Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq.
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
Some
critics have been pleased to decide that Brome describes life from
the groom's point of view, and have ascribed his coarseness to bis
want of education and humble origin. The truer explanation is
1 Epigram ci.
? This parallel is noted in Faust's dissertation, Richard Brome, Halle, 1887, p. 52.
E. L. VI. CH, IX.
15
## p. 226 (#244) ############################################
226 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
that he uses Jonson's manner without Jonson's full-blooded,
massive humanity, without his satiric intensity, without his intel-
lectual power; so that the Jonsonian scenes in Brome, his
numerous efforts to describe the humours of London life, repel
or tire the reader.
Fifteen of Brome's plays have come down to us. Four of these
were published in quarto in Brome's lifetime ; five were printed
together, in 1653, shortly after his death ; five more in 1659; and
one other, in quarto, in 1657. The plays have been conveniently
classed under the headings of comedies of manners, romantic
comedies and romantic dramas of intrigue. These divisions ex-
hibit Brome's debt to Jonson, for the first class is much the
largest, including nine plays? . But these nine plays are not purely
Jonsonian. The Northern Lasse is the earliest of the extant
plays. It was printed in 1632 and, again, in 1635 and in 1663. It
was the most popular of Brome's plays and definitely made his
reputation as a writer. It is full of humours, which fill up the
scenes of an ingenious plot; but its popularity was mainly due
to the romantic note struck in the character of the northern lass
herself. The modern reader finds it hard to detect the charm of
Constance; she is very thinly and imperfectly drawn, and her
‘northern’ speech is clumsy ; but she pleased John Ford and
Thomas Dekker. It would appear that the seventeenth century
found in her some faint anticipation of the charm of the Scottish
heroines of The Waverley Novels. Brome did not get this romantic
note from Jonson, and the six romantic plays suggest to us that it
was more natural to him than Jonson's hard, intellectual satire,
and that he would have done better work if he had used it oftener.
But the nine plays of Jonsonian humour and plot have certain
merits. Brome always does his best. He works without enthusiasm,
but steadily and conscientiously, and, as pieces of stagecraft, the
plays are never contemptible. As a picture of the London of the
period, they are full of interest and value. If their outlook were
broader, if they depicted not only the vices and follies of life, but,
also, its virtues and amenities, they would be read with eagerness,
but it is not fair to blame Brome only for this defect. It is the
weakness of the satiric method of Jonson that it tends continually
to describe only what it can scourge, so that its world gets uglier
and uglier. Brome's temperament fitted him for a kindlier type
· The Northern Lasse, The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, Covent Garden Weeded,
The New Academy or The New Exchange, The Damoiselle, The Court Beggar, The
Madd Couple well matcht, The City Witt.
## p. 227 (#245) ############################################
Brome's Sparagus Garden
227
of comedy, and there are many indications in his plays that he
would have produced better work under a gentler master than
Jonson Jonson's satire is often mitigated by the introduction
of a purely comic idea, which is not vicious or even eccentric, but
merely whimsical, such as Morose's hatred of noise. Brome shows
a special aptitude in copying his master in this respect, and his
touch is lighter. Jonson is sometimes over-ingenious and his
workmanship heavy-handed. The Antipodes is Brome's best
effort in this kind.
Among the less interesting of the comedies of manners
which may be regarded as fairly representative of Brome's usual
work, The Sparagus Garden, acted 1635, takes its title from
the custom of going to eat asparagus in a garden where it
was grown. Such places were haunts of disreputable people of
both sexes, and the 'humours' of the garden are coarse though
sketched with much vivacity and some wit. They bulk so largely
in the play that it is justly classed as a comedy of manners.
The scenes in which Timothy Hoyden, a yeoman's son from the
country, is shown the way to become a fine gentleman, are ex-
cellent comedy ; they are whimsical as well as witty, and written
with a genuine gaiety. When Brome's humours have this gaiety
and lightness of touch, we are reminded of another master than
Jonson ; we are conscious of something of the spirit of Dekker.
Among the commendatory verses prefixed to The Northern Lasse
are some characteristic lines 'To my Sonne Broom and his Lasse,'
by Thomas Dekker. How much friendship these words imply we
have no means of discovering ; but Brome is more truly a 'son' of
Dekker than of Jonson. His best and happiest work is in the
vein of Dekker. But the scenes of our play are not all in the
asparagus garden. The first two suggest a quiet domestic drama
a
which might turn to tragedy or comedy, but would not harmonise
properly with the garden humours. Two young men decide to
attempt the reconcilement of two angry old men by proposing a
match between the son of one of them and the adopted daughter
of the other. The first scene describes the attempt and its failure.
In the second scene, the two friends try to console the son for
their failure and resolve to help him. Brome's verse rises to an
almost passionate height, as Gilbert insists that
Love is wit itself,
And through a thousand lots will find a way
To his desired end.
Both these scenes describe common life simply and naturally, and
15—2
## p. 228 (#246) ############################################
228 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
with a touch of idealism not very common in Brome, who recants
a
his usual creed when he confesses:
Poets they are the life and death of things.
The play is a mine of allusions and references to the life of old
London. From this point of view, Brome will always be worth
reading.
The brightest and pleasantest of Brome's comedies of manners
is The City Witt, or The Woman wears the Breeches. It is the
best, just because it most successfully keeps in one key. Fleay
contends that it is the earliest of the extant dramas, and says:
* Dekker's influence is more clearly visible in it than in the other
plays. ' He means that the gaiety and lightness of touch which we
have noted as Dekker's rather than Jonson's are very noticeable
in the play. But the prologue, composed by Brome for a revival
of the play, states that it 'past with good applause in former
times'; adding that
It was written when
It bore just judgment and the seal of Ben.
We must suppose, therefore, that Dekker's influence was sub-
ordinate to Jonson's, and that Brome himself was unconscious of
the force of the former. Its strength was due to its suitability to
Brome's temperament. The lines prefixed to The Northern Lasse
were the last we have from Dekker's pen; he, probably, died
before the end of 1632.
In his plots, Brome is apt to be over-ingenious, so that the
action of his plays is either obscure or too episodical. It is the
merit of The City Witt that its episodes are all held together by
one central idea which is clear and simple, so that the play is well-
knit and easily keeps the attention of the spectator to the end.
A young citizen, Mr Crasy, by his kindness and easy-going dis-
position, has involved himself in many difficulties, and discovers
that his fairweather friends all fall away when he asks for their
help. He disappears, therefore, and returns disguised, with the
object of bringing his false friends to book for their meanness.
The play is a lively and laughable protest against worship of rank
and money, and has in it a true breath of that unworldly spirit
which is conspicuous in Dekker's best plays. The protest is all
the more effective as coming from the tradesman's level. In that
age, the development of trade brought with it new temptations.
Dishonest speculation and the making of fortunes by all sorts of
trickery were becoming common. At the same time, the new
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
Brome's City Witt
229
devices by which bankruptcy was made profitable were scorned
by oldfashioned tradesmen. Crasy declares
I must take nimble hold upon occasion
Or lie for ever in the bankrupt ditch
Where no man lends a hand to draw one out.
I will leap over it or fall bravely in't,
Scorning the bridge of baseness, composition,
Which doth infect a city like the plague,
And teach men knavery that were never born to 't.
His troubles are largely due to the odious malice of his mother-
in-law, Mistress Pyannet Sneakup, who illustrates the evil effect
upon tradesmen's wives of the degenerate times. Her son-in-law
asks gently, “May not an honest man—' when he is taken up by
the irate lady-
Honest man! Who the devil wished thee to be an honest man? Here's my
worshipfal husband, Mr Sneakup, that from a grasier is come to be a Justice of
Peace: and, what, as an honest man? He grew to be able to give nine
hundred pound with my daughter; and what, by honesty? Mr Sneakup and
I are come up to live i’ th City, and here we have lyen these three years;
and, what? for honesty? Honesty! What should the City do with honesty,
when 'tis enough to undoe a whole Corporation? Why are your wares
gumm’d; your shops dark; your prices writ in strange characters? what, for
honesty?
This 'woman of an eternal tongue, this creature of an ever-
lasting noise' is the most considerable character in the piece ;
but Sarpego is equally good in another direction. We have already
touched upon him. His sudden scraps of Latin are very comical-
O Dii! Quem video? Nonne Mr Sneakup? '-and one wonders
how far they were followed by the audience. Some of his para-
phrases are very happy—“Tempora mutantur; the town's ours
again'; 'Lupus in fabula ; the devil's in the woman's tongue’;
'Sic transit gloria mundi ; the learned is coney-caught. ' The
briskness and bustle of the play are maintained to the end, and,
if it were not for the absence of Mrs Tryman from the list of
dramatis personae, the dénouement would be a complete surprise.
Crasy's honesty, his ‘unsuspicious freeness' and 'most easy good-
ness' flavour the play and convince us that Brome, with all his
s
grossness, was unsophisticated.
By way of proving this point more fully and carrying further
the comparison of Brome with Dekker, we may next consider
Brome's masterpiece, A Joviall Crew, Or, The Merry Beggars.
It was the latest play written by Brome, being produced in 1641
and continuing on the stage till it came to be the very last play
acted before parliament closed the theatres in 1642—'it had the
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
luck to tumble last of all in the Epidemicall ruin of the Scene! '
In his prologue, Brome notes that his title promises mirth,
Which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days;
but, since he finds that plays are now liked which tediously and
tearfully relate lovers' distresses, up to the point at which
some impossibility
Concludes all strife and makes a comedy,
he, therefore, composes a kind of parody on this popular style, in
which he hopes the sadness will not make any woman weep. This
interesting account of the genesis of the play would hardly have
been surmised by the critic without the author's help. The finest
thing in the play, and, indeed, in all Brome's writings, is the
description of the steward Springlove's annual hunger for the
green grass and the careless content of the wandering beggar.
You kept a swallow in a cage that while.
I cannot, Sir, endure another summer
In that restraint with life: 'twas then my torment
But now my death.
We have to wait till the days of George Borrow and R. L. Steven-
son for a repetition of Brome's conception of the joy and glory of
vagabondage. The sketch of the beggars' content is combined
with a very natural picture of the kind and compassionate master
and squire. There is a touch of religious feeling in the picture of
Oldrents's kindness of heart, and his compassion for the poor and
unfortunate; the only drawback to the charm of the play is the
occasional coarseness of the realism in the description of the
jovial crew of beggars. The first act of this play is work of high
and rare merit. Brome's English is admirably plain, unaffected
and direct; his blank verse is unadorned, but clear and natural,
and he reaps the reward of his simplicity. To the student of
decadent romanticism, this play has the perfection of a cup of
cold water in a dry and thirsty land.
