growth, the farce, the coarseness and general slack morality of which shows how much of a Later Comedy. popular growth it continued to be. One of Brederoo's closest imitators was Willem Diederickz. Hooft, author of five farcical pieces; but the best writers of comedy and farce in the latter years of the century were Dr Pieter Bernagie (1650-1699), who wrote some fifteen tragedies and comedies, "free and natural pictures of the native manners of his time," which have not yet disappeared from the stage, and Thomas Asselijn, whose Jan Klaaszen (1682), Stiefmoer (1684), Stiefvaar (1690), and Spilpenning (1690), are brilliant comic pictures of life and manners in the last days of the century. Jan Klaaszen of Gewaande Dienstmaagd is his masterpiece, inferior in comic spirit to Brederoo's best work, but superior in construction, owing, doubtless, in some measure to the beneficial influence of Molière. Asselijn and Langendijk, who followed, lie somewhat outside the period covered in this volume. 84 CHAPTER III. ENGLISH DRAMA. INTRODUCTORY OF GEORGE CHAPMAN - BEN JONSON HIS THEORY COMEDY-EARLIER COMEDIES-TRAGEDIES-MATURE COMEDIES LAST PLAYS-MASQUES-'SAD SHEPHERD'-ACHIEVEMENT-MARSTON -DEKKER-MIDDLETON-HEYWOOD-WEBSTER-HIS TWO TRAGEDIES THE first ten years of the century witnessed the crowning splendour of the Elizabethan drama.1 The genial and mature comedies and heroic histories with which Shakespeare had illumined the closing years of the sixteenth century Introductory. 1 Minto, Characteristics of English Poets, Edin., 1885; Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature, Lond., 1887-1903; Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, Lond., 1891; Mezières, Predecesseurs et Contemporains de Shakespeare, Paris, 1894, and Contemporains et Successeurs de Shakespeare, 1897; Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. iv., Lond., 1903; Jusserand, Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglais, Paris, 1904; Emil Koeppel, Quellen-studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's und Beaumont's und Fletcher's, Erlangen und Leipzig, 1895; Id. zu den Dramen George Chapman's, Philip Massinger's, und John Ford's, Strassburg, 1897; Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society, 1874-92; Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare - Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1865-1905; Englische Studien, Heilbronn, 1877-1906; Anglia, Halle, 1878-1906; Dictionary of National Biography, Lond. were succeeded by the great tragedies of thought and passion; and when the second decade opened he was taking farewell of the stage in the more slightly constructed romances, full of pathos and poetry, in which we can trace not only an alteration in the poet's mood, but it may be also that more general change in taste to which the romantic and sentimental drama of Beaumont and Fletcher conduced and ministered. During these same years Jonson was working with all the vigour of his gigantic powers; and the best plays of Chapman, Marston, Dekker, Middleton, and Webster date from this decade or a few years later. The ruling spirits of the next two decades are Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is in the work of their followers and imitators -Massinger, Ford, and Shirley-that the flame which had been kindled by Marlowe and the other "university wits" burned itself out in the years immediately preceding the close of the theatres. Shakespeare is, by the plan of this series, excluded from the scope of the present volume, so that it remains to sketch briefly the work of the other dramatists who flourished during the years from 1600 to 1640. The oldest of them all was the veteran scholar, poet, and dramatist, George Chapman1. Born some 1 The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, with Notes and a Memoir, 3 vols., London, 1873 (a literal reprint from the old copies); The Works of Chapman, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 3 vols., London, 1874-5; All Fools and the "Bussy" and "Byron " plays, ed. W. L. Phelps of Yale College, in Mermaid Series, London, 1895. Text in all these corrupt. The " Bussy" plays have been edited carefully by F. S. Boas, Belles Lettres Series, Boston and London, 1905. Chapman. eight years before Shakespeare, educated at Oxford, Chapman does not come before our notice as a poet until 1594, as a dramatist until 1595-96. How he spent the interval we do not know. There may be truth in Mr Swinburne's conjecture that he visited the Low Countries, with which he seems familiar, not, like Jonson, trailing a pike, but with the actors who went over in "Lecester's tijen," from which the peasants in Dutch comedy frequently date events, as the same comedies contain repeated reference to such companies. In 1598 he is mentioned by Meres as one of the best writers of comedies and tragedies, which would point to his being the author of plays now lost. Of plays certainly written before the close of the century we have only the worthless Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598) and A Humorous Day's Mirth (1599), with the fine, though exaggerated and grotesque, adaptation from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, the comedy of All Fools (1600), so eloquently praised by Mr Swinburne. The majority of the plays which have survived belong to the early years of the new century. They include the comedies The Gentleman Usher (1606), Monsieur D'Olive (1606), May Day (1611), and The Widow's Tears (1612), with the tragedies Bussy D'Ambois (1607), Byron's Conspiracy, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613), to which falls to be added the later published tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey (1631) and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France (1639). If Shirley had any hand in the latter, it was probably confined to the pathetic closing scene. I cannot myself discover Chapman's style in the crude plays Revenge for Honour (1654) and the Tragedy of Alphonsus (1654). Comedy. In Chapman's comedy the influence of Jonson is obvious. His comic characters are grotesque and absurd humourists, his comic incidents clumsy feats of gulling. But Chapman does not attempt to imitate Jonson's careful structure and his singleness of satiric purpose. His comic scenes are interwoven with romantic story. The romantic incidents are extravagant and grotesque, but are relieved by outbursts of the same splendid poetry as illumines the tragedies - passages of the same glowing enthusiasm for the spirit which can rise superior to mortal limitations and social conventions. Perhaps of all his comedies in spite of the high praise given to All Fools- the most readable as comedy, but for the close, is the sardonic Widow's Tears.1 Chapman's tragedies bear an interesting family resemblance to one another. They are taken from French history, and Mr Boas has shown Tragedy. that Chapman's Holinshed was Edward Grimeston's Inventorie of the Historie of France, published in 1611. Dramatically and poetically they recall the tragedies of Marlowe. Their hero is a man "like his desires, lift upward and divine." 1 Mr A. L. Stiefel, who has tracked so many French plays to their source in Italian Novella-Comedies, has discovered Chapman's footsteps in the same snow, and shown that his May-Day is an adaptation of the Alessandro of Alessandro Piccolomini (1508-1578). |