1856. Plays and Puritans. lieve that Massinger was one,) and setting Look, then, at Webster's two masterforth how the heroine was attended all pieces, Vittoria Corromborea and the Duchess through by an angel in the form of a page, of Malfi. A few words spent on them will and how (not to mention the really beautiful surely not be wasted; for they are pretty ancient fiction about the fruits which Doro- generally agreed to be the two best tragedies thea sends back from Paradise,) Theophilus written since Shakspeare's time. The whole story of Vittoria Corromborea overcomes the devil by means of a cross composed of flowers. Massinger's account of is one of sin and horror. The subject-matter Theophilus' conversion, will, we fear, make of the play is altogether made up of the those who know anything of that great crisis fiercest and the basest passions. But the of the human spirit, suspect that Massinger's play is not a study of those passions, from experience thereof was but small: the fact which we may gain a great insight into huwhich is most interesting is, the Virgin man nature. There is no trace (nor is there, Martyr is one of the foulest plays known. again, in the Duchess of Malfi,) of that deEvery pains has been taken to prove that velopment of human souls for good or evil, the indecent scenes in the play were not which is Shakspeare's especial power,-the written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on power which (far more than any accidental what grounds we know not. If Dekker as-beauties") makes his plays, to this day, sisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to the delight alike of the simple and the wise, have done, we are aware of no canons of while his contemporaries are all but forinternal criticism, which will enable us to gotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that to exhibit the development of the human all the indecency is Dekker's, and all the soul; to construct dramas in which the conpoetry Massinger's. He confesses (as indeed clusion shall depend, not on the events, but he is forced to do) that "Massinger himself on the characters, and in which the characis not free from dialogues of low wit and ters shall not be mere embodiments of a buffoonery;" and, then, after calling the certain passion, or a certain "humour," but scenes in question "detestable ribaldry," "a persons, each unlike all others; each having loathsome sorterkin, engendered of filth and a destiny of his own, by virtue of his own dulness," recommends them to the reader's peculiarities, of his own will, and each prosupreme scorn and contempt,-with which ceeding toward that destiny, unfolding his feelings the reader will doubtless regard own strength and weakness before the eyes them; but will also, if he be a thinking of the audience, and in such a way, that, man, draw from them the following conclu- after his first introduction, they should be sions: that even if they be Dekker's (of able (in proportion to their knowledge of which there is no proof,) Massinger was human nature) to predict his conduct under forced, in order to the success of his play, any given circumstances. This is indeed to pander to the public taste, by allowing "high art:" but we find no more of it in Dekker to interpolate these villanies; that Webster than in the rest. His characters, the play which, above all others of the sev be they old or young, come on the stage enteenth century, contains the most supra- ready-made, full-grown, and stereotyped; lunar rosepink of piety, devotion, and pur- and, therefore, in general, they are not charity, also contains the stupidest abominations acters at all, but mere passions or humours of any extant play; and lastly, that those in a human form. Now and then he essays who reprinted it for its rosepink piety and to draw a character; but it is analytically, purity, as a sample of the Christianity of by description, not dramatically, by letting that past golden age of High-churchmanship the man exhibit himself in action; and in had to leave out about one-third of the play, the Duchess of Malfi, he falls into the great for fear of becoming amenable to the laws against abominable publications.pa does it in his own way, by blood and fury, | curious scene, in which she acquaints Antomadmen and screech-owls, not without a nio with her love for him, and makes him rugged power. marry her, is, on the whole, painful. WebThere are scenes of his, certainly, like that ster himself seems to have felt that it was of Vittoria's trial, which have been praised so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, for their delineation of character; but it is to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the one thing to solve the problem, which Shaks-end by making her break down in two expeare has so handled in Lear, and Othello, quisite lines of loving shame: but he has utand Richard the Third, "given a mixed terly forgotten to explain or justify her love, character to show how he may become crim- by giving to Antonio, (as Shakspeare would inal," and to solve Webster's "given a ready- probably have done,) such strong specialties made criminal, to shew what he will say and of character as would compel, and therefore do on a certain occasion." To us the know- excuse his mistress's affection. He has ledge of character shewn in Vittoria's trial- plenty of time to do this in the first scenes, scene, is not an insight into Vittoria's especial-time which he wastes on irrelevant matheart and brain, but a general acquaintance ter; and all that we gather from them is with the conduct of all bold bad women that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful perwhen brought to bay. Poor Elia, who son. If he gives promise of being more, he knew the world from books, and human na- utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. ture principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria's innocenceresembling boldness*-and seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence in her, and so forth. Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of unfortunate females in the presence of a police magistrate, yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster's confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save to ask, cui bono?