We see what the artist means, but his
execution
is
not perfect.
not perfect.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
the absent son of a prominent courtier.
Shirley departs
from his source in the last act by depriving the hero of both
the ladies he had wooed, whereas the Spanish author makes
him lose the duchess, but marries him to one of her ladies. The
point of the plot of The Coronation (1635) lies in the successive
discovery of two brothers of a reigning queen, whose crown thus
shifts from head to head, producing a succession of effective
situations, in which lies the chief merit of the play. It contains
a masque, but no low comedy. This piece was included in the
## p. 205 (#223) ############################################
Shirley's Romantic Comedies
205
second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, but no considerable
part of the play is to be ascribed to any hand but Shirley's. The
main interest of The Royall Master, performed first in Dublin and
printed in 1638, lies not in a somewhat conventional, if skilful,
central intrigue, but in the secondary figure of the young girl
Domitilla, who imagines that the king is in love with her, and is
cured of her infatuation by her royal master, who pretends
to seek her love basely. This situation is taken from the De-
cameron? ; the main plot is stated by Stiefel to be Spanish in
origin? Another Dublin play, licensed in 1640, is The Doubtfull
Heir. The interest here, as in The Coronation, lies in the
surprises of the action, the fortunes of Ferdinand, the lost heir
of Murcia, undergoing a series of most violent changes; while the
charm of the piece is in the constancy of the hero and his
betrothed, which gave the play its original name Rosania, or
Love's Victory. There are two plots of almost equal importance
in The Gentleman of Venice (1639). In one, an interesting contrast
of character is elaborated between the duke's son, supposed to be
the gardener's, and the gardener's son, supposed to be the duke’s.
In the other, a plot of an uncommonly painful nature is handled
with delicacy. The Arcadia, printed in 1640, but, perhaps, per-
formed some years before, is a frank dramatisation of the main
incidents of Sidney's romance, with much elaboration of the
farcical elements. The Humorous Courtier (printed 1640), also
of uncertain date of production, has an ingenious plot, but is
spoiled by the gratuitous coarseness of the scenes dealing with
Orseolo, the pretended misogynist but actual libertine, who gives
the play its name. The main plot turns on the testing of her
courtiers by the duchess of Mantua, who, secretly betrothed to
the duke of Parma, gives out that she means to marry at home,
and enjoys the spectacle of her lords covering themselves
with ridicule in their efforts to gain her hand. The Im-
posture (1640) was considered by Shirley to be in the first rank
of his compositions. It is, indeed, cleverly manipulated, and the
interest is well maintained through a highly complicated plot.
But the devices are lacking in both novelty and probability. An
ambitious favourite, seeking to secure the daughter of the duke of
Mantua for himself, substitutes for her his own discarded mistress
when the son of the duke of Ferrara comes wooing. The low
comedy is supplied by a young coward Bertholdi, who seeks to
ingratiate himself with the gallants by offering to each in turn the
1 Day x, nov. 7. 2 For modern analogues, see Ward, vol. II, p. 116, note 1.
## p. 206 (#224) ############################################
206
Ford and Shirley
hand of his widowed mother, a lady of wit and independence.
The Sisters (1642) was the last play by Shirley performed
before the theatres were closed. It is a lively and amusing
treatment of the theme of the proud and the humble sister. After
the former has been fooled by a captain of bandits masquerading
first as a fortune teller and then as a prince, she is discovered to
be the child of a peasant, and the estates and the real prince go to
her modest rival. The farce is frankly absurd, but, on the stage,
must have been highly amusing. The dedication has an inter-
esting picture of the condition of poets in England just before the
war began, and the prologue contains eulogies of Shakespeare,
Fletcher and Jonson. The Court Secret, the latest of Shirley's
regular dramas, was not acted till after the Restoration. It deals
with the familiar theme, already several times employed by him,
of the hidden heir, and surpasses other works on the subject only
in the extreme intricacy of the plot. Mendoza, the father of the
supposititious prince, is handled with some freshness and humour,
being rendered miserable by the possession of the court secret,'
but without the courage to reveal it. The real and the false
princes are treated with a delicacy of comparison that distinguishes
them clearly from the similarly situated but broadly contrasted
pair in The Gentleman of Venice.
A number of miscellaneous pieces remain to be mentioned.
The most curious of these is the extraordinary hodge-podge written
for the Dublin theatre, and called St Patrick for Ireland (printed
1640). The main plot, derived from the life of the saint, may be re-
garded as something between a chronicle history and a miracle-play;
the love story is tragicomedy ; the figure of Rodamant is farcical.
The device by which a lover gets access to a virtuous girl in the
guise of a god is as old as Josephus and was already familiar on
the English stage. A bracelet making the wearer invisible is used
both in the serious and in the low comedy parts. Though the piece
contains scenes and speeches that might find appropriate enough
place in regular dramas, the effect of the whole is grotesque; and
even the noble figure of St Patrick suffers in dignity from its
patchwork background.
Interesting in a different way is the allegorical drama, Honoria
and Mammon (pub. 1659), an elaboration of a morality, A Con-
tention for Honour and Riches, which Shirley had printed in
1633. The purpose of the 'Moral,' as he calls it, is the exalting
of the scholar as against the courtier and the soldier, and the
exposing of the deceitfulness of riches. In its form, there is
## p. 207 (#225) ############################################
Shirley's Entertainments
207
much conventional dramatic material; but, on the allegorical side,
it is a more interesting production. The characters, which, in
the earlier form, are largely abstractions, become, in the revision,
types; and this change makes them much more effective for the
pictures of contemporary life in which lies the main value of the
piece.
The Tragedie of Chabot Admirall of France (licensed 1635) is
ascribed on the title-page of the quarto to Chapman and Shirley.
Chapman was dead before the play was acted, and Shirley may
have given it some revision; but, in all essentials, it is evident
that it is the work of the older poet? . Like most of Chapman's
tragedies, it is founded on French history; it is full of his weighty
diction and serious thought; and it is much less well adapted to
the popular stage than we should expect had Shirley had any
considerable share in it.
Besides the masques introduced into nine or ten of his plays,
Shirley has left three separate productions of this class : The
Triumph of Peace (1633), The Triumph of Beauty (printed 1646)
and Cupid and Death (1653). The first of these has already been
referred to as the great entertainment presented by the inns of
court to the king and queen. Except in scale and splendour, it
does not differ notably from most other productions of its kind,
and today it is memorable chiefly as a document in social, rather
than in literary, history. The Triumph of Beauty deals with the
judgment of Paris, and it is introduced by an extensive and obvious
imitation of the rehearsals of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' by Bottom and
his friends in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cupid and Death,
on the familiar fable of the exchange of the weapons of the two
deities and its disastrous results, was written for performance
before the Portuguese ambassador.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armor of
Achilles (printed 1659), though often described as a masque, is,
in reality, nothing of the sort. It is a short dramatic piece, based
on Ovid's Metamorphoses, intended for private production. It
contains nothing spectacular and no dancing. Some of the speeches
are eloquent, though both the main characters suffer from the
obvious comparison with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. The
piece is now remembered for the great lyric already mentioned,
with which it closes.
Of the originality of Shirley's plots, it is at present somewhat
hazardous to speak. In the foregoing pages, we have been able to
1 Cf. ante, chap. IL
## p. 208 (#226) ############################################
208
Ford and Shirley
indicate sources for only about one-fourth of his plays, and it has
been customary to credit him with a greater share of inventiveness
than most of his fellow dramatists. But Stiefel, who proved the
Spanish origin of the plot of The Opportunitie, named another for
The Young Admirall, and stated that The Wedding, The
Humorous Courtier, The Example and The Royall Master are,
also, from Spanish sources. If this can be made good, it is clear
that it is too soon to pronounce on the question of invention in
this sense. But, from those plays whose sources are known, we
can draw inferences as to his skill in treating a source; and our
evidence is sufficient to justify us in crediting to him a high degree
of ability in making over a story for stage purposes, in leading the
interest up to a well prepared climax and in arranging effective
situations. This last power had, indeed, distinguished most of his
predecessors in the seventeenth century, but he does not so often
as, say, Beaumont and Fletcher, sacrifice the unity of impression of
the whole play, or the consistency of character, for the sake of
single sensational scenes.
In characterisation as in theme, he had both the advantages
and disadvantages of the situation described at the beginning of
the present chapter. Fifty years of drama lay behind him of which
to follow or avoid the example. Could we read half a dozen of
the best plays of Shirley without any knowledge of his predecessors,
we should, doubtless, rank him much higher in the literature of
the world than we do; but he is usually read, as he wrote, at the
end of the series, and we are thus obliged to recognise constant
echoes, reminiscences and imitations of the giants who went be-
fore. It was, perhaps, hardly possible for any writer of his date
to avoid the familiar types and situations which had been often
employed. A dramatist of the time of Charles I had to walk
through a field honeycombed with pits, and it was futile to seek
to follow a straight course and avoid them all. If frequent con-
ventionality in these matters implies decadence, then Shirley was
undoubtedly decadent.
The moral standards of Shirley were not those of Ford.
Shirley has his share of grossness, both in incident and dialogue,
but this grossness is neither more frequent than in his pre-
decessors, nor is it by any means habitual. Of Ford's moral
agnosticism there is no trace in Shirley. In some of his plays, the
moral is almost obtrusive; in none of them is the general drift
immoral. Nor is he notable for the violence or sensationalism of
his catastrophes. The slaughter which closes The Traytor, Loves
## p. 209 (#227) ############################################
Shirley and Ford compared
209
Crueltie and The Cardinall is no more wholesale than that at the
end of Hamlet or King Lear, and, in intention at least, it is like
Shakespeare's, the necessary outcome of character and previous
action, not, like Ford's, an ingenious horror concocted for a final
thrill. In comic power, he stands high above Ford. Without
being primarily a comic artist, Shirley yet displays much genuine
comic power, both in conceiving amusing situations, and in creating
comic characters. In versification, too, Shirley seems to belong
to an earlier and sounder school than Ford. His metre is
singularly correct and easily read; Ford uses much licence and
not infrequently gives us lines hard to scan. Both men were
capable of great sweetness of melody, and both adorned their
finer speeches with a wealth of flowery imagery, not always
dramatically appropriate, but frequently of great beauty and
imaginative suggestiveness.
