SOME ETHICAL ASPECTS
OF
ATER ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY:
BY
J. ROSE COLBY, A. M.

ARTES
837
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
TEENOR
SI-QUÆRIS PENINSULAM-AMⱭ HAN
CIRCUMSPICE


SOME ETHICAL ASPECTS
OF
C69
29892
ATER ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY:
PRECEDED BY
AN EXAMINATION OF ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY.
A THESIS
esented to the Academic Faculty of the University of Michigan for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
BY
J. ROSE COLBY, A. M.
ANN ARBOR:
PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR,
JUNE, 1886.
822.9
сья
[ONLY 200 COPIES.]
This Thesis has been accepted for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy by the committee charged with the direction
of the candidate's studies.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,
June 1, 1886.
ISAAC N. DEMMON,
WILLIAM H. PAYNE,
GEORGE S. MORRIS,
Committee.
THE REGISTER PRINTING COMPANY.

CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION...
NATURE AND END OF TRAGEDY: ARISTOTLE'S THEORY:
A. Aristotle's definition.................
a. Purification of passions..
b. Relation of tragic pity and fear...........……………………………………………
B. Means to attain tragic end:
a. Statement of means....
1
1 2 2
3
b. Discussion of cause of suffering and quality of character................. 3
1. Aristotle's explanation...………………………..
4
2. Pity is for unworthy suffering; fear, for our like...................
3. Likeness to us means moral responsibility..
5
6
4. The tragic hero must not completely realize the moral law in
his life
8
9
9
10
11
5. Nor violate it as one ignorant of its existence..........................
6. Crime as cause of suffering...
7. Error as cause of suffering..
C. Purification and Tragic Joy...........
ATTITUDE OF THE DRAMATIST:
A. Must work in freedom.......
B. His work must be moral……………….
12
12
C. His genius must unite creative expression and moral judgment.….….….….. ……….. 13
HEORY TESTED BY FACT:
A. Why Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher are chosen for study.............
B. Questions involved in this study.......
14
15
C. John Ford:
a. Ford and the Renaissance in Italy......
16
b. Ford's subjects displease us, but are not the chief cause of our
displeasure
17
c. Ford and moral values:
1. Apparent indifference....
2. Real insensibility.
d. Fascination of passion: its effect on his art.........
D. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher:
a. General characteristics.........
18
20
21
23
b. Lack of moral insight supplied by conventional judgment.……………………………….. 23
c. General effect on their art......
d. Special effects:
24
1. Friendship as a tragic motive.............
2. Loyalty as a tragic motive..........
3. Love as a tragic motive…...…………………………..
4. Honor as a tragic motive…......
5. Freedom and responsibility....
e. Extent of their failure...........
CONCLUSION………………..
25
33
20 20 2 2 3 20 88
25
28
31
35
38

CRITICAL WORKS CONSULTED.
ARISTOTLE: De Arte Poetica (Vahlen's Text): With Translation by Edward
Wharton, M. A. Oxford and London: 1883.
Ethica Nicomachea ex Recensione Immanuelis Bekkeri. Editio Quarta. Be
1881.
Opera Omnia, Græce et Latine. Paris: 1862.
BAUMGART, HERMANN: Aristoteles, Lessing, und Goethe. Ueber das Ethisch
das Aesthetische Princip der Tragödie. Leipzig: 1877.
COLERIDGE, S. T.: Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists. Works,
New York: 1853.
COLLIER, J. PAYNE: The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of S
speare; and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. A new edition. 3
London: 1879.
DOWDEN, EDWARD: Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. London:
GERVINUS, DR. G. G.: Shakespeare Commentaries. Translated by F. E. Bur
New edition. London: 1875.
KEDNEY, J. S.: Hegel's Aesthetics. A Critical Exposition. Chicago: 1885.
LAMB, CHARLES: The Life, Letters, and Writings. Edited by Percy Fitzge
6 vols. London: 1882. Vol. IV.
LESSING, G. E.: Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Werke, 6. Stuttgart: 1874.
Laokoön. Werke, 5. Stuttgart: 1874.
LEE, VERNON: Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in
Renaissance. Second edition. London: 1885.
MANNS, P.: Die Lehre des Aristoteles von der Tragischen Katharsis und Hama
Karlsruhe und Leipzig: 1883.
MOULTON, R. G.: Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. Oxford: 1885.
MACAULAY, G. C.: Francis Beaumont: A Critical Study. London: 1883.
PLATO: The Republic. Jowett's Translation, vol. 3. Oxford: 1875.
SCHILLER, FRIEDRICH: Kleinere Prosaische Schriften. 2 vols. Berlin.
SCHLEGEL, A. W.: A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. T
lated by John Black. London: 1861.
SYMONDS, J A.: Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama. London: 1884
Renaissance in Italy:
The Age of the Despots. London: 1875.
The Revival of Learning.
Italian Literature. 2 vols.
London: 1877.
London: 1881.
Sketches and Studies in Italy. London: 1879.
SWINBURNE, A. C.: Essays and Studies. London: 1875.
TAINE, H. A.: History of English Literature. Translated by H. Van Laun. 4
London: 1883.
ULRICI, DR. HERMANN: Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. Translated by L. 1
Schmitz. 2 vols. London: 1876.
WARD, A. W.: A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Qu
Anne. 2 vols. London: 1875.
I.
The student of the Elizabethan drama is speedily con-
onted by various questions in dramatic ethics which lead
in at once to a consideration of the nature and end of
gedy. The answers he may finally give to them will de-
nd immediately upon the theory of tragedy adopted. I
wish to consider some of these questions in a form suggested
the work of three poets whose dramatic activity fell in the
ter part of the period still known, in literary history, as
Mzabethan, although the Stuarts were on the throne. To
approach them with profit, it will be necessary to dwell first
al at some length, not upon the form and external features
tragedy, but upon some of its vital, ethical characteristics.
Astotle's famous definition of tragedy will be used as the
basis of the discussion.
II.
NATURE AND END OF TRAGEDY.
In the Poetics Aristotle defines tragedy as "representation
important and complete action of some compass, in em-
bellished language of either kind according to the several
rts of the play, in the way of action, not of narrative,
efecting by means of pity and fear the purification of such
Desions." 1
· ἔστιν οὖν τραγωδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας, μέγε
θες ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστου τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις,
Αμύντων καὶ οὐ δι' ἀπαγγελίας, δι' ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν
τούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν. Poetics, ch. 6 [1449 b]. Aristotle explains
that by "of either kind according to the several parts of the play" he means verse
alone and verse accompanied by music. This does not touch the essential nature of
trendy, and accordingly I have said nothing further concerning it.
2
Some Ethical Aspects of
1
Perhaps not the least merit of this definition in the eyes of
commentators is the possibility of variously interpreting the
last phrase. Without imitating them so far as to give an
extended reason for my belief, I shall assume that by the
words "the purification of such passions" Aristotle meant
the purification of the group of passions which, according to
his well-known habit, he would classify under the general
heads of pity and fear; that is, taking as the virtuous mean,¹
in each case, the feeling pity and fear when one ought, and
as one ought, and towards the objects one ought, he would
include under the same heads all degrees of the same feel-
ings which vary from the standard of the mean either by
defect, or by excess, or by being exercised at the wrong times,
or towards the wrong objects. The purification would then
consist in bringing the vicious extremes into unison with the
virtuous mean, in lifting us, though but momentarily, to the
plane for which we are made, in enabling us to attain, for the
time, to our proper nature, to realize, in so far as pity and
fear are concerned, our proper activity as men.
A second point in Aristotle's definition must be noticed,
and the view accepted in this paper made clear at the outset.
This concerns the mutual relation of tragic pity and fear, and
the view adopted is, in the main, the one defended by Les-
sing²: in tragedy, at least, the two are to be held inseparable,
as two phases of one emotion-fear turned within to contem-
plate possibilities of suffering arising from one's own nature,
pity looking outward upon suffering already realized in the
experience of a kindred nature; or, if you please, we will
hold that they are bound together as cause and effect, in that
1 Aristotle's formula for the mean is given in the Ethics II. 5, (Bekker's 4th ed.), in
the words: τὸ δ᾽ ὅτε δεῖ καὶ ἐφ᾽ οἷς καὶ πρὸς οὓς καὶ οὗ ἕνεκα καὶ ὡς δεῖ,
μέσον τε καὶ ἄριστον, ὅπερ ἐστὶ τῆς ἀρετῆς. I have translated loosely, in-
cluding ἐφ᾽ οἷς καὶ πρὸς οὓς καὶ οὗ ἕνεκα in the one expression “towards the
objects one ought."
2 Lessing's criticism is to be found in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, especially
in numbers 74-83. Aristotle in the Rhet. II. 5, 8, speaking of pity and fear in gen-
eral, uses a form of expression that points plainly to the same view.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
3
pity for another arises from our beholding him meeting a
fate which the common nature within us recognizes as at once
possible and full of dread, before which, therefore, it shrinks
with fear.
