which might lead us to 
 suppose (in the absence of other evidence to 
 the contrary) that the play All is True, acted 
 as a new play at the Globe in 1613, was that 
 which is printed as Henry VIII in the First 
 Folio of Shakespeare. There is nothing, how- 
 
94 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 ever, to tell us that this play of 1613 was by 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Leaving for the present the question of date, 
 we must now consider the more important 
 question of authorship. And here we should 
 premise that the fact of Henry VIII having 
 been printed in the First Folio is far from being 
 a conclusive argument on behalf of its genuine- 
 ness, whole or partial. The editors of the 
 First Folio had an elastic sense of their editorial 
 responsibilities. They admitted Titus Androni- 
 cus and the three parts of Henry VI, which 
 it is practically certain that Shakespeare did 
 no more than revise; as well as The Taming 
 of the Shrew, which we know to be a recast 
 of the earlier play The Taming of a Shrew. 
 They did not admit Pericles, which was pub- 
 lished in Quarto under Shakespeare's name, 
 universally recognized at the time as his, 
 and, in the greater part of it, so obviously 
 Shakespearian that its authenticity could 
 not have been seriously doubted. 
 
 The first to call attention to the metrical 
 peculiarities of Henry VIII was a certain Mr. 
 Roderick, Fellow of Magdalen College, Cam- 
 bridge, some of whose notes are given in the 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 95 
 
 sixth and posthumous edition of Thomas 
 Edwardes' Canons of Criticism, published in 
 1758. Roderick notes (1) that "there are in 
 this Play many more verses than in any other, 
 which end with a redundant syllable . . . 
 this Play has very near two redundant verses 
 to one in any other Play;" (2) that "the 
 Ccesurce, or Pauses of the verse, are full as 
 remarkable;" (3) "that the emphasis, arising 
 from the sense of the verse, very often clashes 
 with the cadence that would naturally result 
 from the metre." "What Shakespeare in- 
 tended by all this," he adds, "I fairly own 
 myself ignorant." 
 
 Before this, Johnson had observed that the 
 genius of Shakespeare comes in and goes out 
 with Katharine, and that every other part 
 might be easily conceived and easily written. 
 Later, in 1819, Coleridge distinguished Henry 
 VIII from Shakespeare's other historical plays 
 as "a sort of historical masque or show- 
 play." Even Knight was forced to acknowl- 
 edge that the moral which he traces through 
 the first four acts has to be clenched in the 
 fifth by referring to history for it. It was 
 not, however, till 1850 that it occurred to 
 
96 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 anyone to follow out these clues by calling 
 in question the entire authenticity of the 
 play. In that year the suggestion was made by 
 three independent investigators. Emerson, in 
 his Representative Men, treating of Shake- 
 speare, says passingly: "In Henry VIII I 
 think I see plainly the cropping out of the 
 original rock on which his own finer stratum 
 was laid. The first play was written by a 
 superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. 
 I can mark his lines, and know well their 
 cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the 
 following scene with Cromwell, where — instead 
 of the metre of Shakespeare, whose secret is, 
 that the thought constructs the tune, so that 
 reading for the sense will best bring out the 
 rhythm — here the lines are constructed on a 
 given tune, and the verse has even a trace of 
 pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, 
 through all its length, unmistakable traits of 
 Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as 
 the account of the coronation, are like auto- 
 graphs. What is odd, the compliment to 
 Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm." In 
 taking it for granted that in Henry VIII Shake- 
 speare is to be seen altering an earlier piece 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIH 97 
 
 of work, rather than working contemporane- 
 ously with another dramatist, or allowing his 
 own work to be altered, Emerson simply 
 follows in the line of Malone's investigations 
 into the construction of the three parts of 
 Henry VI. It did not lie within his scope 
 to investigate the matter further; the passage, 
 indeed, in which he states his view, is a digres- 
 sion from his main argument. In August 
 of the same year Mr. James Spedding published 
 in the Gentleman's Magazine a paper entitled 
 "Wlio wrote Shakespeare's Hem\^\m"III?" in 
 which he dealt at considerable length with the 
 question of authorship. "I had heard it 
 casually remarked," he says, ''by a man of 
 first-rate judgment on such points [Tennyson] 
 that many passages in Henry VIII were very 
 much in the manner of Fletcher. ... I deter- 
 mined upon this to read the play through with 
 an eye to this especial point, and see whether 
 any solution of the mystery would present 
 itself. The result of my examination was a 
 clear conviction that at least two different 
 hands had been employed in the composition 
 of Henry VIII, if not three; and that they had 
 worked, not together, but alternately upon 
 
98 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 (.1 
 
 distinct portions of it." On August 24, 1850, 
 a letter appeared in Notes and Queries from 
 Mr. Samuel Hickson (the writer of an investi- 
 gation into the authorship of The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen, pubhshed in the Westminster Review 
 of April 1847) stating that he himself had 
 made the same discovery as Mr. Spedding three 
 or four years back, and desiring (he adds) 
 *'to strengthen the argument of the writer 
 in the Gentleman's Magazine, by recording the 
 fact that I, having no communication with 
 him, or kif">wledge of him, even of his name, 
 should have arrived at exactly the same con- 
 clusion as his own." In 1874 the New 
 Shakespere Society republished Mr. Spedding's 
 essay and Mr. Hickson's letter, supporting 
 the theory of double authorship by Mr. 
 Fleay's and Mr. Furnivall's application of 
 certain further metrical tests. In a paper 
 read before the New Shakspere Society, No- 
 vember 13th, 1874, Professor J. K. Ingram 
 expressed himself as not so fully convinced 
 that the non-Fletcherian portion of the play 
 was by Shakspeare as that the non-Shakespear- 
 ian part was by Fletcher. ''In reading the 
 (so-called) Shakspearian part of the play I 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 99 
 
 do not often feel myself in contact with a 
 mind of the first order. Still, it is certain that 
 there is much in it that is like Shakspere, and 
 some things that are worthy of him at his 
 best; that the manner, in general, is more 
 that of Shakspere than of any other con- 
 temporary dramatist; and that the system of 
 verse is one which we do not find in any other, 
 whilst it is, in all essentials, that of Shak- 
 spere's last period. I cannot name anyone 
 else who could have written this portion of the 
 play" {New Shakspere Society^ s Transactions, 
 1874, p. 454). Finally, Mr. Robert Boyle, 
 in an "Investigation into the Origin and 
 Authorship of Henry VIII," read before the 
 New Shakspere Society, January 16th, 1885, 
 attempted to prove that Shakespeare had no 
 share whatever in the play, but that the part 
 formerly assigned to him was really written 
 by Massinger, and that Massinger and Fletcher 
 wrote the play in collaboration. Mr. Spedding 
 had accepted the generally-received date of 
 1612 or 1613, and suggested that the play may 
 have been put together in a hurry on the occa- 
 sion of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage 
 (February, 1612-1613) ; Mr. Boyle contended 
 
100 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA ' 
 
 that the play was not produced till 1616, 
 probably not till 1617, and that it was written 
 to supply the place of All is True (possibly 
 Shakespeare's, possibly not) which was de- 
 stroyed in the Globe fire of 1613. 
 
 Such, in brief, are the main theories with 
 regard to the various problems raised by this 
 puzzling play. I have purposely avoided 
 saying much as to the question of date, both 
 because I think there is little to be said, and 
 because this little is rather an inference from, 
 than a support to, whatever theory of author- 
 ship we may choose to follow. 
 
 That Shakespeare, or that any single writer, 
 did not write the whole of Henry VIII, seems 
 to me (to take a first step) practically beyond 
 a doubt. So much we can hardly fail to accept ; 
 first, on account of the incoherence of the gen- 
 eral action, the failure of the play to produce 
 on us a single, calculated effect; secondly, 
 on the even stronger evidence of the versifica- 
 tion. As Hertzeberg remarks, Henry VIII is 
 "a chronicle-history with three and a half 
 catastrophes, varied by a marriage and a 
 coronation pageant, ending abruptly with the 
 birth of a child." Spedding rightly notes that 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 101 
 
 ''the effect of this play as a whole is weak and 
 disappointing. The truth is that the interest, 
 instead of rising towards the end, falls away 
 utterly, and leaves us in the last act among 
 persons whom we scarcely know, and events 
 for which we do not care. . . . The greater 
 part of the fifth act, in which the interest ought 
 to be gathering to a head, is occupied with 
 matters in which we have not been prepared 
 to take any interest by what went before, and 
 on which no interest is reflected by what comes 
 after." It is not merely that there are certain 
 defects in the construction : defects in construc- 
 tion are to be found in nearly every play of 
 Shakespeare. The whole play is radically 
 wanting in both dramatic and moral coherence. 
 Our sympathy is arbitrarily demanded and 
 arbitrarily countermanded. We are expected 
 to weep for the undeserved sorrows of Katha- 
 rine in one act, and to rejoice over the triumph 
 of her rival, the cause of all those sorrows, in 
 another. ''The effect," as Spedding expres- 
 sively puts it, "is much like that which 
 would have been produced by the Winter^s 
 Tale if Hermione had died in the fourth act 
 in consequence of the jealous tyranny of 
 
102 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Leontes, and the play had ended with the 
 coronation of a new queen and the christen- 
 ing of a new heir, no period of remorse inter- 
 vening." That Shakespeare, not only in the 
 supreme last period of his career, but at any 
 point in that career at which it is possible that 
 the play could have been written, should 
 be supposed capable of a blunder so headlong, 
 final, and self-annulling, is nothing less than an 
 insult to his memory. It is difficult to believe 
 that any single writer, capable of so much 
 episodical power, could have produced a play 
 in which the point of view is so constantly 
 and so unintelligibly shifted. 
 
 This is difficult, but it is impossible to 
 beUeve that any single writer could have 
 produced a play in which the versification obeys 
 two perfectly distinct laws in perfectly distinct 
 scenes and passages. The unanswerable ques- 
 tion is: Did Shakespeare at any period of his 
 life write verse in the metre of Wolsey's often- 
 quoted soliloquy (iii. 2, 350-372)? If one may 
 believe the evidence of one's ears, never; 
 nor is the metre so admirable that we can 
 suppose he would take the trouble to acquire 
 it, lacking as it is in all that finer magic, 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 103 
 
 in all that subtler faculty of expression which 
 marked, and marked increasingly, his own 
 verse. The versification of some portions of 
 the play does undoubtedly bear a considerable 
 resemblance to the later versification of Shake- 
 speare. We have thus in one play verse which 
 is like Shakespeare's and verse which is unlike 
 Shakespeare's. The conclusion is inevitable: 
 two writers must have been engaged upon it. 
 Messrs. Spedding and Hickson agreed in divid- 
 ing the play as follows. To the writer whose 
 versification is like Shakespeare's (and whom 
 they took to be Shakespeare) they assign i. 
 1, 2; ii. 3, 4; iii. 2 (as far as line 203); and 
 V. 1. The rest of the play they assign to the 
 other author. Mr. Boyle, in his examination 
 of the play, while substantially following this 
 division, assigns to the Shakespeare-like author 
 iv. 1 (rightly, as I think), and also adds to his 
 share i. 4, lines 1-24, 64-108; ii. 1, lines 
 1-53, 137-169; and v. 3, lines 1-113. Reading 
 the remaining parts of the play, the parts writ- 
 ten in the metre of that soHloquy of Wolsey, 
 so markedly unlike that of Shakespeare, we 
 find that the metre is as markedly similar to 
 that of Fletcher. Compare with this passage 
 
104 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the following typical passage from one of 
 Fletcher's plays, The False One, ii. 1: 
 
 I have heard too much; 
 And study not with smooth shows to invade 
 My noble mind as you have done my conquest. 
 Ye are poor and open; I must tell you roundly, 
 That man that could not recognise the benefits. 
 The great and bounteous services of Pompey, 
 Can never dote upon the name of Caesar. 
 Though I had hated Pompey, and allowed his ruin, 
 I gave you no permission to perform it. 
 Hasty to please in blood are seldom trusty; 
 And but I stand environ'd with my victories. 
 My fortune never failing to befriend me, 
 My noble strengths and friends about my person, 
 I durst not trust you, nor expect a courtesy 
 Above the pious love you show'd to Pompey. 
 You have found me merciful in arguing with ye; 
 Swords, hangmen, fires, destructions of all natures, 
 Demolishments of kingdoms, and whole ruins. 
 Are wont to be my orators. Turn to tears. 
 You wretched and poor seeds of sunburnt Egypt; 
 And now you have found the natm-e of a conqueror. 
 That you cannot decline with all your flatteries, 
 That when the day gives light will be himself still. 
 Know how to meet his worth with humane covu-tesies. 
 Go and embalm the bones of that great soldier; 
 Howl round about his pile, fling on your spices, 
 Make a Sabaean bed, and place this phoenix 
 Where the hot sun may emulate his virtues. 
 And draw another Pompey from his ashes, 
 Divinely great, and fix him 'mongst the worthies. 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 105 
 
 This gives, in an extreme form, those charac- 
 teristics which peculiarly distinguish the verse 
 of Fletcher, and which (it will be seen) dis- 
 tinguish equally the passage of Henry VIII 
 to which I have referred, and all those portions 
 of the play already indicated; there is the 
 same abundance of double and triple endings, 
 the same fondness for an extra accented syl- 
 lable at the end of a line (a characteristic which 
 is inveterate in Fletcher, and of which scarcely 
 an example is to be found in the work of any 
 of his contemporaries), the same monotony, 
 the same clash of metrical and sense emphasis. 
 Emerson, in the passage already quoted, 
 defines admirably the difference between this 
 metre and that of Shakespeare; a difference 
 which is indeed so obvious as to make defini- 
 tion seem unnecessary. It may be doubted 
 whether in the whole of Shakespeare there is 
 such a line as this (iii. 2, 352) : 
 
 This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth — 
 
 where the double ending is composed of two 
 equally accented syllables. Examples by the 
 score could be cited at a moment's notice from 
 any play of Fletcher's, and from Fletcher's 
 
106 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA ' 
 
 plays alone. May we not therefore feel justi- 
 fied in assigning to Fletcher (in the absence, 
 be it understood, of any distinguishing Shake- 
 spearian qualities in the characterization and 
 the language) those portions of the play in 
 which the versification is precisely like that 
 of Fletcher and completely unlike that of 
 Shakespeare or any other known dramatist? 
 
 We have now to consider the authorship of 
 the remaining part of the play, the more im- 
 portant part, not only because it contains the 
 famous trial-scene, but because the writer 
 introduced, and doubtless sketched out, the 
 various characters afterwards handled by 
 himself and his coadjutor. Are these char- 
 acters, we may ask first, worthy of Shake- 
 speare, and do they recall his manner of han- 
 dling? Is their language the Shakespearian 
 language, the versification of their speeches 
 the Shakespearian versification? Or do the 
 characters, language, and versification seem 
 more in the style of Massinger, or of any other 
 writer? 
 
 In looking at the characters in Henry VIII 
 we must not forget that they were all found 
 ready-made in the pages of Holinshed. The 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 107 
 
 same might, to a certain extent, be said of all 
 Shakespeare's historical plays; the difference 
 in the treatment, however, is very notable. 
 In Henry VIII Holinshed is followed blindly 
 and slavishly; some of the most admirable 
 passages of the play are taken almost word for 
 word from the Chronicles] there are none of 
 those illuminating touches by which Shake- 
 speare is accustomed to transfigure his bor- 
 rowings. Nor does Shakespeare content him- 
 self with embellishing: he creates. Take, for 
 example, Bolingbroke, of whose disposition 
 Holinshed says but a few words; the whole 
 character is an absolute creation. Shake- 
 speare's fidelity to his authorities is not so 
 great as to prevent him from rejecting material 
 ready to his hand where such material is at 
 variance with his own conception of a charac- 
 ter. For example, Holinshed records a speech 
 of Henry V before the battle. Shakespeare 
 writes a new one, in marked contrast to it. 
 Again, Holingshed gives a speech of Hotspur 
 delivered shortly before the battle of Shrews- 
 bury. Shakespeare puts quite other words 
 and thoughts into Hotspur's mouth. In both 
 cases Holinshed furnished a speech that might 
 
108 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 well have been turned into blank verse; never- 
 theless, it was set aside. But in Henry VIII 
 Holinshed is followed with a fidelity which is 
 simply slavish. 
 
 The character of Katharine, for instance, on 
 which such lavish and unreasoning praise has 
 been heaped, owes almost all its effectiveness 
 to the picturesque narration of the Chronicles. 
 There we see her, clearly outlined, an obviously 
 practicable figure; and it cannot be said that 
 we get a higher impression of her from the play 
 than we do from the history. The dramatist 
 has proved just equal to the occasion; he has 
 taken the character as he found it, and, keep- 
 ing always very close to his authority, he has 
 produced a most admirable copy, transplant- 
 ing rather than creating. To speak of the 
 character of Katharine as one of the triumphs 
 of Shakespeare's art seems to me altogether a 
 mistake. The character is a fine one, and it 
 seems, I confess, almost as far above Massinger 
 as it is beneath Shakespeare. But test it for a 
 moment by placing Katharine beside Her- 
 mione. The whole character is on a distinctly 
 lower plane of art : the wronged wife of Henry 
 has none of the fascination of the wronged 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 109 
 
 wife of Leontes; there are no magic touches. 
 Compare the trial scene in Henry VIII 
 (ii. 4) and the trial scene in The Winter's 
 Tale (iii. 2) I should rather say contrast them, 
 for I can see no possible comparison of the two. 
 Katharine's speech is immeasurably inferior 
 to Hermione's, alike as art and as nature. 
 It has none whatever of that packed imagery, 
 that pregnant expressiveness, that vividly 
 metaphorical way of being direct, which gives 
 its distinction to the speech of Hermione. It 
 is, moreover, almost word for word from Holin- 
 shed. As for the almost equally famous 
 death scene, I can simply express my astonish- 
 ment that anyone could have been found to 
 say of it, with Johnson, that it is "above any 
 other part of Shakespeare's tragedies, and 
 perhaps above any scene of any other poet, 
 tender and pathetic." Tender and pathetic it 
 certainly is, but with a pathos just a little limp, 
 if I may use the word, flaccid ahnost, though, 
 thanks to the tonic draught of Holinshed, not 
 so limp and flaccid as Fletcher often is. 
 
 If Katharine is a little disappointing, Anne 
 is an unmitigated failure. That she is meant 
 to be attractive is evident from the remarks 
 
110 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 made about her in various parts of the play, 
 in which we are told that she is " virtuous and 
 well-deserving," that she is "a gallant creature 
 and complete," that ''beauty and honour" 
 are mingled in her, and the like. And what 
 do we see? A shadow, a faint and unpleasing 
 sketch, the outline of one of those slippery 
 women whom Massinger so often drew. She 
 would sympathize with the queen, and her 
 words of sympathy are strained, unnatural in 
 her; she is cunning, through all her affected 
 primness (" For all the spice of your hypoc- 
 risy," says the odious Old Lady to her); and 
 in what we see of her at Wolsey's banquet she 
 is merely frivolous. In all Shakespeare's work 
 there is no such example of a character so 
 marred in the making, so unintentionally de- 
 graded (after Massinger' s inveterate manner) 
 as this of Anne. I would rather think that 
 Shakespeare began his career with Lavinia 
 than that he ended it with Anne. 
 
 Turning to the character of Henry VIII, we 
 find a showy figure, who plays his part of king 
 not without effect. Looking deeper, we find 
 that there is nothing deeper to discover. The 
 Henry of history is a puzzling character, but 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VIII 111 
 
 the Henry of a play should be adequately 
 conceived and intelligibly presented. What- 
 ever disguise he may choose to assume towards 
 the men and women who walk beside him on 
 the boards, to us he must be without disguise. 
 As it is, we know no more than after reading 
 Holinshed whether the Henry of the play 
 believed or did not believe, or what partial 
 belief he had, in those " scruples," for instance, 
 to which he refers, not without a certain 
 unction. He is illogical, insubstantial, the 
 mere superficial presentment of a deeply inter- 
 esting historical figure, who would, we may be 
 sure, have had intense interest for Shakespeare, 
 and to whom Shakespeare would have given 
 his keenest thought, his finest workmanship. 
 A greater opportunity still is lost in the case 
 of Wolsey. We hear a great deal of his com- 
 manding qualities, but where do we see them? 
 Arrogance we see, and craft, but nowhere 
 does he produce upon us that impression of 
 tremendous power, of magnificence, in good 
 and evil, which it is clearly intended that he 
 should produce. Is it credible that the 
 dramatist who, in the shape of a swoln and 
 deluded Falstaff, drives in upon us the impres- 
 
112 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 sion of the man's innate power with every 
 word that he utters, and through all his buf- 
 fetings and disgraces, should, with every ad- 
 vantage of opportunity, with such a figure, 
 ready made to his hand, as Wolsey, have given 
 us this merely formal transcript from Holin- 
 shed, this ''thing of shreds and patches?" 
 How dramatically would Shakespeare have 
 worked the ascending fortunes of the man to a 
 climax; with what crushing effect, and yet 
 how inevitably, brought in the moment of 
 downfall! As it is, the effect is at once trivial 
 and spasmodic, and the famous soliloquies, 
 even, when one looks at them as they really 
 are, but fine rhetorical preachments, spoken 
 to the gallery ; fine, rhetorical, moving, memo- 
 rable, but not the epilogue of a broken fortune, 
 the last words of a bitterness worse than death, 
 as Shakespeare or as nature would have given 
 them. One feels that there is no psychology 
 underneath this big figure : it stands, and then 
 it is doubled up by a blow; but one sees with 
 due clearness neither why it stood so long 
 nor why it fell so suddenly. The events 
 happen, but they are not brought about 
 by that subtle logic which, in Hamlet or in Lear, 
 
THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 113 
 
 constructs the action out of the character, and 
 so enables us to follow, to understand, every 
 change, however sudden and unlooked-for, 
 in the uncertain fortunes of a tormented human 
 creature struggling with the powers of fate and 
 of his own nature. 
 
 Now all this, so incredible in Shakespeare, is 
 precisely what we find again and again in his 
 contemporaries, and nowhere more than in 
 Fletcher and Massinger. In Shakespeare, 
 never neglectful of the requirements of the 
 stage, the picturesqueness is made to grow 
 out of the real nature of things: Fletcher and 
 Massinger, only too often, are ready to sacri- 
 fice the strict logic of character to the momen- 
 tary needs of a dramatic spectacle, the stage- 
 interest of sudden reverses. And in all that 
 I have been saying of the character-drawing 
 which we see in this play, little has been said 
 which would not lead us to assign this work, 
 so far beneath Shakespeare, to such fine but 
 imperfect dramatic poets as Fletcher and 
 Massinger. 
 