A Jovialt Crew is classed among Brome's romantic dramas
of intriguel; and two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The
Queenes Exchange, have been reckoned as pure romantic dramas.
This division, of course, is merely intended to meet the require-
ment of convenience. Of the six romantic plays, the last two
mentioned and The Love-sick Court best illustrate Brome's ideas
of romance and poetry, and thus call for some notice. Brome's
modest conception of himself as a playwright and not an author
1 With three others, The Love-sick Court, The Novella and The English Moor.
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
Brome's Romantic Dramas
231
or poet—his disinclination to indulge in imaginative effort-stamps
him as out of sympathy with the fashionable taste for lengthy
imaginative sentiment. He had a real sense of artistic form, and
recoiled not only from the sentimentality, but from the incoherence,
both in plan and metre, of the later Caroline drama. We have
already quoted his account of the composition of A Joviall Crew.
In the prologue to The Antipodes, he complains that 'opinion
cares only for plays that
carry state,
In scene magnificent and language high,
And cloathes worth all the rest, except the action.
The taste of the journeyman playwright, on this head, was certainly
far sounder than that of the king and his court. Yet Brome did
essay romantic drama, and with very interesting results. The
Love-sick Court was, probably, the earliest of the batch; The
Queenes Exchange dates from about 1632, and The Queen and
Concubine from after 1635. In these plays we see Brome manfully
striving to write as a poet and to achieve a good romantic play.
In the first two, he is often at a loss; his art fails him, and only
fumbling work is produced; but The Queen and Concubine marks
a very definite advance, and shows that Brome might have pro-
duced excellent romantic work if his public had asked for it
Shakespeare, rather than Fletcher, is the master from whom
Brome takes his suggestions, and the good queen Eulalia, whose
trials and virtues are touchingly described, is a blend of the
patient Grissill of Dekker and queen Katharine in Henry VIII,
There are two fine songs in the play; one of them—What if a
day, or a month, or a year’-possessing the true Elizabethan
charm of Campion or Dekker. The shining merit of Brome in
these plays, for all their feeble workmanship, is his capacity for
the unsophisticated and direct expression of emotion. We escape
from inflated sentiment and return to a simplicity of moral feeling
which belongs to the earlier days of the drama. Brome's humility
was described above as almost servile; and the suggestion was
made that his unaffected modesty is reflected in the restraint and
the naturalness of his art. Like Day, Brome proves his manliness
when he falls on evil days. He wrote his dedication of A Joviall
Crew, when it was printed in 1652, a few months before his death,
' in these anti-ingenious Times,' when the theatres had been closed
for ten years. Since the Times conspire to make us all Beggars,'
he says, 'let us make ourselves merry. That is what his play
drives at. ' He does not Ainch in his extremity: 'I am poor and
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
proud,' he tells us; ‘you know, Sir, I am old and cannot cringe. '
This is his last word.
Among Jonson's most eager admirers was Thomas Randolph;
but he was not, like Field and Brome, a pupil of the old poet.
He was a king's scholar of Westminster school, who became a
fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. At the end of 1629, a year
of plague broke up the schools at Cambridge, and Randolph made
Jonson's acquaintance during his stay in London; he was probably
adopted as a 'son' before he returned to Cambridge. He had written
by this time his two earliest ‘shews-Aristippus and The Conceited
Pedler, which were printed in 1630. These lively sketches recall
that early type of dramatic performance, the clown's jig, in which
a famous comedian, such as Tarlton, poured forth an improvisation
of his own, which was a mixture of prose, verse and antics. But
it is Randolph's command of racy English, his high spirits and his
exuberant wit that suggest this comparison. His pieces belong to
that large body of 'college drama' which is described in another
chapter? Aristippus, or, The Joviall Philosopher is a dispute on
the rival merits of ale and sack. All the technical terms of Aris-
totle's logic are crowded into a hilarious laudation of sack and a
decrying of malt liquor, which never flags. Randolph's classical
and scholastical learning supplies matter for a cataract of ingenious
puns and word play, and, therefore, his transference of Aristotelian
metaphysic into English farce is to be contrasted with, rather than
compared to, Robert Browning's profuse employment of the details
of Attic drama in his Aristophanes' Apology. Both poets, while
crammed with learning, have no pedantry in their nature. The
marvellous agility of some of the riming in Aristippus is another
point of contact with Browning's poetry.
In March 1632, king Charles visited Cambridge, and the
Trinity men acted before him The Jealous Lovers, written for
the occasion. It is Randolph's only failure. Its dramatic character
is so bad that the ability of the writing cannot redeem it. After
the king's visit, Randolph left Cambridge for London, 'called thence
to keep the flock of Corydon. ' In An Eglogue to Mr Johnson, he
describes how he had relished his Aristotelian studies—those deep
and learned layes' which 'the shepherd of Stagira used to sing';
but now he has to keep another's flock,' and not he but 'the Master
shears the sheep. ' Fleay's interpretation of this passage is that
Randolph was manager of prince Charles's men acting at Salisbury
? See post, chap. XII, where more is said about The Jealous Lovers.
· I. . . Ben Jonson.
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Thomas Randolph
233
court in 1632 and 1633. At Salisbury court theatre, Fleay thinks.
The Muses Looking-Glasse was presented towards the end of 1632.
(It was not printed till 1638, when the writer was dead. ) This
theory accords very well with the character of Randolph's master-
piece, and explains the genesis of this new and distinct type of
dramatic art. It is just such a work as the writer of Aristippus
might be expected to produce if he were called upon to expand
his short shew' into something that could compete in length,
interest and dignity with the plays of a better class. Randolph's
creative capacity had been stimulated to this effort by close con-
tact with the drama of the London stage; but the Aristotelian
student is still in evidence. The main part of the piece consists
of a series of fifteen scenes, in which the vices of Aristotle's Ethics
appear in couples or singly and, in accordance with the theory
of comedy put forward in the first act of the piece, hold up a
mirror in which spectators may note their own defects; this is
how comedies ‘laugh' people 'into wit and virtue. ' These scenes,
therefore, are planned like the colloquies' of Day's Parliament of
Bees; but the contrast is great between Day's delicate rimes and
Randolph's masculine and emphatic blank verse, which only
occasionally uses the heroic couplet. Kolax, the flatterer, remains
on all the time because 'Any vice yields work for flattery. In
these strongly written scenes, the influence of Jonson's satiric
plays is very obvious. In act I, there is an excellent scene in
which Comedy, Tragedy, Mime and Satire dispute together and
expound their functions according to classic theory. Before the
vices come in, we have a masque,
a rude dance,
Presented by the seven deadly sing.
In act v, after Mediocrity, the mother of virtues, has expounded
in a bundred lines Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, she presents a
masque of her daughters, 'wherein all the Vertues dance together. '
The invention of all this is both copious and happy. The author
describes his work as containing
No plot at all, but a meer Olla Podrida,
A medley of ill plac'd and worse penned Humours,
borrowed from the man
to whom he owes
All the poor skill he has, great Aristotle.
Randolph is pleasantly unconscious that the creative and artistic
faculty is too often, as in Jonson's case, smothered, rather than
nourished, by theory, however sound. But we have still to mention
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
the most delightful feature of the play. The 'moralising 'scenes
are presented before Bird, a feather-man, and Mistress Flowerdew,
wife to a Haberdasher of Small Wares. ' These worthies bring
feathers and pins and looking glasses to sell to the players; but
they belong to the Sanctified Fraternity of Black-Fryers': that is
to say, they are puritans. This device is not new. Beaumont used
it admirably in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But Randolph
employs it to lighten the didactic tendency of his main scenes;
moreover, his two puritans are to be converted to the theory of
comedy put forward in the play; they are, therefore, described
with more good humour, with more restraint and naturalness,
than is usual in Elizabethan comedy. When the virtues are to be
presented, Bird hopes there are no 'cardinal vertues'-
I hate a vertue
That will be made a Cardinal,
-he adds that even ‘Bishop vertues are unwarrantable,' and,
generally,
Vertnes in Orders are unsanctified.
He is disturbed when the virtues dance:
O vile, absurd, Maypole-Maid-Marian Vertue!
Yet, as the play goes on, Mistress Flowerdew begins to relent:
I have picked
Out of the garden of this play a good
And wholesome salad of instruction.
And, finally, both are mollified Bird says
.
I'll teach devotion now a milder temper,
while Mistress Flowerdew admits,
I might have gone to hell the narrow way.
We have called The Muses Looking-Glasse Randolph's masterpiece,
though this title might be claimed for his fine pastoral Amyntas.
But the later production has to compete with even finer work
by Jonson and Fletcher, while the former is unique of its kind.
Randolph died in 1635, at the age of twenty-nine; and he is to be
counted among those poets whose achievement, considerable as it is,
is an earnest only of what his matured powers might have given us.
It remains to attempt a hurried survey of the lesser dramatists
of the end of the age, who were writing from the later years of
James until the closing of the theatres. They exhibit very clearly
the exhaustion of the great dramatic impulse which begins with
Marlowe and ends with Shirley and Brome. A tasteless and
featureless mediocrity or a pretentious extravagance are the
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
May. Davenport
235
characteristics of work which was ceasing to conform to type
and losing all sense of true dramatic form. On a first casual
inspection, the more meritorious of these plays seem better written
and more judiciously planned than much of the Elizabethan work
which has survived; but a closer study reveals the essential
insipidity of the later work, due, in the first place, to exhaustion
of the dramatic impulse, and, in the second, to the deterioration
of the audiences and the practical cessation of a demand for good
plays
Thomas May, the historian of the Long parliament, whose
character Clarendon and Marvell? unite in decrying, began his
literary career with two comedies, The Heir and The Old Couple,
written about 1620. The Heir is a Fletcherian tragicomedy; The
Old Couple, which Fleay thinks the earlier of the pair, a play of
Jonsonian intrigue and manners. After producing these plays, May
turned to the work by which he is best known-his translations of
the Georgics and of Lucan's Pharsalia.
Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq. ,'
and May was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius. Jonson's influence
and that of the classics would seem to have turned May to classical
drama, and he produced three tragedies, of which the first, Antigone,
the Theban Princess is dedicated to Endymion Porter, and may
have been written before 1626. Fleay has suggested that May
is the author of the anonymous Nero, printed 1624. We are to
suppose that the fire and energy of this fine play were the result
of May's first study of Tacitus, perhaps before he had been too
much obsessed by Jonson's influence and method. But May's
study of Tacitus would seem to have been later than 1624. His
Cleopatra is dated 1626, and Julia Agrippina 1628. May's
imagination is pedestrian; his style is regular and painstaking.
Nero is the work of a scholar whose imagination is fiery and
strong, and who contrives to crowd into his play a great deal
of the excitement, the incident and the underlying unity of the
Roman historian's picture of the tyrant. May's first two plays
are meritorious; there is care and correctness in the blank verse,
and much careful invention in the plot and the conception of the
characters; but his classical plays are no better and no worse
than his continuation of Pharsalia. They are pale reflections of
Jonson's work in Sejanus and Catiline. May is nothing more than
a 'son' of Ben, who copied his adoptive father's least inspired work.
Meritorious, like May's, was the work of Robert Davenport,
1 Most servile wit and mercenary pen. '
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
whose activity begins in 1624. Three of his plays survive, two
comedies and a tragedy. The tragedy is a careful rewriting of
Munday and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington!
Chettle's drama is stripped of its crudities and banalities ; so
far as may be, the horrible is replaced by the pathetic, and a
considerable adornment of poetic diction and imagery is added.
The versification, of course, is brought up to date and irregularities
disappear. The old play has a deeper significance than that which
it expresses: we read it with impatience; but we remember it with
interest, because of its suggestion of horror and gloom. Davenport,
on the other hand, we read with respect for his industry, and we
forget him at once. It is a plausible conjecture that his comedies
were remodellings of older material; so that all his work looks
backward. But The City-Night-Cap and A New Tricke to Cheat
the Divell are, both of them, interesting and able comedies, like
the two plays of May which we have just considered. The former
dates from 1624. As this play takes its main story from “The
Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, there can be nothing sur-
prising in the fact that, in some respects, it is unpleasant; indeed,
its comic part is intolerable; but, on the romantic side, it has merit
It contains echoes of Measure for Measure, of Cymbeline and of
A Winter's Tale; it is highminded, with some grace of diction
and force of eloquence, but dramatically unreasonable and wrong.
The other play is slighter and more humorous, and, on the whole,
more agreeable. Two of Davenport's friends were players; of his
circumstances nothing is known.
Thomas Nabbes seems to have belonged to the same social
level as Davenport, and, like him, to have produced his tragedy,
Hannibal and Scipio, by revising an older play; he was a friend
of Richard Brome. His Microcosmus is a morality play which he
calls a masque. His best work is to be found in his three comedies,
Covent-Garden, 1632, Totenham-Court, 1633, and The Bride, 1638.
Nabbes breaks away from the prevailing coarse type of comedy,
intended to hit the taste of the man about town, and takes pains
and pleasure in representing people of virtuous life and con-
versation. With just a little more distinction and force, both in
his writing and in his characterisation, Nabbes would have risen
above the ranks of third-rate dramatists. The Bride is a comedy
of considerable effectiveness, distinguished among the plays of its
time by the goodness and purity to be found in its men and women.
His heroes and heroines are amiable and sincere; somewhat colour-
1 Cf. ante, vol. V, chap. XIII,
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
>
coarse.
Cartwright. Mayne 237
less when compared with stronger dramatic work; but without the
two diseases of the time, the convention of coarseness, and the
convention of fantastic sentiment
Two writers who were among the sons' of Ben and of great
repute in their day need not detain us long. William Cartwright
was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester. He was educated at
Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and rose to be the most
noted man in his university as a strenuous scholar, an admired
dramatist and a 'seraphical' preacher. His first play, probably, was
his comedy The Ordinary, produced about 1635. This was followed
by three tragicomedies, The Lady Errant, The Royall Slave and
The Siedge or Love's Convert. After taking holy orders in 1638, he
did not write any more plays. He died in 1642. His plays, therefore,
were probably composed hurriedly. They are essentially the work
of a man of parts, who writes for reputation without any true
respect either for his art or for himself. His comedy is a flashy
and vulgar imitation of Jonsonian 'humours,' as tedious as it is
His tragicomedies belong to the school of enervated
romance which pleased king Charles and was suited to the
French tastes of the queen. The Royall Slave was presented
before the king and queen at Oxford on 30 August 1636, by
the students of Christ Church, and, again, six months later, at
Hampton court, by the king's players. The students are said to
have acted best. Very probably, professionals found it difficult
to adapt themselves to the extravagant sentiment and preciosity
of Cartwright's style. Jonson's saying, 'my son Cartwright writes
all like a man,' suggests a directness of style and truth of inspira-
tion which are not found in Cartwright's plays.
Jasper Mayne, dramatist, translator and archdeacon, was a
Devonshire man, educated at Westminster school an Christ
Church, Oxford. Like his friend Cartwright, he was an admired
preacher. He produced a tragicomedy, The Amorous Warre,
and a comedy, The Citye Match, which was acted at Whitehall by
the king's command in 1639. It is a much better comedy than
Cartwright's, with plenty of life and movement in it, and, although
it has no moral elevation, it is without Cartwright's obscenity.
Mayne's most useful contribution to the literature of his country
was his translation of Lucian.
The tragicomedies of Cartwright and Mayne belong to the
group of romantic plays specially characteristic of the closing
years of the drama, written to please the court and the current
liking for inflated sentiment and fantastic emotion. But, before
1 Both Cartwright and Mayne contributed to Jonsonus Virbius.
## p. 238 (#256) ############################################
238 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
we deal summarily with these plays, a figure of some consequence
calls for a less perfunctory consideration.
In 1642, the year of the closing of the theatres, Sir John Suckling
poisoned himself in Paris. All his plays are not worth his handful
of incomparable lyrics; but they have some salt of genius in them
which entitles them to a place of their own among the work of
lesser dramatists. Aglaura, a tragedy of court intrigue, of which
the scene is supposed to be Persia, was acted in the winter of 1637,
when its literary qualities received less attention than the novelty
and magnificence of the scenery used and the dresses presented
by the author to the actors. King Charles is said to have
requested an alternative final act with a happy ending, which
Suckling afterwards wrote. Flecknoe saw the play when it was
revived at the Restoration, and his criticism, that it was 'full of
flowers, but rather stuck in than growing there,' applies to all
Suckling's dramatic work. He has imagination, fancy and wit,
but these faculties are not usually employed upon his plot and
his characters. The famous lyric, "Why so pale and wan, fond
lover ? ' occurs in the fourth act of Aglaura. The Goblins was
probably written next; it was acted in 1638, and is Suckling's
best play. His goblins are thieves who masquerade as devils, and
their pranks are mixed up with the feuds of two noble families
and a double love story. The so-called goblins administer justice
in the style of Robin Hood and his men in older plays. Suckling's
restless temperament expresses itself in the impossible rapidity
and abruptness of the action ; but the sprightliness of the play is
undeniable and its mixture of song and witty dialogues caught
Sheridan's attention, and, undoubtedly, influenced his style. His
lyric 'Here's to the maiden' is suggested by a catch in The
Goblins. Although The Goblins is Suckling's most satisfactory
performance, the tragedy Brennoralt is a work of more promise
and a more striking evidence of his poetic capacity. It did not
appear till 1846 ; but it had been printed in a shorter form in
1640 as The Discontented Colonell. The interest of Brennoralt
lies mainly in our seeming to detect in the hero something of the
inner self of the author, and to find that self better and sounder
than the shallow prodigal who caught the public eye. The gloomy
colonel, in spite of his strict loyalty, is clearly aware of defects
in his king. The rebel Lithuanians are meant for Scots, of about
the year 1639. The rebels having been informed that the king
cannot be unjust to them where there's so little to be had,' their
leader Almerine replies, “Where there is least, there's liberty. '
Suckling's style perceptibly strengthens in the play. The fine
6
## p. 239 (#257) ############################################
Suckling
Marmion.
Carlell
239
a
things are less obviously 'stuck in. ' Sententious force, by which
his political experience receives apt expression, is added to genuine
poetic vigour, Brennoralt is left alive, his rival and both the
heroines being dead. The false Caroline ideal of tragicomedy
prevents the solution of suicide demanded by the tone of the
play. But the melancholy, disillusioned character of Brennoralt,
who points forward to Byron, rather than backward to Marston,
may help to explain Suckling's own suicide, which seems very incon-
sistent with the rest of his career. The versification is spasmodic
and formless. A blank verse line, here and there, suggests to us
what the metre is supposed to be, and, occasionally, such a line as
‘Oh! it is wisdom and great thrift to die ! ' proves that Suckling
had it in him to write blank verse. In all his plays, he has a
trick of appropriating Shakespearean phrases and lines, and, in
The Goblins, the courtship of Orsabrin and Reginella is copied
unblushingly from the courtship scenes in The Tempest. Although
Shakespeare's work is weakened, Suckling's courtship scenes are
the prettiest scenes in his play, and his hero Orsabrin is a brave
spirit of true heroic strain.
A friend and companion in arms of Suckling, who died before
him in 1639, was Shackerley Marmion, author of the considerable
poem Cupid and Psyche. He produced three comedies before his
poem, not, as we should expect, in the romantic vein, but all of
them rather thin imitations of Jonson. The Antiquary is the
best of these. Veterano, from whose pursuits the play is named,
is an original conception ; but the author fails to give him life,
lacking the capacity to use the opportunity with which he has
provided himself.
In conclusion, we may rapidly enumerate among later writers
of the Jacobean age those dramatists who are important only
because they initiated the type of play which, in its full develop-
ment in the Restoration period, came to be known as the 'heroic
drama. ' In this connection, the insipid and tedious tragicomedies
of Lodowick Carlell have importance. Carlell is said to have
come from the stock which afterwards produced Thomas Carlyle.
He was a Scot, born in 1602, who came to court to make his for-
tune and rose to the position of keeper of the forest at Richmond.
Of his plays, which began in 1629, four tragicomedies remain, two
of which are in two parts. They are taken from contemporary
romances, Spanish or French. French romance, as written by
.