With this understanding of Aristotle's words, and with a
partial reservation on one point soon to be noticed more
fully, I am willing to accept his definition of the nature and
end of tragedy, together with the consequences that follow as
to the necessary means to attain that end. These are, in
brief, that the action chosen be important (arovdaías), not mean
sad trivial; that it be complete (Teleías), having beginning,
middle, and end; of some compass¹-long enough to ad-
init of adequate development of the motive; that it involve
suffering, since it is to produce pity and fear; that the form
of suffering best adapted to this end should involve a revo-
Jution of circumstances, in case of the main actor, from great
repute and prosperity to adversity, and this consequent on
his own error; that the solution of the plot should not be
mechanical or irrational, but arise necessarily or probably out
of itself³; and, finally, that the character be good.*
2
In case of the most of these requirements the mere state-
ment of them is enough to carry conviction. Of two of them,
the cause of suffering, and the quality of character, more
must be said. They are nearly allied to each other and may
be considered together. That a form of suffering involving
a contrast with antecedent happiness is more potent than
other to produce pity and fear, no one will deny. But why
any
* In ch. 7 [1451 a] he explains: ἐν ὅσῳ μεγέθει (κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τό ἀναγκαῖον
ἐφεξῆς γιγνομένων) συμβαίνει εἰς εὐτυχίαν ἐκ δυστυχίας ἢ ἐξ εὐτυχίας
εἰς δυστυχίαν μεταβάλλειν, ἱκανὸς ὅρος ἐστὶ τοῦ μεγέθους.
* Suffering is used here to include "revolution” and “recognition" (πepɩTÉTEIA
στις αναγνώρισις).
φανερὸν οὖν ὅτι καὶ τὰς λύσεις τῶν μύθων ἐξ αὐτοῦ δεῖ τοῦ μύθου
συμβαίνειν, καὶ μὴ ὥσπερ ἐν τῇ Μηδείᾳ ἀπὸ μηχανῆς ... ἄλογον δὲ μηδὲν
εἶναι ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν, εἰ δὲ μὴ, ἔξω τῆς τραγῳδίας. Poetics, ch. 15 [1454].
Poetics, ch. 15 (1454 a).
4
Some Ethical Aspects of
must this suffering be caused by the victim's own error?
Why may he not remain entirely innocent? Or again, if his
own action is to be the cause, why must it be of a kind to be
called error? What does Aristotle mean, and is he in the
right here?
1
His explanation is adequate as far as it goes. The sight of
absolutely unmerited suffering is not, he says, pitiful and
fearful, it is μapòv¹, that is, shocking to the religious sense;
it does violence to our finer instincts, begets feelings of in-
jury, impatience, and aversion, in place of those that it is the
function of tragedy to arouse. On the other hand, the suffer-
ing of the absolutely vicious' produces in us merely the feel-
ing of philanthropy, an emotion which, as men, we must
experience in the presence of all human suffering whatsoever,
merely because it is human; but this also is far removed from
pity, and is unaccompanied by fear, for pity, he adds in ex-
planation, is for unworthy suffering, fear, for our like. But
that by "unworthy suffering" he does not mean suffering of
the absolutely innocent his own previous words have shown;
that by
our like" he does not mean anything and every-
thing that may possibly wear the human form, is also clear.
What, then, may be the range of character in the central
figures whose suffering is to kindle in us and purify the pas-
sions of pity and fear, and what degree of error may be ad-
mitted as cause of that suffering? Farther on he says that
the character must be good, adding that character is shown
1 πρῶτον μὲν δῆλον ὅτι οὔτε τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς ἄνδρας δεῖ μεταβάλλοντας
φαίνεσθαι ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν (οὐ γὰρ φοβερὸν οὐδὲ ἐλεεινὸν
τοῦτο, ἀλλὰ μιαρόν ἐστιν). Poetics, ch. 13 [1452 b].
2 οὐδ᾽ αὖ τὸν σφόδρα πονηρὸν ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν μεταπίπ
τειν, τὸ μὲν γὰρ φιλάνθρωπον ἔχοι ἂν ἡ τοιαύτη σύστασις, ἀλλ᾽ οὔτε
ἔλεον οὔτε φόβον. Poetics, ch. 13 [1453 a].
3 ὁ μὲν γὰρ [i. e., ἔλεος] περὶ τὸν ἀνάξιόν ἐστι δυστυχοῦντα, ὁ δὲ
[i. e., φόβος] περὶ τὸν ὅμοιον, . . . ὥστε οὔτε ἐλεεινὸν οὔτε φοβερὸν ἔσται
τὸ συμβαῖνον. Poetics, ch. 13 [1453 a].
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
LO
5
by choice, and good character by good choice.¹ And there he
leaves it.
Now certainly we cannot accept this assertion merely be-
cause it is Aristotle's, and his explanation is unfortunately,
though characteristically, brief; but at least we may find in
his words a starting point for the discussion of a question of
such paramount importance both to the general theory of
tragedy and to a just criticism of particular tragedies. We
find this starting point in the words: "Pity is for unworthy
suffering; fear, for our like," and especially in the last clause.
The words that I have rendered in this way, 6 μèv пeρì TÒV
THIẾT CỦA CÔNG TUYODY Ta, etc., are more commonly and appar
endly more exactly rendered: Pity is for the innocent suffer-
ing, etc. Reflection and a further reading of the Poetics go
far to show that this is not and cannot be Aristotle's thought,
for he approves the choice of such heroes as Edipus, Orestes,
and Thyestes. Moreover, a critical reading of the passage
itself in its context may be held to justify the same conclu-
sion, and to confirm, as I think, the meaning implied in the
rendering here adopted. Tov àvátov is used as a middle term
between τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς and τοὺς μοχθηροὺς Οὐ τὸν σφόδρα πονηρὸν,
between the good and the thoroughly, hopelessly base. [But
between these extremes the mean' is the man marked by na-
ture as neither pre-eminently good, nor wholly bad, the man
of mistakes and sins, of crimes, it may be, but with some-
thing in his character which shows that he deserved a better
fate. This shade of meaning, belonging to the Greek ú àvážtos,
· περὶ δὲ τὰ ἤθη τέτταρά ἐστιν ὧν δεῖ στοχάζεσθαι, ἓν μὲν καὶ πρῶτον,
όπως χρηστὰ ᾖ, ἕξει δὲ ἦθος μὲν, ἐὰν ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη ποιῇ φανερὸν ὁ λόγος
* ή πράξις προαίρεσίν τινα, χρηστὸν δὲ ἐὰν χρηστήν. Poetics, ch.15 [1454 2].
The other three qualities to be aimed at do not touch the point in question.
•
μεταξὺ ἄρα τούτων λοιπός ἔστι δὲ τοιοῦτος ὁ μήτε ἀρετῆ δια-
φέρων καὶ δικαιοσύνῃ, μήτε διὰ κακίαν καὶ μοχθηρίαν μεταβάλλων εἰς
τὴν δυστυχίαν ἀλλὰ δὲ ἁμαρτίαν τινὰς τῶν ἐν μεγάλη δόξῃ ὄντων καὶ
εὐτυχία, οἷον Οἰδίπους καὶ θυέστης καὶ οἱ ἐκ τῶν τοιούτων γενῶν
ἐπιφανεῖς
migaveis ävôpes. Poetics, ch. 13 [1453 a].
6
Some Ethical Aspects of
is lost in the English rendering closest to it in etymology,
"the unworthy man," but is preserved by connecting the
attribute with the substantive implied in the participle dus-
tuyouvтa, and translating as I have done: Pity is for unworthy
suffering. The last clause, moreover, "fear, for our like,"
points in the same direction, and, if carefully considered, will
lead us to a similar result.
We are men, and the likeness to us must, we may be sure,
consist in something essentially human, in something pre-
eminently, distinctively human. But the distinctive mark of
man is his conscious spiritual life, his existence as an intelli-
gence conscious of its own power of discrimination, compre-
hension, and judgment, conscious, too, of a power of self-
determination, of self-guidance. More than this. Man as a
conscious intelligence is aware of a life not himself, manifest-
ing itself in a physical world external to him, and following
an order of development which he did not lay down for it,
but which he has learned to recognize as inherent in its very
nature. He has recognized that his own body must per-
force obey the same physical law, under which the fulfillment
of certain conditions ensures its continued life as body, while
their non-fulfillment means death. Thus one side of man's
intelligent experience has been a finding-out, by little and
little, the order of physical life, the lines that physical exist-
ence must follow, until now, even where he has not yet suc-
ceeded in discovering this order, he is nevertheless convinced
of its existence. But his intelligent experience has had
another side. Slowly, hesitatingly, man has come to see that
in his own acts also a law is made manifest, not in the sense
that they are fixed and determined by something beyond his
own control, but in this, that by the doing of certain things
and the avoiding of others, individual life acquires new worth,
a nobility unknown before, is crowned by the joy that comes
from the fulfillment of its characteristic end; that society
also achieves its end of the general good in proportion as its
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
7
individual members follow this line of conduct rather than
another. He has perceived that reversing this course the
individual ends in confusion and moral death, society in dis-
union and dissolution; and, as, in case of physical death, he
has learned to recognize its cause in a broken law, that is, in
non-fulfillment of the conditions of life, so, for this moral
death he seeks a similar cause. Comparing the results of the
two lines of conduct he inevitably concludes that the one end-
ing in proved consciousness of fuller life is the true order of
development of the life of the spirit. He recognizes the
existence of moral law, side by side with physical law, as an
order which he has not established himself, which he may
violate, if he will, but which he is bound to follow if he would
achieve his true, his proper life. This conviction has become
a part of the inheritance of civilized peoples. We demand an
expression of it in their national life, we demand an expression
of it in the life of the individual. Nor is this saying that the
individual must or can live up to the level of the law, for
what its order is he has not yet discovered in its entirety, in
its perfection, any more than he has discovered the last secret
of physical law. With single-hearted purpose to choose the
right, he may, in particular cases fall into disastrous error;
with divided purpose, with even a controlling desire for ends
not to be attained save by direct collision with the moral law,
he may yet reveal a full recognition of its existence and of its
just authority; and it is this "instinct of the one true way,"
still abiding in man in spite of error, in spite even of crime,
which we demand of him as man, for it is in this that we
recognize our own likeness. This instinct, therefore, we
demand of the tragic character also, as the indispensable con-
dition of arousing our pity and fear.