 I have spoken of the evidences of Fletcher's 
 metre which we find in certain parts of the 
 play, evidences which seem scarcely to admit 
 
114 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 of a doubt. But I confess that the metre and 
 language of the non-Fletcherian portion do not 
 seem to me by any means so clearly assign- 
 able to Massinger. Massinger's verse is a 
 close imitation of the later verse of Shake- 
 speare; but it is an imitation which stops 
 short at the end of no very lengthy a tether. 
 The verse of the non-Fletcherian portion of 
 Henry VIII rings neither true Shakespeare 
 nor true Massinger, and I know of no other 
 dramatist to whom it can be attributed. 
 There are lines and passages which, if I came 
 across them in an anonymous play, I should 
 assign without hesitation to Massinger; there 
 are also lines and passages to which I can recol- 
 lect no parallel in all his works. Mr. Boyle, 
 in his valuable paper already quoted, gives a 
 certain number of "parallel passages" in 
 support of the Massinger authorship, but I 
 cannot say that they appear to me altogether 
 conclusive. Nor is the argument from sup- 
 posed historical allusions, by which he assigns 
 the play to 1616 or 1617, a date which would 
 favour the theory that Massinger and Fletcher 
 wrote together, anything more than vaguely 
 conjectural. As I have said before, we really 
 
\ » 
 
 THE QUESTION OF HENRY VHI 115 
 
 do not know when this play was written; 
 there is nothing to forbid the assumption that 
 it was a new play in 1613, there is nothing to 
 forbid the assumption that it was not written 
 till 1616 or 1617. The backward limit of 
 date is indeed fixed by the characteristics of 
 the metre; but the very slight evidence which 
 identifies the play of Henry VIII as we have 
 it, with the play All is True, which was being 
 performed on the occasion of the Globe fire, 
 is not conclusive enough to stand in the way of 
 a later date, should a later date seem to be 
 demanded by other considerations. We are 
 thus free to deal with the question of author- 
 ship entirely on internal evidence. The like- 
 ness between the verse of Shakespeare and 
 such verse as: 
 
 Turn me away and let the foul'st contempt 
 Shut door upon me, and so give me up 
 To the sharpest kind of justice 
 
 is so close as to seem almost beyond imitation. 
 Yet of two difficulties, is it not easier to 
 imagine someone coming so near to Shake- 
 speare's technique in verse than Shakespeare 
 falling so far below the level of his imagination? 
 I have already given my reasons for believing 
 
il6 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 that Shakespeare wrote neither the whole nor 
 a part of the play, and that Fletcher did write 
 certain portions of it. But I cannot hold with 
 any assurance that the second author has yet 
 been discovered. It seems not impossible that 
 this second author was Massinger. 
 
 1890. 
 
VIII. ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 The play of Romeo and Juliet is like a 
 piece of music, and it is the music which 
 all true lovers have heard in the air since 
 they began listening to one another's voices. 
 Here, for once, youth becomes conscious of 
 itself, and of the charm which is passing out 
 of the world with its passing. A young man 
 wrote this wise and passionate eulogy of 
 youth; and it is that contemporaneous heat 
 of blood in it which has kept the names of 
 these two young lovers alive in men's minds 
 as the perfect exemplars of unspoiled love. 
 Love in youth is an emotion that may well 
 seem exaggerated ''to animals that do not 
 love"; and if the passion of Romeo and 
 Juliet is at times as clamorous as Italian love 
 in Italian operas, that leaves it perhaps all 
 the more like the thing which it renders so 
 frankly. In Ferdinand and Miranda, in Per- 
 dita and Florizel, there is a more subtly human 
 poetry than in Romeo or Juliet; only we 
 
 117 
 
118 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 remember that for its poetry, while we remem- 
 ber this as if it were love itself. 
 
 Compared with one of Shakespeare's later 
 women, with Imogen, for instance, Juliet 
 is but a sketch; she lives, but only in her 
 love; as Romeo, indeed, but for his love, in 
 any hasty and ardent youth out of whom 
 passion strikes unlooked-for sparks of imagina- 
 tion. But it is precisely by this concentration 
 upon the development and consequences of 
 one impulse, irresistible and yet ineffectual, 
 that Shakespeare has given us, not this or 
 that adorable person who, among other things, 
 loves, but two lovers, who, besides loving, 
 just remember to live. They have but one 
 desire, and this they attain; so that they 
 must be said to have succeeded in life. But 
 they have no force over circumstances; they 
 bend to their will only the consent of a few 
 hours. 
 
 In Antony and Cleopatra, in which we 
 see the other side of love, played out before 
 the world on the stage of the world, the two 
 eager and calculating lovers have the larger 
 part of a lifetime given to them to love and 
 hate in. This play, as Coleridge has noted, 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 119 
 
 "should be perused in mental contrast with 
 Romeo and Juliet^ It is indeed in these two 
 plays that Shakespeare expounds the whole 
 art of love. It may be that he has left some- 
 thing over; for there is another garden 
 besides Juliet's in which Sakuntala walked; 
 and Isolde, in Wagner's music, has added a 
 cry to ''the desire of the w^oman for the 
 desire of the man." But the whole art, cer- 
 tainly, is in those two plays. Romeo and Juliet 
 is the breviary of lovers who have loved young 
 and at first sight. 
 
 Romeo, when we first see him, is already 
 in love with love; but Juliet has learned 
 nothing yet from experience. To be married, 
 says she, is '' an honor that I dream not of." 
 Love has not yet been thought of; marriage, 
 about which she has heard her mother talk, 
 is a grave thing, an honour. When she sees 
 Romeo she gives him her heart as simply 
 as her hand; innocent, unshamed nature 
 speaks out of her mouth with the simplicity 
 of a child saying, I am tired, I am hungry. 
 She is as eager to be loved as if she knew 
 that her moments in the world were counted, 
 and that there is no other earthly flame which 
 
120 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 can give a little light and heat on this side 
 of the grave. Turn from that lyric scene in 
 the garden to the scene in which Cleopatra 
 enters leaning on the shoulder of Antony, 
 and saying her slow, experienced first words, 
 
 If it be love indeed, tell me how much. 
 
 She has set bounds to her passion, and a 
 narrow limit to love. Love, to her, is hedged 
 in by the senses, and these are mortal. But 
 Juliet, saying the words as her instinct teaches 
 them to her, can say, truly: 
 
 My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
 My love as deep; the more I give to thee, 
 The more I have, for both are infinite! 
 
 The unrealised idea of love can suggest to 
 her neither reservation nor any ending; she 
 responds to it with the entire energy of her 
 being. 
 
 Love, in Romeo and in Juliet, is first an 
 inspiration, then a religion, then a madness. 
 Both awaken as if from a dream, and the 
 awakening is to that true reality which 
 henceforth shuts them off from the world, 
 as if in a deeper dream. The first love-scene 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 121 
 
 in the garden is a duet of two astonishments. 
 Each is amazed that such a moment can find 
 them, and that they can be ready for such a 
 moment. Instantly it becomes incredible to 
 them that anything else could have happened. 
 They have only to exchange hearts. But 
 that has been done already. When? When 
 Romeo leaves his wife after their one night 
 of love it is with a profound peace that they 
 say over to one another that divine auhade 
 which the lark and the nightingale seem to say 
 for them. Death is behind them and before 
 them, and Juliet, looking down on her lover 
 as he lingers in the garden, sees him, with an 
 "ill-divining soul." 
 
 As one dead in the bottom of a tomb. 
 
 To the end their love is a sacred madness; it 
 fills every word that they are to speak, as it 
 has filled every corner of their being. It exalts 
 and purifies their words with its own intel- 
 lectual purity, as it has transfigured their 
 souls; imagination comes into the verse, 
 sweeping it clean of fancy. It is not the same 
 Romeo as the gentle lover of the garden 
 ("I would I were thy bird"), or even as 
 
122 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the grave and tender lover of Juliet's chamber 
 ("How is't, my soul? let's talk, it is not day"), 
 who rises to a kind of triumph as he looks on 
 the dead body, as he thinks: 
 
 For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes 
 
 This vault a feasting presence full of light. 
 
 I will stay with thee; 
 
 And never from this palace of dim night 
 
 Depart again: here, here will I remain 
 
 With worms that are thy chambermaids; 0, here 
 
 Will I set up my everlasting rest; 
 
 And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
 
 From this world- wearied flesh. 
 
 Lovers live by apprehension; love makes 
 every man superstitious; and throughout the 
 play there is a continual muttering of omens 
 and presages, like warning notes striking 
 through love-music. We are warned from the 
 beginning: 
 
 These violent delights have violent ends. 
 Therefore love moderately; long love does so. 
 Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. 
 
 Just before he is to hear the news that Juliet 
 is dead, Romeo has dreamed an ambiguous 
 dream, from which he draws comfort: 
 
 My dreams presage some joyful news at hand. 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 123 
 
 Hearing of her death, he has but one thing 
 to say, for a calamity so immovable has struck 
 him atheist : 
 
 Is it even so? then I deny you, stars! 
 
 In this play, in which love seems to be 
 everything, and nothing else to matter, Shake- 
 speare has created a whole world around these 
 two central figures, and by so doing he has 
 given us, not love in the abstract of a brief 
 lyric, but love living its own deaf and blind 
 life in a world busied about other matters. 
 The action takes place during five days, and 
 in this precipitancy we see Shakespeare's 
 aim at giving us the essential part of love, love 
 in its intensity, not its duration. He begins 
 sharply in the streets, with that "motley dance 
 of all ranks and ages to one tune," as Coleridge 
 says, "as if the horn of Huon had been playing 
 behind the scenes." The atmosphere is pre- 
 pared; we see hate, Italy, and the heat: 
 For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring. 
 
 After the fighting with swords comes the 
 fighting of wits. As the swords were drawn 
 idly, for trivial reasons, and by those who had 
 no personal share in the hereditary feud of two 
 
124 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 houses, so Mercutio and the other talkers 
 talk for effect, ''by art as well as nature," 
 and only then seem to themselves, as they put 
 it, "sociable." This antic and fantastic talk, 
 part Euphues, part fashion of the court, 
 part parody, which, if it has lost some of the 
 bloom of its youth, keeps nimble to this day, 
 may be contrasted with the crueler banter of 
 the Restoration: each images the lighter 
 *'form and pressure" of an age, and in only one 
 was there room for poetry. There is youth 
 in Shakespeare's gaiety of humor in this 
 prelude to tragedy; it is as if his genius had 
 not grown wholly accustomed to itself, and 
 must turn every amble into a steeplechase, 
 so eager was it for display, for the mere excite- 
 ment of exercise. 
 
 And outside this society of wits and brawlers, 
 probably so true to the circumstances of Shake- 
 speare's time, there is another homelier group : 
 the old Capulets and the immortal Nurse. 
 The others come, glitter, and fade out; for, 
 when true passions have begun to work, these 
 mummers and jesters have no further place. 
 But the people about Juliet are set there for 
 the sake of their fixed opposition to her quite 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 123 
 
 otherwise fixed resolve. They are age, cus- 
 tom, the family, the vulgar; they are the world 
 itself, in its lumbering journey along its own 
 road. Shakespeare, after his wont, has been 
 prodigal with them; the comic creation of 
 the Nurse is as full of his genius as the tragic 
 creation of Juliet. Indeed, when he makes 
 her speak, she speaks faultlessly, and is never 
 out of key; while Juliet often speaks for love 
 or for Shakespeare, in the manner of a poet 
 not yet willing to sacrifice the poetry to the 
 drama, and not yet able to fuse drama and 
 poetry in one. 
 
 In the Nurse we have the satiric after- 
 part of Greek drama, brought boldly into 
 the midst of the tragic action; in Friar 
 Laurence we have one aspect of the chorus, 
 that aspect in which it fulfilled Schlegers 
 partial definition, and became "the ideal 
 spectator." The one point fixed, where all 
 else is turning, he represents philosophy among 
 the passions, judging them, humouring them, 
 and helpless and disturbing enough when he has 
 succeeded in setting them moving to his 
 own pattern of abstract wisdom. The Nurse 
 and the Capulets, who would also fetter a 
 
123 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 live passion, or teach it the direction in which 
 it should grow, are seen even more helplessly 
 at its mercy. It is with an immense tragic 
 gaiety that Shakespeare shows us this ancient 
 busybody hobbling after her mistress, run- 
 ning her errands and the errands of her mother; 
 looking wisely after affairs, as she and the 
 mother suppose; with all the instincts of the 
 procuress, rendered harmless by the invincible 
 innocence of Juliet. She is the first of those 
 pets and preachers of iniquity who came to 
 ripe philosophy in Falstaff and to the scaven- 
 ger's wisdom in Thersites. 
 
 It is one of the signs of that judgment which 
 was part of the genius of Shakespeare that he 
 should have begun by working on what lay 
 nearest to his hand, and with the materials 
 which he was sure that he had in his posses- 
 sion. It is probable that Romeo and Juliet 
 was written a few years after the two narra- 
 tive poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape 
 of Lucrece; and in these poems we see Shake- 
 speare exercising himself, so to speak, by giving 
 the most elaborate expression to sensual and 
 to heroically domestic love. In the comedies 
 there is scarcely a perceptible note of prepara- 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 127 
 
 tion. Love is a game, a sentiment, a thing of 
 fashion, preference, polite employment; it 
 is worn as an ornament, the heart on the 
 sleeve wholly as a motive of decoration. 
 We are no nearer to genuine passion than 
 is Romeo when he laments over the cold- 
 ness of Rosaline. ''Night's candles" are not 
 yet ''burnt out"; the lover has not yet 
 said, "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" 
 But the two poems lay down a kind of founda- 
 tion, solid in the earth, on which to raise this 
 chapel of romantic love. It is through the 
 senses that Shakespeare has found out love, 
 and finding it, he has not plucked the flower 
 away from the rest. The passion of Romeo 
 for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo is a part 
 of nature; not a whim, not a dream, not a 
 sick fancy bred in the brain, but nature 
 itself. It is sex, although the idea of sex is 
 overflowed by a divine oblivion; Romeo sighs 
 after "the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand," 
 and Juliet's is the most honest, the most 
 day-light passion that has ever been spoken 
 in words; it speaks as straight, feels as deeply, 
 and adds as much courtesy to passion as the 
 heroic love which takes on chivalry without 
 
128 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 quitting nature in Gottfried of Strasburg's 
 Tristan und Isolde. 
 
 Although Romeo and Juliet contains certain 
 lines and passages which are as mature in 
 imagination and as brilliant in execution as 
 anything which Shakespeare ever wrote, the 
 main part of the play has all the characteristics 
 of his early, somewhat formal and somewhat 
 exuberant, period. There are not only rhymes 
 in couplets, but crossed rhymes, in fixed 
 stanzas; the blank verse is often monoto- 
 nous, line following line, for five lines at a 
 time, with unvarying pauses; sometimes it is 
 as bad as 
 
 Away to heaven, respective lenity, 
 And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now! 
 
 It can rave like ''Jeronimo," or split hairs 
 with the painful ingenuity of the period, as 
 in Juliet's series of puns on the word "Ay" 
 and the letter "I." The writing is often self- 
 conscious; the narrative passages have a 
 certain stiffness. We see Shakespeare still 
 unwilling to trust wholly to his ear, to abandon 
 himself frankly to his imagination. In the 
 midst of some of his most splendid writing he 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 129 
 
 seems to clieck himself, and stops to write-in 
 a passage on some accepted model. 
 
 There is a charm of its own in immaturity, 
 and, for the most part, when it is the imma- 
 turity of a vast genius, some rare beauty, 
 growing out of the mere happy accidents 
 of growth, which must be lost with ripeness. 
 Here we have a whole spring-tide of buds; 
 *' spring with its odors, its flowers, and its 
 transiency," as Coleridge says, in that ex- 
 quisite passage in which he turns the play into 
 an allegory of spring. It is the first play in 
 which Shakespeare touches maturity, but he 
 touches it only, and relapses into the defects 
 and graces that belong to an incomparable 
 promise. There are whole passages, like the 
 lament of the Nurse and the Capulets over 
 Juliet, which are purely lyrical, or like answer- 
 ing music. The auhade again is frankly music 
 and a song. Juliet's monologue before drink- 
 ing the sleep-drink is the first of those many 
 curious questionings of death, in which Claudio 
 is^to lead the way to Hamlet. It has been 
 said by Hazlitt, with too hasty an emphasis 
 that ''Romeo is Hamlet in love." There are 
 touches in him of what was probably most like 
 
130 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Shakespeare in Hamlet; that is to say, of 
 passionate absorption, of a will which seems 
 infirm because it is too much at the mercy 
 of deeper questionings; but if Romeo some- 
 times speaks for Shakespeare, a little aside 
 from his character, Hamlet is a wholly con- 
 sistent part of Shakespeare, detached finally 
 from his creator. 
 
 It is natural that Romeo and Juliet should 
 always have been a favorite with actors. It 
 is full of pictures; it appeals to the most 
 popular of the emotions; its poetry is only 
 too well fitted for recitation. There never 
 was an actress under fifty who did not feel her- 
 self a Juliet, or an actor under sixty who did 
 not see himself as Romeo. For once, Shake- 
 speare wrote great poetry which the mob 
 could not but love, could not but find itself 
 at home with. Juliet is the Englishman's 
 symbol for Helen; and Shakespeare has made 
 her the name for virtue in love, fatal indeed 
 to herself and to Romeo, but innocently fatal, 
 and, unlike Helen, healing by death the 
 discord which has not been stirred up by her 
 life. We are far from '' the couple of un- 
 fortunate lovers" of Brooke's Tragicall History 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 131 
 
 of Romeus and Juliet, ''written first in Italian 
 by Bandell, and nowe in Englishe by Ar. 
 Br.," one of Shakespeare's sources, whom 
 Brooke hastily shows us "finally, by all 
 means of unhonest life, hasting to most un- 
 happy death." "The two hours' traffic of 
 our stage" was, to Shakespeare, concerned with 
 "the misad ventured piteous overthrows" of 
 "a pair of star-crossed lovers": he lays the 
 blame on no one, not even on fate, giving us 
 the story as it happened; 
 
 For never was a story of more woe 
 Than this of JuKet and her Romeo, 
 
 he adds quite simply. 
 
 1903. 
 
IX. CYMBELINE 
 
 If it could be assumed, with any strong 
 probability, that Cymbeline, which ends the 
 First Folio, was really the last play which 
 Shakespeare wrote, several difficulties which 
 present themselves in connection with it 
 might be resolved at once. It contains one 
 of the most perfect of Shakespeare's women, 
 two gallant boys, a notable villain, with rapid, 
 summarising studies in jealousy, a murderous 
 queen, a royal clown, done as if from memory, 
 or on second thoughts. There are pastoral 
 scenes in it which can only be compared with 
 the pastoral scenes in The Winter's Tale; and 
 they are written in verse of the same free and 
 happy cadence. Yet the play is thrown to- 
 gether loosely, rather as if it were a novel, to 
 be read, than a play, to be acted. The action 
 is complicated here, neglected there. A scene 
 of sixteen lines is introduced to say that the 
 tribunes are required to raise more forces for 
 the war, and that Lucius is to be general. 
 
 132 
 
CYMBELINE 133 
 
 The last scene is five hundred lines long, and 
 has to do as much business as all the rest of the 
 play. The playwright seems no longer to have 
 patience with his medium; it is as if his inter- 
 est had gone out of it, and he were using it as 
 the only makeshift at hand. 
 
 Most artists, at the end of their careers, 
 become discontented with the form in which 
 they have worked. They have succeeded 
 through obedience to this form, but it seems to 
 them that a rarer success lies, uncaptured, 
 outside those limits. They are tempted by 
 what seems lawless in life itself; by what is 
 certainly various and elastic in life. They are 
 impatient with the slowness of results, with 
 their rigidity, inside those inexorable limits. 
 The technique which they have perfected 
 seems to them too perfect; something cries 
 out of chains, and they would set the voice, 
 or Ariel, free. 
 
 That spirit, I think, we see in the later plays 
 of Shakespeare, in which not only does metre 
 dissolve and reform, in some new, fluctuant 
 way of its own, but the whole structure becomes 
 vaporous, and floats out through the solid 
 walls of the theatre. Even The Tempest, 
 
134 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 when I have seen it acted, lost the greater part 
 of its magic, and was no longer that " cloud- 
 capt " promontory in "faery seas forlorn," 
 the last foothold of human life on the edge of 
 the world. What sense of loss do we feel when 
 we see Othello acted? Othello has nothing 
 to lose; the playwright has never forgotten the 
 walls of his theatre. In Cymheline he is frankly 
 tired of them. 
 
 Cymheline is a romance, made out of Holin- 
 shed, and Boccaccio, and perhaps nursery 
 stories, and it is that happiest kind of romance, 
 which strays harmlessly through tragic in- 
 cidents in which only the bad people come to 
 grief. All the time things seem to be knotting 
 themselves up inextricably; every one is 
 playing at cross purposes with every one, as 
 in a children's game, immensely serious to the 
 children; and one is allowed the thrill which 
 comes out of other people's dangers, and the 
 pleasant consciousness that everything will 
 be all right in the end. There are plays of 
 Shakespeare which are almost painfully real, 
 in their so much more than reality; this 
 play, even in its most desperate complication, 
 is never allowed to come too close to us for 
 
CYMBELINE 135 
 
 pleasure. We are following the track of a 
 romance, and in countries where no one is 
 sick or sorry beyond measure. 
 
 The two central figures of the romance are 
 Posthumus and Imogen, and it is those two 
 unlucky lovers who wander through the forest, 
 seeking and flying from each other, along 
 roads chosen mockingly for them by the fate 
 which lies in things as they are. Posthumus 
 is a new kind of hero of romance. He is a 
 showy gentleman, who has the gift of winning 
 every one to his side, including Imogen. 
 
 By her selection may be truly read 
 What kind of man he is, 
 
 says the First Gentleman in the first scene, 
 plausibly, but not with knowledge : his praises 
 are to be taken at the valuation of common 
 rumour. Married to an incomparable woman, 
 Posthumus has never known her. To doubt 
 her is not to have known her. The jealousy 
 of Posthumus is circumstantial, a jealousy 
 of dull senses, to which the imagination has 
 never spoken. He doubts her at the first 
 rumour of mere coincidence. I should not 
 say doubts; he has not a doubt; her dishonor 
 
136 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 is palpable to him. He hugs the certainty, 
 driving it into him like a knife in a foe's hand. 
 He will not wait to know all that can be said 
 against her; he is convinced from the first. 
 Rage makes him voluble, and then inarticulate; 
 "I'll do something," is all that he is quite 
 sure of. He orders her death, and when he is 
 told that she is dead, he cries: 
 
 I'll die 
 For thee, Imogen, even for whom my life 
 Is, every breath, a death. 
 