Yet, with all Shirley's greater soundness, greater versatility,
surer versification and admirable craftsmanship, one feels that
there are certain heights and depths achieved by Ford which
the younger man never reached. When we turn to the most
wonderful things in Ford, we find a tenderness, a poignancy
and an insight that Shirley cannot match. Shirley is the more
balanced mind, the better workman; Ford, the rarer genius. The
best things in both give them assurance of their place in the
ranks of the greater dramatists of their age, and, if so, then of
any age. And these facts must be carefully considered before,
together or apart, they are set down as examples of their art's
decline.
E, L. VI.
CH. VIII.
14
## p. 210 (#228) ############################################
CHAPTER IX
LESSER JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE DRAMATISTS
THE Elizabethan drama, undoubtedly, followed a natural law
of development. It culminated in tragedy in the first decade of
the seventeenth century, because men and women reveal themselves
most fully and finally in the furnace of affliction; and, therefore,
the dramatist who desires to express the truth of human nature
arrives, sooner or later, at tragedy as his most penetrating and
powerful method. After the height has been reached, a necessary
rest and suspension of effort ensue, and of such a nature was the
Jacobean and Caroline age of the drama. But a second cause
was at work to increase this exhaustion and to hasten the decadence
of an art that had lost its freshness. The tension of feeling as to
things political and religious, which led, at last, to the civil war,
was unfavourable to all artistic effort, but was especially hurtful
to the drama. It took possession of the minds of all but the
most frivolous. Theatre-goers ceased to be drawn from all ranks,
as they were in Elizabeth's days, and began to form a special
class composed of careless courtiers and the dregs of the town
populace. Such a class required only lesser dramatists to supply
its wants; and, as we approach the date of the closing of the
theatres (1642), the greater lights go out one by one till only
a crowd of little men are left, writing a drama which has neither
form nor spirit remaining in it.
The accident of the survival of Henslowe's diary helped us
to group together in some kind of natural order the more active
of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists. We have no document of
this sort to aid us in the case of the Jacobean and Caroline writers;
but we are confronted by a remarkable personality whose relations
with the dramatists and poets of his age were as honourable and
unselfish as Henslowe's were mercenary and mean. A young dra-
matist, writing to Henslowe for a loan, signs himself, in Elizabethan
fashion, 'your loving son. ' It was a slight extension of this usage
which made Jonson the literary father of a large family of ‘sons,' all
a
## p. 211 (#229) ############################################
The Influence of Ben Jonson
2II
proud to be sealed of the tribe of Ben. His position as the leader
of literary and dramatic taste and the centre of literary society in
London was a new thing in English life, and his influence was so
commanding and complete that most of the lesser dramatists stood
in some sort of relation to him, either of attraction or repulsion:
they were either friends or foes. It may also be conjectured that
Jonson's art lent itself to imitation by lesser men more readily
than Shakespeare's. Shakespeare's apparent artlessness covered
a far more subtle method and mystery than did Jonson's strict
canons of conformity to definite theories of dramatic composition.
Secondly, Jonson's theory of 'humours' simplified human nature
and enabled the lesser dramatist, in setting about the composition
of a comedy, to choose his basic humour, and get to work on
inimitable humanity with some confidence. And, thirdly, while
Jonson's massive common sense and satiric intensity are, in bulk,
colossal, they can be readily imitated by lesser men who manu-
facture smaller pieces of the same stuff. Jonson’s most remarkable
plays were quarries from which contemporary writers chose what
suited them, diligently working it into some sort of artistic shape.
For these reasons, Jonson occupies an exceptional relation towards
the literature of the Jacobean age, and may be regarded as a
centre round which the lesser dramatists are grouped. He fails
us only when we deal with romantic tragicomedy, in which species
Fletcher and Massinger are the dominating influences. But the
lesser writers of romantic drama are so weak that we shall have
no space
for detailed examination of their work.
We propose to begin our survey with John Day, adding a list
of smaller men, whose comedy is either Elizabethan in general
character, or Elizabethan with the additional influence of
Middleton's hard, bright realism. We shall next consider the
work of two men who came personally under Jonson’s tuition
and have a special right to be entitled his ‘sons'-Nathaniel Field
and Richard Brome. Field's work, like John Day's, has distinction
and originality. Brome was a careful and strenuous craftsman,
pursuing his vocation steadily till the stage was silenced. Field
was the foremost actor of his day, and Brome was intimately
acquainted with stage life. Together, they cover the Jacobean
and Caroline age till 1642. Both of them continue the Eliza-
bethan impulse, and Brome may justly claim to be noted, with
Shirley, as having worthily maintained the Elizabethan tradition
till the end. Brome has left fifteen plays, none of which is without
its interest, and, on the whole, he is the most considerable writer
14-2
## p. 212 (#230) ############################################
212 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
who will come before us. Two other men, although they have no
claim, like Field and Brome, to a place among those who continue
the Elizabethan dramatic impulse, nevertheless are distinguished
by a wit and genius raising them above the crowd of lesser men
who show that the Elizabethan impulse is dead.
These are
Thomas Randolph and Sir John Suckling. When we have dealt
with their work, there remain to us only dramatists whose plays
are either meritorious and dull, or extravagant and dull. We
shall make an effort to discover among these the precursors of
the next age, and, accordingly, the last name on our list will
be that of Sir William D'Avenant.
As a member of the group of robust collaborators who wrote
assiduously for Henslowe during the last year of Elizabeth's reign,
John Day failed to produce distinctive work. It was, perhaps, by
writing for the children of the revels that he struck into his own
vein and produced three plays, which, because they stand apart in
style and manner from the main stream of dramatic work, attract
an attention hardly due to their actual merits as literature. And
they have a second claim upon the student. Day's pleasant little
masterpiece, The Parliament of Bees, which is not a play, is directly
related to his plays; and we can see in his plays those qualities at
work which make The Parliament of Bees charming. The Ile of
Guls was produced in the spring of 1605. The plot is taken from
Sidney's Arcadia. Duke Basilius has left his kingdom under
his brother and retired with his queen and two daughters to a
'desert isle,' sending a general challenge 'to all the youthful bloods
of Africa' to
Woo, win, entice, or any way defeat
Me of my charge, my daughters of their hearts.
The successful suitors—both of them, apparently-
Shall with their loves wear my imperial crown.
But, before the play begins, there is a prose induction containing
the conversation of three gentlemen, who interrupt the prologue,
supposing him to be the boy who should provide them with stools.
They ask whether the play has any connection with the recent
West-Ward Hoel and suppose that there is some political libel in
it, since the title, Ile of Guls, is obviously suggested by Nashe's Isle
of Dogs? . To the disappointment of the first gentleman, the pro-
logue protests fervently against these suppositions. He desires 'to
1 Cf. ante, chap. VII.
2 Cf. ante, vol. v, chap. VI.
## p. 213 (#231) ############################################
Day's Ile of Guls
213
hear vice anatomized and abuse let blood in the master vein'; he
asks of the play, 'Is there any great man's life charactered in't? . . .
And there be not wormwood water and copperas in't, I'll not like it. '
The second gentleman cares for none of these things; his tastes
are simpler; 'Is there any good bawdry in't, jests of an ell deep
and a fathom broad? ' He wants scenes that will make a man's
spirits stand on their tip toes and die his blood in a deep scarlet,
like your Ovid's Ars Amandi. ' When the prologue objects that
chaste ears would never endure it, he retorts, 'What should chaste
ears do at a play? ' But the third gentleman cares for neither
railing nor bawdry; he requires 'a stately penned history'. . .
‘high-written'-'mere fustian,' his friend calls it, 'full of tear-cut
thunderclaps. '
Upon these three kinds, says the dramatist, the popular audience
insists—all these we must have and all in one play or 'tis already
condemned to the hell of eternal disgrace. The induction shows
that Day intended to produce a new style if he could; it shows,
also, that he was very much afraid of failing; he has none of
Ben Jonson's sturdy scorn of popular taste; when the prologue is
finally allowed to speak, we get only a faint-hearted defiance of
'Opinion's voice,' whose tyranny is
The misery that waits upon the pen
Of the best writers.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Day fails to emancipate
himself from the evils he deprecates. In the matter of bawdry
especially, he yields to the base demands of 'opinion. ' He is not
more coarse than others and he makes no attempt to dye our blood
in a deep scarlet ; but he takes his story and his characters from
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and besmirches the sweet and noble
romance of his original with the indecencies of the work-a-day
Elizabethan drama. It may be urged that Shakespeare does the
same thing, even in As You Like It. But Shakespeare creates
such a soul of purity in his heroines that their most outrageous
jests and words fail to hurt them. Day puts no soul at all into
his women; his characters have almost no personality. Although
he protests that he will not be a satirist, it is his railer, Dametas,
who comes nearest in his play to being a live man, and the duke
and his queen are vulgarised as well as the heroines. We are fre-
quently reminded of Shakespeare's earlier comedies in reading Day.
In The Ile of Guls, we catch echoes from A Midsummer Night's
Dream. But this similarity almost forces us to compare Day's
duke and duchess with Shakespeare's Theseus and Hippolyta.
## p. 214 (#232) ############################################
214 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
What would have become of the romance and charm of Shake-
speare's play if Theseus—and, with him, Hippolyta—had been
involved in a clumsy intrigue, depriving the king and hero of all
grace and dignity? The two pairs of lovers are equally uninterest-
ing. It is enough to say that Day in no way differentiates them;
and we are unable to care much about what happens to either
couple. All these things interfere with our appreciation of Day's
art in providing us with a pretty tangle, neatly and deftly untied
at the end. Such an art there is in The Ile of Guls, and it is a
new thing in the Elizabethan drama as Day uses it. It points
forward to Restoration comedy, and has some kinship with the
comedy of Molière.
And it is not only in his plot that Day shows clear conception
of a comedy different from the Shakespearean romantic comedy
and from the Jonsonian comedy of humours—both of them full of
life and humanity; in his dialogue there is a new note-a new con-
vention of epigram and repartee—which, together with neatness of
plot, marks the typical Restoration comedy. In The Ile of Guls,
the plot by which all the characters are collected together at
the end of the play blindfolded, as it were, to find themselves
plain gulls when the bandage is taken off, is cleverly and neatly
elaborated; but, in the course of the play, we also have a continued
effort to present a dialogue duly arranged and ordered, in which
the wit has a scheme and keeps the rules. The most notable
instance is the famous tennis match scene in the second act.