But the question still remains: granting the presence in his
mind of the living moral sense, how far must he obey it, and
how far may he rebel against its authority in desire and act,
and still in his suffering force us to yield the tribute of fear
and pity to the acknowledged tie between us?
8
Some Ethical Aspects of
In seeking an answer to this question let us first consider
once again Aristotle's reason why the blameless man should
not be made the hero of tragic action. Why do we readily
acquiesce in Aristotle's opinion that the sight of undeserved
suffering is repulsive, shocking to the religious sense? Why
does such suffering carry in itself no power of reconciling us
to its existence? Why must reconciliation come, if at all,
from other considerations?
The effect upon us of suffering in others, its meaning for
us, is determined by our own experience. Now the most of
us are so conscious of our own imperfection, so conscious,
also, of suffering as resulting from that imperfection, that we
have come to look upon the suffering as the natural mark of
the imperfection itself, of the failure to achieve our proper
end, just as joy is the mark of its achievement, of perfection.
We feel the inevitableness and the justice of suffering grow-
ing out of error, because we can trace it to an inherent cause.
The suffering of the innocent, on the contrary, although life
brings us face to face with it at every turn, still strikes us as
incongruous, unnatural, monstrous, because no such inherent
cause can be assigned for it in the life of the sufferer. Looked
at in itself alone it is not an appeal to our pity so much as to
our indignation. It is a shock to our fundamental notions of
justice. In truth,
64
These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad."
We cannot rest at this thought. We take refuge in our con-
sciousness of the interdependence of human lives. Our
offended moral nature seeks and must seek satisfaction in the
effort to discover the relation of this innocent suffering to the
life and act of another. Looked at in this way, not directly,
as an end in itself, but indirectly, as an element in the guilt
of another, it is no longer merely abhorrent and unendurable.
Nay, in thus bringing home to us the consequences to other
lives of possible wrong-doing springing from our own imper-
fection, it may become a most potent cause of that emotion
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
9
whose inward-looking face is fear, whose outward-looking face
is pity. But this is only another way of saying that, while
tragedy may, perhaps, employ the suffering of the innocent
as a means to its desired end, yet it may do so only in the case
of subordinate persons, not in case of the central figure from
whose character reacting upon circumstances the tragic action
springs. The tragic hero must not be one in whose life the
moral law is completely realized.]
But if the conditions of our nature and experience demand
that suffering, if it is to have a healing power over the spirit,
have its roots in the imperfection of a moral agent, the same
conditions, also, would seem to demand that that imperfection
should not be too nearly absolute. While we are all conscious
of impulses, desires, and acts infringing the moral law, a
spontaneous and violent outrage to it seems to us almost more
unnatural for man than perfection itself. We feel that the
one is extra-human, but our common speech itself has decreed
that the other is inhuman. We do not recognize ourselves
in it. By no effort can we realize to ourselves the state of
mind from which the crime has resulted. But if the guilt is
so remote from us that we find it impossible by any effort to
put ourselves in the place of the guilty, so also the suffering
that falls upon him in consequence is equally remote from us.
We feel horror for the act, compassion, philanthropy, it may
be, for the agent, but active, vivid pity for him we do not
feel; for the nerves of fear in our own being are untouched.
Does this imply that the tragic dramatist is never to build
his tragedy on the basis of a great crime? In the face of the
facts both of the drama and of life it would be absurd to make
such a claim. But if a great crime is so used, the motive
inspiring it must be felt to be commensurate with it. To be
so felt it must be of a kind to appeal strongly to all men, or,
at least, to most men; it must therefore be grounded in one
of the universal passions. More than this, we must not only
perceive that the tragic hero acts under the influence of a
Uor M
10
Some Ethical Aspects of
passion of which we are aware as a strong incentive, or pos-
sible strong incentive, to our own actions; but we must be
made to feel the intensity of that passion in the particular
instance before us. Now, intensity of force is measured by
its power of overcoming resistance. Accordingly, to realize
the intensity we must see evidence of the resistance. To
retain our respect for the tragic hero as a moral agent, when
force of passion drives him into crime, we must see him
either making a strong struggle against it before he falls its
victim, or shrinking after the deed before the avenging power
of his own consciousness of wrong. For in the futile battling,
in the shame and terror of overthrow in that struggle in which
defeat is guilt, we recognize the action and the passion of a
spirit like our own. An undefined fear of our own being, of
its unknown, unrealized possibilities of good and evil, settles
upon us, and with it a great pity for him who has fallen in
the self-same battle that each one of us must fight,-that battle
in which the two sides of our dual nature meet and strive
together, and the victory of the one is life, and of the other,
death. We do not reason upon the spectacle, we may not be
able to analyze our feeling or account for it; it simply
possesses us through the power of poetic truth-fear of dis-
loyalty to ourselves, of a failure to live up to the highest that
is in us as men; pity for the suffering unworthy of man in
that it is begotten of that failure.
No less instant, no less complete, is the response of the
nerves of pity and of fear in us to the touch of suffering that
is the child of error. Errors of unreflecting impulse, of un-
disciplined temper, of mistaken judgment of moral values
or of the demands of duty or of justice-these have laid so
heavy a burden on us, our own lives go so staggering under
their load, that we cannot refuse the meed of pity to one who
has sunk beneath a like burden. With a greater dread we look
along the half-lit way of life, with a new awe of that mystery
of human destiny which makes adherence to a certain course
Maou
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
11
the condition of life and happiness, and yet leaves us to the
possibilities of ignorance and halting strength. Tragedy may
not explain this mystery; but it may make present to our con-
sciousness with new power the inviolableness of the moral
law, which attaches the penalty of suffering to every trans-
gression, and that not by outward, mechanical means, but by
an inherent necessity; it may show us not the severity only,
of this law, but its beauty and eternal attractiveness as the law
of life; it may fill us at once with a truer sense that the real
evil to be feared is disloyalty to this law, and with a wiser,
truer sympathy with him who has in his weakness felt the full
measure of its retributive power.
It may do this, and in so far as it is true to its function it
will do this; for this is in truth to bring about that activity of
the passions of pity and fear in which, as we have said, their
purification consists. But this is not, after all, the utmost
and final effect of tragedy; for, as all true activity is per-
fected by pleasure, so this purification, this activity of the
soul in the proper exercise of pity and fear, is crowned and
perfected by tragic joy. Moreover, it is only to the pleasure
so arising that this distinctive term belongs. All other pleas-
ures derived from tragedy, whether occasioned by beauty of
diction, sweetness and melody of verse, richness of imagery,
or striking incident, is but accidental, is at most subsidiary to
this true tragic joy, and must neither be confounded with it
nor allowed to usurp its place.¹ [The end of tragedy is dis-
tinctly a moral end, its crowning joy is distinctly a moral joyj
1 In Aristotle's words: "We should not seek from Tragedy any pleasure, but
that which is proper to it.” οὐ γὰρ πᾶσαν δεῖ ζητεῖν ἡδονὴν ἀπὸ τραγῳδίας,
a là Tây orala). Poeties, ch.14 [1453 b].
12
Some Ethical Aspects of
III.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE DRAMATIST.
What, then, should be the attitude of the dramatist? Is
he to be merely a preacher whose sermons take on a dramatic
form? Is he to personify vices and virtues, and array them
against each other in a more or less complex action, taking
care that the virtues come off victorious? Is the dramatist
to sit down deliberately to inculcate a specific moral lesson,
and consciously, deliberately, order the action to that end?
