His retirement and death. 48. Othello, or perhaps the Tempest, is reckoned by many the latest of Shakspeare’s works. In the zenith of his faculties, in possession of fame disproportionate indeed to what has since accrued to his memory, but beyond that of any contemporary, at the age of about forty-seven, he ceased to write, and settled himself at a distance from all dramatic associations in his own native town; a home, of which he had never lost sight, nor even permanently quitted, the birthplace of his children, and to which he brought what might then seem affluence in a middle station, with the hope, doubtless, of a secure decline into the yellow leaf of years. But he was cut off in 1616, not probably in the midst of any schemes for his own glory, but to the loss of those enjoyments which he had accustomed himself to value beyond it. His descendants, it is well known, became extinct in little more than half a century.

Greatness of his genius. 49. The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature—it is the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near to him in the creative powers of the mind; no man had ever such strength at once, and such variety of imagination. Coleridge has most felicitously applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom, certainly none so deserving of it, μυριονους, the thousand-souled Shakspeare.[540] The number of characters in his plays is astonishingly great, without reckoning those, who, although transient, have often their individuality, all distinct, all types of human life in well defined differences. Yet he never takes an abstract quality to embody it, scarcely perhaps a definite condition of manners, as Jonson does; nor did he draw much, as I conceive, from living models; there is no manifest appearance of personal caricature in his comedies, though in some slight traits of character this may not improbably have been the case. Above all, neither he nor his contemporaries wrote for the stage in the worst, though most literal, and of late years the most usual sense; making the servants and handmaids of dramatic invention to lord over it, and limiting the capacities of the poet’s mind to those of the performers. If this poverty of the representative department of the drama had hung like an incumbent fiend on the creative power of Shakspeare, how would he have poured forth with such inexhaustible prodigality the vast diversity of characters that we find in some of his plays? This it is in which he leaves far behind not the dramatists alone, but all writers of fiction. Compare with him Homer, the tragedians of Greece, the poets of Italy, Plautus, Cervantes, Molière, Addison, Le Sage, Fielding, Richardson, Scott, the romancers of the elder or later schools—one man has far more than surpassed them all. Others may have been as sublime, others may have been more pathetic, others may have equalled him in grace and purity of language, and have shunned some of its faults; but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out of the human heart, whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It is, if not entirely wanting, very little manifested in comparison with him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent period, whom we are about to approach.

[540] Table-talk, vol. ii., p. 301. Coleridge had previously spoken of Shakspeare’s oceanic mind, which, if we take it in the sense of multitudinous unity, ποντιων κυματων ανηριθμον γελασμα, will present the same idea as μυριονουσ in a beautiful image.

His judgment. 50. These dramatists, as we shall speedily perceive, are hardly less inferior to Shakspeare in judgment. To this quality I particularly advert, because foreign writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed an extraordinary barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong indeed to an age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its entertainments, and are of course to be classed with what is called the romantic school, which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach. But no one who has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare, or contemporary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing of the theatres in the civil war, will pretend to deny that there is far less regularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be desired, in a large proportion of these (perhaps in all the tragedies) than in his own. We need only repeat the names of the Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excellently constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But even where an analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is generally an unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter’s Tale is not a model to follow, but we feel that the Winter’s Tale is a single story; it is even managed as such with consummate skill. It is another proof of Shakspeare’s judgment, that he has given action enough to his comedies without the bustling intricacy of the Spanish stage. If his plots have any little obscurity in some parts, it is from copying his novel or history too minutely.

His obscurity. 52. Few will defend these notorious faults. But is there not one, less frequently mentioned, yet of more continual recurrence; the extreme obscurity of Shakspeare’s diction? His style is full of new words and new senses. It is easy to pass this over as obsoleteness; but though many expressions are obsolete and many provincial, though the labour of his commentators has never been so profitably, as well as so diligently, employed as in tracing this by the help of the meanest and most forgotten books of the age, it is impossible to deny that innumerable lines in Shakspeare were not more intelligible in his time than they are at present. Much of this may be forgiven, or rather is so incorporated with the strength of his reason and fancy that we love it as the proper body of Shakspeare’s soul. Still can we justify the very numerous passages which yield to no interpretation, knots which are never unloosed, which conjecture does but cut, or even those, which if they may at last be understood, keep the attention in perplexity till the first emotion has passed away? And these occur not merely in places where the struggles of the speaker’s mind may be well denoted by some obscurities of language, as in the soliloquies of Hamlet and Macbeth, but in dialogues between ordinary personages, and in the business of the play. We learn Shakspeare, in fact, as we learn a language, or as we read a difficult passage in Greek, with the eye glancing on the commentary; and it is only after much study that we come to forget a part, it can be but a part, of the perplexities he has caused us. This was no doubt one reason that he was less read formerly, his style passing for obsolete, though in many parts, as we have just said, it was never much more intelligible than it is.[541]

[541] “Shakspeare’s style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure. It is true that in his later plays he had worn off somewhat of this rust.”—Dryden’s Works (Malone), vol. ii., part ii., p. 252. This is by no means the truth, but rather the reverse of it: Dryden knew not at all which were earlier, or which later, of Shakspeare’s plays.