D'Urfé and Mlle de Scudéry, was characterised by a refinement
of sentiment which cut it off from real life and made it vapid
and extravagant. In our own drama, the romance of Fletcher
## p. 240 (#258) ############################################
240 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
shows a tendency to exaggeration; the dramatic thrill ceases
to represent reality; it begins to have a note of hysteria, and to
enjoy its own deliciousness; emotion is dwelt upon, sentiment is
refined, till love, honour and friendship are taken altogether out of
the world of reality. Queen Henrietta Maria's French tastes and
upbringing added the example of French romance to tendencies
already prevailing in England, and rendered the influence of the
court upon the drama merely enervating. Fleay says that Carlell's
plays ‘show what rubbish was palatable to Charles and Henrietta. '
The peculiar extravagance of romantic sentiment which these plays
exhibit goes along with a looseness and incoherence of blank verse
very accurately described by the same critic as 'a riot of hybrid
iambic. ' Dryden's use of rime was almost needed to bring back some
form into this chaos. The plays of Henry Glapthorne are noticeable
from this point of view. His three comedies, at their worst, sink as
low as Cartwright and, at their best, touch the level of Mayne or
Nabbes; but his more serious work, consisting of The Ladies Privi-
ledge, Argalus and Parthenia and Albertus Wallenstein, approaches
more nearly to literature than any of the parallel efforts of Carlell,
Mayne, Cartwright, or Thomas Killigrew. The first of these plays,
which ends as a comedy, belongs to the type of tragicomedy in
which extravagant sentiment insists upon submitting itself to
absurd tasks in the effort to prove its heroism. The second is
a pastoral, also conforming to the tragicomedy type ; and the third
is history treated on the same lines. The plays, therefore, illustrate
the enervating and disintegrating effect of heroic sentiment on all
the chief forms of English drama. But it is William D'Avenant
whose work best enables us to observe the transition to the heroic
drama of Dryden. His first two plays were tragedies in Fletcher's
grimmest style, dated 1626 and 1627, and these were followed by two
able comedies which enjoyed considerable popularity. After 1630,
illness incapacitated him for several years; and, when he resumes
work as a dramatist, his style has altered, and four plays, Love and
Honour, 1634, The Platonick Lovers, 1635, The Fair Favourite,
1638, and The Unfortunate Lover, 1638, show him under French
influences and as the leading exponent of the cult of platonic love,
of which queen Henrietta herself was the patron. The Platonick
Lovers is a budget of speeches and disputations on this unreal
and undramatic theme; it is curious to the student of manners,
but futile as literature. D'Avenant lived to revive the theatre
shortly before the Restoration, and to contribute to its literature
after that date. He will, therefore, receive some further notice
in a later volume.
## p. 241 (#259) ############################################
CHAPTER X
THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
WHEN Elizabeth came to the throne, she found attached to
the court not only musicians and minstrels, but eight players of
interludes. This body had been a permanent part of the court
establishment for some reigns; and, in the new theatrical activity
of Elizabeth's reign, it was supplanted by other bodies, but
not dissolved. It accompanied her occasionally on her pro-
gresses, and only gradually died out. Companies of such players
had long been attached to the households of men of wealth and
position, whose 'livery' or badge they wore on their sleeves.
A statement in Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612) may be
taken to mean that some kind of royal licence was considered
necessary or advisable by these companies, so far back as the
reign of Henry VIII.
In many cases, these companies supported themselves by
playing before the public in various parts of the country. The
practice seems to have been for players, on coming to a town,
first to attend the mayor, to inform him whose servants they were
and to receive his licence for public playing. If the mayor liked
the company or wished to honour their master, he would pay them
a sum (which the entrance money charged to the public would
supplement') to give a first performance before the corporation, to
which the public were admitted. Several cases are on record
where players received a fee, though they were forbidden by the
town's bylaws or otherwise to give a performance. Travelling
players appeared frequently, also, at private houses, at weddings
and on other festival occasions; and, occasionally, even in
churches. At Exeter, Yarmouth and Worcester, there seem to
have been regular playhouses ; at other times, the actors played
1 Murray, John Tucker, ‘English Dramatic Companies in the towns outside of
London, 1550-1600,' Modern Philology, vol. 11, p. 539.
E. L. VI.
16
6
CH. X.
## p. 242 (#260) ############################################
242
The Elizabethan Theatre
6
at the guildhall, or in an innyard. Such incidents as the remon-
strance issued by the privy council to the lord president of the
north in 1556, touching the seditious plays acted by 'certain lewd
persons naming themselves to be the servants of Sir Frances
Lake,' suggest that some, at least, of the companies attached to
great houses had received no recognition or licence from the
crown; while 'common players of interludes,' orders for whose
regulation or arrest were occasionally issued, did not belong, either
in fact or in name, to any nobleman's establishment. In addition
to companies bearing the names of patrons, there were still in
existence a large number of wandering troupes of jugglers and
players, descendants of the old minstrels, who owned no kind of
patronage. Certain municipal corporations had their band of
players; and, in Cornwall and elsewhere, local associations of
amateurs still met to perform town or village plays and pageants
which the reformation had shorn of their old glory. The com-
petition of travelling companies was, perhaps, as important an
element in the decadence of these local bodies as was the hostility
of the puritans.
A few months after her accession, Elizabeth issued a proclama-
tion providing that no interlude should be played without being
notified beforehand and licensed by the mayor or chief officer of
a town, or, in the country, by lieutenants or two local justices
of the peace. And, in 1572, the question of these unattached
companies was finally settled by a law providing that common
players in interludes not belonging to a baron or honourable
personage of greater degree, or not having a licence from two
justices of the peace, should be deemed rogues and vagabonds.
This, practically, is the close of the history—so far as their influence
on the progress of the drama is concerned- of any theatrical
bodies except those definitely under patronage. The early part of
Elizabeth's reign saw not only the triumph of the professional
actor over the amateur, but the supplanting of the old player of
interludes by the better equipped companies then newly formed
by nobles anxious to please their sovereign.
In the city of London, jurisdiction over public theatricals
rested, under the proclamation of 1559, in the mayor and cor-
poration, steady foes of the drama. The decay of the feudal
system under the Tudors had increased the importance not only of
the immediate neighbourhood of the court, but of the capital ; and
London was now the centre of theatrical activity. Elizabeth's own
love of the play tended to the same result; and the privy council,
## p. 243 (#261) ############################################
Grounds of Objection
243
on the whole, supported her in defending the acted drama against
the attacks of the city government. The difference between court
and city was the cause of many disputes and much uncertainty,
as is shown at length in a later chapter of this volume, where
it is also related how an unforeseen result of the city's opposition
was the enormous stimulus given to theatrical art by the building
of playhouses outside the common council's jurisdiction but within
easy reach of the citizens of London.
The quarrel' was due to other causes besides the religious
difference, and the inevitable conflict between the feudal privilege
from which companies drew their origin, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the rights of the corporation, which meant the growing
importance of the middle class. A very reasonable objection was
advanced against the overcrowding of narrow streets by people
riding or, later, driving to the playhouses, and by the concourse of
loafers and beggars; furthermore, apprentices and others were
tempted to play truant and occasional tumults or crimes resulted
from the massing of numbers of people in holiday mood. A
theatrical performance, like the performance of a miracle-play in
earlier times, meant a procession through the streets with drums
and trumpets. It would not be fair, however, to ascribe to plays
alone all the disturbances which are on record. Such incidents as
those which took place outside the Theater in 1584, when 'one
Browne, a serving man in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe,' attacked
an apprentice with a sword, were due rather to the fact that the
neighbourhood of this house was the 'ordinary place for all maister-
les men and vagabond persons. . . to meet together and to recreate
themselfes. ' The gravest cause for the corporation's objection to
plays a cause which the privy council readily supported them in
avoiding—was, however, the recurrence of the plague, to the grievous
and prolonged visitations of which full reference is made in the
chapter discussing the conflicts between puritanism and the stage*.
But, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, every year
was a plague year, and, besides 1582—3, 1558, 1586, 1593, 1603,
1613, 1625 and 1636 were very bad plague years. It was important
to check the spread of infection by preventing the gathering of
crowds, and plays were forbidden whenever it seemed desirable.
Early in the reign of James I, all performances were prohibited
· See post, chap. xiv.
· For an interesting suggestion as to the influence of the Blackfriars playhouse in
and after the year 1597, see Wallace, C. W. , Children of the Chapel, chap. XII.
* Remembrancia, vol. 11, p. 103.
* See post, chap. XIV.
16_2
## p. 244 (#262) ############################################
244
The Elizabethan Theatre
when the number of deaths a week reached 30; and, in or about
1619, 40 was fixed as the limiting number'. This frequently en-
tailed the closing of places of public performance during the whole
of the summer and autumn, when companies sometimes 'broke,
sometimes went on tour in England and sometimes travelled
abroad. The history of these travels is well worth study, but lies
outside the scope of this work.
In the conflict between the drama and the corporation, the
weight of Elizabeth herself was thrown entirely on the side of the
drama. The list of performances at court shows that, while masques
were frequently performed by amateurs at the beginning of her
reign, their place was almost entirely taken later by the per-
formances of professional actors whom her patronage helped to
bring to efficiency. The stock excuse offered by the privy council
for contravention of the prohibitive regulations of the city authori-
ties is that players must be allowed full opportunities of practising
their art in order that they may exercise it fitly before the queen,
during the Christmas holidays or at Shrovetide—the great seasons
of performances at court. In 1583, the queen, at the suggestion
of Walsingham, and probably as a countermove to a decision of
the common council, had her own company selected from the best
actors of the day; and every attempt was made to regard public
performances as mere rehearsals for those at court. It is easily
possible to make too much of the pretext, which, doubtless, was
convenient at the time. The chance of a play being awarded a
place among the few to be performed at court would scarcely have
sufficed to encourage playwrights to produce work of the quantity
or the character left by Elizabethan dramatists. Occasional state
performances, rewarded with a small fee, could not be prize enough
to keep large numbers of men working hard at acting, and at
nothing else, all the year round; and players grew well-to-do and
respectable, not because they played now and then at court, but
because court favour enabled them to meet the ardent desire for
theatrical performances which had been largely thwarted in pre-
vious troubled reigns, but which, when it could be indulged, to a
great extent supplanted the love of athletic or acrobatic exhibi-
tions that had had to suffice for earlier times. Such exhibitions
still survived; but the drama either swept them into its own
a
i Greg's Henslowe's Diary, vol. 11, p. 145.
? See Cohn, A. , Shakespeare in Germany and. The English Comedians in Germany,'
by Harris, C. , in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, N. S.