Bullen says truly: 'Outside of Shakespeare's early comedies it
would be difficult to find among the dramatists of the time such
another tour de force of sprightly repartee’; but, although
Shakespeare's early work, probably, was the chief influence in
producing Day's type of comedy, there is a noticeable contrast
between the two kinds. The copiousness and exuberance of all
the punning and repartee of Love's Labour's Lost produce an
effect the exact opposite of Day's balanced and considered epi-
grams. Shakespeare gives his characters full play in the scenes
of quip and repartee; Day holds his in. His art has not enough
vigour and flow in it; Shakespeare's has too much. Shakespeare,
again, is eager to break loose from the fetters of rime for the
larger scope and movement of blank verse; Day, on the contrary,
desires to get back to rime; he has not breath enough for Eliza-
bethan blank verse. Shakespeare's fountain gushes and leaps, with
much danger to artificial restraints of all sorts; Day's rivulet, on
the contrary, flows obediently whither it is led, and often trickles
>
## p. 215 (#233) ############################################
Humour out of Breath
215
nearly dry. Elizabethan extravagance and overstrain are foreign
to his art, which is Attic, or even Doric, in its simplicity and
orderliness. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Day never
does himself justice in his plays; he is too much hampered and
confused by the alien conditions in which his genius has to work.
In The Ile of Guls, it is only the induction wbich is quite easy and
lucid. The tennis scene, perhaps because the terms used are no
longer familiar, is hard to follow, and the verse effects are too
complicated.
We see what the artist means, but his execution is
not perfect. A scene in Law-Trickes, where the countess dis-
courses to her maids as they sew, is his nearest approach to
dramatic effectiveness in his own style. This play, probably, was
written in 1606, and Humour out of Breath in 1607. The three
plays present, quite recognisably, a new dramatic type, but they
do not coherently and adequately realise it.
The title Humour out of Breath is actually quoted from The
Comedy of Errors, and the influence of Shakespeare's early
comedies is very evident in all three plays; but the neatness and
compactness of Day's prose style in his dialogue is more akin to
the manner of another master-John Lyly. Lyly does not exhibit
in his comedies the copiousness and exuberance which characterise
Shakespeare's first work. Lyly's plays, even more than Day's, lack
flesh and blood, and belong to a world of moonshine and shadow.
But, within their limits, they have a true charm of fancy, and their
style escapes the pedantry and tediousness of the writer's prose
work, and is as deft and crisp as Day at his best. To complete
the parallel, we may note that Lyly (supposing him to be their
author") gives us a handful of beautiful lyrics, remarkable as be-
longing not to the true Elizabethan type, but, rather, to the later
style of Herrick. Day's best lyric work in The Parliament of Bees
is, in the same way, post-Elizabethan. It must be compared with
Browne's Pastorals or Milton's L'Allegro.
· Day describes The Parliament of Bees as “an allegorical
description of the actions of good and bad men in these our
days. ' But he composed it from scenes contributed to two plays
which have reached us under the titles The Noble Souldier
and The Wonder of A Kingdome. Dekker, in cooperation with
Samuel Rowley, was mainly responsible for these plays. Between
their style and Day's, there could be no real accord, and only
enough of Day is left to make it clear that The Parliament
of Bees was not, as we might suppose, completely fresh work
1 On this question, cf. ante, vol. v, chap. VI, p. 125.
## p. 216 (#234) ############################################
216 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
constituting a new departure in the art of the writer. Scenes
contributed to more than one play were the groundwork upon
which Day composed his dainty and graceful series of 'Colloquies'
or 'Characters. The fact throws a true light on Day's dramatic
work; but the drama was not his natural vein. What would be
interesting to know is how he came to write The Parliament of
Bees. In the excellent prose tract, Peregrinatio Scholastica,
written, apparently, before The Parliament, he speaks of himself
as 'becalmed in a fog of necessity,' that is to say, he writes be-
cause he needs money, which he hopes to get not only from the
printer, but, also, from the patron to whom he dedicates his book.
He says, also, that he is lying at anchor 'before the Islands, Meliora
Speramus. ' Fleay's tempting suggestion is that Day means holy
orders by this, and by the 'shrine of Latria,' towards which, in the
allegory, the sometimes student of Gunvill and Caius Colledge in
Cambridge' is travelling. If this were so, it would be necessary
for the old playwright, until he was duly ordained, to make money
by some more edifying form of literature than plays. He, therefore,
wrote Peregrinatio and, after that, used certain scenes from old
plays to make his unique Parliament of Bees. There is extant a
manuscript copy of The Bees earlier than the quarto of 1641, and
the changes are not all of them merely in style; the poem is made
definitely graver in revision. The delightful first title disappears
as too flippant-'An olde Manuscript conteyning the Parliament
of Bees, found In a Hollow Tree In a garden at Hibla, in a strandge
Languadge, And now faithfully Translated into Easie English Verse
by John Daye, Cantabrig. ' The poem, it should be noted, is not a
masque in the ordinary and technical sense. It rather resembles
a series of pastoral eclogues. The successive scenes have no con-
tinuity, except such as is supplied by the idea of making all the
characters bees. Day conceives his poem as a series of satires ;
but he charges his bees to
Carry an humble wing
Buzz boldly what I bid, but do not sting
Any particular,
It is only the usuring bee whom we can identify:
Most of the timber that his state repairs
He hews out o' the bones of foundred players :
They feed on poets' brains, he eats their breath.
This can be none other than Philip Henslowe.
We gather, from both Peregrinatio and The Parliament, that
Day was not seeking orders from any unworthy motives. The prose
a
## p. 217 (#235) ############################################
Robert Armin
217
of the tract is more fluent than that of the plays. The style of the
poem, too, has, more fully than that of the plays, Day's special gift-'a
sense of delicate music in the fall and arrangement of quite common
words' In spite of the fog of necessity' around him, the writer
is at peace with himself and the world. A note of peevishness and
bitterness which occasionally obtruded itself in his earlier work
has disappeared, and the poet's music in his last poem is serene,
spontaneous and sweet. John Day died before the quarto of
The Parliament was printed, probably in the autumn of 1640.
A belated Elizabethan of considerable interest whose extant
work was printed in the early years of king James was Robert
Armin, reported to have been trained by Tarlton and called his
''
son. He followed William Kemp as player of Dogberry about
1599, continued in Shakespeare's company for some years and
has a place in the list of players in the 1623 folio. His single
play, printed 1609, is entitled The History of the two Maids of
More-clacke; With the life and simple maner of John in the
Hospitall. On the title-page, there is a cut of Armin in the
character of John in the hospital. In his words to the 'friendly
peruser,' Armin calls the play 'a Historical discourse,' and says
that
he would have 'againe inacted' John, if he had been able. His
age, presumably, prevented him, for he seems to have been born
about 1564 and was dead by 1612. He adds, you shall find verse,
as well blancke, as crancke, yet in the prose let it pass for currant. '
The blank verse of the play is in so disordered a state that it
has been compared with the mutilated 1603 quarto of Hamlet.
The phenomena suggest the solution that Armin was not re-
sponsible for the verse, but supplied the prose of the old-
fashioned fool's part of John, in which, earlier, he had made a
hit. He was no more the author of the serious part of the play,
than William Kemp was of the whole of A Knack to Know a
Knave. But the play is interesting, in spite of its corrupt con-
dition. There are in it indications that, in some form or other, it
dates back to Elizabeth's reign ; but, also, echoes from Shake-
speare's tragedies—from Macbeth, for instance—which date, ap-
parently, from about 1608. Humil's doubt of his mother's honour
reminds us of Hamlet, and the play is worth careful study for its
bearing on the Hamlet problem. The plot is absurdly compli-
cated and full of incident, and, in this respect, we are reminded of
Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman. The play has genuine dramatic
1 Nero and other plays, p. 208.
## p. 218 (#236) ############################################
218 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
power, forcible eloquence and fine poetry, all of which we should
be inclined to ascribe to Dekker or Chettle, if another author than
Armin himself must be looked for. There are, however, some re-
semblances between Armin's other works and our play. In 1605,
he published Foole upon Foole, or, Sixe Sortes of Sottes, a prose
tract, amplified, in 1608, into A nest of Ninnies', in the dedica-
tion of which “To the most true and rightly compleat in all good
gifts and graces, the generous Gentlemen of Oxenford, Cambridge,
and the Innes of Court'he declares I have seene the stars at mid-
night in your societies. ' This, apparently, gave offence to some
of the graver spirits among the old player's hosts, and his next
and last tract, dated 1609, contains a kind of apology for it. This
tract, The Italian Taylor and his Boy, a verse translation from
the Italian, is written with considerable dexterity, and raises our
opinion of Armin's gifts and scholarship. It is curious that we
should have nothing from his pen earlier than 1605, although
Nashe and Harvey, in 1593, speak of him as a common pamphle-
teer and 'son' of Elderton.
Middleton's influence on comedy is apparent in the two sur-
viving plays of the lawyer Edward Sharpham-The Fleire, acted
probably early in 1606, and Cupid's Whirligig, produced about a
year later. Both plays were frequently reprinted, from 1607
onwards. They owed their popularity to their wit and rapidity
of action, but can hardly claim to be more than farces; there
is in them the shadow of Middleton's art, and more than the
substance of his grossness. Much better than these is Lodowick
Barry's single play Ram-Alley or Merrie-Trickes, acted perhaps
as early as 1609 and extant in several quartos. Ram alley was
a particularly disreputable lane, leading from Fleet street to the
Temple, and of the coarseness promised by the title of the play we
find, as it proceeds, a full supply. But this realistic indecency
is relieved by some breath of life and character. Many echoes
from Shakespeare's plays are introduced, both by way of parody
and of imitation. There is much of the London of the period-
both of the place and its manners—in this comedy; and it not
only shows force in its presentation of life and character, but is
also marked by a vigour in its blank verse, which, in one or two
places, almost reaches distinction. The prologue says that, if the
play succeeds, the writer will attempt something more serious,
which even puritans will accept as satisfactory. Barry, no doubt,
1 Cf. ante, vol. iv, p. 532.
## p. 219 (#237) ############################################
John Cooke and Robert Tailor
219
overrated the complaisance of puritans; but he was right in feeling
that he had in him the power to produce work of a higher rank
altogether than his Ram alley obscenities. It is disappointing
that this one play and his name are all that we know of him.