His popularity. 53. It does not appear probable that Shakspeare was ever placed below, or merely on a level with the other dramatic writers of this period.[542] That his plays were not so frequently represented as those of Fletcher, is little to the purpose; they required a more expensive decoration, a larger company of good performers, and above all, they were less intelligible to a promiscuous audience. But it is certain that throughout the seventeenth century, and even in the writings of Addison and his contemporaries, we seldom or never meet with that complete recognition of his supremacy, that unhesitating preference of him to all the world, which has become the faith of the last and the present century. And it is remarkable that this apotheosis, so to speak, of Shakspeare was originally the work of what has been styled a frigid and tasteless generation—the age of George II. Much is certainly due to the stage itself, when those appeared, who could guide and control the public taste, and discover that in the poet himself which sluggish imaginations could not have reached. The enthusiasm for Shakspeare is nearly coincident with that for Garrick; it was kept up by his followers, and especially by that highly-gifted family which has but recently been withdrawn from our stage.

[542] A certain William Cartwright, in commendatory verses addressed to Fletcher, has the assurance to say:

Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fools’ replies.

But the suffrage of Jonson himself, of Milton, and of many more that might be quoted, tends to prove that his genius was esteemed beyond that of any other, though some might compare inferior writers to him in other qualifications of the dramatist. Even Dryden, who came in a worse period, and had no undue reverence for Shakspeare, admits that “he was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation; he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”—Dryden’s Prose Works (Malone’s edition), vol. i., part ii. p. 99.

Critics on Shakspeare. 54. Among the commentators on Shakspeare, Warburton, always striving to display his own acuteness and scorn of others, deviates more than anyone else from the meaning. Theobald was the first who did a little. Johnson explained much well, but there is something magisterial in the manner wherein he dismisses each play like a boy’s exercise, that irritates the reader. His criticism is frequently judicious, but betrays no ardent admiration for Shakspeare. Malone and Steevens were two laborious commentators on the meaning of words and phrases; one dull, the other clever; but the dullness was accompanied by candour and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of both. Neither seems to have had a full discernment of Shakspeare’s genius. The numerous critics of the last age who were not editors have poured out much that is trite and insipid, much that is hypercritical and erroneous; yet, collectively, they not only bear witness to the public taste for the poet, but taught men to judge and feel more accurately than they would have done for themselves. Hurd and Lord Kaimes, especially the former, may be reckoned among the best of this class;[543] Mrs. Montagu, perhaps, in her celebrated Essay, not very far from the bottom of the list. In the present century, Coleridge and Schlegel, so nearly at the same time that the question of priority and even plagiarism has been mooted, gave a more philosophical, and, at the same time, a more intrinsically exact view of Shakspeare, than their predecessors. What has since been written, has often been highly acute and æsthetic, but occasionally with an excess of refinement which substitutes the critic for the work. Mrs. Jameson’s Essays on the Female Characters of Shakspeare are among the best. It was right that this province of illustration should be reserved for a woman’s hand.

[543] Hurd, in his notes on Horace’s Art of Poetry, vol. i., p. 52, has some very good remarks on the diction of Shakspeare, suggested by the “callida junctura” of the Roman poet, illustrated by many instances. These remarks both serve to bring out the skill of Shakspeare, and to explain the disputed passage in Horace. Hurd justly maintains the obvious construction of that passage: “notum si callida verbum Reddiderit junctura novum.” That proposed by Lambinus and Beattie, which begins with novum, is inadmissible, and gives a worse sense.

Ben Jonson. 55. Ben Jonson, so generally known by that familiar description that some might hardly recognise him without it, was placed next to Shakspeare by his own age. They were much acquainted, and belonged to the oldest, perhaps, and not the worst of clubs, formed by Sir Walter Raleigh about the beginning of the century, which met at the Mermaid in Friday-street. We may easily believe the testimony of one of its members, that it was a feast of the most subtle and brilliant wit.[544] Jonson had abundant powers of poignant and sarcastic humour, besides extensive reading, and Shakspeare must have brought to the Mermaid the brightness of his fancy. Selden and Camden, the former in early youth, are reported to have given the ballast of their strong sense and learning to this cluster of poets. There has been, however, a prevalent tradition that Jonson was not without some malignant and envious feelings towards Shakspeare. Gifford has repelled this imputation with considerable success, though we may still suspect that there was something caustic and saturnine in the temper of Jonson.

[544] Gifford’s Life of Jonson, p. 65. Collier, iii., 275.