 He is always crying out like a child or a mad- 
 man, always against sense, too soon or too 
 late. He is the slave of the moment, always 
 in its power for evil; and it is against all his 
 endeavours, and against all probability, that 
 he ends happily, having failed in every attempt 
 to destroy his own happiness. That, perhaps, 
 is the irony, as much as the mercy, of the 
 play. 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's women Imogen is the 
 manliest and womanliest. All may say of her, 
 as each man says of the woman whom he loves, 
 that for him she is faultless, whatever faults 
 may be seen in her by others. She is a 
 woman to make virtue its own reward; the 
 
CYMBELINE 137 
 
 "infinite variety" of the wicked seems to lurk 
 in her under some saintly disguise. If English- 
 men can point to this picture of an English- 
 woman, and say that it is true to nature, 
 nothing remains to be said in praise of our 
 women. It is in her simplicity that Imogen 
 is greatest. Nothing is too hard for her to do 
 easily, nor does it ever occur to her to hesi- 
 tate. She puts on boy's clothes without a 
 thought of sex; and when, at the end of the 
 play, she finds her husband again, repentant 
 and ready to receive her, she forgets her 
 disguise, and runs to him, to be thrust away 
 by the inevitable blunderer. She has humour, 
 a witty readiness of speech, exquisitely alert 
 and to the point. Only once does Shake- 
 speare burden her with those forced metaphors 
 and that unnatural ingenuity of discourse 
 which blemish so many of his pages. This is 
 in the scene where she finds the headless 
 body of Cloten in the clothes of Posthumus, 
 and takes the dead man for her husband. 
 Those dreadful lines about — 
 
 His foot Mercurial; his Martial thigh; 
 
 The brawns of Hercules : but his Jovial face — 
 
 Murder in heaven? — How — 'Tis gone — 
 
138 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 are nowhere exceeded in Shakespeare for sheer 
 unsuitability. Else, Imogen is a model of 
 speech as of honour, justice, and mercy. And, 
 though unbreakable, she has that woman's 
 flexibility which carries her easily through 
 terrifying adventures; she can find herself 
 nowhere where she is not at home; her spirit 
 is always (as Cymbeline says of her, when, 
 at the end, 
 
 Posthumus anchors upon Imogen, 
 
 having learned trust at last) a kind of 
 
 harmless lightning hitting 
 Each object with a joy. 
 
 Round these two lovers, on their difficult 
 way through the entanglements of the story, 
 are grouped one or two brave companions and 
 a motley company of hinderers. Of these the 
 chief is lachimo. lachimo is the gentlemanly 
 villain through vanity. His whole intelligence 
 is not let out to evil, as with lago; he enter- 
 tains evil unawares, finding some unsuspected 
 kinship there. He believes in his power over 
 women, perhaps rather because he holds them 
 lightly than because he prizes himself highly. 
 
CYMBELINE 139 
 
 He has probably had experiences in Italy which 
 have seemed to prove the justice of his esti- 
 mate. The Englishwoman, though a new 
 country for him, awakes none of his sus- 
 picions. It is his creed that all women are 
 alike ; only, that some have not been tempted. 
 He has smiled at the confidence of husbands; 
 Posthumus is franker than the others, that is 
 all. He fully expects to win his wager. 
 
 After he has talked with Imogen for a few 
 minutes, he realises that the wager is lost, 
 if it is to be won honestly. He does not seri- 
 ously tempt her: he makes his few orna- 
 mental passes, and drops the foil; with finesse, 
 after all, convincing her of the innocence of his 
 intentions. His vanity, doubtless, is wounded ; 
 and it is really his vanity, alert to defend itself, 
 which sets his "Italian blood" to ''operate" 
 so instantly the dishonourable trick of the 
 coffer. 
 
 To the Italian, treachery has always been 
 something of a fine art. Machiavelli taught 
 it to princes, and not a gipsy could be cleaner 
 of conscience after a lie than the Neapolitan 
 of to-day. To have lied successfully is to 
 have shown one's ability, much more subtly 
 
140 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 than if the struggle had been an open one, 
 strength against strength. lachimo is a study 
 in the Italian temperament, faultlessly in- 
 dicated, until his vehemence of remorse at the 
 end of the play brings him to a good end, 
 perhaps not so much in the Italian manner. 
 
 The Queen, with her useless poisons which 
 harm no one, belongs to Shakespeare's series 
 of wicked queens, most of them constructed 
 on much the same pattern, but leading upward 
 to a masterpiece in Lady Macbeth. Cymbe- 
 line's Queen is, so far as her action is concerned, 
 a busy-body, a meddler; her intentions are 
 criminal, but all she really does is to provide 
 Imogen with a sleeping-draught. She pulls 
 some of the strings of the play, herself some- 
 thing of a puppet. Shakespeare wants the 
 wicked stepmother of all the legends, and he 
 gives us a wicked stepmother who would fit 
 into any of them. 
 
 Her son, Cloten, the bullying fool, is one of 
 Shakespeare's mockeries of the gentleman by 
 birth who is scarcely a man by wits. Shake- 
 speare was no flatterer of the people; he 
 respected tyrants, he loved the pomp of kings. 
 But in Cloten he shows us one of the rags 
 
CYMBELINE 141 
 
 which may go to the making of that pomp, 
 hardly laughing as he holds it out; all the 
 braveries of the world have that side to them. 
 Here and there he gives the pitiable thing a 
 few sound words to say; on "our saltwater 
 girdle," for instance, or the "If Caesar can hide 
 the sun from us with a blanket, or put the moon 
 in his pocket." Commentators have seen 
 arguments in these generous lendings for sup- 
 posing that the play was written partly at one 
 time and partly at another; for how, they say, 
 can the "mere fool" of the first act be "by no 
 means deficient in manliness" in the third? 
 It is part of Shakespeare's art to make even 
 stupidity carry divine messages. Even this, 
 the muddiest of his dolts, can transmit heroism 
 by mistake. 
 
 That "mountainous country with a cave," 
 in Wales, on which Cloten intruded, to his 
 destruction, is the scenery of the most bracing 
 scene in Shakespeare. Here we breathe moun- 
 tain air, and are among natures as free and 
 healthy. These folk of the high rocks, with 
 their princely manners, their high natural 
 courtesy, live courtly lives in the open air, and 
 attend with ceremony upon every action. 
 
142 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Shakespeare is careful to explain that the 
 two boys are none of ''nature's gentlemen," 
 but princely by birth, though brought up not 
 to know it; and that the old man is really 
 a great lord in exile. He bids us look on what 
 is intrinsic in noble descent, after having 
 seen how that too, like all natural forces, can 
 be flawed in a Cloten. Guiderius and Arvira- 
 gus are indeed brothers to Imogen, tempered 
 in the same steel. They are to other men 
 almost what she is to other women. She has 
 been unspoilt by civilisation; they, untouched 
 by it. 
 
 It is around this old man and these delight- 
 ful boys that most of what is best in the play, 
 most after Shakespeare's heart, we may be 
 sure, takes place. Lyric beauty, not only 
 in the incomparable dirge, fills these scenes with 
 enchantment. Hardly in The Winter's Tale 
 are there tenderer things said about flowers; 
 nowhere are there more joyous things said 
 about light, air, and the gentleness and energy 
 of mere life in the sun and wind. And, 
 always, blithely and instinctively in the two 
 boys, with the gravity of experience in the 
 old man, there is that nobility of soul which is 
 
CYMBELINE 143 
 
 perhaps the part of Shakespeare's genius which 
 grew most steadily to the last. 
 
 His feeling for nature, also, grew or matured 
 steadily. Shakespeare loved, no doubt, the 
 woods of Arden and the forest ways of The 
 Midsummer Night's Dream. He could play 
 with them, for happy, sufficient purposes of 
 his own. But it was not till his work was 
 ending, and he had gone through the world, 
 weighing it and judging it, and making it 
 over again after almost its own miraculous 
 pattern of life, that he came to feel the earth. 
 As his art tired, we may think, of the play- 
 house, so his nature, which had been content 
 with cities, cried out for something which was 
 not in cities. The open air, the sea, the fields, 
 the hills, came to mean to him something 
 which they had never meant. 
 
 The ground that gave them first has them again, 
 
 he can say, in Cymheline, of the dead, with a 
 profound sense of the earth, and of our roots 
 there. 
 
 In Cymheline, as in all Shakespeare's later 
 plays, the writing is for the most part moulded 
 upon the thought, with a closeness very dif- 
 
144 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 ferent from the draped splendours of the 
 earlier work. It is often condensed into a kind 
 of hardness, it would say too much in every 
 word; but it allows itself no other license. 
 Often, in this play, it is chary of occasions for 
 fine writing by the way. Take, for instance, 
 the soliloquy of Posthumus in prison (V. 4). 
 Compare it with Claudio's shuddering pre- 
 vision of death and of the ''thrilling regions of 
 thick-ribbed ice" in Measure for Measure; 
 with Hamlet's reasoning in the dark of a sensi- 
 tive limagination, fearful of uncertainties. 
 Both are quick with feeling; each is the 
 outcry of a naked human soul, alone with the 
 fear of death. But Posthumus, who is willing 
 to die, and who believes that "there are none 
 want eyes to direct them the way I am going 
 but such as wink and will not use them," 
 argues coldly with himself, in his only half- 
 hearted invocation of the gods. The solilo- 
 quy is a masterpiece of that difficult kind of 
 writing which has to wring a kind of emotion 
 out of the absence of emotion in the speaker. 
 It is packed with thought, with ingenuities 
 of argument, precisely in keeping with the 
 situation. 
 
CYMBELINE 145 
 
 In the speeches of Imogen there are the same 
 clearness, simplicity, and packed meanings of 
 a singularly direct kind. That soliloquy before 
 the cave of Belarius, beginning 
 
 I see a man's life is a tedious one, 
 
 is, like the soliloquy of Posthumus, all made up 
 of little sentences, each half a line long, 
 springing naturally and unexpectedly out of 
 the last half line, in that way which Coleridge 
 notes as characteristic of Shakespeare, ''just 
 as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum 
 of its own body, and seems forever twisting 
 and untwisting its own strength." There is 
 scarcely a figure of speech; the poetry seems 
 too much in earnest, too eager to say definite 
 things directly. It is poetry made out of mere 
 thinking aloud, with all the starts and incon- 
 sequences of actual thinking. One of the 
 speeches is the most breathless in Shakespeare. 
 In the mountain scenes, the verse has not 
 only lyric beauty, but an austere quality which 
 keeps just so much of splendour as can be at the 
 same time grave and subdued. Rhetoric has 
 all gone out of the verse, nothing is loud or 
 showy any longer; there is a new aim at that 
 
146 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 last refinement in which strength comes dis- 
 guised, and beauty seems a casual stranger. 
 The verse itself has been broken, as it has to be 
 broken over again in every age, as soon as it 
 has come to perfection, and hardened there. 
 Read a speech of Imogen after a speech of 
 Juliet, and it will seem to you, at first sight, 
 that Imogen is speaking almost prose, while 
 Juliet is certainly singing poetry. It is in that 
 apparent approach to the form of prose that 
 verse finally becomes its most authentic self. 
 Juliet has her few notes, and no more, her 
 formal tunes; while Imogen can set the whole 
 of Shakespeare's brain to a music as various 
 and uncapturable as the wind. 
 
 1907. 
 
X. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 It is probable that in this play, the most 
 tragical of all comedies and the most comical 
 of all tragedies, Shakespeare for once wrote 
 to please himself; and, though we cannot 
 take literally the publisher's note to the 
 Second Quarto, that ''you have here a new 
 play, never staled with the stage, never clap- 
 per-clawed with the palms of the vulgar," it 
 is not likely that what we now read is precisely 
 what the King's Majesty's Servants acted at 
 the Globe Theatre. What they acted, and 
 what we now read, was certainly not all from 
 the hand of Shakespeare. The Prologue, 
 which appears for the first time in the Second 
 Quarto. 
 
 A prologue armed, but not in confidence 
 Of author's pen or actor's voice, 
 
 has the cumbrous bombast of a thing made for 
 
 the occasion; and the concluding scenes of the 
 
 play, in which Dry den rightly saw "nothing 
 
 147 
 
'148 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 but a confusion of drums and trumpets, ex- 
 cursions and alarms," have much the same 
 note of forced and laboriously measured writ- 
 ing. They are not like Shakespeare's writing 
 at any period; they may possibly belong 
 to some rough earlier play on the subject, 
 from which Shakespeare, in his easy fashion, 
 was content to take over untouched fragments, 
 together with some of the original framework. 
 The play as we have it, even apart from these 
 doubtful scenes, is uncertainly constructed, 
 and betrays the workmanship of different 
 periods. What we know of its date con- 
 firms the suspicion that Shakespeare may have 
 worked at it after its first rough completion. 
 The two quartos, identical but for the new 
 title-page and preface of the second, were 
 published in 1609; but as early as 1599, in 
 the satirical play Histriomastix, there is an 
 obvious allusion to a scene in a Troilus and 
 Cressida which is coupled with a pun on 
 "shake" and "spear." In 1603 there is 
 an entry in the Stationers' Register relating 
 to James Roberts's unsuccessful attempt to 
 "get sufficient authority" for the printing of 
 "the book of Troilus and Cressida'^; in Janu- 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 149 
 
 ary, 1609, the publication of the Quarto is 
 entered. More than one partial revision, at 
 any time during those ten years, with the 
 possible intrusion of the meddling hand of the 
 Prologue-writer, would account for much of 
 what seems difficult, at first sight, to account 
 for in the play as we have it. If we accept 
 the hypothesis of an earlier play, not Shake- 
 speare's, there may have been some clearing 
 away, as well as developing and deepening, 
 of the play as it was first acted by the King's 
 Servants. I can imagine the deeper intention 
 coming gradually into his own work, as he 
 went over it, with some inattentive impatience 
 towards those parts which had still to carry 
 the original meaning, the main weight of the 
 story. Throughout there are ragged ends of 
 action, with one discrepancy in fact between 
 the second and the third scene of Act I., and 
 a transposition, by the printers of the First 
 Folio, of a rhyming tag from the end of 
 the play to the end of the third scene of the 
 last act, as if that had once been the end of 
 the play. Lines are left in careless lengths, 
 now too short and now too long, as if parts had 
 been revised without regard to their context. 
 
150 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 The difference between the formal rhymed 
 couplets of some scenes and the free and 
 weighty blank verse of others is the difference 
 between one period and another of Shake- 
 speare's technique. Some of the speeches, 
 written in the later style, are the longest in 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Troilus and Cressida is a kind of Don 
 Quixote, in which it is even more difficult 
 to disentangle the burlesque from the serious 
 element. The first aim of Cervantes was to 
 ridicule the folly of courtly romances, to 
 *' laugh Spain's chivalry away," so far as 
 the extravagant facts of chivalry were con- 
 cerned. But on the way he laughed at a 
 thousand other things which are now of more 
 interest to the world, and he made his scare- 
 crow hero one of the most sympathetic victims 
 of romance; the eternal idealist, lovable and 
 ridiculous and lamentable and heroic, and the 
 sport of a rough world which is, after all, 
 always his servant. Shakespeare takes the 
 story of the fall of Troy, the commonplace 
 of poets and romance-writers, a legend almost 
 as sacred as the Bible, and he makes it, in 
 his parody of it, a parable of the world. 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 151 
 
 Troilus and Cressida is an assaying of 
 accepted values, and Shakespeare takes the 
 two prime heroisms, love and glory (the two 
 fights for honour), and shows them to us 
 through the eyes of Thersites: ''Still wars and 
 lechery! nothing else holds fashion." In this 
 picture we see how like we are at our highest 
 to the beasts that perish. Here is Troy, the 
 city of the world's desire; Helen, the desire 
 of the world; the mighty Agamemnon; the 
 wise Ulysses; the hero of heroes, Achilles; 
 Ajax, the bravest of men; Hector, Cassandra, 
 Andromache; and only Hector has any plain 
 nobility, and is not either a coward, a bully, 
 or a fool. It is a Greek who counts that 
 "for every false drop" in the veins of Helen 
 "a Grecian's life hath sunk"; even Hector 
 doubts the wisdom of keeping Helen, though 
 he would still keep up the fight, not for Helen's 
 sake, but for the honour of the cause. None 
 of these "heroes" have any heroical impulses; 
 they fight for their own heads, for spite, 
 because others are fighting. We see the 
 petty inside of war, as, in Cressida and in 
 Helen, we see the shallow and troubled 
 depths of woman. In this morbid, almost 
 
152 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Swiftian, consciousness of the dung in which 
 roses are rooted. Shakespeare drags Thersites 
 out of his sewer and bids us listen to him. 
 Thersites is his chorus, his mouthpiece, his 
 pet scavenger. 
 
 Beside Thersites is the other sign-post to 
 the knowledge of evil, Pandarus. Pandarus 
 is love's broker as Thersites is the broker of 
 glory. Each has a different platform from 
 which to rail at the world; but Pandarus is a 
 foul and feeble part of that at which Thersites 
 rails. Thersites is the Falstaff of a world 
 that tastes bitter. He has infinite curiosity; 
 he runs recklessly into danger, in order that 
 he may spy out the mean secrets on which 
 his mind battens. He is beaten, and rails on, 
 saying, "I serve not thee," to the stronger 
 bully against whom he has only the weapon 
 of his tongue. He shares with Ulysses the only 
 brains in two armies of fighters, who know not 
 why they are fighting, and who are drawn into 
 action or out of it for straws; and he sees 
 farther than Ulysses, because he does not 
 see with a purpose. He is Irish in the inven- 
 tive imagination of his abuse ; he has the richest 
 vocabulary of any rogue in Shakespeare. His 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 153 
 
 speech is a foul glory, a glory fouled. ''So 
 much and such savoured salt of wit" is in his 
 words that the foulness is forgotten in the 
 fierce and ever-armed intelligence which, help- 
 less to overthrow, pricks mortally all this 
 "valiant ignorance." 
 
 For the most part, in his plays, Shake- 
 speare gives us an underplot which is a kind of 
 echo or reflection of the main story; and here, 
 as a luminous background for Cressida, be- 
 tween Troilus and Diomedes, we see Helen, 
 between Menelaus and Paris. For a moment, 
 as the great lines of Marlowe come into his 
 mind, Shakespeare speaks of Helen, through 
 the mouth of Troilus, with reverence : 
 
 Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl, 
 
 Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships, 
 
 And turned crowned kings to merchants! 
 
 The wonderful scene between Paris and Helen 
 (Act ni.. Scene 1) gives, with its touch of 
 luxurious, almost lascivious satire, the Renais- 
 sance picture of the two most famous lovers 
 of the world. There is a refrain of "love, 
 love, love," grossly, luxuriously, mockingly. 
 "Let thy song be love," murmurs Helen: 
 
154 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 "this love will undo us all. Cupid, Cupid, 
 Cupid!" And Paris echoes: "Aye, good 
 now, love, love, nothing but love." Helen 
 speaks as grossly as Cressida; Paris twice 
 calls her "Nell." In the dispraise of Helen, 
 from the mouth of Diomedes (Act IV., Scene 
 1), Shakespeare forces the note, making even 
 those who had least cause rail on the woman 
 with all the contempt of hate. Yet the noblest 
 praise that has ever been said of Helen comes 
 to her in this pity from the undistinguished 
 mouth of a punning servant, who calls her 
 "the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, 
 love's invisible soul." Later on, in Cleopatra, 
 Shakespeare is to give us the supreme en- 
 chantress, taking her wholly from her own 
 point of view, or at least with sympathetic 
 impartiality. Here he seems to ask with 
 Pandarus, "Is love a generation of vipers?" 
 His cruelty with Helen is but a part of his 
 protest, his criticism, his valuation of love. 
 Love in this cloying scene between Paris and 
 Helen appears before us sickly, a thing of 
 effeminate horror, which can be escaped only 
 by turning it into laughter. 
 
 Cressida is a symbol of Helen, the feminine 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 155 
 
 animal shown us in detail. Ulysses sums her 
 up in a few significant lines which say every- 
 thing: 
 
 Fie, fie upon her! 
 There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, 
 Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out 
 At every joint and motive of her body. 
 O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue. 
 That give accosting welcome ere it comes, 
 And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts 
 To every ticklish reader! set them down 
 For sluttish spoils of opportunity, 
 And daughters of the game. 
 
 She is mere sex, the Manon Lescaut of 
 her period, so incapable of fidelity, so anxious 
 to get her pleasure by pleasing, a coquette, 
 not a criminal, petty with the instincts of the 
 cat, sly and provident, apologetic to the end. 
 From the first she plays at virtue, and is 
 taken for chaste when she is but chary of her- 
 self for a purpose. 
 
 In Troilus we get the sensual man, brave, 
 passionate, and constant, suffering from pas- 
 sion as from a disease. His speech is often 
 mere extravagance; but once, when he waits 
 for Cressida in the orchard, he speaks perhaps 
 the most sensitive lines in Shakespeare: 
 
156 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 I am giddy: expectation whirls me round. 
 
 The imaginary relish is so sweet 
 
 That it enchants my sense : what will it be 
 
 When that the watery palate tastes indeed 
 
 Love's thrice-repured nectar! death, I fear me, 
 
 Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, 
 
 Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, 
 
 For the capacity of my ruder powers: 
 
 I fear it much, and I do fear besides 
 
 That I shall lose distinction in my joys, 
 
 As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps 
 
 The enemy fljdng. 
 
 In those lines we get what is most precise and 
 exquisite in the play, free, for the moment, 
 of all irony ; a rendering of sensation sharpened 
 to the vanishing-point; the sensation which 
 does not know itself for pain or pleasure, so 
 inexplicably is it intermingled in the delights 
 of opposites. Much of what seems to us 
 most characteristically modern in modern 
 literature, together with almost the whole aim 
 of modern music, is here anticipated. It is 
 Shakespeare showing us, in a flash, that he 
 may be quite fair, all of ecstasy that does really 
 exist in the thing he holds up to our mockery. 
 Is it with a kind of cruelty that Shake- 
 speare is so patient with Cressida, setting 
 her to unfold herself before us, little by 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 157 
 
 little, in scene after scene nicely calculated 
 for her exposure? To be so feminine and so 
 vile, so much a woman, with all the woman's 
 pretty tricks, and so old in craft, an angler 
 for hearts; there is a dreadful and a merciless 
 knowledge in the picture. In the scene in 
 the court of Pandarus (Act IV., Scene 2), 
 Cressida has all the lightness and unwhole- 
 some charm of actual, attractive vulgarity; 
 in the scene in the Grecian Camp (Act V., 
 Scene 2), where we hear her words through a 
 series of listeners — Troilus, Ulysses, and Ther- 
 sites, the lover, the observer, and the mocker — 
 she is vulgar nature naked to the roots and no 
 longer deceptive. Shakespeare is using her 
 to point his moral against her sex; he gloats 
 over her, not to spare her. 
 