There could be no surer way than this to defeat his end. He
is not to avert his eyes from the trouble and the stress, the
turmoil and confusion, the beauty and the baseness of human
lives, and build up his characters, and his plots on the simple
lines of abstract truth and justice. He is indeed to guard the
freedom of the spirit and the supremacy of its judgment, but
not by separating himself from the actual world. He is to live
among men, to be the observer of all life, to touch it at all
points, to make himself one with it in all its phases through
that power of sympathetic imagination and spiritual insight
which we call genius. He is to seek the truth, as one has
said, "not by exclusion, but by inclusion," even as he did
"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole."
And having seen it, having known it, he is to make us see it
in imaginary lives created by his genius working, not in the
spirit of the preacher, but with the true freedom of the artist.
None the less, his work must be moral, and this simply
because human life is moral. The truth about life does not
lie in isolated facts, it lies in the relation of those facts to law;
life as it is, life looked at steadily, seen in its wholeness, is
life seen in its relation to law. It is thus that the dramatist
is to see and represent it. Nor is this attitude repugnant to
genius, or oppressive to its free activity, for if we can seize
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
13
the secret of genius at all, it lies in a certain natural capacity
and aptitude to do this very thing, to perceive the subtile
links that bind the facts of life together, for isolation to sub-
stitute relation. The surest mark of highest genius is the
comprehensiveness and spontaneity of this its moral vision,
informing and controlling a power of creative expression that
is commensurate with itself.
To appreciate the necessity of both these powers to highest
tragic creation, we have only to turn to work of an admittedly
lower order than the highest, and seek to determine what is
lacking to it, what unsoundness in it justifies the common
verdict. We shall find for the most part, I am convinced,
that its relative inferiority springs from the poet's defective
spiritual insight, from an incompleteness and one-sidedness
of the moral judgment; that this incompleteness reacts upon
his creative power and is reproduced in his work, so that how-
ever fine it may be in parts, however moving and powerful, it
leaves us at last with a sense, vague or well-defined, of insuf-
ciency and inharmoniousness, instead of strengthened as by
contact with living truth. That is, with relative weakness of
spiritual vision the poet may still possess the happy gift of
felicitous expression, may command the secret of exquisite, be-
cause beautiful, pathos, or make us shuddering observers of
the might of baneful passion: what he can hardly do, or can do
only at rare moments of clarified vision, is to calm even while
he excites us, to use the intensity of emotion to produce peace.
He seizes our attention, he forces us to look on while the
creatures of his brain play out their parts before us; he tears
our hearts, adds pang to pang, but there his power—may be
his purpose also ceases. He gives us a great emotion, he
does not care to inquire whether it be a holy emotion as well;
whether it be merely a tumult of the senses, seeking through
sympathy with another's feeling to throw off the fetters of the
moral will, and rule in lawless usurpation; or an emotion
founded in the moral nature, receiving from it its strength,
14
Some Ethical Aspects of
and to it acknowledging full allegiance. Excitement as an
end in itself, emotion for emotion's sake, passion command-
ing sympathy as mere passion: this is what we may look for
from that form of ability in which a considerable creative
power is not balanced by a broad and thoroughly sound moral
judgment.
This unsoundness will be felt in the whole conception of an
action. It will betray itself by dwelling upon a narrow range
of subjects, by proneness to seek, within that range, unnatural
actions; by failure to apply to the poison of such actions the
remedy of a clean and wholesome treatment; by an inade-
quate conception of moral responsibility and therefore of
character. It will seize upon the transitory forms assumed
by the enduring qualities of human nature rather than upon
the real nature of those qualities. It will be accompanied by
an inability to rise far above the level of even a low average
standard of taste and judgment in the contemporary world.
Its mark upon a work is, "of an age," rather than "for all
time."
IV.
THEORY TESTED BY FACT.
That this is not mere theorizing the pages of the minor
Elizabethan drama abundantly testify, but I wish here to call
to witness especially the work of John Ford' and Beaumont
and Fletcher². Nor shall I be careful to distinguish between
the individual work of the last two, and this not because the
effort to do so does not lead to fruitful results, but because
the points that I shall dwell upon here are almost, if not
1 The Works of John Ford, with Notes Critical and Explanatory, by William Gif-
ford, Esq. A new Edition, carefully revised, with Additions to the Text and to the
Notes by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. 3 vols., London, 1869.
2 The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, with Notes and a Biographical Memoir
by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. 11 vols., London, 1843-46.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
15
quite, as characteristic of their joint work as of Fletcher's
sole production.
But why is Ford's name joined with theirs? Certainly not
because of any similarity to them evident at first sight.
Beaumont and Fletcher were by preference writers of comedy,
and betrayed their comic bent even in their tragedies. Ford
on the contrary had hardly a trace of comic power, whether
for construction or for dialogue. Beaumont and Fletcher like
the excitement of intrigue and the risk of a general catas-
trophe, but for the most part prefer at any cost to save their
leading characters from ruin. Ford broods over the victims
of passion, follows them lingeringly to their doom, and with
a sigh drops the curtain at the end upon a stage where death
rules all. In the intensest scenes the pulse of the two co-
workers still beats evenly and lightly; they look on in undis-
turbed serenity. Ford never wholly frees himself from his
own creations. He falls under the fascination of the passions
he is embodying, while the gloom which hangs deep over all
his work is, we feel, but the shadow of a melancholy which
obscured his soul. They have not been taken together then,
as, for instance, Webster and Tourneur might be, because
they worked in the same vein, but because in their very un-
likeness they show certain characteristics which can be traced
only to one source; because, furthermore, it is from an uneasi-
ness and dissatisfaction left in my own mind by their plays,
and from the necessary conviction that this cannot be the
proper effect of any true form of art, that I have been led,
first, to inquire what the effect of real tragedy is, and finally
to see that it is in truth what Aristotle called it, a purification,
that is, a bringing of our ordinary selves into harmony with
our real selves and with the real world that surrounds us.
What is there in the actions chosen by these poets, or in
their treatment of chosen actions, to account for their effect
on us? Are the actions themselves, or the passions on which
they are based, ill-adapted to dramatic treatment, or does the
16
Some Ethical Aspects of
trouble lie in the poet's conception of them? Do they take the
wrong subjects, or do they value them for the wrong reasons?
Does our displeasure arise from the characters in their plays,
or from the ideal of character which is involved in them?
These are troublesome questions, but they are questions that
the student of the drama cannot avoid asking himself at last,
however he may have yielded for a time to the strange power
of Ford, or the unfailing interest of the stories dramatized
with so much beauty and effectiveness by Beaumont and
Fletcher.
In the true spirit of the Elizabethan Englishman these
poets turned to Italy, to the tales of her Renaissance poets,
and the lives of the men and women who made illustrious and
infamous the great age of her new-born life. From Italy
they brought, if not their plots and characters as they were
to use them, yet minds filled with pictures of that contradic-
tory life in which beauty was so strangely mingled with ugli-
ness; in which men gave themselves up with equal ardor to
the worship of the once-lost and newly re-won authority of
beauty in art and letters, and to a violence and bestiality of
crime which destroyed beauty in life. They caught some-
thing of the spirit of that worship, but they were fascinated
by the energy and boundlessness of that crime. Now in that
crime students of the Renaissance have helped us to see
mainly an expression of a new and vivid recognition of the
worth of the individual, a recognition carried to the extreme
of giving to individual impulses the authority of law, once
held by the old moral standards, but now denied to them as
to rules imposed from without, and hence unworthy of free-
1 See J. A. Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, passim.
1
2 See Symonds's Renaissance in Italy: Age of the Despots, Chapters I and II; The
Revival of Learning, Chapters I and IX; Italian Literature, Chapters II and III, and
IX to XI (for effect on Italian literature); also, for influence on English literature,
Symonds's Sketches and Studies in Italy, Chapter VI. See also Vernon Lee's Eupho-
rion, especially the essays "The Sacrifice," and "The Italy of the Elizabethan Dra-
matists." The latter contains a valuable criticism on Ford.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
17
men. By this lawlessness itself become law Ford in particu-
lar seems to have been attracted; or perhaps it would be truer
to say that this temper of the Italian Renaissance is curiously,
even if unconsciously, reflected in Ford's tragedies.
Too many of those old Italian crimes were committed in the
name of something that called itself love. It is over these
that Ford must have lingered longest; to these he must have
returned again and again, for these form the subjects of three
of the four tragedies of which he was sole author. True to
his age he loved striking effects and strong emotions. To
make sure of them he chose actions that at the best touch the
limits of nature, and at the worst pass on into regions whither
the healthy mind follows with aversion and only under com-
pulsion. There can be little doubt that in two of these
tragedies the subject itself produces one element of the reader's
discomfort.
But it is not the greatest. When we recall some of the
tragic myths of Greece, tales of the house of Cadmus or of
Pelops, and the great tragedies founded on them, not only
without offense to the spirit, but with actual inspiration to its
better instincts, it is impossible to say that even the worst of
Ford's subjects might not, so far as the mere action is con-
cerned, have been wrought into something on which the mind
could repose with satisfaction. The myth of the Agamem-
non is not in itself purer than the story of Bianca, and the
legend of the Oedipus involves greater horror than was neces-
sarily forced upon the poet who wrote of the love of Giovanni
and Annabella: but from the one we rise strengthened and
composed by the power of the emotions stirred; from the
other, with a sickening recoil, and a loathing all the greater
for our consciousness that, for a time, our sympathies have
been flowing in the abnormal channel prepared for them by
the poet's art.