Two other single plays, Greene's Tu Quoque and The Hog hath
lost his Pearl, we may mention at this point, because they belong
rather to the early comedy of Haughton than the later Jonsonian
comedy. They are less touched by Middleton's influence than
Ram-Alley. The clever acting of Thomas Greene made Greene's
Tu Quoque or The Cittie Gallant very popular about 1611. It was
printed in 1614 as written by Jo. Cooke, Gent. ,' and Thomas
Heywood contributes a preface stating that both the author and
the actor Greene are dead. It is one of the pleasantest and live-
liest among the productions of the lesser dramatists. The blank
verse is not so good as Barry's; but Cooke's art and his capacity
for working out a comic idea are above the ordinary, and his prose
is excellent. The master, Staines, changes places with his man,
Bubble, and coaches him to take his place in the fashionable
world. There is an excellent scene in which the affectations of the
Italianate Englishman are taken off, probably aimed at Coryate.
The women in the play remind us of the girls of Porter and
Haughton; they are, perhaps, more refined—the sisters of
university students rather than of tradesmen—but they are very
naturally and pleasantly drawn. A scene in which Joyce, anxious
to hide the state of her heart, confounds and bewilders her lover,
first by her silence and then by her speech, recalls the vigorous
domestic comedy of Porter? It is curious that we should know
nothing whatever of 'Jo. Cooke,' and that, like Barry, he
should have just one play to his credit. The Hog hath lost his
Pearl is, again, the single play of a writer whose name—Robert
Tailor—is all that is known about him. Tailor's literary capacity
is below that of either Barry or Cooke. To a play of low comedy,
he tacks on a romantic plot of a painful character? which only a
master of dramatic art could make endurable. Tailor manages the
prose of his comedy much better than the verse of his moral
romance; the main interest of the play, however, is not in its style
or story but in the circumstances of its production. Sir Henry
Wotton, in a letter dated 16123, tells us that 'some sixteen
? See ante, vol. v, chap. XIII.
2 Otway's Orphan deals with the same plot.
3 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Smith, L. P. , vol. 1, p. 13.
## p. 220 (#238) ############################################
220 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
apprentices,' having secretly learnt their parts, 'took up the
White Fryers for their theatre,' and invited their friends to see
them perform The Hog hath lost his Pearl. The sheriffs inter-
vened before the end of the performance and carried off six or
seven of the apprentices to prison. He adds that it was supposed
that Sir John Swinnerton was meant by the hog, and the late
lord treasurer by the pearl. The prologue of the printed play
alludes to this incident, but says that
our swine,
Is not as divers critics did define,
Grunting at state affairs or invecting
Much at our city vices;
if the play pleases, 'we'll say 'tis fortunate, like Pericles. ' Like
the two plays mentioned before it, Tailor's is full of interest for
the student of Jacobean London.
We come now to the main stream of Jacobean dramatic work,
in which the influence of Jonson, both personal and by his art, is
all-pervasive.
Among the extant plays of the reign of king James, two by
Nathaniel Field are of such merit as to suggest that the writer,
probably, would have risen above the ranks of the lesser dramatists,
had he persevered in the prosecution of his art. He was born in
1587, a few months before his father's death. That father was the
famous preacher John Field, whose rousing discourse upon the
collapse of a gallery in Paris garden in 1583 has come down to
us? . It contains interesting details about the catastrophe and a
violent attack upon theatrical performances, with valuable in-
formation about London players and their theatres. Nat's elder
brother, Theophilus, was educated at Cambridge and rose to be
bishop of Hereford; and it is singular, therefore, that Nat Field's
name should be found first among the six 'principal comedians'
of the band of lads called the children of the queen’s revels, who
acted in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels in 1600. These boys were the
‘young eyases' discussed by Hamlet. For a time, as has been seen? ,
they rivalled men players in public favour; and Field, as he grew
older, maintained his position and may claim to have succeeded
Burbage as the leading actor on the English stage. Jonson, no
doubt, owed a debt to Field for his clever acting in Cynthia's Revels
and Poetaster, and the debt is repaid by the mention of Field, in
1614, in Bartholomew Fayre— Which is your Burbadge now? . . .
i Cf. , as to this incident, post, chap. XIV.
Cf. ante, chap. II, and post, chap. XI.
## p. 221 (#239) ############################################
Field's A Woman is a Weather-cocke 221
Your best actor, your Field ? ' Field joined the King's company
before he finally retired from the stage, and, in the 1623 folio of
Shakespeare's plays, he is seventeenth in the list there given of
twenty-six players. Jonson told Drummond that “Nat Field was
his scholar. An interesting proof of Jonson’s regard for Field is
afforded by the insertion of an extra sheet of commendatory
verses addressed by Field to Jonson in some copies of the 1607
quarto of Volpone. Field's verses are amateurish-he speaks
justly of his 'weak flame'-but they show a great awe of Jonson,
whom 'to dare commend were damnable presumption. The
lines should be compared with the much more mature address
'to his worthy and beloved friend Master Ben Jonson on his
Catiline3. ' Field had been educated by Mulcaster at the
Merchant Taylors' school, but 'taken' by N. Giles as one of the
company of the children of the revels. Giles was accused of
kidnapping boys against their parents' wishes, and we may con-
jecture that Field would not have been annexed, had his strenuous
father been alive to protect him.
Field's first play, A Woman is a Weather-cocke, was produced
in 1610. In the first scene, Scudmore is discovered reading a
vehement letter from Bellafront, the lady he loves. To him, thus
occupied, enters his friend Nevill on his way to a wedding. The
lover very prettily takes his friend into his confidence, enlarges
like a Romeo on his mistress,
Whose face brought concord and an end of jars,
and passionately proclaims,
She is the food, the sleep, the air I live by.
He ends with the lady's name; whereupon his friend blurts out in
amazement, ‘But that's the wedding I was going to. ' This dramatic
scene is put before us with a force and vividness remarkable in so
young a writer. In itself, it is an excellent beginning ; but the
Jonsonian 'humours' of the next scene jar a little. They are not
in the same key as the romantic passionate opening of the play.
But Field's wit is considerable and is not a mere copy of
Jonson. His manner has a sprightliness and good-humour, and
a
1 They read Horace and Martial together; see Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations
with Drummond, ed. Laing, D. , p. 11.
? It is contained in the British Museum copy, C 12, c. 17, which was presented by
Jonson to John Florio with an inscription in Ben's autograph to his loving father
and friend, the aid of his Muses. ' See Percy Simpson in Notes and Queries, Ser. VIII,
vol. VIII, p. 301.
But in this age where jigs and dances move
How few there are that this pure work approve.
.
## p. 222 (#240) ############################################
222 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
an occasional naturalness, which are his own, and differentiate
his comic style quite definitely from Jonson's.
The second act is constructed on the same plan as the first. It
begins with a semi-romantic scene and ends with 'humour. ' When
captain Pouts, who has been rejected by Katharine, publicly insults
her at the door of the church in which she has just been married
to Strange, she urges her new husband to vindicate her honour;
and, perhaps, no better example could be given of Field's capacity
as a writer of strong, direct, blank verse than her invective:
Thou wert ordained,
And in thy cradle marked to call me wife,
And in that title made as my defence,
Yet sufferedst him to go away with life,
Wounding my honour dead before thy face!
Redeem it on his head, and his own way,
Even by the sword, his long profession,
And set it clear amongst the tongues of men,
That all eyes may discern it slandered,
Or thou shalt ne'er enjoy me as a wife.
The verse is in the manner of Shakespeare in the Henry V
period, although with less music and very little imaginative
decoration, and the excellence of its directness and spontaneity
is due, no doubt, to Field's training as an actor. His use of
language, too, is free, like Shakespeare's—to be understood by
the audience though not always approved by the grammarian. In
the passage quoted, ‘his long profession, with the meaning, ‘for so
long a time his profession,' has a Shakespearean sound, as, also, has
the rather enigmatic, but still forcible, 'made' of the third line.
Strange's speech, a little later, about the law's inequalities, again,
is forcible, eloquent blank verse. But the second part of the plot
overloads the play as a whole. Field, as a scholar of Jonson,
desires to show his dexterity as a plotter ; but, like all young
writers of promise, and like all immature dramatists, he gives his
audience too much, and cannot endure to limit his own scope.
In this play, which is full both of matter and of varied promise
of dramatic ability, Ben Jonson is obviously the master most con-
sciously copied. The ‘humours' are in Jonson's manner, as are
the complicated plottings. The compression of the action into
exactly one day is in accordance with Ben's teaching. It might
be contended that a certain intensity in the serious scenes
copies the splendid passion of Volpone, which is the high water
mark of Jonson's art. This, however, would be a mistake. The
serious scenes of the play are essentially romantic and idealistic,
suggesting Romeo and Juliet rather than The Alchemist. But
a
## p. 223 (#241) ############################################
3
T
1
ป
It
Field's Amends for Ladies
223
Romeo has been brought up as a player and has appeared upon
the public stage from his childhood, and Ben Jonson has been his
schoolmaster. He has, therefore, lost all exterior softness and
sentiment, and, at first reading, a certain hardness and bravado
in his manner deceive the student. Field's second play, Amends
for Ladies, followed hard upon the first, and was intended to atone
for the many hard things said against women in the first play.
There are three heroines, the lady Honour, the lady Perfect and
the lady Bright, who, as maid, wife and widow, vindicate, respec-
tively, the claims of their sex to constancy and virtue. It will be
seen, therefore, that, again, the scheme of the play is too full of
incident; there are three plays in one. The second play, on the
whole, is a more hasty piece of work than the first; it has the
drawbacks of an after-thought; but there is a distinct maturity
and strengthening to be noted in its style. Field's natural bent
is, more obviously than before, to draw ideal heroes, headstrong
and indomitable. He does not yet show much power of characteri-
sation; his heroes and heroines are all repetitions of one type.