The Alchemist. 56. The Alchemist is a play which long remained on the stage, though I am not sure that it has been represented since the days of Garrick, who was famous in Abel Drugger. Notwithstanding the indiscriminate and injudicious panegyric of Gifford, I believe there is no reader of taste but will condemn the outrageous excess of pedantry with which the first acts of this play abound; pedantry the more intolerable, that it is not even what, however unfit for the English stage, scholars might comprehend, but the gibberish of obscure treatises on alchemy, which, whatever the commentators may chuse to say, was as unintelligible to all but a few half-witted dupes of that imposture as it is at present. Much of this, it seems impossible to doubt, was omitted in representation. Nor is his pedantic display of learning confined to the part of the Alchemist, who had certainly a right to talk in the style of his science, if he had done it with some moderation: Sir Epicure Mammon, a worldly sensualist, placed in the author’s own age, pours out a torrent of gluttonous cookery from the kitchens of Heliogabalus and Apicius; his dishes are to be camels’ heels, the beards of barbels and dissolved pearl, crowning all with the paps of a sow. But while this habitual error of Jonson’s vanity is not to be overlooked, we may truly say, that it is much more than compensated by the excellencies of this comedy. The plot, with great simplicity, is continually animated and interesting; the characters are conceived and delineated with admirable boldness, truth, spirit, and variety; the humour, especially in the two Puritans, a sect who now began to do penance on the stage, is amusing; the language, when it does not smell too much of book-learning, is forcible and clear. The Alchemist is one of the three plays which usually contest the superiority among those of Jonson.

The Silent Woman. 59. The Silent Woman, which has been named by some with the Alchemist and the Fox, falls much below them in vigorous delineation and dramatic effect. It has more diversity of manners than of character, the amusing scenes border sometimes on farce, as where two cowardly knights are made to receive blows in the dark, each supposing them to come from his adversary, and the catastrophe is neither pleasing nor probable. It is written with a great deal of spirit, and has a value as the representation of London life in the higher ranks at that time. But, upon the whole, I should be inclined to give to Every Man in his Humour a much superior place. It is a proof of Jonson’s extensive learning that the story of this play, and several particular passages, have been detected in a writer so much out of the beaten track as Libanius.[545]

[545] Gifford discovered this. Dryden, who has given an examination of the Silent Woman, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, takes Morose for a real character, and says that he had so been informed. It is possible that there might be some foundation of truth in this; the skeleton is in Libanius, but Jonson may have filled it up from the life. Dryden gives it as his opinion that there is more wit and acuteness of fancy in this play than in any of Ben Jonson’s, and that he has described the conversation of gentlemen with more gaiety and freedom than in the rest of his comedies, p. 107.

Sad Shepherd. 60. The pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd is the best testimony to the poetical imagination of Jonson. Superior in originality, liveliness, and beauty, to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, it reminds us rather, in language and imagery, of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, perhaps, no other poetry has come so near to that of Shakspeare. Jonson, like him, had an extraordinary command of English, in its popular and provincial idioms, as well as what might be gained from books; and though his invincible pedantry now and then obtrudes itself into the mouths of shepherds, it is compensated by numerous passages of the most natural and graceful expression. This beautiful drama is imperfect, hardly more than half remaining, or more probably having ever been written. It was also Jonson’s last song; age and poverty had stolen upon him; but, as one has said, who experienced the same destiny, “the life was in the leaf,” and his laurel remained verdant amidst the snow of his honoured head. The beauties of the Sad Shepherd might be reckoned rather poetical than dramatic; yet the action is both diversified and interesting to a degree we seldom find in the pastoral drama; there is little that is low in the comic speeches, nothing that is inflated in the serious.

Beaumont and Fletcher. 61. Two men, once united by friendship, and for ever by fame, the Dioscuri of our zodiac, Beaumont and Fletcher, rose upon the horizon as the star of Shakspeare, though still in its fullest brightness, was declining in the sky. The first, in order of time, among more than fifty plays published with their joint names, is the Woman-Hater, represented, according to Langbaine, in 1607, and ascribed to Beaumont alone by Seward, though, I believe, merely on conjecture.[546] Beaumont died, at the age of thirty, in 1615; Fletcher in 1625. No difference of manner is perceptible, or, at least, no critic has perceived any, in the plays that appeared between these two epochs; in fact, the greater part were not printed till 1647, and it is only through the records of the play-house that we distinguish their dates. The tradition, however, of their own times, as well as the earlier death of Beaumont, give us reason to name Fletcher, when we mention one singly, as the principal author of all these plays; and, of late years, this has, perhaps, become more customary than it used to be. A contemporary copy of verses, indeed, seems to attribute the greater share in the Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, and King and no King, to Beaumont. But testimony of this kind is very precarious. It is sufficient that he bore a part in these three.

[546] Vol. i., p. 3. He also thinks The Nice Valour exclusively Beaumont’s. These two appear to me about the worst in the collection.