1 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Love's Sacrifice.
2
18
Some Ethical Aspects of
Did Ford then write with a set purpose to betray us? Had
he a grudge against moral beauty that in two of his tragedies
he used all his powers to cheat us into taking moral ugliness
in its place? Or was he simply indifferent to both, spending
his strength to make now one now the other attractive accord-
ing as each served his turn? For we must not forget that he
who conceived an Annabella drew also a Katherine Gordon;
that to offset a Fernando he gave us a Dalyell; and that the
man who could lament the death of a Bianca in terms due to
a Desdemona, could give us in Penthea a touch-though but
a touch of purity to which the average moral sense of the
world has hardly yet attained.
The point here must not be misunderstood. All dramatists
may create characters in which evil preponderates, and may
take them for protagonists if they so choose. They may
expend their utmost skill in the analysis of crime and crimi-
nal motive, and give us the result in a Richard III or an
Iago. They may force us by the depth of their humanity,
after making us witnesses of the murder of a kingly guest, a
friend, and innocent children, yet thrill with almost intoler-
able sympathy with the mournful weariness of the murderer,
looking forward to an old age stripped by his crime of hon-
our, love, obedience, troops of friends. Nor do we feel
resentment towards them for this exercise of their powers,
but rather gratitude; for we feel that the intensity of our
sympathy rests, not upon a forgetfulness of the wrong, but
upon a deeper consciousness of its meaning, a new realization
of its pitifulness and its horror. If this were the result of
Ford's studies in crime, we should have nothing but gratitude
for him; but his power is turned to quite other ends. In the
ghastly scene in which Giovanni and Annabella make their
mutual confession, all the sweetness and tenderness at his
command are lavished to make us feel the winning fascination
of their, love, to make it beautiful, and to kindle in us the
ever-ready human sympathy with love. He even makes them,
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
2
19
as one writer has pointed out,' swear their guilty faith to each
other by the ashes of their dead mother, and that with all the
tenderness and simplicity of innocent love. Instead of keep-
ing steadily before us the horror of the scene, he seems him-
self to be carried away by sympathy with the actors in it, and
it is only by effort that we ourselves retain a full realization
of it and a steadfast self-command. Nor does he atone in the
final scenes of despair and death. In spite of Annabella's
nominal repentance we feel that her real sorrow is not for her
sin, but for the discovery which has separated her from her
companion in it. Nor does this repentance, formal and worth-
less as it is, occur either to her or to the poet in the final
interviews between brother and sister. Here too the poet
1 Vernon Lee: Euphorion, 2d ed., p. 100.
2 I quote from the latter part of the scene (Act I. sc. 3):
3 Act V. sc. 5:
Gio. Nearness in birth and blood doth but persuade
A nearer nearness in affection.
I have ask'd counsel of the holy church,
Who tells me I may love you; and 'tis just
That, since I may, I should; and will, yes, will.
Must I now live, or die?
Ann.
Live; thou hast won
The field, and never fought: what thou hast urg'd
My captive heart had long ago resolv’'d.
I blush to tell thee,-but I'll tell thee now,-
For every sigh that thou hast spent for me
I have sigh'd ten; for every tear shed twenty:
And not so much for that I loy'd, as that
I durst not say I lov'd, nor scarcely think it.
Gio. Let not this music be a dream, ye gods,
For pity's sake, I beg ye!
Ann.
On my knees,
Brother, even by our mother's dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate:
Love me or kill me, brother.
Gio.
On my knees,
Sister, even by our mother's dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate:
Love me or kill me, sister.
Gio. Never till now did Nature do her best
To show a matchless beauty to the world,
Which in an instant, ere it scarce was seen,
The jealous Destinies requir'd again.
20
Some Ethical Aspects of
seems to take the part of his characters, breathes his own
soul out in their words, and looks back longingly with them
to the days they called happy. The suffering may be great,
but is not of a kind to purify any one, whether the victims of
it or the spectators.
Yet, though in this tragedy Ford shows a fascinated sym-
pathy with guilty passion, his Perkin Warbeck and The
Broken Heart are enough to acquit him of a deliberate pref-
erence for it. He has the same readiness and fullness of
sympathy with the chivalrous love of Warbeck, the strong
womanliness and steadfast affection of Katherine, the loyal,
self-forgetful devotion of Dalyell, and Penthea's tortured
faithfulness.
On the other hand, in spite of this impartiality of sympa-
thy, it would not, perhaps, be quite accurate to say that Ford
Pray,
Annabella, pray! Since we must part,
Go thou, white in thy soul, to fill a throne
Of innocence and sanctity in heaven.
Pray, pray, my sister!
Ann.
Then I see your drift.-
So say I.
Ye blessed angels guard me!
Gio.
Kiss me. If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorr'd.
Give me your hand: how sweetly life doth run
In these well-colour'd veins! how constantly
These palms do promise health! but I could chide
With Nature for this cunning flattery.
Kiss me again:-forgive me.
Ann.
With my heart.
Gio. Farewell!
Ann.
Will you be gone?
Gio.
Be dark, bright sun,
And make this mid-day night, that thy gilt rays
May not behold a deed will turn their splendour
More sooty than the poets feign their Styx!—
One other kiss, my sister.
Ann.
What means this?
Gio. To save thy fame, and kill thee in a kiss. [Stabs her.]
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
21
is indifferent to real moral values. Indifference to a thing
implies at least a consciousness of its existence, and a living
consciousness of moral values is hardly to be found in Ford.
We do find a superficial recognition of a conventional stand-
ard, but scarcely a hint of a thought that goes below the sur-
face. Where we do for a moment feel that he is grasping a
truth, as, for instance, in making Penthea's deepest wretched-
ness spring from a sense of the degradation of her marriage
with Bassanes,' we are after all left doubtful whether he him-
self saw the true basis for such a feeling, or founded it wholly
on her love for Orgilus. It is in Bianca, however, the hero-
ine of Love's Sacrifice, that we have the clearest evidence of
Ford's insensibility to the real meaning of character. In the
case of Giovanni and Annabella he makes an appeal to a
generally recognized standard of conduct, not because that
standard rests on immutable distinctions of right and wrong,
but, in despite of this, in order to obtain a stronger sensation
by carrying sympathy with a feeling that violates alike our
deepest-seated convictions and our profoundest prejudices.
Love's Sacrifice also is based on an implicit appeal to a con-
ventional standard, but with a difference. Here the standard
is an essentially low one, using a grossly material measure of
a thing which is distinctly spiritual in essence, namely, purity;
yet on this standard he depends throughout to win, not pity
merely, but honor approaching reverence, for a woman whose
whole nature is an inconceivable outrage to the spirit of
purity.
We have thus far been treating Ford's errors from a nega-
tive point of view, but the facts brought out indicate plainly
enough the positive characteristic that is the source of his
unsoundness. This is his absorbing interest in passion for
its own sake, more especially in the passion of love, with those
forms of hate, sorrow, and revenge that have their source in
love. Their power over his spirit reaches the point of fasci-
1 The Broken Heart, II. 3; II. 2; IV. 2.
22
Some Ethical Aspects of
nation. He loses his freedom, or abandons it for the intoxica-
tion of pleasure that comes from living in the shifting flow
of emotion; until finally, all other considerations forgotten,
the mere strength of a feeling becomes with him the best
justification of its existence. Caring only for the intensity of
each emotion in turn, and not at all for the reconciliation of
all emotions in the moral judgment, he chooses actions that
by the artificial tension of normal motives, or by dependence
on motives thoroughly abnormal, seem calculated to produce
the degree of intensity desired. Nor does he fail of momen-
tary success. At the cost of the sacrifice of the true effect of
tragedy, he succeeds in stirring in us a tumult of feeling so
violent that we forget at first to look beyond it. We pass
from the sway of one emotion to another without resistance
and without considering the nature of its cause. But, since
we are something more than a mere succession of emotional
states, since in the freedom of the spirit we remain above
them and in independence of them, this our momentary pas-
sivity of feeling must soon change to the activity of reflec-
tion; and with the advent of reflection begins a revulsion from
our previous state of subjection to the poet's power to a new
state of indignation and resentment at the means employed to
subdue us. Beauty, sweetness, tenderness, and passion-these
elements of true tragedy are not lacking in Ford; but, turned
from their true end, perverted from the service of true spirit-
ual insight, they serve too often only to perturb the spirit;
they cannot give it the fullness of repose which comes only
through fullness of its true activity. Even in Perkin War-
beck, the one of his tragedies in which he comes nearest to
achieving this, we feel, knowing his general methods, that the
result is largely accidental. The historical subject placed
restrictions upon him, stood to him in place of his own judg-
ment, and his success here makes us regret the more the
absence of that judgment, which alone could have brought
his noble powers into harmony with the universal power of
goodness, truth, and beauty.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
23
The tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher seem at first sight
to be marked by no defect so general and so far-reaching as
that observed in Ford. They are like him, indeed, in return-
ing constantly to one subject, but they are more fertile than
he is in devising masks for it. They give more prominence,
also, to secondary motives grouped about the primary motive,
and either co-operating or conflicting with it. Nor are they
so absorbed in sympathetic delineation of characters and suf-
fering as to lose their own self-command. On the contrary,
they write in the impartial spirit of the genuine story-teller
who has a disinterested affection for all parts of his story,
and whose changing moods are assumed in order to stimulate
them in turn in the auditor. Finally, they write with extra-
ordinary fluency, beauty, pathos, and interest; not with mere
narrative interest, but with great dramatic effectiveness.