 People have complained because Troilus 
 and Cressida can be set down under no general 
 title; because, as the printers of the First 
 Folio discovered to their confusion, it is neither 
 tragedy, comedy, nor history, but something 
 of each and something else besides. It is 
 made out of history, with an infinite deal of 
 tragedy in the matter of it, and its upshot is 
 purely comic. Here, more than anywhere 
 
158 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 else in Shakespeare, we get the comedy of 
 pure mind, with its detachment from Hfe, 
 to which it appUes an abstract criticism. 
 Tragedy comes about from an abandonment 
 to the emotions, and the tragic attitude is one 
 of sympathy with this absorption in the mo- 
 ment, this child's way of taking things seri- 
 ously, of crying over every scratch. To the 
 pure reason emotion is something petty, 
 ridiculous, or useless, and the conflicts of 
 humanity no more than the struggles of ants 
 on an ant-hill. To Thersites's "critique of 
 pure reason" all the heroisms of the world 
 reduce themselves to his fundamental thesis: 
 *'all incontinent varlets." Shakespeare uses 
 not only Thersites but Pandarus to speak 
 through, as he escapes the sting of love by 
 making a laughing-stock of the passion under 
 cover of Pandarus' s trade, and holds up war to 
 contempt, through the license of the ''fool," 
 mimic, and "privileged man" of these "beef- 
 witted lords" who are playing at soldiers. 
 
 To write drama from a point of view so 
 aloof is to lose most of the material of drama 
 and all dramatic appeal. It is to make the 
 puppets cry out: See what puppets we are! 
 
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 159 
 
 When pure mind rules, manoeuvres, and judges 
 the passions, we lose as well as gain. We 
 lose the satisfaction of tragedy, the classic 
 "pity and terror," the luxury of tears. We 
 no longer see a complete thing cut boldly 
 off from nature and shown to us labelled. 
 We are condemned to be on the watch, to 
 weigh, balance, and decide. We must appre- 
 hend wholly by the intelligence, never by the 
 feelings. 
 
 We gain, certainly, in knowledge, width 
 of view, hardihood. We read life, in this 
 bewildering comment on it, not through the 
 eyes of Shakespeare's final wisdom, but as 
 Shakespeare, at one period, read life. It is 
 difficult to believe that Troilus and Cressida 
 does not belong to the same period as Timon 
 of Athens, and that, in these two illuminating 
 and bitter plays, in which the glories of the 
 world are reviled in so different a temper, to 
 so similar a purpose, Shakespeare is not 
 giving expression to an attitude of mind 
 which was his in an interval of his passage from 
 serenity to serenity. His young comedies 
 have, first, the trivial gaiety of mere youth 
 before the spectacle of the world; then a 
 
160 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 woodland breath and sweetness, all the com- 
 fort of nature, not tried past forbearance. 
 Tragedy comes into the scheme of things simply 
 as a disturbance natural to life at its height, 
 the shadow pursuing love, beauty, all the 
 graces of the world. The shadow darkens, 
 the colours of life are washed one by one out 
 of it, in a mere inexplicable spoiling of the 
 delicate fabric. At the last we get the ulti- 
 mate calm of The Tempest, which is the calm 
 of one who has suffered shipwreck and escaped. 
 Troilus and Cressida is laughter in the midst 
 of the storm; it has all the wisdom that lies 
 in the deepest irony. The wisdom of Shake- 
 speare, as we sum it up from a contemplation 
 of his whole work, is neither optimism nor 
 pessimism, but includes both. It is part of 
 Shakespeare's vital immensity that he can 
 give us in a single play, as in Troilus and Cres- 
 sida, a complete philosophy, which will prove 
 sufficient for the use and fame of more than 
 one great writer who is to come after him; 
 and can then go on his way, creating new 
 aspects from which to see life, as nature itself 
 leads the way for him. 
 1907. 
 
XI. PHILIP MASSINGER 
 
 Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, 
 and was baptized at St. Thomas's on the 
 24th November, 1583; he died at London, 
 in his house on the Bankside, and was buried 
 in St. Saviour's on the 18th March, 1638. 
 His father, Arthur Massinger, was a retainer 
 of the Herbert family, in whose service, we 
 learn from the dedication of The Bondman, 
 he "happily spent many years, and died a 
 servant to it." The exact significance of the 
 word ''servant" used many times in reference 
 to Arthur Massinger's position, is not quite 
 clear; it certainly represents an honorable 
 form of service. Evidence of the respect in 
 which the elder Massinger was held may be 
 found in the letters and despatches of Henry, 
 Earl of Pembroke. One of these, addressed 
 to Lord Burghley, recommends him for the 
 reversion of the office of Examiner in the Court 
 of the Marches of Wales; another refers to 
 him as negotiator in a treaty of marriage be- 
 
 161 
 
162 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 tween the Pembroke and Burghley families; 
 yet another describes him as the bearer of 
 letters from Pembroke to the Queen. It has 
 been conjectured that PhiHp Massinger may 
 himself have been page to the Countess of 
 Pembroke at Wilton, and imaginative his- 
 torians are pleased to fancy Sir Philip Sidney 
 as his possible godfather. Life at the most 
 cultured and refined house in England, if such 
 favour was indeed granted him, would acquaint 
 the future painter of courtly manners with the 
 minutest details of his subject; and in some 
 of the men and women who met at Wilton he 
 would see the ideal of manly chivalry, and a 
 higher than the ideal of womanly virtue, to 
 which his writings were to bear witness. 
 
 The first authentic account of Massinger, 
 after the register of his baptism, is the entry 
 of "Philippus Massinger, Sarisburiensis, gene- 
 rosi filius, nat. an. 18" (Philip Massinger, of 
 Salisbury, the son of a gentleman, aged 18) 
 as a commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, 
 May 14th, 1602. Wood tells us that "he 
 gave his mind more to poetry and romances 
 for about four years or more, than to logic 
 and philosophy, which he ought to have 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 163 
 
 done, as he was patronized to that end" by 
 the Earl of Pembroke. Langbaine, on the 
 other hand, asserts that he closely pursued his 
 studies for three or four years, and that he was 
 supported solely by his father. It is difficult 
 for a reader of Massinger to help believing that 
 logic and philosophy alternated evenly enough 
 with poetry and romances. Massinger's Latin, 
 by no means despicable, though it has a tend- 
 ency to concentrate itself in the very service- 
 able phrase Nil ultra, scarcely suggests the 
 temper of a scholar; but that passionate fond- 
 ness for argument, and intense devotion to 
 principles in the abstract, visible in every page 
 of his works, would consort very ill with the 
 character of the heedless loiterer on learning 
 indicated to us by Wood. In 1606 he quitted 
 the University abruptly, and without taking 
 a degree. About the same time occurred (it 
 is believed) the death of his father; it has been 
 suggested, on the one hand, that he was by this 
 circumstance deprived of his support (suppos- 
 ing it to have been provided by his father); 
 on the other, somewhat fancifully, that "his 
 father's death bereft him of the heart and hope 
 of his academical studies." But if we believe 
 
164 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Wood's account, his exhibition was from the 
 Earl of Pembroke. The old Earl Henry, 
 Arthur Massinger's patron, had died on Jan- 
 uary 19, 1601. PhiHp Massinger, therefore, 
 who went to Oxford more than a year after 
 Earl Henry's death, would owe his support 
 to William (the supposed ''Mr. W. H," of 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets), eldest son and suc- 
 cessor of the old earl.i Why should this 
 support be suddenly and finally withdrawn? 
 Earl William, we are told by Clarendon, was 
 "the most universally beloved and esteemed 
 of any man of that age ... of a pleasant and 
 facetious humour, and a disposition generous 
 and munificent . . . ready to promote the 
 pretences of the worthy." Why then should 
 he have ceased to promote the "pretences" 
 of such a man as Philip Massinger, the son 
 of one of his father's most trusted retainers? 
 It is conjectured by Gifford that Massinger, 
 "during his residence in the University, had 
 exchanged the religion of his father for one at 
 that time the object of terror, persecution, 
 
 ^ The Countess of Pembroke, though living at the time, 
 had been left by her husband so badly provided for, that 
 any assistance from her would be quite out of the question. 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 165 
 
 and hatred," and had, by becoming a Roman 
 Catholic, aHenated the sympathies of the 
 Earl of Pembroke, who is known to have pro- 
 fessed a zealous and patriotic Protestantism. 
 "He was a great lover of his country," says 
 Clarendon, ''and of the religion and justice 
 which he believed could only support it; and 
 his friendships were only with men of these 
 principles^' In support of his hypothesis, 
 Gifford points particularly to The Virgin 
 Martyr, The Renegade, and The Maid of 
 Honour. I cannot think the evidence of these 
 plays conclusive; but, such as it is, it certainly 
 goes a long way in favour of the supposition. 
 Besides the ecclesiastical legends, the curious 
 conversions of The Virgin Martyr, the implied 
 belief in baptismal regeneration, and the 
 wonder-working Jesuit of The Renegade, Mas- 
 singer's view of life and tone of moralizing 
 not in these plays alone, are far removed from 
 the Puritan standpoint, while distinctly and 
 indeed assertively religious. The Roman 
 Catholic religion would naturally have con- 
 siderable attraction for a man of Massinger's 
 temperament; and he would certainly have 
 every opportunity of association with it in a 
 
166 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 University of such Catholic and conservative 
 principles as Oxford. 
 
 After leaving the University in 1606, Mas- 
 singer appears to have gone to London, 
 where, according to Antony Wood, ''being 
 sufficiently famed for several specimens of 
 wit, he betook himself to writing plays." 
 The English drama was now at its height; 
 Shakespeare was producing his latest and 
 greatest tragic masterpieces; Jonson, Chap- 
 man, Dekker, Middleton, and perhaps Mars- 
 ton, were at their best; Webster was nearing 
 his artistic maturity, and Tourneur flaming out 
 in his sudden phase of short-lived brilliance; 
 Beaumont and Fletcher were about to begin 
 their career. When and how Massinger began 
 to write we are not aware: probably, like 
 most playrvTights of the time, he began with 
 adaptation. The first mention of his name 
 as a dramatist occurs in the year 1621, when 
 his comedy The Woman's Plot (the play known 
 to us under the name of A Very Woman) was 
 performed at Court. During this period of 
 fifteen years he probably produced seven plays, 
 now lost to us through Mr. Warburton's 
 insatiable cook;i several others in collabora- 
 
 '": ^ The plays in Warburton's possession, burnt leaf by leaf 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 167 
 
 tion with Fletcher ;i and The Virgin Martyr, 
 The Fatal Dowry, The Unnatural Combat, and 
 The Duke of Milan. It may be doubted 
 whether Massinger was ever sufficiently popu- 
 lar to make a very good living out of his pro- 
 fession of playwright. We have evidence, 
 in the pitiful document discovered by Malone 
 in the archives of Dulwich College, that in 
 the early part of his career he was reduced to 
 beg urgently for an immediate loan of £5. 
 The document is undated; but it is assigned 
 by Mr. Collier to 1624 or the previous year. 
 
 After this melancholy flash of light into the 
 darkness of a somewhat shadowy existence, we 
 learn nothing more of Massinger's personal 
 history up to the time of his death, with the 
 exception of the dates of the licensing of his 
 plays, a few allusions to them, and an infer- 
 by his cook as covers for pie-crust, were the following: 
 Minerva's Sacrifice, or, the Forced Lady (tragedy); The 
 Nohh Choice, or, The Orator (comedy); The Wandering 
 Lovers, or. The Painter (comedy, by Massinger and 
 Fletcher); Philenzo and Hippolita (tragi-comedy, altered 
 by Massinger); Antonio and Vallia (comedy, altered by 
 Massinger); The Tyrant (tragedy); and Fast and Welcome 
 (comedy). 
 
 ^ The plays written by Massinger and Fletcher together 
 (mostly near about this period) are probably not less than 
 thirteen or fourteen. 
 
168 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 ence or two which may be drawn from their 
 dedications. It is interesting to know that 
 Henrietta Maria paid Massinger the unusual 
 compUment of attending the performance of 
 his lost tragedy Oleander (produced May 7th, 
 1634); and that another play now lost, The 
 King and the Subject, having been referred 
 by the Master of the Revels to the decision of 
 Charles, the king gave judgment in its favour, 
 contenting himself with striking out a single 
 passage touching too closely on the burning 
 question of Ship-Money, with the words, 
 *'This is too insolent, and to be changed." 
 
 On the morning of the 17th of March, 1638, 
 Massinger, who had gone to bed on the pre- 
 vious night in apparent health, was found 
 dead in his house on the Bankside. He was 
 buried in St. Saviour's, South wark; the entry 
 of his interment reads: ^'1638. March 18th. 
 Philip Massinger, stranger, in the church 
 . . . 2 li." The word "stranger," pathetic 
 as it now sounds, meant nothing more than 
 non-parishioner; and it has been supposed that 
 this fact accounts for the unusual amount of 
 the charge, £2, or double that entered twelve 
 years earlier in the register of the same church 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 1G9 
 
 for "John Fletcher, a poet." It is said by- 
 Sir Aston Cockayne, in his "Epitaph on 
 Mr. John Fletcher and Mr Philip Massinger," 
 that Massinger and Fletcher, friends and com- 
 rades in life, were buried in the same grave. 
 
 When Massinger came to London, the 
 English drama, as I have said, was at its 
 height. But before he had begun any dramatic 
 work of importance the turning-point had been 
 reached, and the period of descent or degen- 
 eration begun. Elizabethan had given place 
 to Stuart England, and with the dynasty the 
 whole spirit of the nation was changing. 
 Fletcher and Massinger together represent 
 this period: Fletcher by painting with dashing 
 brilliance the light^ bright, showy, super- 
 ficial aristocratic life of wild and graceful 
 wantonness; Massinger by painting with a 
 graver and a firmer brush, in darker colours 
 and more considered outlines, the shadier 
 side of the same impressive and unsatisfactory 
 existence. The indications of lessening vital- 
 ity and strength, of departing simplicity, of 
 growing extravagance and affectation, which 
 mark the period of transition, reappear in 
 the drama of Massinger, as in that of Shirley, 
 
170 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and sever it, by a wide and visible gulf, from 
 the drama which we properly name Eliza- 
 bethan. Massinger is the late twilight of the 
 long and splendid day of which Marlowe was 
 the dawn. 
 
 The characteristics of any poet's genius 
 are seen clearly in his versification. Massin- 
 ger's verse is facile, vigorous, grave, in the 
 main correct; but without delicacy or rarity, 
 without splendour or strength of melody; 
 the verse of a man who can write easily, and 
 who is not always too careful to remember 
 that he is writing poetry. Owing, no doubt, 
 partly to the facility with which he wrote, 
 Massinger often has imperfectly accentuated 
 lines, such as: 
 
 They did expect to be chain'd to the oar. 
 
 Coleridge has remarked on the very slight 
 degree in which Massinger' s verse is dis- 
 tinguished from prose; and no one can read 
 a page of any of his plays without being struck 
 by it. It is not merely that a large proportion 
 of the lines run on and overlap their neigh- 
 bours; this is only the visible sign of a radical 
 peculiarity. The pitch of Massinger's verse 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 171 
 
 is somewhat lower than the proper pitch of 
 poetry; somewhat too near the common pitch 
 of prose. Shakespeare, indeed, in his latest 
 period, extended the rhythm of verse to its 
 loosest and freest limits; but not merely 
 did he never pass beyond the invisible and 
 unmistakeable boundary, he retained the true 
 intonation of poetry as completely as in his 
 straitest periods of metrical restraint. 
 
 Massinger set himself to follow in the steps 
 of Shakespeare, and he succeeded in catching 
 with admirable skill much of the easy flow and 
 conversational facility at which he aimed. 
 ''His English style," says Lamb, ''is the purest 
 and most free from violent metaphors and 
 harsh constructions, of any of the dramatists 
 who were his contemporaries. ' ' But this ' ' pure 
 and free" style obtains its freedom and purity 
 at a heavy cost; or let us say rather, the style 
 possesses a certain degree of these two quali- 
 ties because of the absence of certain others. 
 Shakespeare's freest verse is the fullest of 
 episodical beauties and of magical lines. But 
 it is a singular thing, especially singular in a 
 writer distinguished not only by fluency but by 
 dignity and true eloquence, that in the whole 
 
172 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 of Massinger's extant works there are scarcely 
 a dozen lines of intrinsic and separable beauty. 
 It would be useless to look in the Massinger 
 part of The Virgin Martyr for any such lines 
 as these of Dekker: 
 
 I could weary stars, 
 
 And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes, 
 
 By my late watching. 
 
 It would be equally useless to search from end 
 to end of his plays. Easy flowing lines, vigor- 
 ous lines, eloquent and persuasive lines, we 
 could find in plenty; but nowhere a line in 
 which colour melts into music, and both be- 
 come magical. Not quite so difficult, but still 
 very hard indeed, would it be to find any single 
 lines of that rare and weighty sort which may 
 be said to resemble the jar in the Arabian 
 Nights into which Solomon had packed the 
 genie. Had Massinger wished to represent 
 Vittoria Accoramboni before her judges, he 
 would have written for her a thoroughly elo- 
 quent, admirable, and telling oration; but he 
 could never have wrought her speech into that 
 dagger with which Webster drives home the 
 sharpness of her imperial scorn. That one 
 line of infinite meaning: 
 
 Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young; 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 173 
 
 spoken by Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi 
 over the corpse of his murdered sister, has no 
 parallel in Massinger, who would probably 
 have begun a long and elaborate piece of 
 rhetoric with 
 
 Stay, I feel 
 A sudden alteration 
 
 If we carry these considerations further, we 
 shall see how fully the mental characteristics 
 of Massinger correspond with the evidences 
 of them in his versification. The ease and 
 facility shown in the handling of metre are 
 manifest equally in the plot and conduct of 
 the plays. Massinger thoroughly understood 
 the art of the playwright. No one perhaps, 
 after Shakespeare, proved himself so constantly 
 capable of constructing an orderly play and 
 working it steadily out. His openings are as 
 a rule admirable; thoroughly effective, ex- 
 planatory and preparatory. How well, for 
 instance, the first scene of The Duke of Milan 
 prepares us, by a certain uneasiness or anxiety 
 of its trembling pitch of happiness, for the 
 events which are to follow! It is not always 
 possible to say as much for his conclusions. 
 Ingenuity, certainly, and considerable con- 
 
174 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 structive skill, are there, in a greater or less 
 degree; and in not a few instances (as in that 
 delightful play The Great Duke of Florence, or 
 in that powerful play Believe as You List) 
 the conclusion is altogether right and satis- 
 fying. But in many instances Massinger's 
 very endeavor to wind off his play in the 
 neatest manner, without any tangles or frayed 
 edges, spoils the proper artistic effect. His 
 persistent aversion to a tragic end, even 
 where a virtual tragedy demands it; his in- 
 vincible determination to make things come 
 to a fortunate conclusion, even if the action 
 has to be huddled up or squashed together in 
 consequence; in a word, his concession to the 
 popular taste, no matter at what cost, not 
 unfrequently distorts the conclusion of plays 
 up to this point well conducted. 
 
 Massinger's treatment of character follows 
 in some respects, while it seems in others to 
 contradict, his treatment of versification and 
 of construction. Where Massinger most con- 
 clusively fails is in a right understanding and a 
 right representation of human nature; in the 
 power to conceive passion and bring its speech 
 and action vividly and accurately before us. 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 176 
 
 His theory of human nature is apparently 
 that of the puppet-player: he is aware of 
 violent but not of consistent action, of change 
 but not of development. No dramatist talks 
 so much of virtue and vice, but he has no con- 
 ception of either except in the abstract; and 
 he finds it not in the least surprising that a 
 virtuous woman should suddenly cry out : 
 
 Chastity, 
 Thou only art a name, and I renounce thee! 
 
 or that a fanatical Mohammedan should 
 embrace Christianity on being told that the 
 Prophet was a juggler, and taught birds to 
 feed in his ear. His motto might be : 
 
 We are all the balls of time, tossed to and fro; 
 
 for his conception of life is that of a game of 
 
 wild and inconsequent haphazard. It is true 
 
 that he rewards his good people and punishes 
 
 the bad with the most scrupulous care; but 
 
 the good or bad person at the end of a play 
 
 is not always the good or bad person of the 
 
 beginning. Massinger's outlook is by no 
 
 means vague or sceptical on religion^ or on 
 
 1 The Renegado is a treatise on Christian evidence, The 
 Virgin Martyr a chronicle of Christian martyrdom, The 
 Maid of Honour concludes with a taking of the veil. 
 
176 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 morals; he is moralist before all things, and 
 the copy-book tags neatly pinned on to the 
 conclusion of each play are only a somewhat 
 clumsy exhibition of a real conviction and con- 
 scientiousness. But his morality is nerveless, 
 and aimless in its general effect ; or it translates 
 itself, oddly enough, into a co-partner of con- 
 fusion, a disturbing and distracting element 
 of mischief. 
 
 Notwithstanding all we may say of Mas- 
 singer's facility, it is evident that we have in 
 him no mere improvisator, or contentedly hasty 
 and superficial person. He was an earnest 
 thinker, a thoughtful politician, a careful 
 observer of the manners and men of his time, 
 and, to the extent of his capacity, an eager 
 student of human nature; but, for all that, 
 his position is that of a foreigner travelling 
 through a country of whose language he 
 knows but a few words or sentences. He 
 observes with keenness, he infers with acumen; 
 but when he proceeds to take the last step, 
 the final touch which transmutes recorded 
 observation into vital fact, he finds (or we, 
 at least, find) that his strength is exhausted, 
 his limit reached. He observes, for instance. 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 177 
 
 that the characters and motives of men 
 are in general mixed; and especially, and in a 
 special degree, those of men of a certain class, 
 and in certain positions. But when we look 
 at the personages whom he presents before us 
 as mixed characters, we perceive that they 
 are not so in themselves, but are mixed in the 
 making. ''We do not forbid an artist in 
 fiction," says Swinburne in speaking of Charles 
 Reade, 'Ho set before us strange instances of 
 inconsistency and eccentricity in conduct; 
 but we do require of the artist that he should 
 make us feel such aberrations to be as clearly 
 inevitable as they are confessedly exceptional." 
 Now this is just what Massinger does not do: 
 it is just here that he comes short of success 
 as a dramatic artist. In Calderon's figure, we 
 see his men dancing to the rhythm of a music 
 which we cannot hear: nothing is visible to 
 us but the grotesque contortions and fantastic 
 motions of the dancer. 
 