Corrupt state of their text. 62. Of all our early dramatic poets, none have suffered such mangling by the printer as Beaumont and Fletcher. Their style is generally elliptical, and not very perspicuous; they use words in peculiar senses, and there seems often an attempt at pointed expression, in which its meaning has deserted them. But, after every effort to comprehend their language, it is continually so remote from all possibility of bearing a rational sense, that we can only have recourse to one hypothesis, that of an extensive and irreparable corruption of the text. Seward and Simpson, who, in 1750, published the first edition in which any endeavour was made at illustration or amendment, though not men of much taste, and too fond of extolling their authors, showed some acuteness, and have restored many passages in a probable manner, though often driven out at sea to conjecture something, where the received reading furnished not a vestige which they could trace. No one since has made any great progress in this criticism, though some have carped at these editors for not performing more. The problem of actual restoration in most places, where the printers or transcribers have made such strange havoc, must evidently be insoluble.

The Maid’s Tragedy. 63. The first play in the collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher, though not the earliest, is the Maid’s Tragedy, and it is among the best. None of their female characters, though they are often very successful in beautiful delineations of virtuous love, attaches our sympathy like Aspasia. Her sorrows are so deep, so pure, so unmerited, she sustains the breach of plighted faith in Amyntor, and the taunts of vicious women with so much resignation, so little of that termagant resentment these poets are apt to infuse into their heroines, the poetry of her speeches is so exquisitely imaginative, that, of those dramatic persons who are not prominent in the development of a story, scarce any, even in Shakspeare, are more interesting. Nor is the praise due to the Maid’s Tragedy confined to the part of Aspasia. In Melantius we have Fletcher’s favourite character, the brave, honest soldier, incapable of suspecting evil, till it becomes impossible to be ignorant of it, but unshrinking in its punishment. That of Evadne well displays the audacious security of guilt under the safeguard of power; it is highly theatrical, and renders the success of this tragedy not surprising in times when its language and situations could be endured by the audience. We may remark in this tragedy, as in many others of these dramatists, that, while pouring out the unlimited loyalty fashionable at the court of James, they are full of implied satire, which could hardly escape observation. The warm eulogies on military glory, the scorn of slothful peace, the pictures of dissolute baseness in courtiers, seem to spring from a dislike, very usual among the English gentry, a rank to which they both belonged, for that ignominious government; and though James was far enough removed from such voluptuous tyrants as Fletcher has pourtrayed in this and some other plays, they did not serve to exemplify the advantages of monarchy in the most attractive manner.

Philaster. 65. Philaster has been in his day one of the best known and most popular of Fletcher’s plays.[547] This was owing to the pleasing characters of Philaster and Bellario, and to the frequent sweetness of the poetry. It is nevertheless not a first-rate play. The plot is most absurdly managed. It turns on the suspicion of Arethusa’s infidelity. And the sole ground of this is that an abandoned woman, being detected herself, accuses the princess of unchastity. Not a shadow of presumptive evidence is brought to confirm this impudent assertion, which, however, the lady’s father, her lover, and a grave sensible courtier do not fail implicitly to believe. How unlike the chain of circumstance, and the devilish cunning by which the Moor is wrought up to think his Desdemona false! Bellario is suggested by Viola; there is more picturesqueness, more dramatic importance, not, perhaps, more beauty and sweetness of affection, but a more eloquent development of it in Fletcher; on the other hand, there is still more of that improbability which attends a successful concealment of sex by mere disguise of clothes, though no artifice has been more common on the stage. Many other circumstances in the conduct of Fletcher’s story are ill-contrived. It has less wit than the greater part of his comedies; for among such, according to the old distinction, it is to be ranked, though the subject is elevated and serious.

[547] Dryden says, but I know not how truly, that Philaster was “the first play that brought Beaumont and Fletcher in esteem; for before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully,” p. 100. Philaster was not printed, according to Langbaine, till 1620; I do not know that we have any evidence of the date of its representation.

King and No King. 66. King and No King is, in my judgment, inferior to Philaster. The language has not so much of poetical beauty. The character of Arbaces excites no sympathy; it is a compound of vain-glory and violence, which rather demands disgrace from poetical justice than reward. Panthea is innocent, but insipid; Mardonius a good specimen of what Fletcher loves to exhibit, the plain honest courtier. As for Bessus, he certainly gives occasion to several amusing scenes; but his cowardice is a little too glaring; he is neither so laughable as Bobadil, nor so sprightly as Parolles. The principal merit of this play, which rendered it popular on the stage for many years, consists in the effective scenes where Arbaces reveals his illicit desire. That especially with Mardonius is artfully and elaborately written. Shakspeare had less of this skill; and his tragedies suffer for it in their dramatic effect. The scene between John and Hubert is an exception, and there is a great deal of it in Othello; but in general he may be said not to have exerted the power of detaining the spectator in that anxious suspense, which creates almost an actual illusion, and makes him tremble at every word, lest the secret which he has learned should be imparted to the imaginary person on the stage. Of this there are several fine instances in the Greek tragedians, the famous scene in the Œdipus Tyrannus being the best; and it is possible that the superior education of Fletcher may have rendered him familiar with the resources of ancient tragedy. These scenes in the present play would have been more highly powerful if the interest could have been thrown on any character superior to the selfish braggart Arbaces. It may be said perhaps that his humiliation through his own lawless passions, after so much insolence of success, affords a moral; he seems, however, but imperfectly cured at the conclusion, which is also hurried on with unsatisfactory rapidity.