Vol. xv, No.
critics have been pleased to decide that Brome describes life from
the groom's point of view, and have ascribed his coarseness to bis
want of education and humble origin. The truer explanation is
1 Epigram ci.
? This parallel is noted in Faust's dissertation, Richard Brome, Halle, 1887, p. 52.
E. L. VI. CH, IX.
15
## p. 226 (#244) ############################################
226 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
that he uses Jonson's manner without Jonson's full-blooded,
massive humanity, without his satiric intensity, without his intel-
lectual power; so that the Jonsonian scenes in Brome, his
numerous efforts to describe the humours of London life, repel
or tire the reader.
Fifteen of Brome's plays have come down to us. Four of these
were published in quarto in Brome's lifetime ; five were printed
together, in 1653, shortly after his death ; five more in 1659; and
one other, in quarto, in 1657. The plays have been conveniently
classed under the headings of comedies of manners, romantic
comedies and romantic dramas of intrigue. These divisions ex-
hibit Brome's debt to Jonson, for the first class is much the
largest, including nine plays? . But these nine plays are not purely
Jonsonian. The Northern Lasse is the earliest of the extant
plays. It was printed in 1632 and, again, in 1635 and in 1663. It
was the most popular of Brome's plays and definitely made his
reputation as a writer. It is full of humours, which fill up the
scenes of an ingenious plot; but its popularity was mainly due
to the romantic note struck in the character of the northern lass
herself. The modern reader finds it hard to detect the charm of
Constance; she is very thinly and imperfectly drawn, and her
‘northern’ speech is clumsy ; but she pleased John Ford and
Thomas Dekker. It would appear that the seventeenth century
found in her some faint anticipation of the charm of the Scottish
heroines of The Waverley Novels. Brome did not get this romantic
note from Jonson, and the six romantic plays suggest to us that it
was more natural to him than Jonson's hard, intellectual satire,
and that he would have done better work if he had used it oftener.
But the nine plays of Jonsonian humour and plot have certain
merits. Brome always does his best. He works without enthusiasm,
but steadily and conscientiously, and, as pieces of stagecraft, the
plays are never contemptible. As a picture of the London of the
period, they are full of interest and value. If their outlook were
broader, if they depicted not only the vices and follies of life, but,
also, its virtues and amenities, they would be read with eagerness,
but it is not fair to blame Brome only for this defect. It is the
weakness of the satiric method of Jonson that it tends continually
to describe only what it can scourge, so that its world gets uglier
and uglier. Brome's temperament fitted him for a kindlier type
· The Northern Lasse, The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, Covent Garden Weeded,
The New Academy or The New Exchange, The Damoiselle, The Court Beggar, The
Madd Couple well matcht, The City Witt.
## p. 227 (#245) ############################################
Brome's Sparagus Garden
227
of comedy, and there are many indications in his plays that he
would have produced better work under a gentler master than
Jonson Jonson's satire is often mitigated by the introduction
of a purely comic idea, which is not vicious or even eccentric, but
merely whimsical, such as Morose's hatred of noise. Brome shows
a special aptitude in copying his master in this respect, and his
touch is lighter. Jonson is sometimes over-ingenious and his
workmanship heavy-handed. The Antipodes is Brome's best
effort in this kind.
Among the less interesting of the comedies of manners
which may be regarded as fairly representative of Brome's usual
work, The Sparagus Garden, acted 1635, takes its title from
the custom of going to eat asparagus in a garden where it
was grown. Such places were haunts of disreputable people of
both sexes, and the 'humours' of the garden are coarse though
sketched with much vivacity and some wit. They bulk so largely
in the play that it is justly classed as a comedy of manners.
The scenes in which Timothy Hoyden, a yeoman's son from the
country, is shown the way to become a fine gentleman, are ex-
cellent comedy ; they are whimsical as well as witty, and written
with a genuine gaiety. When Brome's humours have this gaiety
and lightness of touch, we are reminded of another master than
Jonson ; we are conscious of something of the spirit of Dekker.
Among the commendatory verses prefixed to The Northern Lasse
are some characteristic lines 'To my Sonne Broom and his Lasse,'
by Thomas Dekker. How much friendship these words imply we
have no means of discovering ; but Brome is more truly a 'son' of
Dekker than of Jonson. His best and happiest work is in the
vein of Dekker. But the scenes of our play are not all in the
asparagus garden. The first two suggest a quiet domestic drama
a
which might turn to tragedy or comedy, but would not harmonise
properly with the garden humours. Two young men decide to
attempt the reconcilement of two angry old men by proposing a
match between the son of one of them and the adopted daughter
of the other. The first scene describes the attempt and its failure.
In the second scene, the two friends try to console the son for
their failure and resolve to help him. Brome's verse rises to an
almost passionate height, as Gilbert insists that
Love is wit itself,
And through a thousand lots will find a way
To his desired end.
Both these scenes describe common life simply and naturally, and
15—2
## p. 228 (#246) ############################################
228 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
with a touch of idealism not very common in Brome, who recants
a
his usual creed when he confesses:
Poets they are the life and death of things.
The play is a mine of allusions and references to the life of old
London. From this point of view, Brome will always be worth
reading.
The brightest and pleasantest of Brome's comedies of manners
is The City Witt, or The Woman wears the Breeches. It is the
best, just because it most successfully keeps in one key. Fleay
contends that it is the earliest of the extant dramas, and says:
* Dekker's influence is more clearly visible in it than in the other
plays. ' He means that the gaiety and lightness of touch which we
have noted as Dekker's rather than Jonson's are very noticeable
in the play. But the prologue, composed by Brome for a revival
of the play, states that it 'past with good applause in former
times'; adding that
It was written when
It bore just judgment and the seal of Ben.
We must suppose, therefore, that Dekker's influence was sub-
ordinate to Jonson's, and that Brome himself was unconscious of
the force of the former. Its strength was due to its suitability to
Brome's temperament. The lines prefixed to The Northern Lasse
were the last we have from Dekker's pen; he, probably, died
before the end of 1632.
In his plots, Brome is apt to be over-ingenious, so that the
action of his plays is either obscure or too episodical. It is the
merit of The City Witt that its episodes are all held together by
one central idea which is clear and simple, so that the play is well-
knit and easily keeps the attention of the spectator to the end.
A young citizen, Mr Crasy, by his kindness and easy-going dis-
position, has involved himself in many difficulties, and discovers
that his fairweather friends all fall away when he asks for their
help. He disappears, therefore, and returns disguised, with the
object of bringing his false friends to book for their meanness.
The play is a lively and laughable protest against worship of rank
and money, and has in it a true breath of that unworldly spirit
which is conspicuous in Dekker's best plays. The protest is all
the more effective as coming from the tradesman's level. In that
age, the development of trade brought with it new temptations.
Dishonest speculation and the making of fortunes by all sorts of
trickery were becoming common. At the same time, the new
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
Brome's City Witt
229
devices by which bankruptcy was made profitable were scorned
by oldfashioned tradesmen. Crasy declares
I must take nimble hold upon occasion
Or lie for ever in the bankrupt ditch
Where no man lends a hand to draw one out.
I will leap over it or fall bravely in't,
Scorning the bridge of baseness, composition,
Which doth infect a city like the plague,
And teach men knavery that were never born to 't.
His troubles are largely due to the odious malice of his mother-
in-law, Mistress Pyannet Sneakup, who illustrates the evil effect
upon tradesmen's wives of the degenerate times. Her son-in-law
asks gently, “May not an honest man—' when he is taken up by
the irate lady-
Honest man! Who the devil wished thee to be an honest man? Here's my
worshipfal husband, Mr Sneakup, that from a grasier is come to be a Justice of
Peace: and, what, as an honest man? He grew to be able to give nine
hundred pound with my daughter; and what, by honesty? Mr Sneakup and
I are come up to live i’ th City, and here we have lyen these three years;
and, what? for honesty? Honesty! What should the City do with honesty,
when 'tis enough to undoe a whole Corporation? Why are your wares
gumm’d; your shops dark; your prices writ in strange characters? what, for
honesty?
This 'woman of an eternal tongue, this creature of an ever-
lasting noise' is the most considerable character in the piece ;
but Sarpego is equally good in another direction. We have already
touched upon him. His sudden scraps of Latin are very comical-
O Dii! Quem video? Nonne Mr Sneakup? '-and one wonders
how far they were followed by the audience. Some of his para-
phrases are very happy—“Tempora mutantur; the town's ours
again'; 'Lupus in fabula ; the devil's in the woman's tongue’;
'Sic transit gloria mundi ; the learned is coney-caught. ' The
briskness and bustle of the play are maintained to the end, and,
if it were not for the absence of Mrs Tryman from the list of
dramatis personae, the dénouement would be a complete surprise.
Crasy's honesty, his ‘unsuspicious freeness' and 'most easy good-
ness' flavour the play and convince us that Brome, with all his
s
grossness, was unsophisticated.
By way of proving this point more fully and carrying further
the comparison of Brome with Dekker, we may next consider
Brome's masterpiece, A Joviall Crew, Or, The Merry Beggars.
It was the latest play written by Brome, being produced in 1641
and continuing on the stage till it came to be the very last play
acted before parliament closed the theatres in 1642—'it had the
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
luck to tumble last of all in the Epidemicall ruin of the Scene! '
In his prologue, Brome notes that his title promises mirth,
Which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days;
but, since he finds that plays are now liked which tediously and
tearfully relate lovers' distresses, up to the point at which
some impossibility
Concludes all strife and makes a comedy,
he, therefore, composes a kind of parody on this popular style, in
which he hopes the sadness will not make any woman weep. This
interesting account of the genesis of the play would hardly have
been surmised by the critic without the author's help. The finest
thing in the play, and, indeed, in all Brome's writings, is the
description of the steward Springlove's annual hunger for the
green grass and the careless content of the wandering beggar.
You kept a swallow in a cage that while.
I cannot, Sir, endure another summer
In that restraint with life: 'twas then my torment
But now my death.
We have to wait till the days of George Borrow and R. L. Steven-
son for a repetition of Brome's conception of the joy and glory of
vagabondage. The sketch of the beggars' content is combined
with a very natural picture of the kind and compassionate master
and squire. There is a touch of religious feeling in the picture of
Oldrents's kindness of heart, and his compassion for the poor and
unfortunate; the only drawback to the charm of the play is the
occasional coarseness of the realism in the description of the
jovial crew of beggars. The first act of this play is work of high
and rare merit. Brome's English is admirably plain, unaffected
and direct; his blank verse is unadorned, but clear and natural,
and he reaps the reward of his simplicity. To the student of
decadent romanticism, this play has the perfection of a cup of
cold water in a dry and thirsty land.