-was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments? In the scene in which the Duchess tells her The "Duchess of Malfi" is certainly in a purer and loftier strain; but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we Neither in his subsequent misfortunes must take the liberty to doubt whether the does Antonio make the least struggle to poor Duchess is " a person" at all. General prove himself worthy of his mistress's affecgoodness and beauty, intense though pure tion. He is very resigned, and loving, and affection for a man below her in rank, and a so forth. To win renown by great deeds, will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, and so prove her in the right to her brothare not enough to distinguish her from thou-ers and to all the world, never crosses his sands of other women; but Webster has no imagination. His highest aim, (and that such purpose. What he was thinking and only at last), is slavishly to entreat pardon writing of was, not truth, but effect; not the from his proud brothers-in-law, for the mere Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her majordomo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess, (in the critical moment of the play,) merely forward. That *C. Lamb. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, p. 229. From which specimens, be it remembered, he has had to expunge not only all the comic scenes, but generally the greater part of the plot itself, to make the book at all tolerable. offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,-"ne valant pas le peine qui se donne pour lui." The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble, and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians, ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really de "Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas! What will you do with my lady? Call for Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours? Farewell, Cariola. I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy of the Caroline Court, of the dramatists of The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his ward Penelope, in which he attempts to seduce the young lady, in language which has certainly the merit of honesty; she refuses him, but civilly enough, and on her departure Mrs. Wilding enters, who, it seems, is the object of her husband's loathing, though young, handsome, and in all respects charming enough. After a scene of stupid and brutal insults, he has the effrontery to ask her to bring Penelope to And so the play ends; as does Vittoria him, at which she naturally goes out in Corrombona, with half-a-dozen murders anger; and Hazard, the gamester enters,coram populo, raving madness, despair, bed- a personage without a character, in any sense lam and the shambles; putting the reader of the word. There is next some talk marvellously in mind of that well-known against duelling, sensible enough, which old book of the same era, "Reynolds' God's arises out of a bye plot,-one Delamere havrevenge against the Crying Sins of Murther ing been wounded in a duel by one Beauand Adultery," in which, with all due pious horror, and bombastic sermonizing, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the play-wrights of the day. The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw, who appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the queen's favourite poet, and who, according to Langbaine, was "one of such incomparable parts, that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself." mont, mortally as is supposed. This bye plot runs through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the usual playhouse type,-a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical, and unfeeling, as playhouse fathers were then found to be; but it is of the most common-place form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which is this:-Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband's affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit, while Mrs. Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece's place, and shame her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune which he fancies is comWe must entreat the reader's attention ing, in scenes of which one can only say, while we examine Shirley's Gamester. if they are not written for the Whether the examination be a pleasant exciting the passions, it is hard to see why business or not, it is somewhat important, they were written at all. But, being with "for," says Mr. Dyce, "the following me- Hazard in a gambling-house, at the very morandum respecting it occurs in the office- hour at which he is to meet Penelope, and book of the Master of the Records :-'On having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a Thursday night, 6th of February, 1633, hundred pounds of Hazard, stays at the table "The Gamester" was acted at Court, made to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to by Sherley, out of a plot of the king's, given supply his place with the supposed Penelope. him by mee, and well likte. The king sayd A few hours before Penelope and Hazard it was the best play he had seen for seven years."" This is, indeed, important. We shall now have an opportunity of fairly testing at the same time the taste of the Royal Martyr, and the average merit, at least in the opinion purpose that of have met for the first time, and Penelope considers him, as she says to herself aside, a handsome gentleman." He begins, of course, talking lewdly to her; and the lady, so far from being shocked with the freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him back in his own coin in such good earnest that she | his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a soon silences him in the battle of dirt-throw-box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the ing. Of this sad scene, it is difficult to say, young cit has been transformed into an inwhether it indicates a lower standard of tolerable bully by the fame so acquired) purity and courtesy in the poet, in the au- takes another hundred pounds to the repentdience who endured it, or in the society of ant uncle for kicking the youth back into his which it was, of course, intended to be a native state of peaceful cowardice. With brilliant picture. If the cavaliers and dam- the exception of some little humour in these sels of Charles the First's day were in the scenes with young Barnacle the whole play habit of talking in that way to each other, is thoroughly stupid. We look in vain for (and if they had not been, Shirley would not anything like a reflection, a sentiment, even have dared to represent them as doing so,) a novel image. Its language, like its moralone cannot much wonder that the fire of God ity, is all but on a level with the laboured was needed to burn up (though alas! only vulgarities of the "Relapse" or the "Profor a while) such a state of society, and that voked Wife," save that (Shirley being a when needed the fire fell. confessed copier of the great dramatists of The rest of the story is equally bad. the generation before him) there is enough Hazard next day gives Wilding voluptuous of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter is in the height of self-reproach at having want of anything like their matter; and as handed over his victim to another, his wife one sickens with contempt at the rakish meets him, and informs him that she herself swagger, and the artificial smartness of his and not Penelope has been