The Loyal Subject. 70. The Loyal Subject ought also to be placed in a high rank among the works of Beaumont and Fletcher. There is a play by Heywood, The Royal King and Loyal Subject, from which the general idea of several circumstances of this have been taken. That Heywood’s was the original, though the only edition of it is in 1637, while the Loyal Subject was represented in 1615, cannot bear a doubt. The former is expressly mentioned in the epilogue as an old play, belonging to a style gone out of date, and not to be judged with rigour. Heywood has, therefore, the praise of having conceived the character of Earl Marshal, upon which Fletcher somewhat improved in Archas; a brave soldier of that disinterested and devoted loyalty, which bears all ingratitude and outrage at the hands of an unworthy and misguided sovereign. In the days of James there could be no more courtly moral. In each play, the prince, after depriving his most deserving subject of honours and fortune, tries his fidelity by commanding him to send two daughters, whom he had educated in seclusion, to the court, with designs that the father may easily suspect. The loyalty, however, of these honest soldiers, like the hospitality of Lot, submits to encounter this danger; and the conduct of the young ladies soon proves that they might be trusted in the fiery trial. In the Loyal Subject, Fletcher has beautifully, and with his light touch of pencil, sketched the two virtuous sisters; one high-spirited, intrepid, undisguised, the other shrinking with maiden modesty, a tremulous dewdrop in the cup of a violet. But unfortunately his original taint betrays itself, and the elder sister cannot display her scorn of licentiousness without borrowing some of its language. If Shakspeare had put these loose images into the mouth of Isabella, how differently we should have esteemed her character!

Valentinian. 74. No tragedy of Fletcher would deserve higher praise than Valentinian, if he had not, by an inconceivable want of taste and judgment, descended from beauty and dignity to the most preposterous absurdities. The matron purity of the injured Lucina, the ravages of unrestrained self-indulgence on a mind not wholly without glimpses of virtue in Valentinian, the vileness of his courtiers, the spirited contrast of unconquerable loyalty in Ætius, with the natural indignation at wrong in Maximus, are brought before our eyes in some of Fletcher’s best poetry, though in a text that seems even more corrupt than usual. But after the admirable scene in the third act, where Lucina (the Lucretia of this story) reveals her injury, perhaps almost the only scene in this dramatist, if we except the Maid’s Tragedy, that can move us to tears, her husband Maximus, who even here begins to forfeit our sympathy by his ready consent, in the Spanish style of perverted honour, to her suicide, becomes a treacherous and ambitious villain; the loyalty of Ætius turns to downright folly, and the rest of the play is but such a series of murders as Marston or the author of Andronicus might have devised. If Fletcher meant, which he very probably did, to inculcate as a moral, that the worst of tyrants are to be obeyed with unflinching submission, he may have gained applause at court, at the expense of his reputation with posterity.

The Two Noble Kinsmen. 75. The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play that has been honoured by a tradition of Shakspeare’s concern in it. The evidence as to this is the title page of the first edition; which, though it may seem much at first sight, is next to nothing in our old drama, full of misnomers of this kind. The editors of Beaumont and Fletcher have insisted upon what they take for marks of Shakspeare’s style; and Schlegel, after “seeing no reason for doubting so probable an opinion,” detects the spirit of Shakspeare in a certain ideal purity which distinguishes this from other plays of Fletcher, and in the conscientious fidelity with which it follows the Knight’s Tale in Chaucer. The Two Noble Kinsmen has much of that elevated sense of honour, friendship, fidelity, and love, which belongs, I think, more characteristically to Fletcher, who had drunk at the fountain of Castilian romance, than to one, in whose vast mind this conventional morality of particular classes was subordinated to the universal nature of man. In this sense, Fletcher is always, in his tragic compositions, a very ideal poet. The subject itself is fitter for him than for Shakspeare. In the language and conduct of this play, with great deference to better and more attentive critics, I see imitations of Shakspeare rather than such resemblances as denote his powerful stamp. The madness of the jailor’s daughter, where some have imagined they saw the masterhand, is doubtless suggested by that of Ophelia, but with an inferiority of taste and feeling, which it seems impossible not to recognise. The painful and degrading symptom of female insanity, which Shakspeare has touched with his gentle hand, is dwelt upon by Fletcher with all his innate impurity. Can anyone believe that the former would have written the last scene in which the jailor’s daughter appears on the stage? Schlegel has too fine taste to believe that this character came from Shakspeare, and it is given up by the latest assertor of his claim to a participation in the play.[548]