A Jovialt Crew is classed among Brome's romantic dramas
of intriguel; and two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The
Queenes Exchange, have been reckoned as pure romantic dramas.
This division, of course, is merely intended to meet the require-
ment of convenience. Of the six romantic plays, the last two
mentioned and The Love-sick Court best illustrate Brome's ideas
of romance and poetry, and thus call for some notice. Brome's
modest conception of himself as a playwright and not an author
1 With three others, The Love-sick Court, The Novella and The English Moor.
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
Brome's Romantic Dramas
231
or poet—his disinclination to indulge in imaginative effort-stamps
him as out of sympathy with the fashionable taste for lengthy
imaginative sentiment. He had a real sense of artistic form, and
recoiled not only from the sentimentality, but from the incoherence,
both in plan and metre, of the later Caroline drama. We have
already quoted his account of the composition of A Joviall Crew.
In the prologue to The Antipodes, he complains that 'opinion
cares only for plays that
carry state,
In scene magnificent and language high,
And cloathes worth all the rest, except the action.
The taste of the journeyman playwright, on this head, was certainly
far sounder than that of the king and his court. Yet Brome did
essay romantic drama, and with very interesting results. The
Love-sick Court was, probably, the earliest of the batch; The
Queenes Exchange dates from about 1632, and The Queen and
Concubine from after 1635. In these plays we see Brome manfully
striving to write as a poet and to achieve a good romantic play.
In the first two, he is often at a loss; his art fails him, and only
fumbling work is produced; but The Queen and Concubine marks
a very definite advance, and shows that Brome might have pro-
duced excellent romantic work if his public had asked for it
Shakespeare, rather than Fletcher, is the master from whom
Brome takes his suggestions, and the good queen Eulalia, whose
trials and virtues are touchingly described, is a blend of the
patient Grissill of Dekker and queen Katharine in Henry VIII,
There are two fine songs in the play; one of them—What if a
day, or a month, or a year’-possessing the true Elizabethan
charm of Campion or Dekker. The shining merit of Brome in
these plays, for all their feeble workmanship, is his capacity for
the unsophisticated and direct expression of emotion. We escape
from inflated sentiment and return to a simplicity of moral feeling
which belongs to the earlier days of the drama. Brome's humility
was described above as almost servile; and the suggestion was
made that his unaffected modesty is reflected in the restraint and
the naturalness of his art. Like Day, Brome proves his manliness
when he falls on evil days. He wrote his dedication of A Joviall
Crew, when it was printed in 1652, a few months before his death,
' in these anti-ingenious Times,' when the theatres had been closed
for ten years. Since the Times conspire to make us all Beggars,'
he says, 'let us make ourselves merry. That is what his play
drives at. ' He does not Ainch in his extremity: 'I am poor and
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
proud,' he tells us; ‘you know, Sir, I am old and cannot cringe. '
This is his last word.
Among Jonson's most eager admirers was Thomas Randolph;
but he was not, like Field and Brome, a pupil of the old poet.
He was a king's scholar of Westminster school, who became a
fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. At the end of 1629, a year
of plague broke up the schools at Cambridge, and Randolph made
Jonson's acquaintance during his stay in London; he was probably
adopted as a 'son' before he returned to Cambridge. He had written
by this time his two earliest ‘shews-Aristippus and The Conceited
Pedler, which were printed in 1630. These lively sketches recall
that early type of dramatic performance, the clown's jig, in which
a famous comedian, such as Tarlton, poured forth an improvisation
of his own, which was a mixture of prose, verse and antics. But
it is Randolph's command of racy English, his high spirits and his
exuberant wit that suggest this comparison. His pieces belong to
that large body of 'college drama' which is described in another
chapter? Aristippus, or, The Joviall Philosopher is a dispute on
the rival merits of ale and sack. All the technical terms of Aris-
totle's logic are crowded into a hilarious laudation of sack and a
decrying of malt liquor, which never flags. Randolph's classical
and scholastical learning supplies matter for a cataract of ingenious
puns and word play, and, therefore, his transference of Aristotelian
metaphysic into English farce is to be contrasted with, rather than
compared to, Robert Browning's profuse employment of the details
of Attic drama in his Aristophanes' Apology. Both poets, while
crammed with learning, have no pedantry in their nature. The
marvellous agility of some of the riming in Aristippus is another
point of contact with Browning's poetry.
In March 1632, king Charles visited Cambridge, and the
Trinity men acted before him The Jealous Lovers, written for
the occasion. It is Randolph's only failure. Its dramatic character
is so bad that the ability of the writing cannot redeem it. After
the king's visit, Randolph left Cambridge for London, 'called thence
to keep the flock of Corydon. ' In An Eglogue to Mr Johnson, he
describes how he had relished his Aristotelian studies—those deep
and learned layes' which 'the shepherd of Stagira used to sing';
but now he has to keep another's flock,' and not he but 'the Master
shears the sheep. ' Fleay's interpretation of this passage is that
Randolph was manager of prince Charles's men acting at Salisbury
? See post, chap. XII, where more is said about The Jealous Lovers.
· I. . . Ben Jonson.
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Thomas Randolph
233
court in 1632 and 1633. At Salisbury court theatre, Fleay thinks.
The Muses Looking-Glasse was presented towards the end of 1632.
(It was not printed till 1638, when the writer was dead. ) This
theory accords very well with the character of Randolph's master-
piece, and explains the genesis of this new and distinct type of
dramatic art. It is just such a work as the writer of Aristippus
might be expected to produce if he were called upon to expand
his short shew' into something that could compete in length,
interest and dignity with the plays of a better class. Randolph's
creative capacity had been stimulated to this effort by close con-
tact with the drama of the London stage; but the Aristotelian
student is still in evidence. The main part of the piece consists
of a series of fifteen scenes, in which the vices of Aristotle's Ethics
appear in couples or singly and, in accordance with the theory
of comedy put forward in the first act of the piece, hold up a
mirror in which spectators may note their own defects; this is
how comedies ‘laugh' people 'into wit and virtue. ' These scenes,
therefore, are planned like the colloquies' of Day's Parliament of
Bees; but the contrast is great between Day's delicate rimes and
Randolph's masculine and emphatic blank verse, which only
occasionally uses the heroic couplet. Kolax, the flatterer, remains
on all the time because 'Any vice yields work for flattery. In
these strongly written scenes, the influence of Jonson's satiric
plays is very obvious. In act I, there is an excellent scene in
which Comedy, Tragedy, Mime and Satire dispute together and
expound their functions according to classic theory. Before the
vices come in, we have a masque,
a rude dance,
Presented by the seven deadly sing.
In act v, after Mediocrity, the mother of virtues, has expounded
in a bundred lines Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, she presents a
masque of her daughters, 'wherein all the Vertues dance together. '
The invention of all this is both copious and happy. The author
describes his work as containing
No plot at all, but a meer Olla Podrida,
A medley of ill plac'd and worse penned Humours,
borrowed from the man
to whom he owes
All the poor skill he has, great Aristotle.
Randolph is pleasantly unconscious that the creative and artistic
faculty is too often, as in Jonson's case, smothered, rather than
nourished, by theory, however sound. But we have still to mention
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
the most delightful feature of the play. The 'moralising 'scenes
are presented before Bird, a feather-man, and Mistress Flowerdew,
wife to a Haberdasher of Small Wares. ' These worthies bring
feathers and pins and looking glasses to sell to the players; but
they belong to the Sanctified Fraternity of Black-Fryers': that is
to say, they are puritans. This device is not new. Beaumont used
it admirably in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But Randolph
employs it to lighten the didactic tendency of his main scenes;
moreover, his two puritans are to be converted to the theory of
comedy put forward in the play; they are, therefore, described
with more good humour, with more restraint and naturalness,
than is usual in Elizabethan comedy. When the virtues are to be
presented, Bird hopes there are no 'cardinal vertues'-
I hate a vertue
That will be made a Cardinal,
-he adds that even ‘Bishop vertues are unwarrantable,' and,
generally,
Vertnes in Orders are unsanctified.
He is disturbed when the virtues dance:
O vile, absurd, Maypole-Maid-Marian Vertue!
Yet, as the play goes on, Mistress Flowerdew begins to relent:
I have picked
Out of the garden of this play a good
And wholesome salad of instruction.
And, finally, both are mollified Bird says
.
I'll teach devotion now a milder temper,
while Mistress Flowerdew admits,
I might have gone to hell the narrow way.
We have called The Muses Looking-Glasse Randolph's masterpiece,
though this title might be claimed for his fine pastoral Amyntas.
But the later production has to compete with even finer work
by Jonson and Fletcher, while the former is unique of its kind.
Randolph died in 1635, at the age of twenty-nine; and he is to be
counted among those poets whose achievement, considerable as it is,
is an earnest only of what his matured powers might have given us.
It remains to attempt a hurried survey of the lesser dramatists
of the end of the age, who were writing from the later years of
James until the closing of the theatres. They exhibit very clearly
the exhaustion of the great dramatic impulse which begins with
Marlowe and ends with Shirley and Brome. A tasteless and
featureless mediocrity or a pretentious extravagance are the
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
May. Davenport
235
characteristics of work which was ceasing to conform to type
and losing all sense of true dramatic form. On a first casual
inspection, the more meritorious of these plays seem better written
and more judiciously planned than much of the Elizabethan work
which has survived; but a closer study reveals the essential
insipidity of the later work, due, in the first place, to exhaustion
of the dramatic impulse, and, in the second, to the deterioration
of the audiences and the practical cessation of a demand for good
plays
Thomas May, the historian of the Long parliament, whose
character Clarendon and Marvell? unite in decrying, began his
literary career with two comedies, The Heir and The Old Couple,
written about 1620. The Heir is a Fletcherian tragicomedy; The
Old Couple, which Fleay thinks the earlier of the pair, a play of
Jonsonian intrigue and manners. After producing these plays, May
turned to the work by which he is best known-his translations of
the Georgics and of Lucan's Pharsalia.
Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq. ,'
and May was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius. Jonson's influence
and that of the classics would seem to have turned May to classical
drama, and he produced three tragedies, of which the first, Antigone,
the Theban Princess is dedicated to Endymion Porter, and may
have been written before 1626. Fleay has suggested that May
is the author of the anonymous Nero, printed 1624. We are to
suppose that the fire and energy of this fine play were the result
of May's first study of Tacitus, perhaps before he had been too
much obsessed by Jonson's influence and method. But May's
study of Tacitus would seem to have been later than 1624. His
Cleopatra is dated 1626, and Julia Agrippina 1628. May's
imagination is pedestrian; his style is regular and painstaking.
Nero is the work of a scholar whose imagination is fiery and
strong, and who contrives to crowd into his play a great deal
of the excitement, the incident and the underlying unity of the
Roman historian's picture of the tyrant. May's first two plays
are meritorious; there is care and correctness in the blank verse,
and much careful invention in the plot and the conception of the
characters; but his classical plays are no better and no worse
than his continuation of Pharsalia. They are pale reflections of
Jonson's work in Sejanus and Catiline. May is nothing more than
a 'son' of Ben, who copied his adoptive father's least inspired work.
Meritorious, like May's, was the work of Robert Davenport,
1 Most servile wit and mercenary pen. '
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
whose activity begins in 1624. Three of his plays survive, two
comedies and a tragedy. The tragedy is a careful rewriting of
Munday and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington!
Chettle's drama is stripped of its crudities and banalities ; so
far as may be, the horrible is replaced by the pathetic, and a
considerable adornment of poetic diction and imagery is added.
The versification, of course, is brought up to date and irregularities
disappear. The old play has a deeper significance than that which
it expresses: we read it with impatience; but we remember it with
interest, because of its suggestion of horror and gloom. Davenport,
on the other hand, we read with respect for his industry, and we
forget him at once. It is a plausible conjecture that his comedies
were remodellings of older material; so that all his work looks
backward. But The City-Night-Cap and A New Tricke to Cheat
the Divell are, both of them, interesting and able comedies, like
the two plays of May which we have just considered. The former
dates from 1624. As this play takes its main story from “The
Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, there can be nothing sur-
prising in the fact that, in some respects, it is unpleasant; indeed,
its comic part is intolerable; but, on the romantic side, it has merit
It contains echoes of Measure for Measure, of Cymbeline and of
A Winter's Tale; it is highminded, with some grace of diction
and force of eloquence, but dramatically unreasonable and wrong.
The other play is slighter and more humorous, and, on the whole,
more agreeable. Two of Davenport's friends were players; of his
circumstances nothing is known.
Thomas Nabbes seems to have belonged to the same social
level as Davenport, and, like him, to have produced his tragedy,
Hannibal and Scipio, by revising an older play; he was a friend
of Richard Brome. His Microcosmus is a morality play which he
calls a masque. His best work is to be found in his three comedies,
Covent-Garden, 1632, Totenham-Court, 1633, and The Bride, 1638.
Nabbes breaks away from the prevailing coarse type of comedy,
intended to hit the taste of the man about town, and takes pains
and pleasure in representing people of virtuous life and con-
versation. With just a little more distinction and force, both in
his writing and in his characterisation, Nabbes would have risen
above the ranks of third-rate dramatists. The Bride is a comedy
of considerable effectiveness, distinguished among the plays of its
time by the goodness and purity to be found in its men and women.
His heroes and heroines are amiable and sincere; somewhat colour-
1 Cf. ante, vol. V, chap. XIII,
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
>
coarse.
Cartwright. Mayne 237
less when compared with stronger dramatic work; but without the
two diseases of the time, the convention of coarseness, and the
convention of fantastic sentiment
Two writers who were among the sons' of Ben and of great
repute in their day need not detain us long. William Cartwright
was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester. He was educated at
Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and rose to be the most
noted man in his university as a strenuous scholar, an admired
dramatist and a 'seraphical' preacher. His first play, probably, was
his comedy The Ordinary, produced about 1635. This was followed
by three tragicomedies, The Lady Errant, The Royall Slave and
The Siedge or Love's Convert. After taking holy orders in 1638, he
did not write any more plays. He died in 1642. His plays, therefore,
were probably composed hurriedly. They are essentially the work
of a man of parts, who writes for reputation without any true
respect either for his art or for himself. His comedy is a flashy
and vulgar imitation of Jonsonian 'humours,' as tedious as it is
His tragicomedies belong to the school of enervated
romance which pleased king Charles and was suited to the
French tastes of the queen. The Royall Slave was presented
before the king and queen at Oxford on 30 August 1636, by
the students of Christ Church, and, again, six months later, at
Hampton court, by the king's players. The students are said to
have acted best. Very probably, professionals found it difficult
to adapt themselves to the extravagant sentiment and preciosity
of Cartwright's style. Jonson's saying, 'my son Cartwright writes
all like a man,' suggests a directness of style and truth of inspira-
tion which are not found in Cartwright's plays.
Jasper Mayne, dramatist, translator and archdeacon, was a
Devonshire man, educated at Westminster school an Christ
Church, Oxford. Like his friend Cartwright, he was an admired
preacher. He produced a tragicomedy, The Amorous Warre,
and a comedy, The Citye Match, which was acted at Whitehall by
the king's command in 1639. It is a much better comedy than
Cartwright's, with plenty of life and movement in it, and, although
it has no moral elevation, it is without Cartwright's obscenity.
Mayne's most useful contribution to the literature of his country
was his translation of Lucian.
The tragicomedies of Cartwright and Mayne belong to the
group of romantic plays specially characteristic of the closing
years of the drama, written to please the court and the current
liking for inflated sentiment and fantastic emotion. But, before
1 Both Cartwright and Mayne contributed to Jonsonus Virbius.
## p. 238 (#256) ############################################
238 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
we deal summarily with these plays, a figure of some consequence
calls for a less perfunctory consideration.
In 1642, the year of the closing of the theatres, Sir John Suckling
poisoned himself in Paris. All his plays are not worth his handful
of incomparable lyrics; but they have some salt of genius in them
which entitles them to a place of their own among the work of
lesser dramatists. Aglaura, a tragedy of court intrigue, of which
the scene is supposed to be Persia, was acted in the winter of 1637,
when its literary qualities received less attention than the novelty
and magnificence of the scenery used and the dresses presented
by the author to the actors. King Charles is said to have
requested an alternative final act with a happy ending, which
Suckling afterwards wrote. Flecknoe saw the play when it was
revived at the Restoration, and his criticism, that it was 'full of
flowers, but rather stuck in than growing there,' applies to all
Suckling's dramatic work. He has imagination, fancy and wit,
but these faculties are not usually employed upon his plot and
his characters. The famous lyric, "Why so pale and wan, fond
lover ? ' occurs in the fourth act of Aglaura. The Goblins was
probably written next; it was acted in 1638, and is Suckling's
best play. His goblins are thieves who masquerade as devils, and
their pranks are mixed up with the feuds of two noble families
and a double love story. The so-called goblins administer justice
in the style of Robin Hood and his men in older plays. Suckling's
restless temperament expresses itself in the impossible rapidity
and abruptness of the action ; but the sprightliness of the play is
undeniable and its mixture of song and witty dialogues caught
Sheridan's attention, and, undoubtedly, influenced his style. His
lyric 'Here's to the maiden' is suggested by a catch in The
Goblins. Although The Goblins is Suckling's most satisfactory
performance, the tragedy Brennoralt is a work of more promise
and a more striking evidence of his poetic capacity. It did not
appear till 1846 ; but it had been printed in a shorter form in
1640 as The Discontented Colonell. The interest of Brennoralt
lies mainly in our seeming to detect in the hero something of the
inner self of the author, and to find that self better and sounder
than the shallow prodigal who caught the public eye. The gloomy
colonel, in spite of his strict loyalty, is clearly aware of defects
in his king. The rebel Lithuanians are meant for Scots, of about
the year 1639. The rebels having been informed that the king
cannot be unjust to them where there's so little to be had,' their
leader Almerine replies, “Where there is least, there's liberty. '
Suckling's style perceptibly strengthens in the play. The fine
6
## p. 239 (#257) ############################################
Suckling
Marmion.
Carlell
239
a
things are less obviously 'stuck in. ' Sententious force, by which
his political experience receives apt expression, is added to genuine
poetic vigour, Brennoralt is left alive, his rival and both the
heroines being dead. The false Caroline ideal of tragicomedy
prevents the solution of suicide demanded by the tone of the
play. But the melancholy, disillusioned character of Brennoralt,
who points forward to Byron, rather than backward to Marston,
may help to explain Suckling's own suicide, which seems very incon-
sistent with the rest of his career. The versification is spasmodic
and formless. A blank verse line, here and there, suggests to us
what the metre is supposed to be, and, occasionally, such a line as
‘Oh! it is wisdom and great thrift to die ! ' proves that Suckling
had it in him to write blank verse. In all his plays, he has a
trick of appropriating Shakespearean phrases and lines, and, in
The Goblins, the courtship of Orsabrin and Reginella is copied
unblushingly from the courtship scenes in The Tempest. Although
Shakespeare's work is weakened, Suckling's courtship scenes are
the prettiest scenes in his play, and his hero Orsabrin is a brave
spirit of true heroic strain.
A friend and companion in arms of Suckling, who died before
him in 1639, was Shackerley Marmion, author of the considerable
poem Cupid and Psyche. He produced three comedies before his
poem, not, as we should expect, in the romantic vein, but all of
them rather thin imitations of Jonson. The Antiquary is the
best of these. Veterano, from whose pursuits the play is named,
is an original conception ; but the author fails to give him life,
lacking the capacity to use the opportunity with which he has
provided himself.
In conclusion, we may rapidly enumerate among later writers
of the Jacobean age those dramatists who are important only
because they initiated the type of play which, in its full develop-
ment in the Restoration period, came to be known as the 'heroic
drama. ' In this connection, the insipid and tedious tragicomedies
of Lodowick Carlell have importance. Carlell is said to have
come from the stock which afterwards produced Thomas Carlyle.
He was a Scot, born in 1602, who came to court to make his for-
tune and rose to the position of keeper of the forest at Richmond.
Of his plays, which began in 1629, four tragicomedies remain, two
of which are in two parts. They are taken from contemporary
romances, Spanish or French. French romance, as written by
.