We remember that one of his great parts was Bussy D'Ambois,
and that Chapman addresses some lines 'to his loved son Nat
Field. ' The comic scenes of the second play are less original and
less amusing than those of the first. There is something perfunc-
tory about 'the merry prankes of Moll Cut-purse, Or, the humour
of roaring. And, again, all that part of the play which uses the
plot of 'The Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, in which a
husband, in order to prove his wife's virtue, eggs on his friend to
tempt her, is intolerable to modern feeling.
from his source in the last act by depriving the hero of both
the ladies he had wooed, whereas the Spanish author makes
him lose the duchess, but marries him to one of her ladies. The
point of the plot of The Coronation (1635) lies in the successive
discovery of two brothers of a reigning queen, whose crown thus
shifts from head to head, producing a succession of effective
situations, in which lies the chief merit of the play. It contains
a masque, but no low comedy. This piece was included in the
## p. 205 (#223) ############################################
Shirley's Romantic Comedies
205
second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, but no considerable
part of the play is to be ascribed to any hand but Shirley's. The
main interest of The Royall Master, performed first in Dublin and
printed in 1638, lies not in a somewhat conventional, if skilful,
central intrigue, but in the secondary figure of the young girl
Domitilla, who imagines that the king is in love with her, and is
cured of her infatuation by her royal master, who pretends
to seek her love basely. This situation is taken from the De-
cameron? ; the main plot is stated by Stiefel to be Spanish in
origin? Another Dublin play, licensed in 1640, is The Doubtfull
Heir. The interest here, as in The Coronation, lies in the
surprises of the action, the fortunes of Ferdinand, the lost heir
of Murcia, undergoing a series of most violent changes; while the
charm of the piece is in the constancy of the hero and his
betrothed, which gave the play its original name Rosania, or
Love's Victory. There are two plots of almost equal importance
in The Gentleman of Venice (1639). In one, an interesting contrast
of character is elaborated between the duke's son, supposed to be
the gardener's, and the gardener's son, supposed to be the duke’s.
In the other, a plot of an uncommonly painful nature is handled
with delicacy. The Arcadia, printed in 1640, but, perhaps, per-
formed some years before, is a frank dramatisation of the main
incidents of Sidney's romance, with much elaboration of the
farcical elements. The Humorous Courtier (printed 1640), also
of uncertain date of production, has an ingenious plot, but is
spoiled by the gratuitous coarseness of the scenes dealing with
Orseolo, the pretended misogynist but actual libertine, who gives
the play its name. The main plot turns on the testing of her
courtiers by the duchess of Mantua, who, secretly betrothed to
the duke of Parma, gives out that she means to marry at home,
and enjoys the spectacle of her lords covering themselves
with ridicule in their efforts to gain her hand. The Im-
posture (1640) was considered by Shirley to be in the first rank
of his compositions. It is, indeed, cleverly manipulated, and the
interest is well maintained through a highly complicated plot.
But the devices are lacking in both novelty and probability. An
ambitious favourite, seeking to secure the daughter of the duke of
Mantua for himself, substitutes for her his own discarded mistress
when the son of the duke of Ferrara comes wooing. The low
comedy is supplied by a young coward Bertholdi, who seeks to
ingratiate himself with the gallants by offering to each in turn the
1 Day x, nov. 7. 2 For modern analogues, see Ward, vol. II, p. 116, note 1.
## p. 206 (#224) ############################################
206
Ford and Shirley
hand of his widowed mother, a lady of wit and independence.
The Sisters (1642) was the last play by Shirley performed
before the theatres were closed. It is a lively and amusing
treatment of the theme of the proud and the humble sister. After
the former has been fooled by a captain of bandits masquerading
first as a fortune teller and then as a prince, she is discovered to
be the child of a peasant, and the estates and the real prince go to
her modest rival. The farce is frankly absurd, but, on the stage,
must have been highly amusing. The dedication has an inter-
esting picture of the condition of poets in England just before the
war began, and the prologue contains eulogies of Shakespeare,
Fletcher and Jonson. The Court Secret, the latest of Shirley's
regular dramas, was not acted till after the Restoration. It deals
with the familiar theme, already several times employed by him,
of the hidden heir, and surpasses other works on the subject only
in the extreme intricacy of the plot. Mendoza, the father of the
supposititious prince, is handled with some freshness and humour,
being rendered miserable by the possession of the court secret,'
but without the courage to reveal it. The real and the false
princes are treated with a delicacy of comparison that distinguishes
them clearly from the similarly situated but broadly contrasted
pair in The Gentleman of Venice.
A number of miscellaneous pieces remain to be mentioned.
The most curious of these is the extraordinary hodge-podge written
for the Dublin theatre, and called St Patrick for Ireland (printed
1640). The main plot, derived from the life of the saint, may be re-
garded as something between a chronicle history and a miracle-play;
the love story is tragicomedy ; the figure of Rodamant is farcical.
The device by which a lover gets access to a virtuous girl in the
guise of a god is as old as Josephus and was already familiar on
the English stage. A bracelet making the wearer invisible is used
both in the serious and in the low comedy parts. Though the piece
contains scenes and speeches that might find appropriate enough
place in regular dramas, the effect of the whole is grotesque; and
even the noble figure of St Patrick suffers in dignity from its
patchwork background.
Interesting in a different way is the allegorical drama, Honoria
and Mammon (pub. 1659), an elaboration of a morality, A Con-
tention for Honour and Riches, which Shirley had printed in
1633. The purpose of the 'Moral,' as he calls it, is the exalting
of the scholar as against the courtier and the soldier, and the
exposing of the deceitfulness of riches. In its form, there is
## p. 207 (#225) ############################################
Shirley's Entertainments
207
much conventional dramatic material; but, on the allegorical side,
it is a more interesting production. The characters, which, in
the earlier form, are largely abstractions, become, in the revision,
types; and this change makes them much more effective for the
pictures of contemporary life in which lies the main value of the
piece.
The Tragedie of Chabot Admirall of France (licensed 1635) is
ascribed on the title-page of the quarto to Chapman and Shirley.
Chapman was dead before the play was acted, and Shirley may
have given it some revision; but, in all essentials, it is evident
that it is the work of the older poet? . Like most of Chapman's
tragedies, it is founded on French history; it is full of his weighty
diction and serious thought; and it is much less well adapted to
the popular stage than we should expect had Shirley had any
considerable share in it.
Besides the masques introduced into nine or ten of his plays,
Shirley has left three separate productions of this class : The
Triumph of Peace (1633), The Triumph of Beauty (printed 1646)
and Cupid and Death (1653). The first of these has already been
referred to as the great entertainment presented by the inns of
court to the king and queen. Except in scale and splendour, it
does not differ notably from most other productions of its kind,
and today it is memorable chiefly as a document in social, rather
than in literary, history. The Triumph of Beauty deals with the
judgment of Paris, and it is introduced by an extensive and obvious
imitation of the rehearsals of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' by Bottom and
his friends in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cupid and Death,
on the familiar fable of the exchange of the weapons of the two
deities and its disastrous results, was written for performance
before the Portuguese ambassador.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armor of
Achilles (printed 1659), though often described as a masque, is,
in reality, nothing of the sort. It is a short dramatic piece, based
on Ovid's Metamorphoses, intended for private production. It
contains nothing spectacular and no dancing. Some of the speeches
are eloquent, though both the main characters suffer from the
obvious comparison with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. The
piece is now remembered for the great lyric already mentioned,
with which it closes.
Of the originality of Shirley's plots, it is at present somewhat
hazardous to speak. In the foregoing pages, we have been able to
1 Cf. ante, chap. IL
## p. 208 (#226) ############################################
208
Ford and Shirley
indicate sources for only about one-fourth of his plays, and it has
been customary to credit him with a greater share of inventiveness
than most of his fellow dramatists. But Stiefel, who proved the
Spanish origin of the plot of The Opportunitie, named another for
The Young Admirall, and stated that The Wedding, The
Humorous Courtier, The Example and The Royall Master are,
also, from Spanish sources. If this can be made good, it is clear
that it is too soon to pronounce on the question of invention in
this sense. But, from those plays whose sources are known, we
can draw inferences as to his skill in treating a source; and our
evidence is sufficient to justify us in crediting to him a high degree
of ability in making over a story for stage purposes, in leading the
interest up to a well prepared climax and in arranging effective
situations. This last power had, indeed, distinguished most of his
predecessors in the seventeenth century, but he does not so often
as, say, Beaumont and Fletcher, sacrifice the unity of impression of
the whole play, or the consistency of character, for the sake of
single sensational scenes.
In characterisation as in theme, he had both the advantages
and disadvantages of the situation described at the beginning of
the present chapter. Fifty years of drama lay behind him of which
to follow or avoid the example. Could we read half a dozen of
the best plays of Shirley without any knowledge of his predecessors,
we should, doubtless, rank him much higher in the literature of
the world than we do; but he is usually read, as he wrote, at the
end of the series, and we are thus obliged to recognise constant
echoes, reminiscences and imitations of the giants who went be-
fore. It was, perhaps, hardly possible for any writer of his date
to avoid the familiar types and situations which had been often
employed. A dramatist of the time of Charles I had to walk
through a field honeycombed with pits, and it was futile to seek
to follow a straight course and avoid them all. If frequent con-
ventionality in these matters implies decadence, then Shirley was
undoubtedly decadent.
The moral standards of Shirley were not those of Ford.
Shirley has his share of grossness, both in incident and dialogue,
but this grossness is neither more frequent than in his pre-
decessors, nor is it by any means habitual. Of Ford's moral
agnosticism there is no trace in Shirley. In some of his plays, the
moral is almost obtrusive; in none of them is the general drift
immoral. Nor is he notable for the violence or sensationalism of
his catastrophes. The slaughter which closes The Traytor, Loves
## p. 209 (#227) ############################################
Shirley and Ford compared
209
Crueltie and The Cardinall is no more wholesale than that at the
end of Hamlet or King Lear, and, in intention at least, it is like
Shakespeare's, the necessary outcome of character and previous
action, not, like Ford's, an ingenious horror concocted for a final
thrill. In comic power, he stands high above Ford. Without
being primarily a comic artist, Shirley yet displays much genuine
comic power, both in conceiving amusing situations, and in creating
comic characters. In versification, too, Shirley seems to belong
to an earlier and sounder school than Ford. His metre is
singularly correct and easily read; Ford uses much licence and
not infrequently gives us lines hard to scan. Both men were
capable of great sweetness of melody, and both adorned their
finer speeches with a wealth of flowery imagery, not always
dramatically appropriate, but frequently of great beauty and
imaginative suggestiveness.