the victim. Now coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffectcomes the crisis of the plot, the conception ed blackguardism of the earlier poets' men. which so delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself, as he expresses it, "fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;" and his rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour by marrying Penelope to Hazard, (even And yet there is one dramatist of that at the cost of disgorging the half of her por- fallen generation over whose memory one tion, which he had intended to embezzle,) cannot but linger, fancying what he would furnish amusement to the audience to the have become, and wondering why so great end of the play; at last, on Hazard and a spirit was checked suddenly ere half-devePenelope coming in married, Wilding is loped, by the fever which carried him off, informed that he has been deceived, and that with several other Oxford worthies, in 1643, his wife is unstained, having arranged with when he was at most thirty-two (and accordHazard to keep up the delusion, in order to ing to one account only twenty-eight) frighten him into good behaviour; where- years old. Let which of the two dates upon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good be the true one, Cartwright must always husband henceforth, and the play ends. rank among our wondrous youths, by Throughout the whole of this farrago of the side of Prince Henry, the Admiral improbable iniquity not a single personage Crichton, and others, of whom one's only has any mark of personal character, or even doubt is, whether they were not too wonof any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of patience under injury. Hazard "The Gamester" is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is impossible to say; he is a mere profligate nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, as we are told, "A man careless This, forsooth, is the best comedy that Charles had heard for seven years, and the plot which he himself furnished for the occasion, fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert. drous, too precociously complete for future development. We find Dr. Fell, sometime Bishop of Oxford, saying that "Cartwright was the utmost man could come to;" we read how his body was as handsome as his soul; how he was an expert linguist, not only in Greek and Latin, but in French and Italian, an excellent orator, admirable poet; how Aristotle was no less known to him than Cicero and Virgil, and his metaphysi Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck cal lectures preferred to those of all his pre To kill so many as another, dares He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the seventeenth century) to let decessors, the Bishop of Lincoln only excepted, "and his sermons, lastly," as much admired as his other composures, and how one fitly applied to him that saying of Aristotle concerning Eschron the poet, that "he could not tell what schron could not do.” We find pages on pages of high-flown epi taphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of his admirers makes one incline to doubt the taste of him whom they so bedaub with praise; and certainly, in spite of all due admiration for the Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to endorse Mr. Jasper Mayne's opinion, that "In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare's stile :" or that he possest "Lucan's bold heights match'd to staid Virgil's care, Martial's quick salt, joined to Museus' tongue." Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason In us, here only lies the difference,- For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous generation, we will love young Cartwright in spite of the suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king's, which at last cost him his head. The Royal Slave, too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame. This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed : but genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, "My son Cartwright writes all like a man." It is impossible to open a page of The Lady Errant, The Royal Slave, As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty The Ordinary, or Love's Convert, without like the rest, when necessary: but humour feeling at once that we have to do with a he has, of the highest quality. The Ordinary man of a very different stamp from any is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, (Massenger perhaps alone excepted) who though too much of a lay figure, and dependwas writing between 1630 and 1640. The ing for his amusingness on his quaint antispecific density of the poems, so to speak, quated language, is such a sketch as Mr. is far greater than that of any of his cotempo- Dickens need not have been ashamed to raries; every where is thought, fancy, force, draw. varied learning. He is never weak or dull, The Royal Slave seems to have been conthough he fails often enough, is often enough sidered, both by the Court and by his conwrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has temporaries, his masterpiece. And justly never laid bare the deeper arteries of hu- so; yet our pleasure at Charles's having manity, for good or for evil. Neither is he shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat altogether an original thinker; as one would marred by Langbaine's story, that the good expect, he has over-read himself; but then acting of the Oxford scholars, "stately he has done so to good purpose. If he imi- scenes, and richness of the Persian habits," tates he generally equals. The table of had as much to do with the success of the fare in The Ordinary smacks of Rabelais, play as its "stately style," and "the excelbut then it is worthy of Rabelais; and if lency of the songs, which were set by that one cannot help suspecting that The Ordin- admirable composer, Mr. Henry James." ary would never have been written had not True it is, that the songs are excellent, as Ben Jonson written the The Alchemist, one are all Cartwright's; for grace, simplicity, confesses that Ben Jonson need not have and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakbeen ashamed to have written the play him- speare's) which the seventeenth century proself, although the plot, as all Cartwright's duced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculare, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. ty seems to have exhausted itself in these If he be platonically sentimental in Love's Convert, his sentiment is of the noblest and purest; and the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed, if ever age on earth did. half-dozen songs. His minor poems are utterly worthless, out-Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic conceits; and his various addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic, and stupid, and artificial, as any |