D'Urfé and Mlle de Scudéry, was characterised by a refinement
of sentiment which cut it off from real life and made it vapid
and extravagant. In our own drama, the romance of Fletcher
## p. 240 (#258) ############################################
240 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
shows a tendency to exaggeration; the dramatic thrill ceases
to represent reality; it begins to have a note of hysteria, and to
enjoy its own deliciousness; emotion is dwelt upon, sentiment is
refined, till love, honour and friendship are taken altogether out of
the world of reality. Queen Henrietta Maria's French tastes and
upbringing added the example of French romance to tendencies
already prevailing in England, and rendered the influence of the
court upon the drama merely enervating. Fleay says that Carlell's
plays ‘show what rubbish was palatable to Charles and Henrietta. '
The peculiar extravagance of romantic sentiment which these plays
exhibit goes along with a looseness and incoherence of blank verse
very accurately described by the same critic as 'a riot of hybrid
iambic. ' Dryden's use of rime was almost needed to bring back some
form into this chaos. The plays of Henry Glapthorne are noticeable
from this point of view. His three comedies, at their worst, sink as
low as Cartwright and, at their best, touch the level of Mayne or
Nabbes; but his more serious work, consisting of The Ladies Privi-
ledge, Argalus and Parthenia and Albertus Wallenstein, approaches
more nearly to literature than any of the parallel efforts of Carlell,
Mayne, Cartwright, or Thomas Killigrew. The first of these plays,
which ends as a comedy, belongs to the type of tragicomedy in
which extravagant sentiment insists upon submitting itself to
absurd tasks in the effort to prove its heroism. The second is
a pastoral, also conforming to the tragicomedy type ; and the third
is history treated on the same lines. The plays, therefore, illustrate
the enervating and disintegrating effect of heroic sentiment on all
the chief forms of English drama. But it is William D'Avenant
whose work best enables us to observe the transition to the heroic
drama of Dryden. His first two plays were tragedies in Fletcher's
grimmest style, dated 1626 and 1627, and these were followed by two
able comedies which enjoyed considerable popularity. After 1630,
illness incapacitated him for several years; and, when he resumes
work as a dramatist, his style has altered, and four plays, Love and
Honour, 1634, The Platonick Lovers, 1635, The Fair Favourite,
1638, and The Unfortunate Lover, 1638, show him under French
influences and as the leading exponent of the cult of platonic love,
of which queen Henrietta herself was the patron. The Platonick
Lovers is a budget of speeches and disputations on this unreal
and undramatic theme; it is curious to the student of manners,
but futile as literature. D'Avenant lived to revive the theatre
shortly before the Restoration, and to contribute to its literature
after that date. He will, therefore, receive some further notice
in a later volume.
## p. 241 (#259) ############################################
CHAPTER X
THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
WHEN Elizabeth came to the throne, she found attached to
the court not only musicians and minstrels, but eight players of
interludes. This body had been a permanent part of the court
establishment for some reigns; and, in the new theatrical activity
of Elizabeth's reign, it was supplanted by other bodies, but
not dissolved. It accompanied her occasionally on her pro-
gresses, and only gradually died out. Companies of such players
had long been attached to the households of men of wealth and
position, whose 'livery' or badge they wore on their sleeves.
A statement in Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612) may be
taken to mean that some kind of royal licence was considered
necessary or advisable by these companies, so far back as the
reign of Henry VIII.
In many cases, these companies supported themselves by
playing before the public in various parts of the country. The
practice seems to have been for players, on coming to a town,
first to attend the mayor, to inform him whose servants they were
and to receive his licence for public playing. If the mayor liked
the company or wished to honour their master, he would pay them
a sum (which the entrance money charged to the public would
supplement') to give a first performance before the corporation, to
which the public were admitted. Several cases are on record
where players received a fee, though they were forbidden by the
town's bylaws or otherwise to give a performance. Travelling
players appeared frequently, also, at private houses, at weddings
and on other festival occasions; and, occasionally, even in
churches. At Exeter, Yarmouth and Worcester, there seem to
have been regular playhouses ; at other times, the actors played
1 Murray, John Tucker, ‘English Dramatic Companies in the towns outside of
London, 1550-1600,' Modern Philology, vol. 11, p. 539.
E. L. VI.
16
6
CH. X.
## p. 242 (#260) ############################################
242
The Elizabethan Theatre
6
at the guildhall, or in an innyard. Such incidents as the remon-
strance issued by the privy council to the lord president of the
north in 1556, touching the seditious plays acted by 'certain lewd
persons naming themselves to be the servants of Sir Frances
Lake,' suggest that some, at least, of the companies attached to
great houses had received no recognition or licence from the
crown; while 'common players of interludes,' orders for whose
regulation or arrest were occasionally issued, did not belong, either
in fact or in name, to any nobleman's establishment. In addition
to companies bearing the names of patrons, there were still in
existence a large number of wandering troupes of jugglers and
players, descendants of the old minstrels, who owned no kind of
patronage. Certain municipal corporations had their band of
players; and, in Cornwall and elsewhere, local associations of
amateurs still met to perform town or village plays and pageants
which the reformation had shorn of their old glory. The com-
petition of travelling companies was, perhaps, as important an
element in the decadence of these local bodies as was the hostility
of the puritans.
A few months after her accession, Elizabeth issued a proclama-
tion providing that no interlude should be played without being
notified beforehand and licensed by the mayor or chief officer of
a town, or, in the country, by lieutenants or two local justices
of the peace. And, in 1572, the question of these unattached
companies was finally settled by a law providing that common
players in interludes not belonging to a baron or honourable
personage of greater degree, or not having a licence from two
justices of the peace, should be deemed rogues and vagabonds.
This, practically, is the close of the history—so far as their influence
on the progress of the drama is concerned- of any theatrical
bodies except those definitely under patronage. The early part of
Elizabeth's reign saw not only the triumph of the professional
actor over the amateur, but the supplanting of the old player of
interludes by the better equipped companies then newly formed
by nobles anxious to please their sovereign.
In the city of London, jurisdiction over public theatricals
rested, under the proclamation of 1559, in the mayor and cor-
poration, steady foes of the drama. The decay of the feudal
system under the Tudors had increased the importance not only of
the immediate neighbourhood of the court, but of the capital ; and
London was now the centre of theatrical activity. Elizabeth's own
love of the play tended to the same result; and the privy council,
## p. 243 (#261) ############################################
Grounds of Objection
243
on the whole, supported her in defending the acted drama against
the attacks of the city government. The difference between court
and city was the cause of many disputes and much uncertainty,
as is shown at length in a later chapter of this volume, where
it is also related how an unforeseen result of the city's opposition
was the enormous stimulus given to theatrical art by the building
of playhouses outside the common council's jurisdiction but within
easy reach of the citizens of London.
The quarrel' was due to other causes besides the religious
difference, and the inevitable conflict between the feudal privilege
from which companies drew their origin, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the rights of the corporation, which meant the growing
importance of the middle class. A very reasonable objection was
advanced against the overcrowding of narrow streets by people
riding or, later, driving to the playhouses, and by the concourse of
loafers and beggars; furthermore, apprentices and others were
tempted to play truant and occasional tumults or crimes resulted
from the massing of numbers of people in holiday mood. A
theatrical performance, like the performance of a miracle-play in
earlier times, meant a procession through the streets with drums
and trumpets. It would not be fair, however, to ascribe to plays
alone all the disturbances which are on record. Such incidents as
those which took place outside the Theater in 1584, when 'one
Browne, a serving man in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe,' attacked
an apprentice with a sword, were due rather to the fact that the
neighbourhood of this house was the 'ordinary place for all maister-
les men and vagabond persons. . . to meet together and to recreate
themselfes. ' The gravest cause for the corporation's objection to
plays a cause which the privy council readily supported them in
avoiding—was, however, the recurrence of the plague, to the grievous
and prolonged visitations of which full reference is made in the
chapter discussing the conflicts between puritanism and the stage*.
But, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, every year
was a plague year, and, besides 1582—3, 1558, 1586, 1593, 1603,
1613, 1625 and 1636 were very bad plague years. It was important
to check the spread of infection by preventing the gathering of
crowds, and plays were forbidden whenever it seemed desirable.
Early in the reign of James I, all performances were prohibited
· See post, chap. xiv.
· For an interesting suggestion as to the influence of the Blackfriars playhouse in
and after the year 1597, see Wallace, C. W. , Children of the Chapel, chap. XII.
* Remembrancia, vol. 11, p. 103.
* See post, chap. XIV.
16_2
## p. 244 (#262) ############################################
244
The Elizabethan Theatre
when the number of deaths a week reached 30; and, in or about
1619, 40 was fixed as the limiting number'. This frequently en-
tailed the closing of places of public performance during the whole
of the summer and autumn, when companies sometimes 'broke,
sometimes went on tour in England and sometimes travelled
abroad. The history of these travels is well worth study, but lies
outside the scope of this work.
In the conflict between the drama and the corporation, the
weight of Elizabeth herself was thrown entirely on the side of the
drama. The list of performances at court shows that, while masques
were frequently performed by amateurs at the beginning of her
reign, their place was almost entirely taken later by the per-
formances of professional actors whom her patronage helped to
bring to efficiency. The stock excuse offered by the privy council
for contravention of the prohibitive regulations of the city authori-
ties is that players must be allowed full opportunities of practising
their art in order that they may exercise it fitly before the queen,
during the Christmas holidays or at Shrovetide—the great seasons
of performances at court. In 1583, the queen, at the suggestion
of Walsingham, and probably as a countermove to a decision of
the common council, had her own company selected from the best
actors of the day; and every attempt was made to regard public
performances as mere rehearsals for those at court. It is easily
possible to make too much of the pretext, which, doubtless, was
convenient at the time. The chance of a play being awarded a
place among the few to be performed at court would scarcely have
sufficed to encourage playwrights to produce work of the quantity
or the character left by Elizabethan dramatists. Occasional state
performances, rewarded with a small fee, could not be prize enough
to keep large numbers of men working hard at acting, and at
nothing else, all the year round; and players grew well-to-do and
respectable, not because they played now and then at court, but
because court favour enabled them to meet the ardent desire for
theatrical performances which had been largely thwarted in pre-
vious troubled reigns, but which, when it could be indulged, to a
great extent supplanted the love of athletic or acrobatic exhibi-
tions that had had to suffice for earlier times. Such exhibitions
still survived; but the drama either swept them into its own
a
i Greg's Henslowe's Diary, vol. 11, p. 145.
? See Cohn, A. , Shakespeare in Germany and. The English Comedians in Germany,'
by Harris, C. , in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, N. S.
Vol. xv, No.