[548] A “Letter on Shakspeare’s Authorship of the Drama, entitled the Two Noble Kinsmen,” Edinburgh, 1833, notwithstanding this title, does not deny a considerable participation to Fletcher. He lays no great stress on the external evidence. But in arguing from the similarity of style in many passages to that of Shakspeare, the author, with whose name I am unacquainted, shows so much taste and so competent a knowledge of the two dramatists, that I should perhaps scruple to set up my own doubts in opposition. His chief proofs are drawn from the force and condensation of language in particular passages, which, doubtless, is one of the great distinctions between the two. But we might wish to have seen this displayed in longer extracts than such as the author of this Letter has generally given us. It is difficult to say of a man like Fletcher that he could not have written single lines in the spirit of his predecessor. A few instances, however, of longer passages will be found; and I believe that it is a subject upon which there will long be a difference of opinion.

The Faithful Shepherdess. 76. The Faithful Shepherdess, deservedly among the most celebrated productions of Fletcher, stands alone in its class, and admits of no comparison with any other play. It is a pastoral drama, in imitation of the Pastor Fido, at that time very popular in England. The Faithful Shepherdess, however, to the great indignation of the poets, did not succeed on its first representation. There is nothing in this surprising; the tone of pastoral is too far removed from the possibilities of life for a stage which appealed, like ours, to the boisterous sympathies of a general audience. It is a play very characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity, indecency, and absurdity. There is some justice in Schlegel’s remark, that it is an immodest eulogy on modesty. But this critic, who does not seem to appreciate the beauty of Fletcher’s poetry, should hardly have mentioned Guarini as a model whom he might have followed. It was by copying the Corisca of the Pastor Fido that Fletcher introduced the character of the vicious shepherdess Cloe; though, according to his times, and, we must own, to his disposition, he has greatly aggravated the faults to which just exception has been taken in his original.

77. It is impossible to withhold our praise from the poetical beauties of this pastoral drama. Every one knows that it contains the germ of Comus; the benevolent Satyr, whose last proposition to “stray in the middle air, and stay the sailing rack, or nimbly take hold of the moon” is not much in the character of these sylvans, has been judiciously metamorphosed by Milton to an attendant spirit; and a more austere, as well as more uniform language has been given to the speakers. But Milton has borrowed largely from the imagination of his predecessor; and by quoting the lyric parts of the Faithful Shepherdess, it would be easy to deceive any one not accurately familiar with the songs of Comus. They abound with that rapid succession of ideal scenery, that darting of the poet’s fancy from earth to heaven, those picturesque and novel metaphors, which distinguish much of the poetry of this age, and which are ultimately, perhaps, in great measure referrible to Shakspeare.

Origin of Fletcher’s plays. 81. There has not been much curiosity to investigate the sources of his humorous plays. A few are historical; but it seems highly probable that the Spanish stage of Lope de Vega and his contemporaries often furnished the subject, and perhaps many of the scenes, to his comedies. These possess all the characteristics ascribed to the comedies of intrigue so popular in that country. The scene too is more commonly laid in Spain, and the costume of Spanish manners and sentiments more closely observed, than we should expect from the invention of Englishmen. It would be worth the leisure of some lover of theatrical literature to search the collection of Lope de Vega’s works, and, if possible, the other Spanish writers at the beginning of the century, in order to trace the footsteps of our two dramatists. Sometimes they may have had recourse to novels. The Little French Lawyer seems to indicate such an origin. Nothing had as yet been produced, I believe, on the French stage from which it could have been derived, but the story and most of the characters are manifestly of French derivation. The comic humour of La Writ in this play we may ascribe to the invention of Fletcher himself.[549]

[549] Dryden reckons this play with the Spanish Curate, the Chances, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, among those which he supposes to be drawn from Spanish novels. Essay on Dramatic Poetry, p. 204. By novels we should probably understand plays; for those which he mentions are little in the style of novels. But the Little French Lawyer has all the appearance of coming from a French novel; the scene lies in France, and I see nothing Spanish about it. Dryden was seldom well-informed about the early stage.