 Where Massinger fails is in the power of 
 identifying himself with his characters, at 
 least in their moments of profound passion or 
 strenuous action. At his best (or let us 
 say, to be scrupulous, at almost his best) he 
 
178 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 succeeds on the one hand in representing the 
 gentler and secondary passions and emotions; 
 on the other, in describing the action of the 
 primary passions very accurately and admi- 
 rably, but, as it were, in the third person, and 
 from the outside. As Leslie Stephen says 
 with reference to a fine speech of Sir Giles 
 Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 
 "Read 'he' for 'I,' and 'his' for 'my,' and it 
 is an admirable bit of denunciation of a char- 
 acter probably intended as a copy from real 
 life." His characters seldom quite speak out; 
 they have almost always about them a sort 
 of rhetorical self-consciousness. The language 
 of pure passion is unknown to them; they can 
 only strive to counterfeit its dialect. In 
 handling a situation of tragic passion, in 
 developing a character subject to the shocks 
 of an antagonistic Fate, Massinger manifests 
 a singular lack of vital force, a singular failure 
 in the realizing imagination. He mistakes 
 extravagance for strength, eloquence for con- 
 viction, feverishness for vitality. Take, for 
 instance, the jealousy of Theodosius in The 
 Emperor of the East. His conduct and language 
 are altogether unreasoning and unreasonable, 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 179 
 
 the extravagances of a weak and unballasted 
 nature, depicted by one who can only thus 
 conceive of strong passions. His sudden and 
 overmastering jealousy at sight of the apple 
 given by Eudocia to Paulinus is without 
 probability; and Eudocia's lie when charged 
 with the gift is without reason. It is almost 
 too cruel in this connection to think of Desde- 
 mona's handkerchief; of the admirable and 
 inevitable logic of the means by which Othello's 
 mind is not so much imbued with suspicion 
 as convinced with certainty. ''AH this pother 
 for an apple!" as some sensible person in 
 the play observes. Again, in The Fatal Dowry, 
 compare for a moment Malefort's careful 
 bombast, which leaves us cold and incredu- 
 lous before an impossible and uninteresting 
 monster of wickedness, with the biting and 
 flaming words of Francesco Cenci, before which 
 we shudder as at the fiery breath of the pit. 
 Almost all Massinger's villains, notwithstand- 
 ing the fearful language which they are in the 
 habit of employing, fail to convince us of their 
 particular wickedness; most of his tried and 
 triumphant heroes fail to convince us of their 
 vitality of virtue. Massinger's conception of 
 
180 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 evil is surprisingly naive: he is frightened, 
 completely taken in, by the big words and 
 blustering looks of these bold and wicked men. 
 He paints them with an inky brush, he tells 
 us how very wicked they are, and he sets them 
 denouncing themselves and their wickedness 
 with a beautiful tenderness of conscience. 
 The blackness of evil and the contrasted 
 whiteness of virtue are alike lost on us, and 
 the good moral with them; for we are unable 
 to believe in the existence of any such beings. 
 It is the same with those exhibitions of tempted 
 virtue of which Massinger is so fond. I do 
 not allude now to cases of actual martyrdom 
 or persecution, such as those of Dorothea or 
 Antiochus; but to situations of a more com- 
 plex nature, such as that of Mathias with 
 Honoria, or Bertoldo with Aurelia, in w^hich 
 we are expected to see the soul's conflict 
 between virtue enthroned and vice assailant. 
 The fault is that of inadequate realization of 
 the true bearing of the situation; inadequate 
 representation of the conflict which is very 
 properly assumed to be going on. Massinger 
 is like a man who knows that the dial-hand 
 of the clock will describe a certain circle, 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 181 
 
 passing from point to point to significant 
 figures; but instead of winding up the clock, 
 and setting it going of itself, he can only move 
 round the hand on the outside. To use 
 another figure, his characters oscillate rather 
 than advance, their conversions are without 
 saving effect on their souls, their falls have no 
 damnation. They are alike outside them- 
 selves, and they talk of "my lust," "my 
 virtue," as of detached and portable con- 
 veniences. 
 
 When we drop to a lower level than that of 
 pure tragedy, when we turn to characters who 
 are grave, or mild, or melancholy, or unfor- 
 tunate, rather than passionate, intense, and 
 flexible, we find that Massinger is more in 
 his element. "Grave and great-hearted," as 
 Swinburne calls him, he could bring before us, 
 with sympathetic skill, characters whose pre- 
 dominant bent is towards a melancholy and 
 great-hearted gravity, a calm and eloquent 
 dignity, a self-sacrificing nobility of service, 
 or lofty endurance of inevitable wrong. Mas- 
 singer's favourite play was The Roman Actor: 
 "I ever held it," he says in his dedication, 
 "the most perfect birth of my Minerva." 
 
182 STUDIi^ IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 It is impossible to say quite that; but it is 
 certainly representative of some among the 
 noble qualities of its writer, while it shows very 
 clearly the defects of these qualities. What 
 it represents is scarcely human nature; but 
 actions and single passions painted for the 
 halls of kings. A certain cold loftiness, noble 
 indeed, but not attained without some freez- 
 ing of vital heat, informs it. Paris, the actor, 
 is rather a grave and stately shadow than a 
 breathing man; but the idealization is nobly 
 conceived; and both actor and tyrant, Paris 
 and Domitian, are, in their way, impressive 
 figures, made manifest, not concealed, in 
 rhetorical prolusions really appropriate to 
 their time and character. Another classical 
 play, the less-known Believe as You List, 
 contains a figure in which I think we have the 
 very best work of which Massinger was 
 capable. The character of the deposed and 
 exiled King Antiochus has a true heroism 
 and kingliness about it; his language, a pas- 
 sionate and haughty dignity. The quiet con- 
 stancy, the undaunted and uncomplaining 
 endurance of the utmost ills of Fate, which 
 mark the character and the utterance of the 
 
PHILIP ^L\SSINGER 183 
 
 Asian Emperor, raise the poetry of the play 
 to a height but seldom attained by the pedes- 
 trian Pegasus of !Massinger. As Antiochus 
 is the most impressive of his heroes, so Flam- 
 inius is one of the most really human and con- 
 sistent of his \dllains. The end of the play is 
 natural, po-werful, and significant beyond 
 that of any other; so natural, powerful, and 
 significant, that we may feel quite sure it was 
 received with doubtful satisfaction by the 
 audience above whose head and against whose 
 taste the poet had for once chosen to write. 
 
 In one or two striking portraits (those for 
 example of the ironical old courtier Eubulus 
 in The Picture, the old soldier Archidamus 
 in The Bondman, or the faithful friend Romont 
 in The Fatal Dowry) Massinger has shown his 
 appreciation of honest worth and sober fidel- 
 ity, qualities not of a showy kind, the recogni- 
 tion and representation of which do him hon- 
 our. In The Bashful Lover and The Maid of 
 Honour he has represented with special sym- 
 pathy two phases of reverential and modest 
 love. Hortensio, of the former, is a sort of 
 pale Quixote, a knight-errant a little crazed; 
 very sincere^ and a trifle ^iven to uttering^ 
 
184 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 
 
 vague and useless professions of hyperbolical 
 humility and devotion. There is a certain 
 febrile nobleness, a showy chivalry, about 
 him; but we are conscious of something 
 "got up" and over-conscious in the exhibi- 
 tion. Adorni, the rejected lover in The Maid 
 of Honour, is a truly noble and pathetic 
 picture; altogether without the specious elo- 
 quence and petted despair of Hortensio, but 
 thoroughly human and rationally self-sacri- 
 ficing. His duet with Camiola at the close of 
 the third act is one of the very finest scenes 
 in Massinger's works: that passage where the 
 woman he loves despatches him to the rescue 
 of the man on whom her own heart is set. 
 "You will do this?" she says; and he answers, 
 "Faithfully, madam," and then to himself 
 aside, "but not live long after." A touch of 
 this sort is but too rare in Massinger. 
 
 Wliile I am speaking of The Maid of Honour, 
 let me refer to the character of Camiola her- 
 self: incomparably Massinger's finest portrait 
 of a woman. Camiola ("that small but 
 ravishing substance," as, with a rare and 
 infrequent touch of delicate characterization, 
 she is somewhere called) is notwithstanding a 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 185 
 
 few flaws in her delineation, a thoroughly 
 delightful and admirable creature; full of 
 bright strength and noble constancy, of wom- 
 anly heart and most manly spirit and wit. 
 Her bearing in the scene, to a part of which 
 I have alluded, is admirable throughout; 
 not admirable alone, but exquisite, are her 
 quick "Never think more then" to the ser- 
 vant; her outcry about the ''petty sum" 
 of the ransom; and especially the words of 
 "perfect moan" which fall from her when 
 she learns the hopeless estate of her lover, 
 imprisoned by his enemy, abandoned by his 
 King: 
 
 Possible! pray you, stand off. 
 If I do not mutter treason to myself, 
 My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him; 
 He is my King. The news you have delivered 
 Makes me weary of your company; we'll salute 
 When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door. 
 Nay, pray you, no more compliments. 
 
 When she learns of the treachery of the 
 lover for whom she has done so much, her 
 wondering and sorrowful "0 Bertoldo!" is 
 worth a world of rhetoric. It is she who utters 
 the most famous phrase in Massinger, the 
 fearless indictment of the Court doctrine of 
 
186 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the divinity of kings. "With your leave/* 
 she says to the King of Sicily, 
 
 With your leave, I must not kneel, sir, 
 While I reply to this : but thus rise up 
 In my defence, and tell you, as a man, 
 (Since, when you are unjitst, the deity, 
 Which you may challenge as a king, parts from you) 
 'Twas never read in holy writ, or moral. 
 That subjects on their loyalty were obliged 
 To love their sovereign's vices. 
 
 Her speech in answer to Bertoldo's hollow pro- 
 testations of penitence, the ''Pray you, rise," 
 is full of delicate tact and subtle beauty of 
 spirit. 
 
 Unfortunately all Massinger's women are 
 not of the stamp of Camiola. Lidia, indeed, 
 in The Great Duke of Florence, is a good, 
 sweet, modest girl; Cleora in The Bondman 
 would like to be so; Bellisant in The Parlia- 
 ment of Love is a brilliant, dashing creature; 
 Margaret in A New Way to Pay Old Debts 
 is an emphatically nice, shrewd, pleasant 
 woman; and Matilda in The Bashful Lover 
 a commonplace, decent young person, without 
 a thread or shade of distinction. But Massin- 
 ger's general conception of women, and the 
 greater number of his portraits of them, are 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 187 
 
 alike debased and detestable. His bad women 
 are incredible monsters of preposterous vice; 
 his good women are brittle and tainted. They 
 breathe the air of courts, and the air is poisoned. 
 Themselves the vilest, they walk through a 
 violent and unnaturally vicious world of 
 depraved imagination, greedy of pleasure and 
 rhetorical of desire. They are shamefacedly 
 shameless; offensive and without passion; 
 importunate and insatiable Potiphar's wives. 
 '^ Pleasure's their heaven," affirms somebody; 
 and their pleasure is without bit or bridle, 
 without rule or direction. Massinger's favour- 
 ite situation is that of a queen or princess 
 violently and heedlessly enamoured of a man, 
 appaiently of mean estate, though he generally 
 turns out to be a duke in disguise, whom she 
 has never seen five minutes before. Over 
 and over again is this wretched farce gone 
 through; always without passion, sincerity, 
 or strength; always flatly, coldly, ridiculously. 
 I am afraid Massinger thought his Donusas, 
 Corsicas, Domitias, Aurelias, Honorias, and 
 Beaumelles brilliant and fascinating flowers 
 of evil, sisters of Cleopatra and Semiramis, 
 magnificently wicked women. In reality they 
 
188 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 never attain to the level of a Delilah. They 
 are vulgar-minded to the core; weak and 
 without stability; mere animals if they are not 
 mere puppets. The stain of sensuality or the 
 smutch of vulgarity is upon even the virtuous. 
 Marcelia, in The Duke of Milan, supposed to 
 be a woman of spotless virtue, utters language 
 full of covert licence; for Massinger seems to 
 see virtue in women mainly as a sort of con- 
 scious and painful restraint. Eudocia, in 
 The Emperor of the East, an injured, innocent 
 wife, betrays an unconscious vulgarity of 
 mind which is enough to withdraw our sym- 
 pathy from a fairly well-deserving object. The 
 curious thing is, not so much that the same 
 pen could draw Camiola and Corsica, but that 
 the same pen could draw Camiola and Marcelia. 
 Massinger's main field is the romantic 
 drama. He attempted, indeed, tragedy, com- 
 edy, and history; but both tragedy and history 
 assume in his hands a romantic cast, while his 
 two great comedies verge constantly upon 
 tragedy. Of his two most distinct and most 
 distinguished tragedies, The Duke of Milan 
 and The Fatal Dowry, the former is a powerful 
 and impressive work, rising in parts to his 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 189 
 
 highest level; the latter, despite its conven- 
 tional reputation, which it owes partly to 
 Rowe's effective plagiarization in The Fair 
 Penitent, a scarcely adequate or satisfactory 
 production. Two or three passages^ in the 
 latter part of The Fatal Dowry have the true 
 accent of nature; but even these are marred 
 by the base alloy with which they are mingled. 
 But The Duke of Milan, despite much that is 
 inadequate and even absurd in its handling, 
 rises again and again to something of passion 
 and of insight. The character and the cir- 
 cumstances of Sforza have been often com- 
 pared with those of Othello: they are still 
 more similar, I should venture to think, to 
 those of Griffith Gaunt; and they have the 
 damning fault of the latter, that the jealousy 
 and its consequences are not made to seem 
 quite inevitable. Sforza is an example, though 
 perhaps the most favourable one, of that 
 inconsequential oscillation of nature to which 
 I have already referred as characteristic of 
 
 ^ Found chiefly in the last scene of the fourth act; from 
 "If this be to me, rise," to "That to be merciful should be a 
 sin," and again in the few words following on the death of 
 Beaumelle; with a passage or two in the fifth act. 
 
190 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 most of Massinger's prominent characters. 
 But his capacity for sudden and extreme 
 changes of disposition, and his violent and 
 unhinged passion, are represented with more 
 dramatic power, with more force and natural- 
 ness, than it is at all usual to find in Mas- 
 singer; who has here contrived to give a fre- 
 quent effect of fineness to the frenzies and 
 delusions of his hero. If Sforza is after all 
 but a second-rate Othello, Marcelia is certainly 
 a very shrewish Desdemona, and Francisco a 
 palpably poor lago.^ 
 
 In tragi-comedy, the romantic drama pure 
 and simple, we may take The Great Duke of 
 Florence as the most exquisite example. In 
 this, the most purely deHghtful play, I think, 
 ever written by Massinger, a play which we 
 read, to use Lamb's expression, "with com- 
 posure and placid delight," we see the sweetest 
 and most delicate side of Massinger's genius: 
 a country pleasantness and freshness, a mas- 
 querading and genial gravity, altogether 
 
 ^ There is one touch however, in the temptings of 
 Francisco which is really almost worthy of lago: 
 
 She's yet guilty 
 Only in her intent! 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 191 
 
 charming and attractive. The plot is admi- 
 rably woven; and how prettily brought about 
 to a happy conclusion, with its good humour, 
 forgiveness, and friendship all around! There 
 is something almost of Shakespeare's charm 
 in people and events; in these princes and 
 courtiers without ceremony and without vice, 
 uttering pretty sentiments prettily, and play- 
 ing elegantly at life; in these simple lovers, 
 with their dainty, easy trials and crosses on the 
 way to happiness; in the villain who does no 
 real harm, and whom nobody can hate. The 
 Guardian, a late play, very fine and flexible 
 in its rhythm, and very brisk in its action, 
 has some exquisite country feeling, together 
 with three or four of the most abominable 
 characters and much of the vilest language 
 in Massinger. One character at least, Dar- 
 azzo, the male of Juliet's nurse, is really, 
 though offensive enough in all conscience, 
 very heartily and graphically depicted. A 
 Very Woman, again, by Massinger and 
 Fletcher,! has much that is pleasant and 
 delightful; some of it full of sweetness, with 
 
 ^ Fletcher's slave-market scene in Act III is a piece of 
 admirable merriment; singularly realistic and inventive. 
 
192 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 some that is rank enough. I have spoken 
 already of The Maid of Honour, or it might be 
 mentioned here as a play uniting (somewhat 
 as in Measure for Measure, which it partly 
 resembles) the lighter and graver qualities 
 of tragedy and comedy under the form of the 
 romantic drama. 
 
 Massinger's lack of humour did not prevent 
 him from writing comedy, nor yet from achiev- 
 ing signal success in it. A New Way to Pay 
 Old Debts is the most memorable of his plays; 
 but, though it is styled a comedy, it is cer- 
 tainly not for laughter that we turn to it. 
 A New Way and The City Madam belong to 
 the Comedy of Manners; satirical tran- 
 script of contemporary Ufe, somewhat after the 
 style of Terence or Plautus. All Massinger's 
 plays are distinguished by an earnest and 
 corrective tone on contemporary politics and 
 current fashions; and it is no wonder that he 
 succeeded in a species of play devoted wholly 
 to the exhibition and satirization of the follies 
 and vanities of the day. His constant touch 
 on manners, even in romantic plays with classi- 
 cal or eastern localities, is peculiar, and 
 suggests a certain pre-occupation with the 
 
PHILIP MASSINGER 193 
 
 subject, possibly due to early associations at 
 Wilton House, possibly to mere personal bent 
 or circumstances. Remembering the letter 
 of 1624, we may be allowed to fancy a personal 
 applicability in the frequent denunciations 
 of usurers and delineations of the misery of 
 poor debtors. But besides that, I think that 
 Massinger, having no force to enter into the 
 deep and secret chambers of the soul, found 
 his place to be in a censorship of society, and 
 was right in concerning himself with what he 
 could do so well. His professedly comic 
 types, even Justice Greedy, are mere ex- 
 aggerations, solitary traits frozen into the 
 semblance of men, without really comic effect. 
 But in the conduct of these two plays, in the 
 episodical illuminations of London and pro- 
 vincial life, in the wealth of observation and 
 satire which they exhibit, Massinger has left 
 us work of permanent value; and in the char- 
 acter of Sir Giles Overreach he has made his 
 single contribution to the gallery of permanent 
 illustrations of human nature: a portrait to 
 be spoken of with Grandet and with Harpagon. 
 Massinger is the product of his period, and 
 he reflects faithfully the temper of court and 
 
194 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 society under the first Charles. Much that 
 we have to regret in him was due to the mis- 
 fortune of his coming just when he did, at the 
 ebb of a spent wave; but the best that he had 
 was all his own. Serious, a thinker, a moralist, 
 gifted with an instinct for nobility and a 
 sympathy in whatever is generous and self- 
 sacrificing, a practical student of history, 
 and an honest satirist of social abuses, he was 
 at the same time an admirable story-teller, 
 and a master of dramatic construction. But 
 his grave and varied genius was lacking in 
 the primary requirements of the dramatist: 
 in imagination, in strength, in sincerity. He 
 has no real mastery over the passions, and his 
 eloquence does not appeal to the heart. He 
 interests us strongly; but he does not convince 
 us in spite of ourselves. The whole man is 
 seen in the portrait by which we know him: 
 in the contrast and contradiction of that 
 singular face, which interests, to some degree 
 attracts, yet never satisfies us, with its melan- 
 choly and thoughtful grace, marred by a cer- 
 tain vague weakness and a scarcely definable 
 sense of something lacking. 
 1887. 
 
XII. JOHN DAY 
 
 John Day, "sometime Student of Caius 
 College, Cambridge," a ''base fellow" and a 
 "rogue" according to Ben Jonson, a good 
 man and a charming writer if the evidence of 
 his own plays may be credited, seems to have 
 come down to posterity in the person of his 
 best work, and of little beside his best. When 
 he began to write for the stage is not known, — 
 before 1593, some have supposed — but we 
 learn from Henslowe's Diary that in the six 
 years from 1598 to 1603 he had a whole 
 or part share in as many as twenty-two plays, 
 only one of which. The Blind Beggar of Bednal 
 Green, has come down to us. These plays 
 were: in 1598, The Conquest of Brute, with the 
 first finding of the Bath (Day, assisted by 
 Chettle); in 1599, The Tragedy of Merry 
 and The Tragedy of Cox of Collumpton (with 
 Haughton), The Orphan's Tragedy (with Haugh- 
 ton and Chettle); in 1600, unassisted. The 
 Italian Tragedy of . . . [name wanting in 
 195 
 
196 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the Diary], The Spanish Moor^s Tragedy and 
 The Seven Wise Masters (with Dekker and 
 Haughton), The Golden Ass, and Cupid and 
 Psyche (with Dekker and Chettle), The Blind 
 Beggar of Bednal Green (with Chettle); in 
 1601, The Second Part of the Blind Beggar ^ 
 and The Third Part (also with Chettle), The 
 Conquest of the West Indies (with Haughton 
 and Wentworth Smith), The Six Yeomen of 
 the West, Friar Rush and the Proud Women of 
 Antwerp, and The Second Part of Tom Dough 
 (all three with Haughton) ; in 1602, unassisted, 
 The Bristol Tragedy; Merry as may he, The 
 Black Dog of Newgate, The Second Part of the 
 Black Dog, The Unfortunate General (all with 
 Hath way and Wentworth Smith), and The 
 Boast of Billingsgate (with Hathway and 
 others); in 1603 or earlier, Jane Shore (with 
 Chettle). In 1610, we learn from the Sta- 
 tioners' Register, Day wrote a play called 
 The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bank- 
 side; in 1619, with Dekker, The Life and Death 
 of Guy of Warwick; again with Dekker, in 
 or before 1623, a "French tragedy" of The 
 Bellman of Paris; and in 1623, a comedy, 
 Come see a Wonder. Of extant plays, The 
 
JOHN DAY 197 
 
 Isle of Gulls was published in 1606; TJie Travels 
 of the Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas^ 
 Sir Anthony, Mr. Robert Shirley (written in 
 conjunction with Rowley and Wilkins), in 
 1607; Law-Tricks, or Who would have thought 
 it, and Humour out of Breath, in 1608; The 
 Parliament of Bees, in 1641; and The Blind 
 Beggar in 1659. There is also extant in the 
 British Museum (Sloane MS. 3150) an alle- 
 gorical prose tract entitled Peregrinatio Scho- 
 lastica, first published in Mr. Bullen's collected 
 edition of Day's works in 1881; a begging 
 acrostic on the name of Thomas Dowton, an 
 actor; an undated letter of Day from which 
 we learn of a poem on The Miracles of Christ; 
 a few autograph lines belonging to some lost 
 historical play: "the rest is silence." 
 
 It is not a pleasant thought that a writer of 
 such dainty and select genius as the author 
 of The Parliament of Bees should have had 
 to labour so hard, on such unworthy material, 
 for so unthankworthy a public as that which 
 left him to borrow of Henslowe two shillings, 
 or it may be five shillings — ''in Redy money," 
 as the record quaintly states. That the 
 main part at least of these lost plays was but 
 
198 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 journeyman's work, work sufficient to the day 
 and the evil thereof, seems evident from the 
 mere titles, a small proportion no doubt of 
 the whole, that have come down to us. Even 
 ]Mr. Bullen finds it impossible to regret the 
 loss; and he would be content to spare the 
 Three English Brothers and the Blind Beggar 
 as well. The fact is, Day's range is exception- 
 ally limited, and outside his circle he has no 
 magic. 
 