Yet, with all Shirley's greater soundness, greater versatility,
surer versification and admirable craftsmanship, one feels that
there are certain heights and depths achieved by Ford which
the younger man never reached. When we turn to the most
wonderful things in Ford, we find a tenderness, a poignancy
and an insight that Shirley cannot match. Shirley is the more
balanced mind, the better workman; Ford, the rarer genius. The
best things in both give them assurance of their place in the
ranks of the greater dramatists of their age, and, if so, then of
any age. And these facts must be carefully considered before,
together or apart, they are set down as examples of their art's
decline.
E, L. VI.
CH. VIII.
14
## p. 210 (#228) ############################################
CHAPTER IX
LESSER JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE DRAMATISTS
THE Elizabethan drama, undoubtedly, followed a natural law
of development. It culminated in tragedy in the first decade of
the seventeenth century, because men and women reveal themselves
most fully and finally in the furnace of affliction; and, therefore,
the dramatist who desires to express the truth of human nature
arrives, sooner or later, at tragedy as his most penetrating and
powerful method. After the height has been reached, a necessary
rest and suspension of effort ensue, and of such a nature was the
Jacobean and Caroline age of the drama. But a second cause
was at work to increase this exhaustion and to hasten the decadence
of an art that had lost its freshness. The tension of feeling as to
things political and religious, which led, at last, to the civil war,
was unfavourable to all artistic effort, but was especially hurtful
to the drama. It took possession of the minds of all but the
most frivolous. Theatre-goers ceased to be drawn from all ranks,
as they were in Elizabeth's days, and began to form a special
class composed of careless courtiers and the dregs of the town
populace. Such a class required only lesser dramatists to supply
its wants; and, as we approach the date of the closing of the
theatres (1642), the greater lights go out one by one till only
a crowd of little men are left, writing a drama which has neither
form nor spirit remaining in it.
The accident of the survival of Henslowe's diary helped us
to group together in some kind of natural order the more active
of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists. We have no document of
this sort to aid us in the case of the Jacobean and Caroline writers;
but we are confronted by a remarkable personality whose relations
with the dramatists and poets of his age were as honourable and
unselfish as Henslowe's were mercenary and mean. A young dra-
matist, writing to Henslowe for a loan, signs himself, in Elizabethan
fashion, 'your loving son. ' It was a slight extension of this usage
which made Jonson the literary father of a large family of ‘sons,' all
a
## p. 211 (#229) ############################################
The Influence of Ben Jonson
2II
proud to be sealed of the tribe of Ben. His position as the leader
of literary and dramatic taste and the centre of literary society in
London was a new thing in English life, and his influence was so
commanding and complete that most of the lesser dramatists stood
in some sort of relation to him, either of attraction or repulsion:
they were either friends or foes. It may also be conjectured that
Jonson's art lent itself to imitation by lesser men more readily
than Shakespeare's. Shakespeare's apparent artlessness covered
a far more subtle method and mystery than did Jonson's strict
canons of conformity to definite theories of dramatic composition.
Secondly, Jonson's theory of 'humours' simplified human nature
and enabled the lesser dramatist, in setting about the composition
of a comedy, to choose his basic humour, and get to work on
inimitable humanity with some confidence. And, thirdly, while
Jonson's massive common sense and satiric intensity are, in bulk,
colossal, they can be readily imitated by lesser men who manu-
facture smaller pieces of the same stuff. Jonson’s most remarkable
plays were quarries from which contemporary writers chose what
suited them, diligently working it into some sort of artistic shape.
For these reasons, Jonson occupies an exceptional relation towards
the literature of the Jacobean age, and may be regarded as a
centre round which the lesser dramatists are grouped. He fails
us only when we deal with romantic tragicomedy, in which species
Fletcher and Massinger are the dominating influences. But the
lesser writers of romantic drama are so weak that we shall have
no space
for detailed examination of their work.
We propose to begin our survey with John Day, adding a list
of smaller men, whose comedy is either Elizabethan in general
character, or Elizabethan with the additional influence of
Middleton's hard, bright realism. We shall next consider the
work of two men who came personally under Jonson’s tuition
and have a special right to be entitled his ‘sons'-Nathaniel Field
and Richard Brome. Field's work, like John Day's, has distinction
and originality. Brome was a careful and strenuous craftsman,
pursuing his vocation steadily till the stage was silenced. Field
was the foremost actor of his day, and Brome was intimately
acquainted with stage life. Together, they cover the Jacobean
and Caroline age till 1642. Both of them continue the Eliza-
bethan impulse, and Brome may justly claim to be noted, with
Shirley, as having worthily maintained the Elizabethan tradition
till the end. Brome has left fifteen plays, none of which is without
its interest, and, on the whole, he is the most considerable writer
14-2
## p. 212 (#230) ############################################
212 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
who will come before us. Two other men, although they have no
claim, like Field and Brome, to a place among those who continue
the Elizabethan dramatic impulse, nevertheless are distinguished
by a wit and genius raising them above the crowd of lesser men
who show that the Elizabethan impulse is dead.
These are
Thomas Randolph and Sir John Suckling. When we have dealt
with their work, there remain to us only dramatists whose plays
are either meritorious and dull, or extravagant and dull. We
shall make an effort to discover among these the precursors of
the next age, and, accordingly, the last name on our list will
be that of Sir William D'Avenant.
As a member of the group of robust collaborators who wrote
assiduously for Henslowe during the last year of Elizabeth's reign,
John Day failed to produce distinctive work. It was, perhaps, by
writing for the children of the revels that he struck into his own
vein and produced three plays, which, because they stand apart in
style and manner from the main stream of dramatic work, attract
an attention hardly due to their actual merits as literature. And
they have a second claim upon the student. Day's pleasant little
masterpiece, The Parliament of Bees, which is not a play, is directly
related to his plays; and we can see in his plays those qualities at
work which make The Parliament of Bees charming. The Ile of
Guls was produced in the spring of 1605. The plot is taken from
Sidney's Arcadia. Duke Basilius has left his kingdom under
his brother and retired with his queen and two daughters to a
'desert isle,' sending a general challenge 'to all the youthful bloods
of Africa' to
Woo, win, entice, or any way defeat
Me of my charge, my daughters of their hearts.
The successful suitors—both of them, apparently-
Shall with their loves wear my imperial crown.
But, before the play begins, there is a prose induction containing
the conversation of three gentlemen, who interrupt the prologue,
supposing him to be the boy who should provide them with stools.
They ask whether the play has any connection with the recent
West-Ward Hoel and suppose that there is some political libel in
it, since the title, Ile of Guls, is obviously suggested by Nashe's Isle
of Dogs? . To the disappointment of the first gentleman, the pro-
logue protests fervently against these suppositions. He desires 'to
1 Cf. ante, chap. VII.
2 Cf. ante, vol. v, chap. VI.
## p. 213 (#231) ############################################
Day's Ile of Guls
213
hear vice anatomized and abuse let blood in the master vein'; he
asks of the play, 'Is there any great man's life charactered in't? . . .
And there be not wormwood water and copperas in't, I'll not like it. '
The second gentleman cares for none of these things; his tastes
are simpler; 'Is there any good bawdry in't, jests of an ell deep
and a fathom broad? ' He wants scenes that will make a man's
spirits stand on their tip toes and die his blood in a deep scarlet,
like your Ovid's Ars Amandi. ' When the prologue objects that
chaste ears would never endure it, he retorts, 'What should chaste
ears do at a play? ' But the third gentleman cares for neither
railing nor bawdry; he requires 'a stately penned history'. . .
‘high-written'-'mere fustian,' his friend calls it, 'full of tear-cut
thunderclaps. '
Upon these three kinds, says the dramatist, the popular audience
insists—all these we must have and all in one play or 'tis already
condemned to the hell of eternal disgrace. The induction shows
that Day intended to produce a new style if he could; it shows,
also, that he was very much afraid of failing; he has none of
Ben Jonson's sturdy scorn of popular taste; when the prologue is
finally allowed to speak, we get only a faint-hearted defiance of
'Opinion's voice,' whose tyranny is
The misery that waits upon the pen
Of the best writers.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Day fails to emancipate
himself from the evils he deprecates. In the matter of bawdry
especially, he yields to the base demands of 'opinion. ' He is not
more coarse than others and he makes no attempt to dye our blood
in a deep scarlet ; but he takes his story and his characters from
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and besmirches the sweet and noble
romance of his original with the indecencies of the work-a-day
Elizabethan drama. It may be urged that Shakespeare does the
same thing, even in As You Like It. But Shakespeare creates
such a soul of purity in his heroines that their most outrageous
jests and words fail to hurt them. Day puts no soul at all into
his women; his characters have almost no personality. Although
he protests that he will not be a satirist, it is his railer, Dametas,
who comes nearest in his play to being a live man, and the duke
and his queen are vulgarised as well as the heroines. We are fre-
quently reminded of Shakespeare's earlier comedies in reading Day.
In The Ile of Guls, we catch echoes from A Midsummer Night's
Dream. But this similarity almost forces us to compare Day's
duke and duchess with Shakespeare's Theseus and Hippolyta.
## p. 214 (#232) ############################################
214 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
What would have become of the romance and charm of Shake-
speare's play if Theseus—and, with him, Hippolyta—had been
involved in a clumsy intrigue, depriving the king and hero of all
grace and dignity? The two pairs of lovers are equally uninterest-
ing. It is enough to say that Day in no way differentiates them;
and we are unable to care much about what happens to either
couple. All these things interfere with our appreciation of Day's
art in providing us with a pretty tangle, neatly and deftly untied
at the end. Such an art there is in The Ile of Guls, and it is a
new thing in the Elizabethan drama as Day uses it. It points
forward to Restoration comedy, and has some kinship with the
comedy of Molière.
And it is not only in his plot that Day shows clear conception
of a comedy different from the Shakespearean romantic comedy
and from the Jonsonian comedy of humours—both of them full of
life and humanity; in his dialogue there is a new note-a new con-
vention of epigram and repartee—which, together with neatness of
plot, marks the typical Restoration comedy. In The Ile of Guls,
the plot by which all the characters are collected together at
the end of the play blindfolded, as it were, to find themselves
plain gulls when the bandage is taken off, is cleverly and neatly
elaborated; but, in the course of the play, we also have a continued
effort to present a dialogue duly arranged and ordered, in which
the wit has a scheme and keeps the rules. The most notable
instance is the famous tennis match scene in the second act.