Why then can we not accept their tragedies without reserve?
Why do we rise from reading them with a feeling that we
have been entertained, indeed, but with a reluctance to ques-
tion too closely the manner of our entertainment, lest we should
be compelled to apologize for ourselves to our own judgment?
If we try them by the high standard to which any serious
study of tragedy must commit us, there is but one answer to
be given. In the subordinate qualities of tragedy—and this
includes qualities that appeal to our love of beauty in thought
and action as well as in measure and form-Beaumont and
Fletcher are rich: they fail in that higher power of spiritual
insight which ennobles all lower powers and harmonizes them
by bringing them into its own service, that power whose
exercise alone can make tragedy what it should be, a veritable
revelation of life. In place of this power of vision, which
comprehends at once the unity and the diversity of life, which
distinguishes between things apparently alike, and connects
things apparently remote, which looks beyond the act to the
motive, and refuses to take false measures for the true-in
place of this, they have the facile, ready judgment of men of
24
Some Ethical Aspects of
the world, of that false, because superficial, world, which has
never discovered that its prevailing prejudices are not ade-
quate to the final judgment of all things.
Beaumont and Fletcher were men of the world in the days
of the first James. They looked at life essentially as the
court of James looked at it and lived it. Life, as they saw it,
and as it is reflected in their plays, is brutal, sensual, cruel,
and bloody; servile, abject, confused, and meaningless. This
it is essentially. Superficially it is chivalrous and beautiful,
full of suffering bravely endured, of loyal friendship, passion-
ate love, and self-sacrificing patriotism. To what is this con-
trast due? The poets themselves are unconscious of it: it
exists by virtue of their unconsciousness. It exists because
they were double-natured men. They are men of the world,
as we have said, but they are poets too, and these two charac-
ters exist in them side by side, unreconciled, but half aware
of each other, yet thwarting each other at every turn. The
poet in them is sensitive to beauty, kindles with a fine ardor
at the mere names of loyalty, friendship, love, honor; but it is
the man of the world in them that determines what these
words shall mean. The statement is a little broad; it needs,
perhaps, a slight modification at every point, more especially
as far as it concerns friendship; and yet in the main it is
true. The current opinions, faiths, prejudices, of the conven-
tional world are their moral inheritance, the solid basis of
their moral possessions. Little covetous of spiritual riches,
they are content with this, only adding to it here and there a
generous thought, a frank enthusiasm, or polishing a moral
heirloom until it seems a new and richer creation. Some of
those heirlooms, we may add, were sadly in need of the pol-
ishing process, and some to which they were most attached
deserved only to be thrust into the fire of a new age, or to
furnish fuel for such a holocaust as Hawthorne dreamed of.
On the other hand, there was now and then one that deserved
all their devotion, one that, if cast upon that mountainous
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
25
sacrificial fire of the world's follies and sins would be found
again, as in the great romancer's fancy all things with truth
in them were found, with only the dross of extravagance or
misconception burned away, leaving the essential truth un-
touched.
Among these last we must place their ideal of friendship,
and this because they possessed it by right of personal expe-
rience as well as by inheritance from an age in which friend-
ship between man and man was at once a passion and a faith.
It was both passion and faith with them. Their conception.
of it involves less of the transitory and more of the permanent
than is usual with them. It means fervent affection, trust,
true-hearted fellowship in joy and grief, if need be renuncia-
tion and self-sacrifice. Alike in the fulfilment of this ideal
by their characters, and in their falling short of it, the ideal
itself is perceived. It is one of the most universal motives in
their plays, and is the noblest. It is not, therefore, upon their
treatment of this that we base our dissatisfaction with them.
It occurs as a motive in almost all their dramas, but it is after
all as a subordinate motive. It forms one thread in the com-
plication of the plot, as in The Maid's Tragedy, Valentinian,
and The Lover's Progress, and occasionally, as in the last
named play, furnishes the final escape from its intricacies.
It does not really dominate, however, over all other motives
in any of their tragedies, and therefore its generally success-
ful handling does not avail to give the prevailing tone to any
of them. It cannot therefore determine a final favorable
judgment, although it may serve to soften an unfavorable one.
The other motives most relied on by them in the involution
and evolution of their plots, are loyalty, love, and the sense of
honor. In their treatment of these we have the surest test of
their conception of character, and in their conception of char-
acter lies the explanation of the fact that they offer us
entertainment for leisure, rather than strength for life.
Confining ourselves to their tragedies, we find in The
UorM
26
Some Ethical Aspects of
Maid's Tragedy and Valentinian the best materials for a
study of their prevailing idea of loyalty. This may be ex-
pressed, in brief, as awe of the king as king: a humble belief
in his divine right not only to rule but to commit whatever
outrages and crimes he will, without thereby giving to any
human power the right to interfere, and without losing his
claim to the reverent obedience of his subjects,—an absolute,
unconditional submission, therefore, on the part of the sub-
ject to the will of the ruler, and on the part of the ruler ex-
emption from the laws of conduct recognized as binding on
other men, an exemption, at least as far as this world is con-
cerned, from the consequences of freedom and responsibility.
This idea is involved in very complex fashion in all the
motiving of The Maid's Tragedy. It underlies Evadne's
strangely base ambition to be a king's mistress, and is the
foundation of her insolent triumph in that position. Reliance
on it is strained to the breaking point in the effort to secure
Amintor from our too great contempt for his facile breach of
faith to Aspatia at the king's command, and from utter scorn
at his passive acceptance of the shameful position thrust upon
him by the king's arbitrary will. In the case of Evadne, hid
under the form of ambition, it becomes the impelling force to
active guilt. It should therefore be a feeling actually or
potentially strong enough in the average spectator to stir in
him the double emotion of pity and fear in presence of the
ensuing suffering. Very likely it did have that effect on the
playgoer at the time of its first production, because this con-
ception of loyalty may well have been current at that time
and in that class of James's subjects, but such a feeling can
be only transitory and restricted at best, and is therefore ill-
adapted for a tragic motive. The same is to be said of its
use in case of Amintor, but still more emphatically inasmuch
as the appeal to it there is explicit instead of implicit.
But are we not misunderstanding this drama and misin-
terpreting the poets' intention? Is not the king slain in the
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
27
end in punishment of his vices, and does not this set matters
straight and restore him to the domain of law and responsi-
bility? Unfortunately, no. For though his death is brought
about by indignation of those who have suffered by him, it is
not made the inevitable and legitimate consequence of his
life. His acts as such are admitted to be worthy of death,
but a curse is pronounced upon the instruments of that death,
since it was inflicted on a king. Even were the curse not
pronounced, the mere death of the king could not remove the
displeasure produced in us by the poets' confident reliance
upon our having sufficient sympathy with Amintor's king-
worship to render him tolerable as the "centre of pathetic
interest." As a matter of fact he is saved from our active
indignation only by being made too weak to be worthy of it.
In Valentinian matters are as bad. The emperor crowns
his infamous life with a crime which should move his people
to open resentment, if there were left in them the least ves-
tige of nobleness. Not the offended honor of one man, but
the righteous indignation of a whole people, should be the
agent of retribution, proceeding to its end, not by crooked
ways of deceit, but with the directness and openness of un-
questioned justice. But what do we find? The people only
murmur, tremble, and submit; and Aëcius, the loyal soldier
and noble gentleman, the soul of honor, counsels¹ absolute
resignation, and, as general, stands ready with the army to
crush the least motion towards resistance. He absolutely
identifies his country with the emperor, love of country with
obedience to a man who is ruining country and people, and
does so on no other ground than that he bears the name of
emperor. We must remember, too, that Valentinian is em-
peror only by election; there is no idea of inherited right
involved, it is purely abject submission to a name. The
result is revolting. The reader's indignation prevails over
all other feelings.
1 Act III, sc. 1, 3.
28
Some Ethical Aspects of
To be quite just, to Fletcher at least, we should recall here
to his credit the much nobler picture of loyalty which he
gives us in his Bonduca. Tacitus, indeed, showed him the
path to this success, and guided him by somewhat unfamiliar
ways; but the success is there, and we should be sorry to lose
from our memories the heroic figure of Caratach defending
his native land against the Roman legions. This is patriot-
ism in a form that we can recognize; and with it his personal
loyalty to royal blood, taking the form of protecting love for
the boy Hengo, far from disturbing us, enriches his character
with the needed vein of tenderness.