 In turning over the pages of Lamb's Speci- 
 mens, it is with something of relief, after so 
 much that is bloody and gloomy, that we come 
 on the two or three brief extracts from The 
 Parliament of Bees, by which alone, for so long 
 a space of time, the name of John Day was 
 known to English readers. They are so light 
 and bright, so delicate in the wording and 
 phrasing, so aloof and apart from the com- 
 monness of everyday doings, or the sombre 
 action of that little world of the Elizabethan 
 drama. The choicest of Day's work comes 
 with just such a sense of relief to the student 
 who has traversed that country widely. It 
 is a wayside rest, a noontide hour in the cool 
 shadow of the woods. There is something so 
 
JOHN DAY 199 
 
 pleasant about the work, that we find our- 
 selves pardoning its faults and overlooking 
 its shortcomings, almost without thinking 
 about them. Day — it is clear if we really 
 consider the matter — has but a very slight 
 insight into human nature, only a very faint 
 power of touching or moving us, no power 
 whatever to mould a coherent figure or paint 
 a full-length portrait; as to plot, he is content 
 with none at all, as in the Bees, or, as in the 
 other three comedies, the plot is of such 
 fantastic and intricate slightness, a very 
 spider' s-web of filmy threads, that it is not 
 to be grasped without coming to pieces. His 
 wit is a clear flame, but thin and only inter- 
 mittent. Day's natural gift in that way is 
 not so rich that it can stand a long draw on its 
 exchequer. The good money becomes used 
 up, and then, instead of putting up the 
 shutters, the bank passes bad currency. All 
 these are serious faults; they are leaks enough 
 to sink a weightier reputation; but, somehow, 
 they do no more than temper our delight in 
 Day. The world of his fancy is not the 
 world of our common sunlight; and life is 
 lived otherwise, and men and women are some- 
 
200 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAIVIA 
 
 what other than the men and women of our 
 knowledge, there. It is a land into which 
 the laws of logic can scarcely come; a land 
 where gentle and petulant figures come and 
 go like figures in a masque, aimlessly enough, 
 yet to measure, always with happy effect, 
 threading the forest paths as we see ourselves 
 in dreams, dreams sleeping or waking, ever 
 on the heels of some pleasing or exciting 
 adventure. The conversation, whenever it 
 is good, is carried on in jests, or in flights of 
 lyrical fancy, somewhat as in Shakespeare's 
 early comedies, somewhat with a sort of 
 foretaste of the comedies of Congreve. If it 
 is not the talk of real life, it is at least a select 
 rendering of our talk at its brightest and 
 freest, when black care is away, and the brain 
 is quickened and the tongue loosened by some 
 happy chance, among responsive friends in 
 tune with a blithe mood. It is how we should 
 often like to talk; and that accord with our 
 likings of things, as apart from our conscious- 
 ness, not always pleasant, of them, is the 
 secret of a certain harmony we seem to feel 
 in those parts of Day's comedies which are 
 least like life. He steps quite through the 
 
JOHN DAY 201 
 
 ugly surface of things, freeing us, as we take 
 the step with him, of all the disabilities of 
 our never quite satisfied existence. 
 
 This land of fancy to which Day leads us, 
 is essentially quite as much a land of fancy 
 in the comedies which profess to chronicle the 
 doings of men and women, as in the comedy 
 whose dramatis personse are all bees. In The 
 Isle of Gulls, Law-Tricks and Humour out 
 of Breath, equally as to the spirit, very 
 differently as regards the point of execution, 
 Day has painted life as it pleased him to see 
 it — in a delightful confusion, made up of 
 entanglements, disguises, jests, sudden ad- 
 ventures, good-hearted merriment, a comedy 
 within a comedy. Compared with Humour 
 out of Breath, the two other plays have a cer- 
 tain coarseness of texture — comparative only, 
 let it be understood; the action is not so pleas- 
 ant, nor the wit so spontaneous. They are 
 immensely lively, always entertaining, ravelled 
 up with incomparable agility, full of business, 
 wit and humour; breaking every now and 
 then into seriousness, and, in the later play 
 particularly, blossoming out quite unexpectedly 
 into a tender and lyrical pathos; as in that 
 
202 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 scene where the forsaken countess talks with 
 such sweet sadness to her maids as they sit 
 at their sewing — a little passage of pure 
 exquisiteness, reminding one, as now and again 
 Day will remind us, of certain of the loveliest 
 bits of Shakespeare. In another single scene 
 in The Isle of Gulls, the tennis-court scene, 
 we find a quite typical example of Day's 
 special variety of wit, thin and captious 
 indeed, but swift in its interchange of strokes 
 as the tennis-balls, flying to and fro, with 
 sharp and harmless knocks, in repartees deftly 
 delivered and straight to their aim. It is in 
 Humour out of Breath, however, — so suggest- 
 ively named, and so truly, for the little play 
 keeps us breathless at the heels of its breath- 
 less actors — here, rather than anywhere else 
 outside The Parliament of Bees, that the spe- 
 cial note of Day's cheerful genius is heard 
 most clearly. It has his finest polish, the 
 cream of his wit, the pick of his women. 
 Day's women are singularly charming: they 
 are all of one type, and that no very subtle 
 one, but they are immensely likable, and in 
 this play we have the very best of them, — ■ 
 Florimel, Emilia's sister, Hippolyta's and 
 
JOHN DAY 203 
 
 Violetta's, but the most beautiful and brilliant 
 of her sisters. Emilia, in Law-Tricks, reminds 
 us, by anticipation, of Millimant; as Miso, in 
 The Isle of Gulls, with her "As I am a Lady," 
 seems almost like a faint foreshadowing of the 
 most tragic figure on the English Comic 
 stage. Lady Wishfort. But Florimel, calling 
 up no associations of Congreve or any other, 
 proves the most delightful of companions. 
 She, like her sisters, is a creature of moods, 
 bright, witty, full of high spirits, very free- 
 spoken, but less free in action than in speech; 
 a thoroughly English girl, perhaps the ideal 
 of our favourite mettlesome breed. You can 
 see her lips and eyes in a smile, flashing as 
 her saucy words; and she is good-hearted, 
 capable of strength in love. Here, as so often 
 elsewhere. Day's instinctive sympathy with 
 whatever is honest, lovely and of good report, 
 shows itself in unthought-of touches. He 
 cannot conceive a villain; his fantastic figures 
 and the fantasy of his action have alike a basis 
 of honesty and rectitude, never intrusive, 
 scarcely visible perhaps, often, but there if 
 we choose to look for it. Just this quality, 
 going out into very homely material, gives to 
 
204 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the hasty, irregular, rough and romping play 
 of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green a saving 
 grace, and not of morals, but of art; for it is a 
 touch of nature. Touches of nature there 
 are, but of another kind, in Humour out of 
 Breath; always, however sincere, however 
 serious, with an after-thought or atmosphere 
 of brightness in or about them : as in Aspero's 
 wooing of Florimel, passing out of jests and 
 quibbles into hearty earnest, earnest from the 
 first perhaps on both sides, though the lady 
 has a dancing wit, and the gentleman goads 
 a sober tongue to curvets. How pretty a 
 touch of nature is this: "I cannot live without 
 him!" cries Florimel, when her saucy petu- 
 lance has driven away her lover. "0 that he 
 knew it, lady," suggests the quick-witted 
 little page, at fault for once in a lover's moods; 
 for, "He does," returns Florimel, never at 
 fault; "he would never have left me else. He 
 does!" Touches of this sort, true to nature 
 in the more intimate and subtle sense, are not 
 common in Day; he is not wont to reveal any- 
 thing new to us in our own hearts, or to go 
 often below the surface. It would be unfair 
 to lay this to his charge, for he does not profess 
 
JOHN DAY 205 
 
 to give us more than we find in him. "Hu- 
 mour out of breath," a world where wit i3 
 the all in all — this is what he gives us; a world, 
 how delightful to contemplate, where men and 
 women are so careful of their jests, and the 
 measure and harmony of this absorbing play- 
 business, that they will even (as Polymeter 
 says on some occasion, in another play) "leave 
 at a jest," and turn the conversation after a 
 period of punning. 
 
 I have said that the scene of these three 
 comedies is virtually a land of fancy; in 
 The Parliament of Bees it is not only virtually 
 but formally so. No instinct could have 
 been happier than that which led Day — could 
 it have been with any thought of Aristophanes? 
 — to turn the "men and women fashioned by 
 his fancy" into bees, and give them a whole 
 play to themselves. That this was an after- 
 thought, only come upon after a large part of 
 what now forms the play was written, seems 
 evident; for, as Mr. BuUen has pointed out, 
 "with the exception of characters 1, 11, and 
 12, which were plainly written for the occa- 
 sion, the masque seems to have been made up 
 of scenes, more or less revised, contributed 
 
206 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 to [Dekker's] Wonder of a Kingdom, [Samuel 
 Rowley's] Spanish Soldier, and other plays 
 that have either been lost or where the con- 
 nection remains yet to be pointed out." There 
 is not even an attempt at anything like a plot; 
 what we have is a sequence of scenes, sketch- 
 ing, and lightly satirising, the "humours" 
 of the age under this queer disguise of the bees. 
 It is doubtful whether Day ever intended it, 
 but in this fantastic masque of his there are all 
 the elements of an heroically comic picture 
 of life; life seen from the point of view of an 
 outside observer, in all its eager stir and 
 passion, so petty and so vain if one could look 
 down on it from above — in all its strenuous 
 littlenesses, its frail strength, its gigantic 
 self-delusions; petty, all of it, to the Gods, 
 as these tiny creatures, with their insect life 
 of a summer, seem to men. Here is the quack, 
 the braggart, the spendthrift, each with all 
 the passions of a man — and just as long as your 
 nail! But if this view enters at all into 
 Day's scheme, it is suffered to add no bitter- 
 ness, no touch of spleen, to this sweet and 
 gracious little play, revised, as we know from 
 an earlier manuscript still existing, with such 
 
JOHN DAY 207 
 
 a tender care, not only for the clear polish of 
 the lines, but equally for the pleasant whole- 
 someness of the story, the honesty and fair 
 fame of the little personages. Quite the best 
 scene, the sixth, between Arethusa and Ulania 
 concerning Meletus, has gained the most from 
 this revision: it is free now from any speck, 
 and is one of the loveliest pastorals in our 
 language, a liAtle masterpiece of dainty in- 
 vention, honey-hearted and without a sting; 
 touching at one point, in the last speech of 
 the poor neglected bee, the last limits of Day's 
 capacity for pensive and tender pathos. Noth- 
 ing in the play is so bee- like, nothing so human, 
 as this all-golden episode; though in pastoral 
 loveliness it is touched, I think, by the wood- 
 notes of the final octosyllabics — verses of 
 exquisite inappropriateness for bees, but with 
 all the smell and freshness of the country in 
 them, a pageant of the delightful things of 
 nature and husbandry, written in rhymes that 
 gambol in pairs like lambs or kids in spring. 
 
 Without The Parliament of Bees we should 
 never have known what Day was capable of. 
 The wit and invention of his comedies of 
 adventure make up, it is true, a very distant 
 
208 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and a very important part of his claim on the 
 attention of posterity; but these comedies, 
 after all, are very largely written, especially 
 in the best parts of them, in prose, and it 
 is as a poetical craftsman that Day is most 
 himself and most perfect. Such a line as 
 this: 
 
 Who then shall reap the golden crop you sow? 
 
 bears the very sign and seal of Day. Or, 
 again : 
 
 The windows of my hive, with blossoms dight, 
 Are porters to let in our comfort, light. 
 
 Our comfort, light — the very cadence of these 
 beautiful words rings of Day, and the meaning 
 equally with the sound. His peculiar vein 
 of fancy comes out typically in those lines 
 where the Plush Bee longs, like Alexander, 
 for "ten worlds" — indeed to sell, but to sell 
 ''for Alpine hills of silver, '^ so prettily extrava- 
 gant, so new and unthought-of a phrase. 
 Familiar and quite ordinary ideas, common- 
 place thoughts, take in his mmd an aspect 
 which gives them all the charm of a pleasing 
 novelty — a fanciful aspect, very fresh and 
 
JOHN DAY 209 
 
 pleasant, the good cheer of fancy. There is 
 often an airy spring in his moods, lifting his 
 honest commonplaces quite off the ground; 
 transforming them, as frost transforms and 
 transfigures the bare branches of the trees. 
 The very sound of his rhymes is a delight in 
 itself, as in those lines which tell how 
 
 of the sudden, listening, you shall hear 
 A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring 
 ActsBon to Diana in the spring. 
 
 Instinctive harmony — a sense of delicate music 
 in the fall and arrangement of quite common 
 words, entirely without factitious aid, as of 
 undue alliteration, or the smallest sacrifice 
 of matter to metre — this is his gift; and it is 
 without any appearance of effort that verse 
 flows after beautiful verse, so easy does it 
 seem for him to "add to golden numbers 
 golden numbers." Easy or not, we know it 
 was not without labour that this play of his 
 became what it is. Day was no trifler, slight, 
 airy, fantastically delicate as his work may 
 be; it was not a trifler, a workman careless 
 of the things of art ,who wrote these lines: 
 
 The true Poet indeed doth scorn to gild 
 A coward's tomb with glories, or to build 
 
210 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 A sumptuous pyramid of golden verse 
 Over the ruins of an ignoble hearse. 
 His lines like his inventions are born free, 
 And both live blameless to eternity: 
 He holds his reputation so dear 
 As neither flattering hope nor servile fear 
 Can bribe his pen to temporize with kings: 
 The blacker are their crimes, he louder sings. 
 
 The writer of these splendid lines was no 
 "base fellow" such as Ben Jonson's hasty 
 spleen would have dubbed him, but a poet 
 with an instinctive sense of melody which 
 Jonson never possessed, and an ideal of art 
 as lofty as Jonson's own. His work has no 
 conquering force, no massive energy, no super- 
 abundance of life; these qualities we can get 
 elsewhere, but nowhere save in Day that 
 special charm of fancy and wit and bright 
 invention, "golden murmurs from a golden 
 hive," for which, if there is any saving grace 
 in these things, we can suppose his name 
 will live a little longer yet. 
 
 1888. 
 
XIII. MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 
 
 Thomas Middleton is thought to have 
 been born in London about 1570; he died 
 there, and was buried at Newington Butts 
 on 4 July, 1627. All that we know about 
 him is that he married a daughter of one of the 
 six clerks in chancery, and had a son in 1604; 
 that he was city chronologer from 1620 till 
 the time of his death, when he was succeeded 
 by Ben Jonson; that, in 1624, he was sum- 
 moned before the privy council, with the actors 
 who had played in his Game of Chess, and, it 
 appears, put in prison at the instigation of 
 Godomar, the Spanish ambassador; and that, 
 in 1619, Ben Jonson spoke of him to Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden as " a base fellow." 
 This hard saying may, after all, have been 
 meant as no more than a literary criticism. 
 The words are : ''that Markham (who added his 
 English Arcadia) was not of the number 
 of the Faithful, i.e., Poets, and but a base 
 fellow. That such were Day and Middleton.' 
 
 211 
 
212 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 This might mean no more than that, to 
 Johnson, Middleton's art or verse seemed 
 *'base," in the sense of pedestrian, or going on 
 a low level. Nothing more was said about 
 him by anyone of consequence, except a 
 passing word from Scott, until the time of 
 Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry 
 in 1808. Lamb gave copious and carefully- 
 chosen extracts from his plays, and said 
 almost all the essential things about him; 
 Leigh Hunt followed, picking up the one grain 
 left over by Lamb; and, in 1860, Dyce brought 
 out a complete edition of the plays, which was 
 re-edited and extended by BuUen in 1885. Of 
 William Rowley, there has never been any 
 edition, and we know even less of him than of 
 Middleton. He is conjectured to have been 
 born about 1585 and to have died some time 
 after 1637, the year of his marriage. He was 
 an actor in various companies, and is sup- 
 posed to have revised plays for new perform- 
 ances. For the most part, he collaborated 
 with other playwrights, especially with Mid- 
 dleton; and the finest work of both Middleton 
 and Rowley is done in this collaboration. 
 His chief play, AlVs Lost by Lust, has never been 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 213 
 
 reprinted from the scarce original edition of 
 1633. Besides the plays, he published, in 
 1609, A Search jhr Money; or, the Lamentable 
 Complaint for the Loss of the Wandering Knight, 
 Monsieur U Argent, a pamphlet in the manner 
 of the time, full of crude realistic satire, 
 written in his abrupt, lean and downright 
 prose. 
 
 The earliest work attributed to Middleton 
 is an endless composition in six-line stanzas 
 called The Wisdoin of Solomon Paraphrased, 
 published in 1597. The dedication to Lord 
 Devereaux, and an address, wanting in some 
 copies, "to the Gentlemen-Readers," are both 
 signed Thomas Middleton, and we can but 
 hope that it was someone else of the same name. 
 Addressing the critics, as Momus and Zoilus, 
 the writer regrets, not quite truthfully, "I 
 lack a scarecrow," and bids them " if you gape 
 for stuffing, hie you to dead carrion carcases, 
 and make them your ordinaries." But no better 
 fare is provided, and a sufficient scarecrow has 
 been set up over this unploughed field by every 
 subsequent editor. The task, if he really 
 endured it, must have effectually cured Mid- 
 dleton of any further inclination for preaching. 
 
214 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 "0 weak capacity of strongest wit!" he la- 
 ments, and with justice; yet, two years after- 
 wards, seems to have attempted satire with no 
 less futility than sermonising. Micro-cynicon. 
 Sixe Snarling Satyres, published in 1599, has 
 been attributed to Middleton for no more cer- 
 tain reason than the signature ''T. M. Gent" 
 which follows the introductory Defiance to 
 Envy with which the writer, in imitation of 
 Hall, introduces his first and only book of 
 satires. They are weakly imitated from Mar- 
 ston. 
 
 My pen's two nebs shall turn into a fork, 
 Chasing old Envy from so young a work, 
 
 the writer threatens; but the threat could not 
 possibly have been needed. The ''snarling 
 Muse now thundering rh^/^me" so feebly must 
 have been beyond the reach of envy, and is 
 now too insignificant to need identification. 
 But Middleton was an unequal writer, and it 
 is impossible to discredit even such bad work 
 as being unlikely because unworthy to have 
 been written by him. 
 
 His mark is much more distinctly to be 
 traced in two pamphlets published in 1604, 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 213 
 
 and signed T. M. in their epistles to the reader. 
 The less interesting of them is Father Huhhurd's 
 Tales, which contains a good deal of indiffer- 
 ent verse, no better than Middleton's lyric 
 verse usually is. Its main interest for us is 
 in the very kindly and regretful praise of 
 Nashe, whom he calls ''honest soul," "too 
 slothful to thyself," "cut off in thy best bloom- 
 ing May": 
 
 Drones eat thy honey : thou wast the true bee. 
 
 The tract is one of the allegorising satires of 
 the time, written in a slow narrative style, 
 with abundant detail of the manners and 
 fashions censured, and a good deal of quite 
 sober realism in the descriptions and incidents. 
 The Black Book is more extravagant and more 
 pungent, and is like a sample of the raw 
 material, presented to us by the playwright 
 in his first self-conscious pose as moralist. 
 He parades as one "diving into the deep of 
 this cunning age" and bringing to light "the 
 infectious bulks of craft, cozenage, and pan- 
 derism, the three bloodhounds of a common- 
 wealth." And he professes that his lively 
 exposures are meant for the warninsj and 
 
216 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 confirming of the ''truly virtuous," and com- 
 mends himself for "the modesty of my phrases, 
 that even blush when they discover vices and 
 unmask the world's shadowed villanies." The 
 tale is put into the mouth of Lucifer, who 
 speaks his own prologue in a vigorous piece 
 of blank verse and rime, by way of response 
 to Nashe's dedication of Pierce Pennilesse to 
 "the high and mightie Prince of darknesse, 
 Donsell dell Lucifer, King of Acheron, Stix 
 and Phlegeton, Duke of Tartary, Marquesse 
 of Cocytus, and Lord high Regent of Lymbo." 
 The pamphlet is done in Nashe's manner, 
 and shows no less knowledge of its subject. 
 It describes what may well have been Nashe's 
 death-bed, seen by "the sullen blaze of a melan- 
 choly lamp that burnt very tragically upon the 
 narrow desk of a half-bedstead, which descried 
 all the pitiful ruins throughout the whole 
 chamber." It shows glimpses of "your twelve 
 tribes of villany," at much the same machina- 
 tions as in the plays; and the devil, having 
 gone to and fro in London, "to gorge every 
 vice full of poison," sits down to make out his 
 last will and testament, leaving legacies "like 
 ratsbane, to poison the realm," in a catalogue 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 217 
 
 of the more profitable of the vices. We see 
 Middleton, for all his drawing of a moral, very 
 interestedly at home in the details of all that 
 he denounces; preparing himself, deliberately 
 or not, for his work as a writer of dramatic 
 comedy. 
 
 It is quite possible that The Mayor of Queen- 
 horough, which was printed with IMiddleton's 
 name in 1661, is the earliest play of his that 
 we have; and quite possible that we have it 
 only in a revised state. Such merit as there 
 is in the play lies almost wholly in individual 
 lines and passages, which stand out from a 
 confused and rather hideous mingle of tragic 
 bombast and strained farce. The dumb-show 
 and choruses between the acts are not less 
 immature than the horrors in action by which 
 we can imagine Middleton to be trying to 
 force himself to be tragic. I can see no trace 
 of Rowley anywhere in the play, least of all in 
 the comic scenes, which have distinct traces 
 of the manner of Middleton. The whole 
 play seems to me the premature attempt of a 
 man, not naturally equipped for tragic or 
 romantic writing, to do the tragic comedy 
 then in fashion ; and his attempt was probably 
 
218 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 continued in the plays, now lost, at which 
 we know Middleton was working in 1602: 
 Caesar^s Fall, with Munday, Drayton, and 
 Webster; The Two Harpies, with the same and 
 Dekker; and The Chester Tragedy. In Blurt, 
 Master Constable, which belongs to the same 
 year and is the first of his published plays, we 
 see him recovering himself after this false 
 start, and setting off spiritedly on the comedies 
 of intrigue which were to form the first division 
 of his work. The prose has become alive, 
 and swift of foot; the dialogue slips easily 
 from prose into verse and back again; the 
 action, and these unchastened tongues, gallop. 
 Middleton has found a subject-matter and a 
 technique; and to these he will be almost 
 wholly faithful for the long first half of his 
 career, the fifteen years of comedy. 
 
 That is, unless we are to believe, on the 
 strength of a dubious allusion, that Middleton, 
 before writing The Mayor of Queenhorough, 
 wrote The Old Land, or part of it, and that 
 Massinger and Rowley, who would both have 
 been too young to have collaborated with 
 him at the time, added large portions later. 
 Of Massinger, there is no trace in the play, 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 219 
 
 but of Rowley the traces are unmistakable, 
 not so much in the actual writing of the comic 
 parts as in the whole conception of the main 
 scenes and characters. The play is in a sense 
 the preparation for A Fair Quarrel of 1617, 
 in which both wTote together, and it seems to 
 mark the beginning of the collaboration, and 
 of that new influence which came into Middle- 
 ton's work w^ith Rowley. It is in these two 
 plays that we find, for the first time, that 
 " exquisiteness of moral sensibility" which 
 Lamb divined in one and that ''delicacy of per- 
 ception in matters of right and wrong" which 
 he distinguished in the other. 
 
