Jonson's qualities as a dramatist, with regard to which there is
general critical agreement, have, perhaps, been sufficiently indicated.
general critical agreement, have, perhaps, been sufficiently indicated.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
97), Herford, Penniman and Schelling identify
Carlo Buffone with Marston; but see Small's discussion, op. cit.
LL VI. CH. 1.
2
## p. 18 (#36) ##############################################
18
Ben Jonson
either rapid or amusing. The faults that beset all Jonson's sub-
sequent comedies, even the best, are manifest: an over-elaboration
of uninteresting characters, and a too detailed exposure of
folly.
Cynthia's Revels resembles Every Man out of His Humour
in its general plan of a group of would-be gallants and ladies
whose follies are exposed to ridicule and shame through the efforts
of a censor representing the author's attitude. The devices of
gods, a masque, an echo dialogue, the fountain of self-love and—to
some extent—the gallants and pages, remind one of the plays of
Lyly, which had recently been revived. Apparently, it was with
these suggestions from Lyly and his Aristophanic scheme that
Jonson set at work on his court entertainment. He also intro-
duced personal satire (perhaps already used in Every Man out of
His Humour), though the only part that can with much con-
fidence be identified is that of Anaides, which Dekker promptly
took to himself. In spite of the evident care taken in construction
and phrasing, the play is inordinately tedious, with the exception
of the lively induction. All the persons bathe in the fountain of
self-love, but, in the end, find restoration in the well of knowledge.
In the epilogue, Jonson forestalls the obvious taunt that he has
mistaken the fountain, and proclaims of the play:
By God 'tis good, and if you like't, you may.
Jonson's arrogance had occasioned enmities with his fellow
dramatists. In Poetaster, he undertook their castigation. The
scene is placed in Rome; the story of Ovid's love for Julia is
introduced ; and the satirical scheme is not unlike that in the
preceding comedies-a voluble captain, an actor, a beggar poet
and an affected gallant come in for exposure, and Vergil and
Horace (Jonson) are the censors. In the end, Demetrius (Dekker)
and Crispinus (Marston) are tried for calumniating Horace, and to
Crispinus is administered a purge which causes him to vomit up a
prodigious vocabulary. Probably, other personal references were
intended in addition to those indicated, but they are not dis-
cernible now. Jonson seems to have been attempting a further
extension of comedy on Aristophanic lines, satirical allegory,
praise of himself and direct personal satire.
Jonson now deserted comedy for a time. His additions to The
Spanish Tragedie and the non-extant Richard Crookback were
1 Act II, sc. 1 is based on Horace's ninth satire of book 1; and there are other
imitations of Horace, Lucian and Homer. See Koeppel, E. , Quellenstudien, 1895;
Small, The Stage Quarrel, pp. 25—27, and Mallory's ed. of the play, Yale Studios, 1905.
## p. 19 (#37) ##############################################
His Tragedies
19
acted within the next two years. In connection with Sejanus
(acted 1603)', we may consider Catiline (acted 1611) as repre-
senting Jonson's contribution to tragedy ; The Fall of Mortimer
is only a fragment, and, apparently, was intended to be even
more classical than Catiline.
In these two plays, Jonson attempted in tragedy a reform similar
to that which he had striven for in comedy. He sought to treat
Roman history with scholarly accuracy and to exemplify upon the
public stage what he regarded as the essential rules of tragic art.
Such representations of Roman history as Lodge's The Wounds of
Civill War, or the still more incongruous medley of Heywood's
Lucrece, must have excited in him even greater condemnation than
did the English chronicle plays. We know that Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar provoked a sneer or two from Jonson”, though its drama-
tisation of Plutarch's portraits apparently excited his emulation
and suggested much in his treatment of Sejanus and Catiline.