Defects of their plots. 82. It is, however, not improbable that the entire plot was sometimes original. Fertile as their invention was, to an extraordinary degree, in furnishing the incidents of their rapid and animated comedies, we may believe the fable itself to have sometimes sprung from no other source. It seems indeed now and then, as if the authors had gone forward with no very clear determination of their catastrophe; there is a want of unity in the conception, a want of consistency in the characters, which appear sometimes rather intended to surprise by incongruity, than framed upon a definite model. That of Ruy Diaz in the Island Princess, of whom it is hard to say whether he is a brave man or a coward, or alternately one and the other, is an instance to which many more might easily be added. In the Bloody Brother, Rollo sends to execution one of his counsellors, whose daughter Edith vainly interferes in a scene of great pathos and effect. In the progress of the drama she arms herself to take away the tyrant’s life; the whole of her character has been consistent and energetic; when Fletcher, to the reader’s astonishment, thinks fit to imitate the scene between Richard and Lady Anne; and the ignominious fickleness of that lady, whom Shakspeare with wonderful skill, but in a manner not quite pleasing, sacrifices to the better display of the cunning crook-back, is here transferred to the heroine of the play, and the very character upon whom its interest ought to depend. Edith is on the point of giving up her purpose, when some others in the conspiracy coming in, she recovers herself enough to exhort them to strike the blow.[550]

[550] Rotrou, in his Wenceslas, as we have already observed, has done something of the same kind; it may have been meant as an ungenerous and calumnious attack on the constancy of the female sex. If lions were painters, the old fable says, they would exhibit a very different view of their contentions with men. But lionesses are become very good painters; and it is but through their clemency that we are not delineated in such a style as would retaliate the injuries of these tragedians.

Their sentiments and style dramatic. 83. The sentiments and style of Fletcher, where not concealed by obscurity or corruption of the text, are very dramatic. We cannot deny that the depths of Shakspeare’s mind were often unfathomable by an audience; the bow was drawn by a matchless hand, but the shaft went out of sight. All might listen to Fletcher’s pleasing, though not profound or vigorous language; his thoughts are noble, and tinged with the ideality of romance, his metaphors vivid, though sometimes too forced; he possesses the idiom of English without much pedantry, though in many passages he strains it beyond common use; his versification, though studiously irregular, is often rhythmical and sweet. Yet we are seldom arrested by striking beauties; good lines occur in every page, fine ones but rarely; we lay down the volume with a sense of admiration of what we have read, but little of it remains distinctly in the memory. Fletcher is not much quoted, and has not even afforded copious materials to those who cull the beauties of ancient lore.

Their characters. 84. In variety of character there can be no comparison between Fletcher and Shakspeare. A few types return upon us in the former; an old general, proud of his wars, faithful and passionate, a voluptuous and arbitrary king (for his principles of obedience do not seem to have inspired him with much confidence in royal virtues), a supple courtier, a high-spirited youth, or one more gentle in manners but not less stout in action, a lady, fierce and not always very modest in her chastity, repelling the solicitations of licentiousness, another impudently vicious, form the usual pictures for his canvas. Add to these, for the lighter comedy, an amorous old man, a gay spendthrift, and a few more of the staple characters of the stage, and we have the materials of Fletcher’s dramatic world. It must be remembered that we compare him only with Shakspeare, and that as few dramatists have been more copious than Fletcher, few have been so much called upon for inventions, in which the custom of the theatre has not exacted much originality. The great fertility of his mind in new combinations of circumstance gives as much appearance of novelty to the personages themselves as an unreflecting audience requires. In works of fiction, even those which are read in the closet, this variation of the mere dress of a character is generally found sufficient for the public.

Their tragedies. 85. The tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, by which our ancestors seem to have meant only plays wherein any of the personages, or at least any whom the spectator would wish to keep alive, dies on the stage, are not very numerous, but in them we have as copious an effusion of blood as any contemporary dramas supply. The conclusion indeed of these, and of the tragi-comedies, which form a larger class, is generally mismanaged. A propensity to take the audience by surprise leads often to an unnatural and unsatisfactory catastrophe; it seems their aim to disappoint common expectation, to baffle reasonable conjecture, to mock natural sympathy. This is frequently the practice of our modern novelists, who find no better resource in the poverty of their invention to gratify the jaded palate of the world.

Inferior to their comedies. 86. The comic talents of these authors far exceeded their skill in tragedy. In comedy they founded a new school, at least in England, the vestiges of which are still to be traced in our theatre. Their plays are at once distinguishable from those of their contemporaries by the regard to dramatic effect which influenced the writers’ imagination. Though not personally connected with the stage, they had its picture ever before their eyes. Hence their incidents are numerous and striking, their characters sometimes slightly sketched, not drawn like those of Jonson, from a preconceived design, but preserving that degree of individual distinctness which a common audience requires, and often highly humorous without extravagance; their language brilliant with wit, their measure, though they do not make great use of prose, very lax and rapid, running frequently to lines of thirteen and fourteen syllables. Few of their comedies are without a mixture of grave sentiments or elevated characters; and though there is much to condemn in their indecency and even licentiousness of principle, they never descend to the coarse buffoonery not unfrequent in their age. Never were dramatic poets more thoroughly gentlemen, according to the standard of their times; and, when we consider the court of James I., we may say that they were above that standard.[551]

[551] “Their plots were generally more regular than Shakspeare’s, especially those which were made before Beaumont’s death: and they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done. Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe; they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection; what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakspeare’s or Jonson’s; the reason is because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies, and pathos in their more serious plays, which suits generally with all men’s humours. Shakspeare’s language is likewise a little obsolete, and Jonson’s wit falls short of theirs.”—Dryden, p. 101.