 From 1602, the date of Blurt, Master Con- 
 stable, to 1617, the date of A Fair Quarrel, 
 almost the whole of Middleton's work is in 
 farcical comedy, at once realistic and satirical. 
 It is to the early part of this period that a play 
 is generally attributed whose authorship no 
 one would have troubled to enquire into if 
 it had not been published as " written by 
 W. S." The Puritan is still printed among 
 what are called the "doubtful plays " of Shake- 
 speare. When Swinburne says that it is 
 "much more like Rowley's than like Middle- 
 
220 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 ton's worst work" he is, I think, strictly true, 
 but is not to be taken to mean that Rowley 
 wrote it. There is nothing sufficiently in- 
 dividual in the play to give so much as a solid 
 starting-point for conjecture. Compare it 
 with the worst of Middleton's comedies, The 
 Family of Love, and in that tedious satire 
 there is at least some intention, though that 
 intention is now mainly lost to us; it is the 
 realist's attempt to show up the dulness of dull 
 people by making them speak and act no more 
 nimbly than was natural to them. The parody 
 there is, apparently, so close that we can 
 mistake it for the original. But the diction, 
 though creeping, is not ignoble; it is like the 
 fumbling of a man on an instrument which 
 he is on the way to master. The fumbler 
 of The Puritan will get no further. 
 
 In 1604 Middleton had some share in The 
 Honest Whore of Dekker, but no very consider- 
 able one, so far as his manner can be traced 
 there, and, seven years later, we find him 
 collaborating again with Dekker in The Roaring 
 Girl, though here, also, what is finest in the 
 play seems to be Dekker's. Apart from these 
 two divergences, and an occasional masque 
 
 I 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 221 
 
 or pageant, done to order, his course is direct, 
 and his main concern, as he defines it later, 
 in commending The World tost at Tennis to the 
 reader and understander, is to be ''neither too 
 bitterly taxing, nor too soothingly telling, the 
 world's broad abuses." In a prefatory address 
 to the "comic play-readers" of The Roaring 
 Girl, he is still more explicit. "The fashion," 
 he says, 
 
 of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so nat- 
 urally as the alteration in apparel; for in the time of the 
 great crop-doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted 
 with mighty words to lean purpose, was only then in 
 fashion: and as the doublet fell, neater inventions began 
 to set up. Now, in the time of spruceness, our plays follow 
 the niceness of our garments ; single plots, quaint conceits, 
 lecherous jests, drest up in hanging sleeves: and those 
 are fit for the times and the termers. Such a kind of light- 
 colour summer stufif, mingled with divers colours, you 
 shall find this published comedy. 
 
 The early comedy of Middleton is as light, 
 rancid, and entertaining as anything in the 
 Elizabethan drama. It is irresponsible rather 
 than immoral, and does not exactly recom- 
 mend or approve of the trickeries and de- 
 baucheries which it represents in a life-like 
 way, under such hnprobable conditions. Yet 
 
222 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the writer is no more careful of his ethical than 
 of his other probabilities, and takes little 
 trouble to keep up any consistency in the 
 minds or morals of his agile puppets. His 
 aim is at effect, and he rarely fails in his aim. 
 Even when we do not believe in the persons, 
 and do not care about the upshot of the action, 
 we are almost constantly enlivened, and, 
 willingly, or unwillingly, carried along. Mid- 
 dleton allows us to hate or despise, but not to 
 disregard him. 
 
 The main material of his comedy is in the 
 acts and moods of the human animal. Sex 
 dominates the whole Elizabethan drama, but 
 here it is not a terror, a fascination, or a sin, 
 but an occupation. A passage in The Phoenix 
 might be applied to almost any of these plays: 
 
 What monstrous days are these! 
 Not only to be vicious most men study, 
 But in it to be ugly; strive to exceed 
 Each other in the most deformed deed. 
 
 Is it a merit in Middleton that he shows us 
 vice always as an ugly thing, even when he 
 seems to take pleasure in it, and to forget to 
 condemn it? The ''beggarly fools and swarm- 
 ing knaves," to use a phrase of his own, who 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 223 
 
 iraffick in souls, bodies, and possessions 
 throughout these travesties, confusions and 
 ''famiUar accidents which happen in town," 
 are set a-gog by no morahst, but by so keen 
 and unprejudiced an observer of the human 
 comedy that, for the most part, they come 
 out in their naked colours, almost against 
 his intention. And, as he lets vice peep 
 through all cloaks and stand self-condemned, 
 so he shows us a certain hardly-conscious 
 *' soul of goodness in things evil." There is true 
 and good human feeling in some of the most 
 shameless scenes of Your Five Gallants, where 
 a whole lost and despised world of ''strange 
 devils and pretty damnable affections" is 
 stirred up into plausible action. They take 
 place where there is "violet air, curious garden, 
 quaint walks, fantastical arbours, three back- 
 doors, and a coach-gate," in a " music-school " 
 or " Maison Tellier " of the period, and the very 
 names of the characters are hardly quotable. 
 The humanity is accidental, and comes from 
 absolute knowledge of a world where "every 
 part shoots up daily into new subtlety; the 
 very spider weaves her cauls with more art 
 and cunning to entrap the fly." Middleton, 
 
224 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 though the spider preoccupies him, and lends 
 him a web for spinning, puts the fly too into 
 the pattern. 
 
 If we seek a reason for the almost universal 
 choice of brothels and taverns as the scenes 
 of Elizabethan comedy, we shall find it 
 partly in a theory, accepted from the Latin 
 and Italian drama, that this was the proper 
 province of the comic muse. The accidents 
 of a player's or professional writer's life gave 
 opportunities for knowledge of just that world 
 into which he was naturally thrust. The 
 Elizabethan audience was accustomed from the 
 first to the two extremes of novel tragedy and 
 brutal comedy. That violent contrast ap- 
 pealed to a taste always hungering and thirst- 
 ing for strong meat and strong drink. The 
 puritan limits had not yet fixed themselves; 
 they were but divined as a thing one could be 
 aware of and mock at. At the same time, the 
 stage was not exactly respected; it had no 
 character to keep up. Thus, the dramatist, 
 being as free as the modern French caricaturist 
 to make his appeal in the most direct way, 
 to the animal through the animal, had no 
 hesitation in using the gross material at hand 
 
 '»!«■ 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 225 
 
 grossly. In the more serious men, we get no 
 more than painful attempts to please a taste 
 which Middlcton must have found it easy 
 to gratify. He was no dreamer, he was not a 
 poet in the instinctive irrepressible sense in 
 which Dekker, for instance, was a poet, and 
 he shared a love which was common to Dekker 
 and to others at that time, for mean adventures 
 of loose people in cities, knaves who gulled 
 and fools who were gulled, sharpers, highway- 
 men, and, outside cities, gipsies. His eyes 
 were open upon every folly of fashion or freak 
 of religion; he knew his law and his lawyers, 
 and he saw their capacities for entertainment; 
 he had all the terms of cant and astrology at 
 his finger's ends, and realised the savour of 
 the oddities of popular speech. It was easy 
 to him to set these people talking as they would 
 really talk, or with just that heightening which 
 his sense of pungent and appropriate words 
 gave him; and he could set scene after scene 
 galloping across the stage, not taking more 
 trouble than his public demanded in making 
 his plots consistent or probable, so long as 
 they went at full speed along familiar ways; 
 not caring, most of the time, to create individ- 
 
226 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 ual characters, but relying upon the effect 
 of vividly realised moods, of people very much 
 alive for a given moment. A character so 
 ripely developed as Sir Bounteous Progress in 
 A Mad World, my Masters is rare among these 
 nimble types and instances of fixed follies 
 or ascertained "humours." 
 
 What we remember Middleton's comedies 
 for is not their separate characters but their 
 brace of gallants, their "school" of wantons, 
 their clash of cozener with cozener, their 
 ingenuities of deceit, the "heat of fury" of their 
 entangled action. We remember single scenes, 
 of a marvellous and sometimes cruelly comic 
 reality, like the death-bed of Dampit the 
 drunkard in A Trick to catch the Old One, 
 or that other death-scene in A Chaste Maid in 
 Cheapside, where an old sinner makes his last 
 end in grotesque and frightened repentance, 
 while the man and woman whom he may be 
 supposed to have most wronged remember 
 the fact for the first time as they foresee the 
 cutting short of their shameful revenue. Here, 
 as often in Middleton, irony comes out of the 
 mere faithfulness with which he sets before us 
 exactly what would happen at such a moment 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 227 
 
 as that. His plays are full of these paradoxes 
 of event, which it is the custom to call unpleas- 
 ant, and which, sometimes, certainly are 
 unpleasant when the playwright seems to be 
 unaware that some hideous piece of villany 
 is being set to rights (so far as relative justice 
 is concerned) by a trick of virtue not less 
 unpardonable. 
 
 If Bullen is right in his conjecture that The 
 Widow (a play published in 1652 as a "lively 
 piece, drawn by the art of Jonson, Fletcher, 
 and Middleton") belongs to about this date, 
 revised later, it would, for Middleton, be 
 curiously innocent in the midst of all its vivid 
 banter and thieves' foolery. In how many 
 plays of this period could the characters say 
 to one another at the close, without irony, 
 "Be good" and "Be honest," as two of the char- 
 acters do here? Jonson is for nothing in it, 
 unless as a passing influence; but I do not see 
 why Fletcher might not have been the reviser, 
 as well as the writer of one or two of the songs. 
 But the main part, unmistakably, is Middle- 
 ton's, and it is, perhaps, in this play that the 
 romantic element first shows itself among the 
 incidents and actualities of knavery. 
 
228 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 It took Middleton a long time to realise 
 that there was such a thing as honour, even in 
 transactions which he felt it his business to 
 watch from the knaves' point of view, because 
 that was the one which would best entertain 
 his audience. He chose stories, persons and 
 surroundings for their immediate stage effect, 
 making them as real and amusing as he could, 
 scene by scene; and it was so rarely that it 
 occurred to him to temper the trickeries of 
 his plots by some honest motive that we find 
 him confusing moral values without due indi- 
 cation of being aware of it. There is no 
 doubt that he wrote hastily, and with ease, 
 and a man who writes hastily and with ease 
 for the stage will readily sacrifice a point of 
 conscience to a theatrical solution. Once, 
 in The Roaring Girl, some frank and convincing 
 honesty comes into the bad company, and has 
 the best of it there. But how much of Middle- 
 ton is to be found in what gives a pleasant 
 quality to that one play, not less astir than the 
 others with his usual crew and company? 
 
 Though the work of each overlaps occasion- 
 ally, there can be little doubt of the main shares 
 of Middleton and Dekker in The Roaring Girl. 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 229 
 
 It is, undoubtedly, Dekker who has created, 
 and mainly set in action, the good honest 
 hoyden who masquerades through the play 
 in the name of Moll Cutpurse, a creature of 
 another colour, if we can believe contemporary 
 records. "Worse things I must needs confess," 
 says Middleton in his preface "to the comic 
 play-readers," "the world has taxed her for 
 than has been written of her; but 'tis the 
 excellency of a writer to leave things better 
 than they are." To paint a woman who 
 asks justly, 
 
 must you have 
 A black ill name because ill things you know? 
 
 and to show her talking thieves' slang among 
 thieves with an easy familiarity, and yet going 
 through this evil company like a knight- 
 errant, helping honest lovers and pulling 
 down knaves, was a task more within the 
 power of Dekker than of Middleton, whose 
 metre and manner come and go with the galli- 
 pots and rattling roguish shop-keepers who cry 
 their wares and complicate their private doings 
 through the whole underplot of the play. 
 But little of the really significant speech of 
 
230 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 Moll can be attributed to Middleton, and, 
 though much of the business and movement of 
 the play is his, and much of the ''manners," 
 Dekker, too, is responsible for the fifth act with 
 its almost too liberal local colour of "canting." 
 The play is untidy, but very much alive; 
 and Dekker seems to bring fresh air into musty 
 rooms, not only by the presence of this vital 
 woman, not to be paralleled elsewhere in 
 Middleton's comedies, but by a way of writing 
 which is more a poet's way than his. The very 
 sound of the lines has a lilt and spring in them, 
 as in a casual image of this kind : 
 
 my thoughts must run, 
 As a horse runs that's blind, round in a mill, 
 Out every step, yet keeping one path stiU. 
 
 Middleton's verse, for all its sinews, could not 
 have given just that turn to a line; and Dekker 
 brings with him that beauty which was 
 always a natural accident in his speech. 
 
 The prose of Middleton, as we see it in the 
 comedies, used more often than verse, but 
 dropping easily into and out of verse, is a pun- 
 gent, fluent, very natural and speakable prose. 
 It has lightness, and yet is not empty, is often 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 231 
 
 witty without going unduly beyond the prob- 
 abilities of talk; only at times, as in The 
 Family of Love, does it become pedantic ; and 
 it rarely loses a certain deftness even when 
 it drops into beastliness. Touches of the 
 edged speech of the period, which shines and 
 strikes, are not wanting. "Bright Helena of 
 this house, would thy Troy were a-fire, for I 
 am a-cold," says someone, on no particular 
 occasion. The prose goes at a great rate, and 
 carries you with it, while you travel slowly 
 with Rowley, as often as he takes Middleton's 
 place. And the verse is hardly less swift, 
 galloping often on more feet than the measure 
 demands, but rarely jarring the measure. In 
 some of the plays, Middleton takes no care to 
 modulate from prose into verse, but jumps 
 forward and backward with little need, barely 
 lifting the verse above the measure of the prose. 
 Gradually the quality and adaptability of the 
 verse improve; developing directly out of the 
 prose it becomes not less flexible. And we 
 find him cultivating with increasing skill what 
 had always been a homely colloquial tendency, 
 dealing in culinary and haberdashery similes, 
 more at home with a dish or dress than with 
 
232 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the moon, and able to set dumb things into 
 gesture, thus: 
 
 Troth, you speak wondrous well for your old house here; 
 'Twill shortly fall down at your feet to thank you, 
 Or stoop, when you go to bed, like a good child, 
 To ask your blessing. 
 
 Verse, to Middleton, is a native idiom; he 
 speaks in it naturally, bending it as he pleases, 
 to any shade of meaning, filling it with stuff 
 alien to poetry and yet keeping its good metre. 
 He does not write for the sake of the verse, 
 and only a native honesty of ear keeps him 
 from dropping clean out of it, without knowing, 
 into prose. Thus, he has few fine passages; 
 yet a few of them he has, where imagination 
 has fastened upon him, and dictated his 
 words. His lines run often, in his later work, 
 to fourteen syllables, yet their feet slide easily 
 within the measure. As he lets his lines grow 
 longer, so he allows himself longer speeches, 
 because he knows that he can keep the ear 
 awake and following them. And, by the 
 time of The Changeling the versification has 
 become graver, with a new thrill in it, through 
 which passion, and not only the mind's 
 energies, can now speak. Was it Rowley who 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 233 
 
 first showed Middleton the possibility of that 
 passionate note, by which drama becomes not 
 only drama but poetry? 
 
 If, as I have conjectured, The Old Law leads 
 the way from the farcical comedies to the tragic 
 comedies like A Fair Quarrel, it is in that play 
 that the influence of Rowley may be first dis- 
 tinguished; and it is impossible not to connect 
 it with the change which came about in the 
 work of Middleton, a change from work 
 almost wholly comic, and of the city kind, 
 to a work partly tragic and partly comic in a 
 higher and more romantic sense. We find 
 Rowley's name beside Middleton's on the title- 
 pages of The Old Law, A Fair Quarrel, The 
 World tost at Tennis, The Spanish Gipsy, 
 and The Changeling; most, that is, of the finest 
 of Middleton's later work, with only the two 
 exceptions of Women beware Women and A 
 Game at Chess. The manner and measure 
 of this collaboration is not so easy to discover 
 as it may at first sight appear. It is his faults 
 that are most obvious in Rowley, his dissonant 
 verse, his over-strained speech, his incapacity 
 for construction, something jagged and uneven 
 in his whole work; and it is only gradually 
 
234 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 that people are beginning to realise that these 
 defects are not the essential part of him. 
 His plays have had the not unnatural mis- 
 fortune to be chaotically printed, verse and 
 prose never clearly distinguished from one 
 another; and some of them are only to be found 
 in a few rare copies of the original editions. 
 It is difficult to be certain of his exact share 
 in many plays to which his name is, rightly 
 or wrongly, appended. One thing is certain; 
 that the plays written by Rowley and Middle- 
 ton together are finer than any of the plays 
 written by either separately. And it is almost 
 equally certain that Rowley's share in the work 
 was not confined to those scenes or passages in 
 which his actual hand can be distinguished 
 in the versification, but that there was a fur- 
 ther and closer collaboration of a kind which no 
 tests of style or versification can ever dis- 
 entangle. We have seen Middleton working 
 alone, and, to a slight extent, with Dekker; 
 we shall see him, at the end of his career, 
 again working alone. We have now to con- 
 sider what can be found out about Rowley, in 
 such work as he did by himself or in company 
 with others, before we can hope to arrive at 
 
 ^ 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 233 
 
 any conclusion in regard to the work in which 
 he is the companion of Middleton. 
 
 The plays published under Rowley's name 
 or initials are : A New Wonder, a Woman never 
 Vexed, 1632; AlVs Lost by Lust, 1633; A 
 Match at Midnight, 1633; and A Shoemaker a 
 Gentleman, 1638. Of these A Match at Mid- 
 night has little resemblance with any of his 
 known work, while it has a close resemblance 
 with the early work of Middleton. It goes 
 with something of the rapidity of the wild 
 and whirling comedies of about the time of 
 Your Five Gallants, but would add more credit 
 to an imitator than to Middleton. Here, as 
 elsewhere, Rowley may in his capacity of actor 
 have made slight changes for acting purposes, 
 which would account for the use of his initials. 
 There is no reason to suppose that he had even 
 so much to do with Fortune by Land and Sea, 
 published, in 1655, as by Heywood and Row- 
 ley, or with The Thracian Wonder, attributed 
 to Webster and Rowley by Kirkman in 
 1661. There is little more probability in 
 the same editor's attribution to the same 
 writers of A Cure for a Cuckold, which he 
 published in the same year. Kirkman's word 
 
236 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 is valueless as evidence, and there is nothing in 
 the play of which we can say with much prob- 
 ability that it is by either Webster or Rowley. 
 Only the slow and thoughtful quality of some 
 of the verse gives any real suggestion of Web- 
 ster; and verse of Webster's kind is quite 
 possible to imitate. The drearily comic prose 
 is done after the pattern of the time, and there 
 is nothing in it distinguishable from similar 
 hack-work, whether done by Rowley or by 
 others for the day's wage. 
 
 In The Travels of the Three English Brothers, 
 published in 1607, with a dedication signed 
 "John Day, William Rowley, George Wilkins," 
 it is easy, but not very profitable, to trace the 
 share of Rowley. He probably put in Zaripha, 
 the Shylock of the play, and wrote some of the 
 more pompous blank verse and of the coarser 
 verbal fooling. In The Maid in the Mill, 
 licensed to Fletcher and Rowley 29 August, 
 1623, and played at the Globe with Rowley 
 as one of the actors, his share and Fletcher's 
 are quite distinct, and they are divided 
 no doubt, equally. Rowley's verse, by the 
 side of the winged verse of Fletcher, seems 
 somewhat crabbed and abstract, and the 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 237 
 
 prose (interspersed with Fletcher's songs) 
 somewhat cold and laboured. In The Witch 
 of Edmonton, published in 1658 as "a Tragi- 
 comedy by divers well-esteemed poets, William 
 Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, etc.," 
 where Dekker and Ford are both equally 
 evident, in their direction of the two main 
 currents, the share of Rowley is difficult to 
 make out, and could hardly have been con- 
 siderable. There remains The Birth of Merlin 
 which was published in 1662 as by Shakespeare 
 and Rowley. Langbaine tells us that "William 
 Rowley was not only beloved by those great 
 men, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, but 
 likewise writ, with the former, The Birth of 
 Merlin^ The share of Shakespeare is not 
 now in need of discussion; the play is crude 
 and lumpish; it is stilted and monotonous in 
 the verse, gross and tame in the prose. It 
 would be pleasant to think that Rowley had 
 no more to do with it than Shakespeare; but 
 it is difficult to be positive in the matter after 
 reading A Shoemaker a Gentleman. 
 
 This incongruous and incoherent piece is a 
 tragic farce, which has never been reprinted 
 from the execrable first edition of 1638, where 
 
238 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 the printer, in his address to "the honest and 
 high-spirited gentlemen of the never decaying 
 art, called the gentle craft," admits with some 
 honesty: ''I know it may come short of that 
 accurateness both in plot and style that this 
 witty age doth with greater curiosity require," 
 yet excuses it, on the ground " that as plays 
 were then, some twenty years ago, it was in 
 the fashion." It is a sad jumble of cobblers, 
 kings, " a wise virgin in Wales," and a Juliet's 
 nurse; at one moment " an angel ascends out 
 of the well and after descends again," at[another 
 there is drinking of blood, and we hear in detail 
 of tortures endured in war; the language varies 
 from " Moulting tyrant, stop thy scandalous 
 breath," used by quarreling kings, to " Clap- 
 perdudgeon" and " Knipperdolin," flung as 
 pet names by the cobbler at his wife. The few 
 good lines which we come across at rare inter- 
 vals are almost cruelly wasted; the farce which 
 submerges them is a mere desperate attempt 
 at comic realism. 
 
 On the title-page of A New Wonder, Rowley 
 is described as "one of his Majesty's Servants"; 
 he is mentioned among the principal actors in 
 The Maid in the Mill; in The Inner-Temple 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 239 
 
 Masque he played Plumporridge; and, in the 
 list of persons in AlVs Lost by Lust, we are 
 told that Jaques, " a simple clownish gentle- 
 man," was "personated by the poet." In the 
 plays which he wrote in collaboration with 
 Middleton, his hand has been most generally 
 traced in the comic underplots, and sometimes 
 as a disturbing element there, working for 
 hardly more than the ears of the groundlings. 
 In the low peasant's humour, earthy and 
 almost animal, which he takes much trouble 
 over in all these plays, sometimes making 
 it really droll, always making it emphatic and 
 telling, there seems to have been something 
 which he really cared to do, perhaps because 
 it was what he could represent best on the 
 stage. In the tw^o chief plays which he wrote 
 by himself he wove the comic prose not in- 
 effectively into the more serious substance, 
 but not only in A Shoemaker a Gentleman, but 
 in most of the work done with Middleton, it 
 stands out in sharp contrast. And this is 
 the more curious, as we shall find unmis- 
 takable signs of a very different kind of 
 influence exercised by him upon precisely 
 that serious si^stance. 
 