Mere spectacle and farce disappear, and events are treated in
accord with a well thought-out theory of historical tragedy. But
Jonson's theory proved hampering; while his effort to secure
fidelity to the historical authorities led him to encumber Sejanus
with an absurd paraphernalia of notes, and to transcribe large
portions of Cicero's orations into Catiline. And, as he was forced
to confess, the historical material and the style of action demanded
by the audiences of the day did not readily lend themselves to the
restrictions of classical rules.
His plays, it must be remembered, were intended for the
public stage, and are not to be classed with closet dramas like
those of Fulke Greville and William Alexander. Jonson had
already contributed to current popular forms of tragedy, and he
started with these as a basis, attempting to rebuild them into
something more like classical models. His cardinal error was his
acceptance of the belief of the classicists that the essential
difference between epic and dramatic fable lay in the observance
of the three unities and similar proprieties. In Sejanus, he
gave up unity of time, but kept that of place; he retained the
comic scenes of the courtesan, but avoided any grotesque mixture
of the comic and the tragic. He omitted battles, jigs and
1 In the address prefixed to the 1605 quarto of Sejanus, Jonson acknowledges the
share of. & second pen' in the play as first written and acted, for which he had sub-
stituted his own work in the published play. This ‘so happy a genius' has been
identified as Chapman among other dramatists; but there is no evidence to support
these conjectures.
: Bartholomew Fayre, act II, sc. 1.
2-2
## p. 20 (#38) ##############################################
20
Ben Jonson
.
spectacles, and secured a coherent and carefully integrated
development of the main action. In Catiline, which he boldly
proclaimed a 'dramatic poem,' he adopted the Senecan technique of
an introductory ghost and a segregated chorus. In both plays, he
was following both humanistic and popular practice in choosing
for his themes the evil effects of ambition resulting in conspiracy
and civil war.
When we consider the self-imposed restrictions by which he
was bound, his achievement must seem remarkable. His interest
lay largely in characterisation, and in this resides the chief merit
of the plays. Jonson, to be sure, never learned Shakespeare's art
of transforming incidents and events into terms of a spiritual
conflict His method is rather that of exposition, each scene
illustrating and emphasising some trait without securing much
illusion of life. Yet the chief persons, Sejanus and Tiberius,
Catiline and Cicero, are thoughtfully conceived and faithfully
represented. Moreover, the minor characters are depicted with
care and even with vivacity, so that the picture of Roman life
carries a strong impression of truthfulness, due to the whole-
hearted concentration of Jonson's imagination upon his task as
well as to his painstaking study of authorities. In their interpre-
tation of historical characters, his tragedies resemble those of his
friend Chapman ; but he lacks Chapman's extraordinary elo-
quence. Jonson's style, especially in long speeches, is too often
rhetorical, and rarely displays great beauty or dramatic power.
Yet it is masterly in its way, competent to its purposes and free
from obscurity or over-ornamentation. The two tragedies, how-
ever, in spite of their excellences, must be regarded as repre-
senting another failure to turn popular English tragedy back into
the classical mould.
Jonson's return to comedy after Sejanus was made in 1604/5,
in collaboration with Chapman and Marston, in Eastward Hoe.
No success has attended any endeavour to disentangle the con-
tributions of the three authors, and their cooperation was probably
very intimate! It seems likely that Jonson aided largely in plan
and suggestion, and that comparatively little of the prose text was
by him.
The four comedies which followed rank with Every Man in
His Humour as his masterpieces. They are all comedies of
humours; but each is a peculiar development of the type. In
!
· Cf. post, chap. 11, and see the edition of this play by Schelling, F. E. (Belles
Lettres Series), 1903.
1
## p. 21 (#39) ##############################################
Volpone
21
Volpone, the Plautian model appears only in the use of the clever
servant as the mainspring of the action, and of entanglements
based on the trickster-tricked type of plot. The subject and
persons, however, are different from those usual in either Latin
or English comedy? Volpone, a miser and sensualist, works on the
greed of his acquaintances, and, by false reports of his sickness
and death, excites their hopes of inheriting his fortune, and lures
them into all kinds of abominable knavery. A shameless lawyer,
a father who disinherits his son in order to satisfy his own greed
and a wittol who offers his wife in return for an inheritance, are
the chief dupes; while Sir Politick Would Be, a foolish English
traveller, and his affected wife, who quotes Plato and knows of
Pastor Fido and 'Montaignie,' play lesser parts. The play has
little mirth; but it is a vigorous exposure of greed and iniquity.