Their female characters. 87. The best of Fletcher’s characters are female; he wanted that large sweep of reflection and experience which is required for the greater diversity of the other sex. None of his women delight us like Imogen and Desdemona; but he has many Imogens and Desdemonas of a fainter type. Spacelia, Zenocia, Celia, Aspasia, Evanthe, Lucina, Ordella, Oriana, present the picture that cannot be greatly varied without departing from its essence, but which never can be repeated too often to please us, of faithful, tender, self-denying female love, superior to everything but virtue. Nor is he less successful, generally, in the contrast of minds stained by guilty passion, though in this he sometimes exaggerates the outline till it borders on caricature. But it is in vain to seek in Fletcher the strong conceptions of Shakspeare, the Shylocks, the Lears, the Othellos. Schlegel has well said that “scarce anything has been wanting to give a place to Beaumont and Fletcher among the great dramatists of Europe, but more of seriousness and depth, and the regulating judgment which prescribes the due limits in every part of composition.” It was for want of the former qualities that they conceive nothing in tragedy very forcibly; for want of the latter that they spoil their first conception by extravagance and incongruity.[552]

[552] “Shakspeare,” says Dryden, “writ better between man and man, Fletcher betwixt man and woman; consequently, the one described friendship better, the other love; yet, Shakspeare taught Fletcher to write love, and Juliet and Desdemona are originals. It is true the scholar had the softer soul, but the master had the kinder.... Shakspeare had an universal mind which comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher a more confined and limited; for though he treated love in perfection, yet honour, ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger passions, he either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude all, he was a limb of Shakspeare,” p. 301. This comparison is rather generally than strictly just, as is often the case with the criticisms of Dryden. That Fletcher wrote better than Shakspeare “between man and woman,” or in displaying love, will be granted when he shall be shown to have excelled Ferdinand and Miranda, or Posthumus and Imogen. And, on the other hand, it is unjust to deny him credit for having sometimes touched the stronger emotions, especially honour and ambition, with great skill, though much inferior to that of Shakspeare.

88. The reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher was at its height, and most of their plays had been given to the stage, when a worthy inheritor of their mantle appeared in Philip Massinger. Of his extant dramas the Virgin Martyr, published in 1622, seems to be the earliest; but we have reason to believe that several are lost; and even this tragedy may have been represented some years before. The far greater part of his remaining pieces followed within ten years; the Bashful Lover, which is the latest now known, was written in 1636. Massinger was a gentleman, but in the service, according to the language of those times, of the Pembroke family; his education was at the university, his acquaintance both with books and with the manners of the court is familiar, his style and sentiments are altogether those of a man polished by intercourse of good society.

His subjects. 92. The subjects chosen by Massinger are sometimes historical, but others seem to have been taken from French or Italian novels, and those so obscure, that his editor Gifford, a man of much reading and industry, has seldom traced them. This indeed was an usual practice of our ancient dramatists. Their works have consequently a romantic character, presenting as little of the regular Plautine comedy, as of the Greek forms of tragedy. They are merely novels in action, following probably their models with no great variance, except the lower and lighter episodes which it was always more or less necessary to combine with the story. It is from this choice of subjects, perhaps, as much as from the peculiar temper of the poets, that love is the predominant affection of the mind which they display; not cold and conventional, as we commonly find it on the French stage, but sometimes, as the novelists of the South were prone to delineate its emotions, fiery, irresistible, and almost resembling the fatalism of ancient tragedy, sometimes a subdued captive at the chariot-wheels of honour or religion. The range of human passion is consequently far less extensive than in Shakspeare; but the variety of circumstance, and the modifications of the paramount affection itself, compensated for this deficiency.

And of his other plays. 96. The Picture, The Bondman, and A Very Woman may perhaps be reckoned the best among the tragi-comedies of Massinger. But the general merits as well as defects of this writer are perceptible in all; and the difference between these and the rest is not such as to be apparent to every reader. Two others are distinguishable as more English than the rest; the scene lies at home, and in the age; and to these the common voice has assigned a superiority. They are A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and the City Madam. A character drawn, as it appears, from reality, and though darkly wicked, not beyond the province of the higher comedy, Sir Giles Overreach, gives the former drama a striking originality and an impressive vigour. It retains, alone among the productions of Massinger, a place on the stage. Gifford inclines to prefer the City Madam; which, no doubt, by the masterly delineation of Luke, a villain of a different order from Overreach, and a larger portion of comic humour and satire than is usual with this writer, may dispute the palm. It seems to me that there is more violent improbability in the conduct of the plot, than in a A New Way to Pay Old Debts.