We come now to our poets' conception of love. George
Eliot somewhere says that "each woman creates in her own
type the love tokens that are offered her." This is one half
the truth. The other half is that the type of tokens offered
depends also on the type of the man who offers them, and
upon his idea of womanhood, not merely upon the character
of the actual woman to whom they are offered. So a tragic
poet's conception of love, and his use of it as a motive, de-
pend in great measure on his conception of womanhood.
Now, Beaumont and Fletcher's conception of womanhood
is radically false, and false for this reason: the idea of woman
as a moral being, that is, as subject in full to the moral law
and owing it allegiance at first hand as a responsible agent,
has not dawned upon them. Man is the absolute term in
creation, woman is relative. The moral law, such as it is with
them, is for man only; the substitute for it for woman is the
will or the honor of the man to whom she stands in nearest
relation, brother, father, husband. Hers is not even the Mil-
tonian standard laid down for Eve-it is not "she for God in
him," but lower yet, for her he is as God.
The consequences to the poets' art are as serious as inev-
itable. Love becomes on the man's part essentially a lust of
possession, a jealousy of ownership; on the woman's part, an
absolute submission of self, a giving up of body and soul to
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
29
the command of another. Purity as a masculine virtue is
unknown, as a feminine virtue it becomes a "material,"
mechanical thing, as Coleridge said,¹ not "a state of being.
The keeping it is a duty she owes to her male relatives, not
to herself as the preservation of an intrinsic quality of her
womanhood. She can even lose it, as Coleridge, again, re-
marked, without her own volition entering into the loss; and
the loss, however it comes about, whether with or without her
will, is met by her relatives, not with the thought of her in
her sorrow or shame, but purely with the thought of the effect
upon themselves, their names, their credit, and a something
they call their honor. So in The Maid's Tragedy Melantius
rages against Evadne because she has made him a mark for
1 Works, Vol. IV. p. 212.
2 I quote from several speeches of Lucina after she had suffered the violence of
Valentinian (Act III. sc. 1):
Lucina. Call in your lady-bawds and gilded pandars,
And let them triumph too, and sing to Cæsar,
"Lucina's faln, the chaste Lucina's conquer'd!”—
Gods, what a wretched thing has this man made me!
For I am now no wife for Maximus,
•
No company for women that are virtuous;
No family I now can claim, nor country.
Where shall poor Virtue live, now I am faln?
Now which way must I go? My honest house
Will shake to shelter me; my husband fly me;
My family,
Because they are honest, and desire to be so,
Must not endure me; not a neighbour know me:
What woman now dare see me without blushes?
This is indeed, as has been said, "a mistake in the right direction"—or would be
if it had a less gross foundation.
3 Against the King also, more for the wrong to himself than for the wrong to his
sister (Act III. sc. 2):
Mel.
Oh, this adulterous king,
That drew her to it! where got he the spirit
To wrong me so?
Act IV. sc. 1: Evad. Begone! you are my brother; that's your safety.
Mel. I'll be a wolf first: 'tis, to be thy brother,
An infamy below the sin of coward. . . . .
Evad. Let me consider.
Mel. Do, whose child thou wert,
Whose honour thou hast murder'd, whose grave open'd,
30
Some Ethical Aspects of
the scorn of time, in that being his sister she has yet sinned.
So in Valentinian, Maximus coming upon his wife in her
innocent, despairing shame, sends her to her death, because
her death alone will save him from the contempt of men.
And why should they not do thus, since these women be-
longed to them as absolute possessions, and derived their only
value from this fact of possession? We need not state the
fact in our own words; Fletcher, at least, has saved us the
trouble. Maximus, in doubt whether to seek revenge upon
Valentinian for the wrong suffered through his wife, medi-
tates:
1
"She is a woman, and her loss the less,
And with her go my griefs!"
Then the essential truth, momentarily forgotten, strikes him.
anew:
66
But, hark you, Maximus,
Was she not yours?"
and that thought is enough; he has found an adequate motive:
Valentinian must perish.
I do not care to dwell at length upon this idea of woman-
hood and its manifestation in their work; but if we recall the
fact that love is the dominant passion with them, and that
this idea underlies and determines their use of love as a
motive, we shall see the gravity of their error. For it is fatal
And so pull'd on the gods, that in their justice
They must restore him flesh again and life,
And raise his dry bones to revenge this scandal.
Evad. I have offended: noble sir, forgive me!
Mel. With what secure slave?
Evad. I dare not tell.
Mel. Tell, or I'll be this day a-killing thee.
Evad. Will you forgive me then?
Mel. Stay; I must ask mine honour first.
I have too much foolish nature in me: speak.
•
Evad. Oh, hear me gently! It was the King.
Mel. No more. My worthy father's and my services
Are liberally rewarded! King, I thank thee!
For all my dangers and my wounds thou hast paid me
In my own metal: these are soldiers' thanks!
1 Act III. sc. 3.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
31
to real tragic effect; fatal, because it is the destruction of per-
sonality, of true responsibility, the basis of true personality.
Tragic characters based upon this conception lack the essen-
tial element of likeness to ourselves; we are essentially out of
sympathy with them. Superficially, sensuously, indeed, they
touch us, but from the poet, above all from the tragic poet,
we demand more than the superficial and the sensuous. If
he gives us only this, he gives us nothing. Our souls go hun-
gry from the feast.
In what has been said of Maximus and Melantius there is
implied disapproval of Beaumont and Fletcher's treatment of
honor as a tragic motive. The ground of disapproval in these
instances must not be mistaken. It is perfectly justifiable
from every point of view that both Maximus and Melantius
should feel the sting of personal disgrace and outrage. It is
perfectly justifiable to use this feeling as one element of the
motive impelling them to revenge: but when this is made the
sole motive, or the predominant motive, our eager sympathy
is checked and recoils upon itself, baffled of expression. The
result is a weakening of tragic effect. Suppose, for instance,
Othello, in his wild rage thought only of his own wrong; sup-
pose that part of his nature left out from which even in the
fullness of his purpose of revenge, comes the cry: “A fair
woman! a sweet woman!" and again: "But yet the pity of
it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!"-suppose this element
lacking in him, and what would Othello be but an intolerable
exhibition of animal instinct and brute force? What power
could it have over the spirit, except either to whelm it under
mere excitement, or to rouse it to fierce rebellion?
But we must go back to Maximus for a moment, for he has
still much to teach us on the subject of honor. His honor
would not suffer Lucina to live, and it urges him on to the
destruction of Valentinian also. Surely it will bid him take
a straight course to that end! It must be that he will seek it
as a man welcoming rather than avoiding death! It is with a
32
Some Ethical Aspects of
shock that the reader, filled with this idea, discovers that this
is just what Maximus will not do. His friend Aëcius-in
everything else one soul with him-will, he fears, strive to
crush him, should he seek open revenge. Accordingly he
plots against Aëcius, gets him suspected with the emperor,
and slain. This obstacle removed, does he now strike an
open blow? No, he sets on two loyal servants of Aëcius to
avenge their master. When the emperor dies, poisoned by
them, Maximus, suddenly bethinking himself of the crooked
way that led to this triumph, feels that he has stained his
own honor and must clear it. His only course should be
boldly to announce his hidden agency in the emperor's death,
or else, according to the ideas of the day, take his own life.
What he actually does is to get himself made emperor, to
marry Eudoxia, Valentinian's empress, and "in his joy and
wine," as he says, tell her that he planned the whole series of
crimes, including his wife's dishonor, for the sole purpose of
winning her. It is with a sigh of relief, but of no higher
feeling, that we witness his death at her hands. We are glad
to be rid of him, even though he is slain to avenge Valentin-
ian; but there is no satisfaction for heart or soul in so mere a
juggling with the theme of honor.¹
1 His soliloquy after the death of Valentinian should be read entire to be appre-
ciated. I quote the most of it (Act V. sc. 3):
Max. My happy ends are come to birth; he's dead,
And I reveng'd. . . .
Can any man discover this, and love me?
For, though my justice were as white as truth,
My way was crooked to it; that condemns me:
And now, Aëcius, and my honour'd lady,
That were preparers to my rest and quiet,
The lines to lead me to Elysium;
You that but stept before me, on assurance
I would not leave your friendship unrewarded;
First smile upon the sacrifice I have sent ye,
Then see me coming boldly!-Stay; I am foolish,
Somewhat too sudden to mine own destruction;
This great end of my vengeance may grow greater:
Why may not I be Cæsar, yet no dying?
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
33
One more illustration of their employment of this motive
will be enough. We will take it from The Double Marriage.
Virolet, saved from death by the faithfulness of his wife
Juliana, who endures the tortures of the rack rather than
betray him to the tyrant Ferrand, is sent off to sea against a
pirate Duke. Taken prisoner and condemned to death, he is
offered by the pirate's daughter his own life and freedom and
a friend's if he will abandon his wife and marry her. He
accepts the terms with little hesitation,' and fulfills them:
divorces his wife on a pretext inconceivably revolting, but
constrained to it by the engagement of his honor, and marries
Martia. Yet he is described as the sum of all perfection, and
the poet means to have us pity him, not despise him. Death
must have seemed to Fletcher an unspeakable evil, that he
could expect to hold our regard for one who to avoid death
could accept such an alternative. It is to make honor as ma-
terial and mechanical as we have already seen that love and
purity are in his conception and his friend's. Our own sense
of honor rebels against such a conception, and condemns it.