Its purpose is not amusement but satire, its subject not folly but
vice, its protagonist not the managing servant but his master,
a inobster of villainy. Utterly bad men are common in Elizabethan
tragedy, and are found, occasionally, in comedy. But nowhere
else, unless in Iago, has vice been drawn with such fulness of
detail and yet with such consistency as in Volpone. No tragic
elevation lends majesty to the theme. The play depicts human
meanness, unrelieved by any greatness of purpose or unselfishness
of passion. It presents men as beasts, with the greed of swine, the
craft of foxes and the rapacity of wolves.
Plot, characters and blank verse, unusually vigorous and
flowing, all show Jonson at his best ; and he was justly proud, as
he boasted in the prologue, of having written in five weeks a
comedy that observed the laws of time, place and persons, and
swerved from no needful rule. In the dedication to both
universities, he excuses the punishment of the vicious in comedy,
defending himself by the example of the ancients, and still more
because 'it is the office of a comic poet to imitate justice, and
instruct to life. ' This is interesting as an adumbration of Rymer's
'poetic justice,' and as an expression of the purpose of Jonson's
satiric comedy. Other passages in this same dedication give noble
expression to the aims at which his art had now arrived,
to reluce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene, the easiness,
the propriety, the innocence, and last, the doctrine, which is the principal
end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living.
? As to the actual source, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, r—Ix, see Adams, J. Q. ,
Molern Philology, vol. II, p. 289 (1905), and Browne, W. H. , Modern Language
$('? B, vol. III, p. 113 (1906).
## p. 22 (#40) ##############################################
22
Ben Jonson
It must be confessed, however, that Jonson's vainglorious pro-
clamation of reform exhibits an insolent disregard of his great
predecessors and contemporaries. He promises
the maturing of some worthier fruits; wherein, if my muses be true to me,
I shall raise the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her out of
those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form,
restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her
worthy to be embraced and kist of all the great and master-spirits of our
world.
The Silent Woman' is much less intent on moral castigation
than is Volpone, and, also, much merrier. Its plot is farcical,
.
dealing with the entrapping of Morose, who hates noise, into
marriage with Epicoene, who turns out to be a noisy tartar,
and, after Morose has forgiven his nephew, proves to be a boy.
Sir Dauphine, the nephew, and his friends, are the wits; Daw,
La Foole and the Ladies Collegiates, the butts of their jests.
There is abundant satire of the manners and affectations of the
day; but the skilfully complicated action depends on numerous
disguises, and does not rise above the level of admirable farce.
In The Alchemist, Jonson essays another large canvas of
tricksters and gulls. Subtle, the alchemist, Dol Conmon and Face,
a housekeeper, have set up their snares in the house of Face's
master. Hither come an extraordinary procession of gulls, whose
very names are enough to recall the lifelike characters-Dapper, a
lawyer's clerk; Abel Drugger, a credulous tobacco man; Sir Epicure
Mammon, a voluptuary with a Micawber-like gift of eloquent
anticipation ; Pertinax Surly, a doubting Thomas; Tribulation
Wholesome and Ananias, two brethren of Amsterdam, who make
an effort to serve both God and Mammon, without forgetting the
weaker brethren; Kastrill, a foolish heir and Dame Pliant, his sister,
a widow. One after another, they expose their folly and greed, and
add to the fun and entanglement, until the master of the house
returns and joins with Face to keep the spoils, including the
widow, and to lock the doors on dupers and duped. Perhaps
in no other play has Jonson so completely succeeded in accom-
plishing what he intended as he has in this. There are no tiresome
excursuses, as in Volpone and Bartholomew Fayre; in everything,
he uses 'election and a mean. ' The entire play is in blank verse,
1 The edition of the play by Aurelia Henry, Yale Studies, 1906, discusses
suggestions for this play in Libanius and Plautus.