240 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 For it is not as a comic poet that Rowley- 
 is most himself, or most admirable. Of his 
 two remaining plays, one is a heroic tragedy 
 and the other a pathetic domestic comedy, 
 and we find in both, very differently exhibited, 
 the same qualities of sincerity and nobility, 
 often turning to uncouthness or exaggeration, 
 but never, as in Middleton, losing the moral 
 sense, the honesty of insight. The action in 
 each is strained beyond probability, and in 
 one becomes barbarous, in the other artificial; 
 the verse follows the action, and halts, not only 
 through the treasons of a more than usually 
 treacherous printer. Yet, as the verse is but 
 an emphasis upon profoundly felt speech, 
 so the action rests always on a strong human 
 foundation. 
 
 In AlVs Lost by Lust (which deals with a 
 subject made more famous by Landor in 
 Count Julian) Rowley shows himself a poet 
 by his comprehension of great passions, his 
 sympathy with high moods, and by a sheer 
 and naked speech, which can grasp filth or 
 heroism in an equal grip. He has no measure, 
 though sometimes constraint; no subtlety, 
 though he will set consciences or clowns 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 241 
 
 arguing in terms of strange pedantry; no 
 sentiment, though he has all the violences of 
 direct emotion; and he says what he wants 
 to say and then stops. He has no ease or 
 grace, and often labours to give point to his 
 humour and weight to his serious utterances. 
 The kind of verse that characterises him at 
 his best is: 
 
 Thy soul is a hired lackey towards hell, 
 
 and he can sharpen it thus: 
 
 Time's ancient bawd, opportunity, 
 Attends us now, and yet our flaming blood 
 Will scarce give leave to opportunity. 
 
 Often he will go beyond the bounds of natural 
 speech, not on a carrying imagination, but 
 under the dragging weight of an emphasis 
 which eloquence can do better without. In 
 some of Blake's drawings of naked men with 
 prodigious muscles, sweeping beards, and 
 frantic eyes, the intense imitation of emotion 
 has gone further than nature can lend help to. 
 Just so does some of the tragic speech in Rowley 
 falter through defects of mere force. " Rough 
 Rowley, handling song with Esau's hand," 
 as Swinburne has called him in a significant 
 
242 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 line, sets himself to construct imagery, and does 
 it, sometimes with splendour, but a splendour 
 prolonged to extinction. Thus he will develop 
 a figure after this manner: 
 
 We'll make so high to quench their silver moons 
 And on their carcases an isthmus make 
 To pass their straits again and forage them. 
 
 Both in fun and earnest he plays on words, 
 and is capable of writing " My heart's tri- 
 angled," as Donne might have done, and 
 distinguishing the number and position of the 
 points. More often he does it in this wholly 
 Elizabethan manner: 
 
 My honoured friends, 
 
 What we all thought to have borne home in triumph 
 
 Must now be seen there in a funeral, 
 
 Wrecked honour being chief mourner; here's the hearse 
 
 Which we'll all follow. 
 
 Even his " virgin martyrs," like Jacinta, who 
 act nobly, are sometimes set talking with 
 horrible detail, as, like Jacinta, they spit at 
 their tormentors and wish 
 
 that my tongue 
 Were pointed with a fiery Pyramis 
 To strike thee through. 
 
 It is impossible for him to realise, even in his 
 Dionysia, who dies with some of the ecstasy 
 
 ^ 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 243 
 
 of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, that a woman 
 can be lascivious and yet talk like a lady. His 
 men can say memorable things, in which there 
 is some of the passion of meditation, but, 
 however well he knew " what kind of thing a 
 man's heart" is, he did not know how to give 
 continually adequate speech to those passions 
 whose habitation there he was aware of. 
 
 In A New Wonder, which takes place in 
 London, and shows us the strange vehement 
 passions, both petty and ardent, of business 
 men, their small prides and large resolutions, 
 we have a speech more easily on the level 
 of the occasion, whether in this heightened 
 way: 
 
 Then be not angry, gentle sir, 
 
 If now a string be touched, which hath too long 
 
 Sounded so harshly over all the city; 
 
 I now would wind it to a musical height; 
 
 or whether the unrelenting father in prison 
 repels his son with the direct cry: 
 
 Ha! what art thou? Call for the keeper there, 
 And thrust him out of doors or lock me up. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, the language is sometimes 
 injured by emphasis, yet there is none of Mid- 
 dleton's aim at point and cleverness, but a 
 
244 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 speech vividly and sometimes grossly natural, 
 which sticks close to the matter. Its comedy 
 is a kind of literalness, and its pathos is, too; 
 and both are crammed with fine substance, 
 thoughtful humour and thoughtful pity, with 
 that simple acceptance and rendering of things 
 as they are which Lamb noted in the play with 
 much satisfaction. It is of this play that he 
 says: "The old play-writers are distinguished 
 by an honest boldness of exhibition, they 
 show everything without being ashamed." 
 Here, there is coarseness and there is clumsi- 
 ness, but there is no flaw in the essential right- 
 ness and reality of this whole contest in hearts, 
 in which a natural human charity has its way 
 with invincible softness. 
 
 Now, if we begin to look for the influence of 
 Rowley upon Middleton, we shall find it not 
 so much in the set scenes of low comedy which 
 he inserted among Middleton's verse, but in 
 a new capacity for the rendering of great 
 passions and a loftiness in good and evil which 
 had never yet been found as an element in 
 Middleton's brilliant and showy genius, and 
 which hardly survives the end of his collabora- 
 tion with Rowley. The whole range of sub- 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 243 
 
 ject suddenly lifts, a new, more real and more 
 romantic world (more real and more romantic 
 because imagination rather than memory is 
 at work) is seen upon the stage, and by some 
 transformation, which could hardly have been 
 mere natural growth, Middleton finds himself 
 to be a poet. 
 
 That Middleton learnt from Rowley, or 
 did, with his help, more than either of them 
 could do by himself, is evident for the first 
 time clearly in A Fair Quarrel. The best 
 part of the actual writing is not Rowley's. 
 Middleton was a man of flexible mind, and we 
 find in him everywhere a marvellous tact of 
 matching his matter and manner. Never, in 
 his wild comedies, does he bring in false 
 heroics; he can keep on a due actual level 
 beyond any dramatist of his time; and, when 
 a great human moment comes to him, and has 
 to be dealt with, he rises easily, and is no 
 less adequate. He does not rise of himself, 
 his material compels him, he is obedient to it, 
 and, I cannot but think, awake to a fierier 
 impulse like Rowley's. It is certain that Row- 
 ley could not have written the two great Cap- 
 tain Ager scenes as they stand; but I am 
 
 / 
 
246 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 equally certain that, with all his promptness 
 of response to an emotion, Middleton could 
 not have begun to render, at such a moral 
 height, such an " absolute man," without some 
 spiritual aid or life from Rowley. When 
 there, when started, he drew his poetry, as he 
 was wont to do, directly from his subject, 
 and the natural emotion of it; and made a 
 great scene where a weak one would have 
 been contemptible. Can nature and poetry 
 go further together, poetry hardly distinguish- 
 able from the direct speech of nature, so 
 warmed is it by human breath? Captain 
 Ager's last words to his mother shine like fire 
 and cut like steel, and are mere plain words 
 with no more rhetoric in them than in this 
 line which strikes straight: 
 
 I never shall have need of honour more. 
 
 In the scene of the duel, when all this fire is 
 out in the man's soul, the tamer verses are not 
 less absolute in their disheartened speech: 
 
 What shall be done in such a worthless business 
 
 But to be sorry, and to be forgiven; 
 
 You, sir, to bring repentance, and I pardon? 
 
 That the writing, in the two great scenes of 
 Captain Ager, is Middleton's, and owes noth- 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 247 
 
 ing in form, whatever it may owe in substance, 
 to Rowley, can be proved beyond doubt by a 
 mere reading over together of two speeches, 
 one in this play, one in a play so wholly and 
 characteristically Middleton's as A Chaste 
 Maid in Cheapside: the speech of Captain 
 Ager (ii. 1), which begins: 
 
 Mine? think me not so miserable, 
 
 and ends: 
 
 Without which I'm ten fathoms under coward, 
 That now am ten degrees above a man, 
 Which is but one of virtue's easiest wonders; 
 
 and the speech of Sir Walter (v. 1) which 
 begins : 
 
 death! is this 
 
 A place for you to weep? 
 
 and ends : 
 
 this shows like 
 The fruitless sorrow of a careless mother, 
 That brings her son with dalliance to the gallows, 
 And then stands by and weeps to see him suffer. 
 
 The difference is all in the feeling; there is 
 none in the phrasing. 
 
 But that difference in the feeling! There is 
 no indication, in anything which Middleton 
 
248 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 has so far written by himself, that he was 
 capable of conceiving a character like Captain 
 Ager, or of keeping such a character on a 
 single level of high emotion. This Rowley 
 could do, and I have no doubt that he was the 
 " only begetter" of what he left to Middleton 
 to develop. It is Rowley who writes the dedi- 
 cation, and it is evident that he takes much of 
 the credit of the play to himself. " You see, 
 sir," he says, " I write as I speak, and I speak 
 as I am, and that's excuse enough for me." 
 His share in the actual writing is, indeed, 
 almost too evident; there is cold, pedantic, 
 sour and crabbed prose, aping comedy, and, 
 in the scene between Jane and the physician, 
 a hard, reasoning kind of serious verse which 
 jars singularly on the rich and copious verse 
 of Middleton, in the finer parts of the play. 
 Some of the worst of the mechanical fooling 
 in prose was added in a second edition, and 
 (the public being much the same in all ages) 
 it was probably added because the original 
 sample had given much satisfaction to the 
 public. Rowley worked for hire, and this is 
 some of his hired work. 
 It was not long after the time of A Fair 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 249 
 
 Quarrel that Middleton and Rowley collabo- 
 rated together in the admirable and enter- 
 taining masque, The World tost at Tennis, 
 For the most part, Middleton's masques are 
 tame and tedious, without originality in the 
 invention or lyrical quality in the songs. In 
 one only. The Inner Temple Masque, is there 
 any natural gaiety, any real quaintness or 
 humour; and, as we find Rowley's name 
 among the actors, in the humorous peasant 
 part of Plumporridge, may it not be con- 
 jectured that Rowley had some share in the 
 writing? His heavy tread is as distinctly 
 heard through all the opening part of The 
 World tost at Tennis, as Middleton's new voice 
 is heard in the later part. Middleton rarely 
 wrote a lovelier succession of cadences than in 
 these lines spoken by Deceit to Simplicity: 
 
 The world, sweetheart, is full of cares and troubles, 
 
 No match for thee; thou art a tender thing, 
 
 A harmless, quiet thing, a gentle fool, 
 
 Fit for the fellowship of ewes and rams; 
 
 Go, take thine ease and pipe; give me the burden, 
 
 The clog, the torment, the heart-break, the world: 
 
 Here's for thee, lamb, a dainty oaten pipe. 
 
 And there is suavity, swiftness and a quaint 
 fantastic colouring in the verse chattered 
 
250 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 against hypocrites and puritans by the Five 
 Starches. 
 
 It was probably about the time, when he was 
 engaged on his masques, that Middleton wrote 
 The Witch, and this may well have been his 
 first attempt at a purely romantic play. The 
 versification is done with astonishing ease, 
 in long, loose, rapid lines; and, in the witches' 
 Bongs, there is not only a ghastly fancy awake, 
 but something nearer to a fine lyric cadence 
 than he ever got before or since. It is through 
 the interpolation, as it obviously was, of 
 some of these lines in the very imperfect text 
 of Macbeth, that a play in which the main action 
 is almost a parody of the romantic drama 
 has come to be looked upon as one of Middle- 
 ton's chief works. The mere writing through- 
 out is good, but the easy eloquent dialogue 
 covers no more than the gaps and deformations 
 of the main outline. The witches bring a 
 new element into Middleton's work, a wild 
 fancy, of which he had shown hardly a trace; 
 in the rest of the play he does but practise 
 in the romantic manner. They stand in some 
 dim middle air, between the old vile pitiable 
 crone of Dekker in The Witch of Edmonton, 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 251 
 
 who is dreadfully human, and the " crowded 
 empress of the nether clefts of hell" in Macbeth, 
 who shares no resemblance with the other 
 Hecate but in her name, and who is more 
 dreadful because she is not human. But 
 Lamb has said finally all that need be said 
 on these fundamental differences. 
 
 After the experiment of The Witch, Middle- 
 ton seems to have returned to his collaboration 
 with Rowley, and it is to about this time that 
 we must assign the play by which both are now 
 chiefly remembered, the tragedy of The Change- 
 ling. It is Rowley who begins the play, and 
 thus introduces and characterises both Bianca 
 and De Flores. The germ of both is there, 
 and the rest of the play is but its growth. 
 But, even in this opening, there are distinct 
 though slight traces of Middleton, as if the 
 collaboration had begun already. IMiddleton 
 takes up the thread in the second act, and has 
 both hands upon it in the third, though at 
 the end of the great scene Rowley seems to 
 snatch the whole web out of his hands and 
 to twist it into an abrupt end. In all this 
 part, mainly written by Middleton, there is a 
 restraint never paralleled elsewhere in his 
 
252 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 work; nowhere else are words used with such 
 fruitful frugality, or so much said in so little. 
 And this bareness, this fierce reticence, lead 
 up, with a stealthy directness, to that out- 
 break of evil joy when De Flores cries: 
 
 this act 
 
 Has put me into spirit! 
 
 and the modest murderess answers in aston- 
 ishment : 
 
 Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked 
 
 Or shelter such a cunning cruelty 
 
 To make his death the murderer of my honour! 
 
 The whole scene is written in words of white 
 heat; Middleton has distilled into it the essence 
 of his own genius and of the genius of Rowley; 
 it is, in Leigh Hunt's famous and revealing 
 words of De Flores, " at once tragical, probable, 
 and poetical" beyond almost any single scene 
 in the Elizabethan drama; a scene unlike 
 anything in Shakespeare, but comparable, 
 not as poetry but as drama with Shakespeare. 
 And it is on the level of this great scene that 
 the play ends, in a splendid horror, and it is 
 Rowley who ends as he began the dreadful 
 lives of De Flores and of Beatrice. Rowley's 
 underplot and some of Middleton's inter- 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 253 
 
 mediate action do what they can to deform a 
 play which, but for them, would be a noble 
 and complete masterpiece. Yet the single 
 impression left upon our minds is scarcely 
 affected by them. The play is De Flores, 
 and De Flores seems to greaten as he passes 
 from one to the other of the two playwrights, 
 as they collaborate visibly at his creation. 
 In this great creation is the first result and 
 justification of Middleton and Rowley's work 
 in common; for it is certain that De Flores 
 as he is would never have been possible to 
 either Rowley or Middleton. 
 
 The Spanish Gipsy is generally put down 
 almost as a whole to Middleton, and even 
 Swinburne refuses to see the hand of Rowley 
 in " the more high-toned passages." I am 
 inclined to think that Rowley wrote a larger 
 part of the play than Middleton, and not by 
 any means only the gipsy scenes, with their 
 jollity, dancing and crabbed ballad singing. 
 The opening was, no doubt, actually written 
 by Middleton, but it has a quality unusual 
 in his work, and not unusual in the work 
 of Rowley. It is as if Rowley were behind 
 Middleton, controlling him. Most of the 
 
254 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 prose, both when it goes creeping and tedious 
 with Sancho and Soto, and when it over- 
 flows into doggrel and occasionally savoury 
 snatches of song, has Rowley's manner and 
 substance; but he is to be traced, also, in 
 the slow and powerful verse which ends the 
 third act, in lines like: 
 
 This is the triumph of a soul drowned deep 
 In the unfathomed seas of matchless sorrow, 
 
 and in the whole attitude and speech of a father 
 who speaks with the very accent of Julianus 
 in All's Lost by Lust: 
 
 Teach me how I may now be just and cruel, 
 For henceforth I am childless. 
 
 Rowley is heard, also, through much of the 
 fourth act, though Middleton comes in un- 
 mistakably towards the end, and is the writer 
 of the whole fifth act. The characters are 
 distributed between them, and so charming a 
 person as Constanza is decidedly at her best 
 when she speaks through Middleton. The 
 whole play is not made very probable, or meant 
 to be so; it is a frank romance, with stage 
 mysteries, some of them thrilling, like the 
 wonderful opening scene, some, mere tricks 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 255 
 
 of convenience; and there is a freshness and 
 pleasantness about it which seem to show 
 us Middleton in full and final acceptance of 
 the romantic manner. 
 
 Yet it is difficult to assign to any other period 
 the comedy of Anything for a Quiet Life, 
 printed in 1662, and so badly printed that it 
 is not easy to distinguish the prose from the 
 verse, the more so as the one seems to be set 
 to run in no very different measures from the 
 other. It seems to be a late and only return 
 to the earlier manner of the farcical comediee 
 of city life, with shop-keeping scenes of the 
 old random brilliance and the old domestic 
 fooleries and reinstallments. Even more mat- 
 ter is crammed into it, even more hastily, and 
 there is the old fierce vigour of talk. But in 
 two plays, published together in 1657, we 
 see what seems to be almost the last mood of 
 Middleton, after his collaboration with Rowley 
 was at an end, and the influence perhaps not 
 wholly evaporated. More Dissemblers besides 
 Women, which is characteristic of Middleton 
 in its tangle of virtues and hypocrisies, its 
 masquerade of serious meanings and humour- 
 ous disguises, is written in verse of a lovely 
 
256 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 and eager quality, which bends with equal 
 flexibility to the doings of " those dear gipsies" 
 and to the good cardinal's concerns of con- 
 science " in a creature that's so doubtful as a 
 woman." It is a parti-coloured thing, and has 
 beauty and oddity. But in Women beware 
 Women we find much of Middleton's finest 
 and ripest work, together with his most rancid 
 " comic relief"; a stern and pitiless " criticism 
 of life" is interrupted by foul and foolish 
 clowning; and a tragedy of the finest comic 
 savour ends in a mere heap of corpses, where 
 
 vengeance met vengeance 
 Like a set match, as if the plagues of sin 
 Had been agreed to meet here all together. 
 
 "I've lost myself in this quite" Middleton 
 might say with the duke, and rarely has better 
 material been more callously left to spoil. 
 There is no finer comedy of its kind in the whole 
 of Elizabethan drama than the scene between 
 Livia, Bianca and the widow; and the kind is a 
 rare, bitter and partly tragic one. The human 
 casuistry is flawless; the irony is an illumina- 
 tion rather than a correction of reality. And 
 these vile people are alive, and the vices in 
 them work with a bewildering and convincing 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 257 
 
 certainty. The technique of such scenes aa 
 that in which husband and wife flaunt their 
 new finery at each other is not less than 
 astonishing. All the meaner passions are 
 seen in probable action, speaking without 
 emphasis, in a language never too far from 
 daily speech for the complete illusion of reality. 
 There is not even the interruption of a mere 
 splendour, no one speaks greatly or utters irrel- 
 evant poetry; here, poetry is the very slave 
 and confidant of drama, heroically obedient. 
 But the heights of The Changeling, the nobility 
 of even what was evil in the passions of that 
 play, are no longer attained. Middleton, 
 left to himself, has returned, with new experi- 
 ence and new capacity, to his own level. 
 
 With one more experiment, and this a 
 master-piece of a wholly new kind, " the only 
 work of English poetry," says Swinburne, 
 " which may properly be called Aristophanic," 
 the career of Middleton comes, as far as we 
 know, to an end. A Game of Chess is a satire, 
 taking the popular side against Spain, and it 
 was the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, the 
 " Machiavel-politician " and Black Knight of 
 its chess-board, who caused the suppression 
 
258 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 of the play, and the punishment of all con- 
 cerned in it. It is the most perfect of Middle- 
 ton's works, and it carries some of his most 
 intimate qualities to a point they had not 
 reached before. Banter turns to a quite 
 serious and clear and bitter satire; burlesque 
 becomes a severe and elegant thing; the verse, 
 beginning formally and always kept well within 
 bounds, is fitted with supreme technical skill 
 to this new, outlandish matter; there are 
 straight confessions of sins and symbolic feasts 
 of the vices, in which a manner learnt for the 
 numbering of the feasts and fastings of the 
 city finds itself ready for finer use. We learn 
 now how 
 
 fat cathedral bodies 
 Have very often but lean little soul, 
 
 and the imagery, already expressive, takes on 
 a new colour of solemn mockery. 
 
 From this Leviathan-scandal that lies rolling 
 Upon the crystal waters of devotion, 
 
 is sometimes the language of the Black Knight, 
 and sometimes: 
 
 In the most fortunate angle of the world 
 The court hath held the city by the horns 
 Whilst I have milked her. 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 259 
 
 Technique, in drama and verse alike, never 
 flags; and the play is a satire and criticism, 
 no longer of city manners or of personal 
 vices, but of the nations' policy; and that it 
 was accepted as such, by the public and by the 
 government of the time, is proved by the 
 fifteen hundred pounds taken by the actors 
 in nine days, and by the arrest of Middleton 
 for what was really a form of patriotism. 
 
 We have no record of anything written by 
 Middleton during the three remaining years of 
 his hfe. A Game of Chess is the culmination 
 of those qualities which seem to have been 
 most natural and instinctive in him, in spite 
 of the splendid work of another kind which he 
 did with Rowley in The Changeling. His 
 genius was varied and copious, and he showed 
 his capacity to do almost every kind of 
 dramatic work with immense vigour. Life is 
 never long absent from these tangled scenes, 
 in which so heterogeneous a crowd hurries 
 by, not stopping long enough to make us 
 familiar with most of the persons in it, but 
 giving us an unmistakable human savour. 
 Few of the plays are quite satisfactory all 
 through; there is almost always some con- 
 
260 STUDIES IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 
 
 eiderable flaw, in construction, in characterisa- 
 tion, or in aesthetic taste; yet hardly one 
 of them can be neglected in our consideration 
 of the work as a whole. In single scenes of 
 tragedy and of comedy (romantic comedy, 
 the comedy of manners, farce and satire) he 
 can hold his own against any contemporary 
 and it is only in lyric verse that he is never 
 successful. He became a remarkable dramatic 
 poet, but he was not born to sing. Poetry 
 came to him slowly, and he had to disentangle 
 it from more active growths of comic energy. 
 It came to him when he began to realise that 
 there was something in the world besides 
 cheating shop-keepers and cozening lawyers, 
 and the bargains made between men and 
 women for bodies, not souls. With the height- 
 ening of emotions his style heightens, and as 
 his comedy refines itself his verse becomes 
 subtler. The cry of De Flores: 
 
 Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light 
 Betwixt that star and me? I dread thee not: 
 'Twas but a mist of conscience; 
 
 is almost unique in imagination in his work. 
 And it is drama even more than it is poetry. 
 His style is the most plausible of all styles 
 
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY 261 
 
 in poetry, and it has a probable beauty, 
 giving an easy grace of form to whatever 
 asks to be expressed. It rarely steps aside 
 to pick up a jewel, nor do jewels drop naturally 
 out of its mouth. 
 
 1907. 
 
 THE END 
 
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