Of the four chief tragic motives employed by Beaumont
and Fletcher, friendship, loyalty, love, and honor, we have
now found all but the first unsatisfactorily treated. In each
case our dissatisfaction springs from the same cause: from
Why should not I catch at it? Fools and children
Have had that strength before me, and obtain❜d it,
And, as the danger stands, my reason bids me:
I will, I dare. My dear friends, pardon me;
I am not fit to die yet, if not Cæsar.
I am sure the soldier loves me, and the people,
And I will forward; and, as goodly cedars,
Rent from Oëta by a sweeping tempest,
Jointed again and made tall masts, defy
Those angry winds that split 'em, so will I,
New-piec'd again, above the fate of women,
And made more perfect far than growing private,
Stand and defy bad fortunes. If I rise,
My wife was ravish'd well: if then I fall,
My great attempt honours my funeral,
1 Act II. se, 3.
2 Act III, sc. 3.
34
Some Ethical Aspects of
the reducing and debasing of values essentially spiritual to
values essentially material; from the destruction of responsi-
bility, the real basis of character; from the obliteration, there-
fore, in their characters of that essential likeness to ourselves
which makes true pity and fear possible. This recklessness
in dealing with human freedom and responsibility finds ex-
treme illustration in Cupid's Revenge and A King and No
King. In the former a kind of satanic Cupid is, in terms,
made the divine ruler and object of worship of a whole peo-
ple. Under the influence of this worship life has become
absolutely sensual, a mere affair of lust. To rescue the peo-
ple from their belief in Cupid and their consequent ruin, the
princess Hidaspes and her brother Leucippus prevail upon
the king, their father, to cause the statues of the god to be
overthrown and sacrifices to him to be forbidden. Our sym-
pathy and our judgment are alike engaged on the side of the
princess. We are even made to feel that the so-called god
Cupid is but a personification of the base impulses and evil
desires of a voluptuous people, and that the princess is the
agent of the powers of good.¹ But with the overthrow of
1 Act I. sc. 1. Hid. Many ages before this,
霉
​When every man got to himself a trade,
And was laborious in that chosen course,
Hating an idle life far worse than death,
Some one that gave himself to wine and sloth,
Which breed lascivious thoughts, and found himself
Contemn'd for that by every painful man,
To take his stain away, fram'd to himself
A god, whom he pretended to obey
In being thus dishonest; for a name,
He call'd him Cupid. This created god
(Man's nature being ever credulous
Of any vice that takes part with his blood)
Had ready followers enow; and since
In every age they grew, especially
Amongst your subjects, who do yet remain
Adorers of that drowsy deity,
Which drink invented; and the winged boy
(For so they call him) has his sacrifices,
And these loose naked statues through the land,
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
35
the statues Cupid's revenge begins. It assumes a character-
istic form: princess, prince, and king in turn are struck by
his curse and forced through a series of revolting love ad-
ventures, ending in their death and that of all connected with
them, the replacing of the statues, and, of course, the recog-
nition of Cupid's sacred authority. Thus Cupid's revenge is
complete, his majesty is vindicated. But where is the moral
law, and who shall vindicate its offended majesty against the
poets' reckless levity? What is the meaning of freedom and
responsibility to modern poets who in a serious tragedy repre-
sent men as helplessly subject to a vicious god? For Cupid's
Revenge is meant as a serious tragedy, not as a burlesque of
all seriousness.
We are studying Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies, not
their comedies; but the latter necessarily serve to illustrate
and interpret the former. They are founded on the same
theory of life and character; the same judgment must decide
what subjects are to be treated with all the seriousness of the
tragic spirit, and for what ones the gentler, lighter spirit of
comedy will be fitting. So it is that, in our effort to discover
the grounds for our dissatisfaction with Beaumont and
Fletcher as tragic poets, we find the conclusions reached from
a study of their tragedies confirmed by a study of their come-
dies and tragi-comedies. In A King and No King, for ex-
ample, we have a subject that could be wholesomely treated
In every village; nay, the palace
Is not free from 'em. This is my request,
That these erected obscene images
May be pluck'd down and burnt, and every man
That offers to 'em any sacrifice
May lose his life.
Leon.
But be advis'd,
My fairest daughter: if he be a god,
He will express it upon thee, my child;
Which Heaven avert!
Leuc. There is no such power;
But the opinion of him fills the land
With lustful sins.
36
Some Ethical Aspects of
only in the tragic spirit and with a finely discriminating judg-
ment, handled lightly in the spirit of comedy. It is no trifl-
ing folly of which Arbaces is guilty, but unholy, infamous
crime as truly guilty as if he had accomplished it; for he
had willed its accomplishment with all his passionate nature.
Mr. Ward says truly that "there was only one end admissible
to such a struggle: the vindication of Law, not the healing
power of accident." And yet it is the healing power of acci-
dent alone that is invoked, and invoked with perfect uncon-
sciousness on the poets' part that it is not all-sufficient. In
The Prophetess, another tragi-comedy, we have human beings
made mere puppets in the hands of an old crone with magic
powers, who flies through the air in a chariot drawn by drag-
ons, and makes and unmakes the fortunes of Roman emperors
at will. There is nothing in her to thrill our nerves or com-
mand our imagination as in the witches of Macbeth, or in
the Mephistophilis of Marlowe. She is not an outward em-
bodiment and awful suggestion of the evil in her victim's
soul, nor a visitant from an infernal world forcing our belief
by uncompromising truth and absolute despair: her power is
mere vulgar magic, and we feel it an insult that we should be
asked to take her seriously. Again, in The Captain we have
in one character² a conception still more horrible than that in
A King and No King, and treated in a spirit that sinks below
comedy. So, too, in The Custom of the Country we have
inconceivable moral degradation in one of the heroes, em-
ployed, with utter unconsciousness of what is revolting in it,
merely to raise a laugh among the groundlings; while in the
burlesque of The Coxcomb it is their own noble ideal of friend-
ship that is dragged through the mire for no higher purpose.
If we could not in the tragedies themselves detect the source
of their unsoundness, the comedies would point the way to it
1 English Dramatic Literature. Vol. II. pp. 185, 186.
2 Lelia; see especially Act IV. Sc. 5, and the denouement.
Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
37
in a dullness of the moral vision, an incurable levity of the
moral judgment.
We have said that it was the man of the world in them that
determined the essential character of their motiving. It is to
the man of the world in them, therefore, that their failure in
realizing the essential nature of tragedy is due. The poet
in them was not great enough to prevent their failure, but
availed to soften it and call attention from it. The poet
accepted the man-of-the-world's false notions of the higher
passions, of character, of life, and set to work to make them
beautiful at least in outward seeming. Beaumont and
Fletcher's ideal of loyalty may be servile; but the word has
an inspiring sound as they utter it. Their conception of love
is base, and is founded in a base conception of manhood and
womanhood; but they clothe it in robes of light, and at times
seem almost to breathe into it a living soul. Their notion of
honor is ignoble, but their zeal for it is fine. They use
familiar terms in an unfamiliar sense, but the tone is sweet
and lingers pleasantly on the ear. We do not reflect at once
the meaning; but, as with Ford, so here, with Beaumont
and Fletcher reflection is fatal to their power and lasting
influence. They too, we say, fail in realizing the essential
nature of tragedy, and we must not suffer ourselves to be
bribed by any subordinate pleasure conferred by them into a
forgetfulness of that higher pleasure, which as tragic poets
they owe to us, which we demand from them as our right.
They, too, excite the senses, quicken the emotions, touch the
heart, and if these were the only elements of our nature they
might satisfy us. But the spirit remains, and the spirit they
cannot satisfy, for the spirit demands what the poet of true
spiritual insight alone can give, that harmony of the indi-
vidual soul with the universal order which, as we interpret
him, Aristotle meant by purification.
upon
38
Ethical Aspects of Later Elizabethan Tragedy.
V.
CONCLUSION.
And so we come back to our starting point. By a simple
examination of the effect upon us of the tragedies of three
poets of an order below the highest; by an effort to trace this
effect to its cause in the positive and negative characteristics
of their work; by comparing now and then the different
influence of other poets, and seeking the reason for the differ-
ence in something present or lacking in those that are the
special object of our study, we find ourselves led to the view
of tragedy with which we started. Aristotle was right, and
the actual failure of Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher that is
forced upon the reader's consciousness by the nature of his
dissatisfaction with them, is a failure to live up to the theory
of the old Greek. We strive instinctively to rise to the realm
of the spirit, and they thrust us back to the realm of the
senses. The result is: no purification of our pity and fear;
no reconciliation of our lower self with our higher self; no
harmony between our will and the universal order; no joy
of the spirit.