Bullen says truly: 'Outside of Shakespeare's early comedies it
would be difficult to find among the dramatists of the time such
another tour de force of sprightly repartee’; but, although
Shakespeare's early work, probably, was the chief influence in
producing Day's type of comedy, there is a noticeable contrast
between the two kinds. The copiousness and exuberance of all
the punning and repartee of Love's Labour's Lost produce an
effect the exact opposite of Day's balanced and considered epi-
grams. Shakespeare gives his characters full play in the scenes
of quip and repartee; Day holds his in. His art has not enough
vigour and flow in it; Shakespeare's has too much. Shakespeare,
again, is eager to break loose from the fetters of rime for the
larger scope and movement of blank verse; Day, on the contrary,
desires to get back to rime; he has not breath enough for Eliza-
bethan blank verse. Shakespeare's fountain gushes and leaps, with
much danger to artificial restraints of all sorts; Day's rivulet, on
the contrary, flows obediently whither it is led, and often trickles
>
## p. 215 (#233) ############################################
Humour out of Breath
215
nearly dry. Elizabethan extravagance and overstrain are foreign
to his art, which is Attic, or even Doric, in its simplicity and
orderliness. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Day never
does himself justice in his plays; he is too much hampered and
confused by the alien conditions in which his genius has to work.
In The Ile of Guls, it is only the induction wbich is quite easy and
lucid. The tennis scene, perhaps because the terms used are no
longer familiar, is hard to follow, and the verse effects are too
complicated.
We see what the artist means, but his execution is
not perfect. A scene in Law-Trickes, where the countess dis-
courses to her maids as they sew, is his nearest approach to
dramatic effectiveness in his own style. This play, probably, was
written in 1606, and Humour out of Breath in 1607. The three
plays present, quite recognisably, a new dramatic type, but they
do not coherently and adequately realise it.
The title Humour out of Breath is actually quoted from The
Comedy of Errors, and the influence of Shakespeare's early
comedies is very evident in all three plays; but the neatness and
compactness of Day's prose style in his dialogue is more akin to
the manner of another master-John Lyly. Lyly does not exhibit
in his comedies the copiousness and exuberance which characterise
Shakespeare's first work. Lyly's plays, even more than Day's, lack
flesh and blood, and belong to a world of moonshine and shadow.
But, within their limits, they have a true charm of fancy, and their
style escapes the pedantry and tediousness of the writer's prose
work, and is as deft and crisp as Day at his best. To complete
the parallel, we may note that Lyly (supposing him to be their
author") gives us a handful of beautiful lyrics, remarkable as be-
longing not to the true Elizabethan type, but, rather, to the later
style of Herrick. Day's best lyric work in The Parliament of Bees
is, in the same way, post-Elizabethan. It must be compared with
Browne's Pastorals or Milton's L'Allegro.
· Day describes The Parliament of Bees as “an allegorical
description of the actions of good and bad men in these our
days. ' But he composed it from scenes contributed to two plays
which have reached us under the titles The Noble Souldier
and The Wonder of A Kingdome. Dekker, in cooperation with
Samuel Rowley, was mainly responsible for these plays. Between
their style and Day's, there could be no real accord, and only
enough of Day is left to make it clear that The Parliament
of Bees was not, as we might suppose, completely fresh work
1 On this question, cf. ante, vol. v, chap. VI, p. 125.
## p. 216 (#234) ############################################
216 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
constituting a new departure in the art of the writer. Scenes
contributed to more than one play were the groundwork upon
which Day composed his dainty and graceful series of 'Colloquies'
or 'Characters. The fact throws a true light on Day's dramatic
work; but the drama was not his natural vein. What would be
interesting to know is how he came to write The Parliament of
Bees. In the excellent prose tract, Peregrinatio Scholastica,
written, apparently, before The Parliament, he speaks of himself
as 'becalmed in a fog of necessity,' that is to say, he writes be-
cause he needs money, which he hopes to get not only from the
printer, but, also, from the patron to whom he dedicates his book.
He says, also, that he is lying at anchor 'before the Islands, Meliora
Speramus. ' Fleay's tempting suggestion is that Day means holy
orders by this, and by the 'shrine of Latria,' towards which, in the
allegory, the sometimes student of Gunvill and Caius Colledge in
Cambridge' is travelling. If this were so, it would be necessary
for the old playwright, until he was duly ordained, to make money
by some more edifying form of literature than plays. He, therefore,
wrote Peregrinatio and, after that, used certain scenes from old
plays to make his unique Parliament of Bees. There is extant a
manuscript copy of The Bees earlier than the quarto of 1641, and
the changes are not all of them merely in style; the poem is made
definitely graver in revision. The delightful first title disappears
as too flippant-'An olde Manuscript conteyning the Parliament
of Bees, found In a Hollow Tree In a garden at Hibla, in a strandge
Languadge, And now faithfully Translated into Easie English Verse
by John Daye, Cantabrig. ' The poem, it should be noted, is not a
masque in the ordinary and technical sense. It rather resembles
a series of pastoral eclogues. The successive scenes have no con-
tinuity, except such as is supplied by the idea of making all the
characters bees. Day conceives his poem as a series of satires ;
but he charges his bees to
Carry an humble wing
Buzz boldly what I bid, but do not sting
Any particular,
It is only the usuring bee whom we can identify:
Most of the timber that his state repairs
He hews out o' the bones of foundred players :
They feed on poets' brains, he eats their breath.
This can be none other than Philip Henslowe.
We gather, from both Peregrinatio and The Parliament, that
Day was not seeking orders from any unworthy motives. The prose
a
## p. 217 (#235) ############################################
Robert Armin
217
of the tract is more fluent than that of the plays. The style of the
poem, too, has, more fully than that of the plays, Day's special gift-'a
sense of delicate music in the fall and arrangement of quite common
words' In spite of the fog of necessity' around him, the writer
is at peace with himself and the world. A note of peevishness and
bitterness which occasionally obtruded itself in his earlier work
has disappeared, and the poet's music in his last poem is serene,
spontaneous and sweet. John Day died before the quarto of
The Parliament was printed, probably in the autumn of 1640.
A belated Elizabethan of considerable interest whose extant
work was printed in the early years of king James was Robert
Armin, reported to have been trained by Tarlton and called his
''
son. He followed William Kemp as player of Dogberry about
1599, continued in Shakespeare's company for some years and
has a place in the list of players in the 1623 folio. His single
play, printed 1609, is entitled The History of the two Maids of
More-clacke; With the life and simple maner of John in the
Hospitall. On the title-page, there is a cut of Armin in the
character of John in the hospital. In his words to the 'friendly
peruser,' Armin calls the play 'a Historical discourse,' and says
that
he would have 'againe inacted' John, if he had been able. His
age, presumably, prevented him, for he seems to have been born
about 1564 and was dead by 1612. He adds, you shall find verse,
as well blancke, as crancke, yet in the prose let it pass for currant. '
The blank verse of the play is in so disordered a state that it
has been compared with the mutilated 1603 quarto of Hamlet.
The phenomena suggest the solution that Armin was not re-
sponsible for the verse, but supplied the prose of the old-
fashioned fool's part of John, in which, earlier, he had made a
hit. He was no more the author of the serious part of the play,
than William Kemp was of the whole of A Knack to Know a
Knave. But the play is interesting, in spite of its corrupt con-
dition. There are in it indications that, in some form or other, it
dates back to Elizabeth's reign ; but, also, echoes from Shake-
speare's tragedies—from Macbeth, for instance—which date, ap-
parently, from about 1608. Humil's doubt of his mother's honour
reminds us of Hamlet, and the play is worth careful study for its
bearing on the Hamlet problem. The plot is absurdly compli-
cated and full of incident, and, in this respect, we are reminded of
Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman. The play has genuine dramatic
1 Nero and other plays, p. 208.
## p. 218 (#236) ############################################
218 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
power, forcible eloquence and fine poetry, all of which we should
be inclined to ascribe to Dekker or Chettle, if another author than
Armin himself must be looked for. There are, however, some re-
semblances between Armin's other works and our play. In 1605,
he published Foole upon Foole, or, Sixe Sortes of Sottes, a prose
tract, amplified, in 1608, into A nest of Ninnies', in the dedica-
tion of which “To the most true and rightly compleat in all good
gifts and graces, the generous Gentlemen of Oxenford, Cambridge,
and the Innes of Court'he declares I have seene the stars at mid-
night in your societies. ' This, apparently, gave offence to some
of the graver spirits among the old player's hosts, and his next
and last tract, dated 1609, contains a kind of apology for it. This
tract, The Italian Taylor and his Boy, a verse translation from
the Italian, is written with considerable dexterity, and raises our
opinion of Armin's gifts and scholarship. It is curious that we
should have nothing from his pen earlier than 1605, although
Nashe and Harvey, in 1593, speak of him as a common pamphle-
teer and 'son' of Elderton.
Middleton's influence on comedy is apparent in the two sur-
viving plays of the lawyer Edward Sharpham-The Fleire, acted
probably early in 1606, and Cupid's Whirligig, produced about a
year later. Both plays were frequently reprinted, from 1607
onwards. They owed their popularity to their wit and rapidity
of action, but can hardly claim to be more than farces; there
is in them the shadow of Middleton's art, and more than the
substance of his grossness. Much better than these is Lodowick
Barry's single play Ram-Alley or Merrie-Trickes, acted perhaps
as early as 1609 and extant in several quartos. Ram alley was
a particularly disreputable lane, leading from Fleet street to the
Temple, and of the coarseness promised by the title of the play we
find, as it proceeds, a full supply. But this realistic indecency
is relieved by some breath of life and character. Many echoes
from Shakespeare's plays are introduced, both by way of parody
and of imitation. There is much of the London of the period-
both of the place and its manners—in this comedy; and it not
only shows force in its presentation of life and character, but is
also marked by a vigour in its blank verse, which, in one or two
places, almost reaches distinction. The prologue says that, if the
play succeeds, the writer will attempt something more serious,
which even puritans will accept as satisfactory. Barry, no doubt,
1 Cf. ante, vol. iv, p. 532.
## p. 219 (#237) ############################################
John Cooke and Robert Tailor
219
overrated the complaisance of puritans; but he was right in feeling
that he had in him the power to produce work of a higher rank
altogether than his Ram alley obscenities. It is disappointing
that this one play and his name are all that we know of him.
Two other single plays, Greene's Tu Quoque and The Hog hath
lost his Pearl, we may mention at this point, because they belong
rather to the early comedy of Haughton than the later Jonsonian
comedy. They are less touched by Middleton's influence than
Ram-Alley. The clever acting of Thomas Greene made Greene's
Tu Quoque or The Cittie Gallant very popular about 1611. It was
printed in 1614 as written by Jo. Cooke, Gent. ,' and Thomas
Heywood contributes a preface stating that both the author and
the actor Greene are dead. It is one of the pleasantest and live-
liest among the productions of the lesser dramatists. The blank
verse is not so good as Barry's; but Cooke's art and his capacity
for working out a comic idea are above the ordinary, and his prose
is excellent. The master, Staines, changes places with his man,
Bubble, and coaches him to take his place in the fashionable
world. There is an excellent scene in which the affectations of the
Italianate Englishman are taken off, probably aimed at Coryate.
The women in the play remind us of the girls of Porter and
Haughton; they are, perhaps, more refined—the sisters of
university students rather than of tradesmen—but they are very
naturally and pleasantly drawn. A scene in which Joyce, anxious
to hide the state of her heart, confounds and bewilders her lover,
first by her silence and then by her speech, recalls the vigorous
domestic comedy of Porter? It is curious that we should know
nothing whatever of 'Jo. Cooke,' and that, like Barry, he
should have just one play to his credit. The Hog hath lost his
Pearl is, again, the single play of a writer whose name—Robert
Tailor—is all that is known about him. Tailor's literary capacity
is below that of either Barry or Cooke. To a play of low comedy,
he tacks on a romantic plot of a painful character? which only a
master of dramatic art could make endurable. Tailor manages the
prose of his comedy much better than the verse of his moral
romance; the main interest of the play, however, is not in its style
or story but in the circumstances of its production. Sir Henry
Wotton, in a letter dated 16123, tells us that 'some sixteen
? See ante, vol. v, chap. XIII.
2 Otway's Orphan deals with the same plot.
3 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Smith, L. P. , vol. 1, p. 13.
## p. 220 (#238) ############################################
220 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
apprentices,' having secretly learnt their parts, 'took up the
White Fryers for their theatre,' and invited their friends to see
them perform The Hog hath lost his Pearl. The sheriffs inter-
vened before the end of the performance and carried off six or
seven of the apprentices to prison. He adds that it was supposed
that Sir John Swinnerton was meant by the hog, and the late
lord treasurer by the pearl. The prologue of the printed play
alludes to this incident, but says that
our swine,
Is not as divers critics did define,
Grunting at state affairs or invecting
Much at our city vices;
if the play pleases, 'we'll say 'tis fortunate, like Pericles. ' Like
the two plays mentioned before it, Tailor's is full of interest for
the student of Jacobean London.
We come now to the main stream of Jacobean dramatic work,
in which the influence of Jonson, both personal and by his art, is
all-pervasive.
Among the extant plays of the reign of king James, two by
Nathaniel Field are of such merit as to suggest that the writer,
probably, would have risen above the ranks of the lesser dramatists,
had he persevered in the prosecution of his art. He was born in
1587, a few months before his father's death. That father was the
famous preacher John Field, whose rousing discourse upon the
collapse of a gallery in Paris garden in 1583 has come down to
us? . It contains interesting details about the catastrophe and a
violent attack upon theatrical performances, with valuable in-
formation about London players and their theatres. Nat's elder
brother, Theophilus, was educated at Cambridge and rose to be
bishop of Hereford; and it is singular, therefore, that Nat Field's
name should be found first among the six 'principal comedians'
of the band of lads called the children of the queen’s revels, who
acted in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels in 1600. These boys were the
‘young eyases' discussed by Hamlet. For a time, as has been seen? ,
they rivalled men players in public favour; and Field, as he grew
older, maintained his position and may claim to have succeeded
Burbage as the leading actor on the English stage. Jonson, no
doubt, owed a debt to Field for his clever acting in Cynthia's Revels
and Poetaster, and the debt is repaid by the mention of Field, in
1614, in Bartholomew Fayre— Which is your Burbadge now? . . .
i Cf. , as to this incident, post, chap. XIV.
Cf. ante, chap. II, and post, chap. XI.
## p. 221 (#239) ############################################
Field's A Woman is a Weather-cocke 221
Your best actor, your Field ? ' Field joined the King's company
before he finally retired from the stage, and, in the 1623 folio of
Shakespeare's plays, he is seventeenth in the list there given of
twenty-six players. Jonson told Drummond that “Nat Field was
his scholar. An interesting proof of Jonson’s regard for Field is
afforded by the insertion of an extra sheet of commendatory
verses addressed by Field to Jonson in some copies of the 1607
quarto of Volpone. Field's verses are amateurish-he speaks
justly of his 'weak flame'-but they show a great awe of Jonson,
whom 'to dare commend were damnable presumption. The
lines should be compared with the much more mature address
'to his worthy and beloved friend Master Ben Jonson on his
Catiline3. ' Field had been educated by Mulcaster at the
Merchant Taylors' school, but 'taken' by N. Giles as one of the
company of the children of the revels. Giles was accused of
kidnapping boys against their parents' wishes, and we may con-
jecture that Field would not have been annexed, had his strenuous
father been alive to protect him.
Field's first play, A Woman is a Weather-cocke, was produced
in 1610. In the first scene, Scudmore is discovered reading a
vehement letter from Bellafront, the lady he loves. To him, thus
occupied, enters his friend Nevill on his way to a wedding. The
lover very prettily takes his friend into his confidence, enlarges
like a Romeo on his mistress,
Whose face brought concord and an end of jars,
and passionately proclaims,
She is the food, the sleep, the air I live by.
He ends with the lady's name; whereupon his friend blurts out in
amazement, ‘But that's the wedding I was going to. ' This dramatic
scene is put before us with a force and vividness remarkable in so
young a writer. In itself, it is an excellent beginning ; but the
Jonsonian 'humours' of the next scene jar a little. They are not
in the same key as the romantic passionate opening of the play.
But Field's wit is considerable and is not a mere copy of
Jonson. His manner has a sprightliness and good-humour, and
a
1 They read Horace and Martial together; see Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations
with Drummond, ed. Laing, D. , p. 11.
? It is contained in the British Museum copy, C 12, c. 17, which was presented by
Jonson to John Florio with an inscription in Ben's autograph to his loving father
and friend, the aid of his Muses. ' See Percy Simpson in Notes and Queries, Ser. VIII,
vol. VIII, p. 301.
But in this age where jigs and dances move
How few there are that this pure work approve.
.
## p. 222 (#240) ############################################
222 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
an occasional naturalness, which are his own, and differentiate
his comic style quite definitely from Jonson's.
The second act is constructed on the same plan as the first. It
begins with a semi-romantic scene and ends with 'humour. ' When
captain Pouts, who has been rejected by Katharine, publicly insults
her at the door of the church in which she has just been married
to Strange, she urges her new husband to vindicate her honour;
and, perhaps, no better example could be given of Field's capacity
as a writer of strong, direct, blank verse than her invective:
Thou wert ordained,
And in thy cradle marked to call me wife,
And in that title made as my defence,
Yet sufferedst him to go away with life,
Wounding my honour dead before thy face!
Redeem it on his head, and his own way,
Even by the sword, his long profession,
And set it clear amongst the tongues of men,
That all eyes may discern it slandered,
Or thou shalt ne'er enjoy me as a wife.
The verse is in the manner of Shakespeare in the Henry V
period, although with less music and very little imaginative
decoration, and the excellence of its directness and spontaneity
is due, no doubt, to Field's training as an actor. His use of
language, too, is free, like Shakespeare's—to be understood by
the audience though not always approved by the grammarian. In
the passage quoted, ‘his long profession, with the meaning, ‘for so
long a time his profession,' has a Shakespearean sound, as, also, has
the rather enigmatic, but still forcible, 'made' of the third line.
Strange's speech, a little later, about the law's inequalities, again,
is forcible, eloquent blank verse. But the second part of the plot
overloads the play as a whole. Field, as a scholar of Jonson,
desires to show his dexterity as a plotter ; but, like all young
writers of promise, and like all immature dramatists, he gives his
audience too much, and cannot endure to limit his own scope.
In this play, which is full both of matter and of varied promise
of dramatic ability, Ben Jonson is obviously the master most con-
sciously copied. The ‘humours' are in Jonson's manner, as are
the complicated plottings. The compression of the action into
exactly one day is in accordance with Ben's teaching. It might
be contended that a certain intensity in the serious scenes
copies the splendid passion of Volpone, which is the high water
mark of Jonson's art. This, however, would be a mistake. The
serious scenes of the play are essentially romantic and idealistic,
suggesting Romeo and Juliet rather than The Alchemist. But
a
## p. 223 (#241) ############################################
3
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It
Field's Amends for Ladies
223
Romeo has been brought up as a player and has appeared upon
the public stage from his childhood, and Ben Jonson has been his
schoolmaster. He has, therefore, lost all exterior softness and
sentiment, and, at first reading, a certain hardness and bravado
in his manner deceive the student. Field's second play, Amends
for Ladies, followed hard upon the first, and was intended to atone
for the many hard things said against women in the first play.
There are three heroines, the lady Honour, the lady Perfect and
the lady Bright, who, as maid, wife and widow, vindicate, respec-
tively, the claims of their sex to constancy and virtue. It will be
seen, therefore, that, again, the scheme of the play is too full of
incident; there are three plays in one. The second play, on the
whole, is a more hasty piece of work than the first; it has the
drawbacks of an after-thought; but there is a distinct maturity
and strengthening to be noted in its style. Field's natural bent
is, more obviously than before, to draw ideal heroes, headstrong
and indomitable. He does not yet show much power of characteri-
sation; his heroes and heroines are all repetitions of one type.
We remember that one of his great parts was Bussy D'Ambois,
and that Chapman addresses some lines 'to his loved son Nat
Field. ' The comic scenes of the second play are less original and
less amusing than those of the first. There is something perfunc-
tory about 'the merry prankes of Moll Cut-purse, Or, the humour
of roaring. And, again, all that part of the play which uses the
plot of 'The Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, in which a
husband, in order to prove his wife's virtue, eggs on his friend to
tempt her, is intolerable to modern feeling.