2 On the relation of The Alchemist to Il Candelaio of Giordano Bruno, see a note by
Child, C. G. , in The Nation, 28 July 1904. See, also, Schelling, Elix. Drama,
vol. 1, pp. 540, 541.
.
## p. 23 (#41) ##############################################
23
Bartholomew Fayre
which is most-skilfully adapted to the rapid dialogue or to the
orations of Tribulation and Sir Epicure. The language is varied,
idiomatic and precise ; the style, finished and animated. The
ingenuity of the plot, which Coleridge ranked among the three
most perfect in literature, the liveliness of the action and the
delineation of manners, harmonise in a work which, of its kind,
could hardly be bettered. The satire on alchemy, which was not
.
winout daring in the days of Simon Forman, flavours the fun
without destroying it; and the picture of Elizabethan London is L
without an equal, unless it be in Bartholomew Fayre.
In the presentation of manners and character, Bartholomew
Fayre may, indeed, be held to outrank even The Alchemist. In
many respects, however, its inferiority is palpable. It is unwieldy
in structure; its fun is often gross and farcical ; and it is over-
crowded with persons and incidents. There are thirty speaking
parts and many supernumeraries. Nowhere else, perhaps, in
literature, have so many people been so vividly presented in a
three hour entertainment as here. The usual pair of witty friends, a
pompous judge bent on reform, a proctor who has written a puppet
show! , a foolish widow, a puritan zealot, Cokes, a booby, and his
rran Waspe, mingle in the fair with a cutpurse, a ballad singer, a
tapster, a bawd, a bully and that Falstaffia of the stews, Ursula
the pig woman. The trouble here, as in other plays by Jonson, is
tl at every character is worked out with elaborate detail. If some
of the subordinate parts were removed, and others reduced in
proportion, the play, doubtless, would be improved. Certainly,
much of Littlewit's puppet play could be spared. But all the
personages mentioned, and as many more, are drawn not only with
painstaking exactness, but, also, with unflagging animation. A
play which unites such masterpieces of comic characterisation as
justice Overdo, Cokes and Zeal-of-the-land Busy, together with
much uproarious fun, must, surely, be accounted an amazing
arliievement of comic invention.
In the amusing induction, Jonson protests against the attribu-
tion of personal satire to the play, and against the tendency of
the public to judge everything by their old favourites, such as
Jeronimo and Andronicus. His protests, in fact, are directed at
the whole field of romantic drama, and include scoffs at A
Winter's Tale and The Tempest.
If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he
the author of Bartholomew Fayre] says, nor a nest of antiques ? he is loth
| Littlewit is identified by Fleay, Penniman and Schelling with the poet Daniel.
1
1
## p. 24 (#42) ##############################################
24
Ben Jonson
to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempeste,
and such like drollerier, to mix his head with other men's heels; let the
concupiscence of jigs and dances reign as strong as it will amongst you ;
yet if the puppets please any body, they shall be intreated to come in.
* The concupiscence of jigs and dances,' to which he also alludes in
the address 'To the Reader' prefixed to The Alchemist, seems to refur
to the introduction of dances and other elements from court masques
into comedy, as in A Winter's Tale, The Tempest and other con-
temporary plays. Jonson, always a precisian, preferred to keep his
masques and comedies separate. It seems clear that he intended to
make Bartholomeu Fayre an example of pure realism. Perhaps for
this reason he wrote it, like Epicoene, wholly in prose, remarkable
for its clearness and flexibility, admirably suited to the different
speakers and imitative of the manners of the time. Characters and
incidents, also, are freer from imitation of Plautus or Aristophanes
than are those of any other of his comedies, though the usual
scheme of gulls and knaves is preserved and amplified. Further
removed from classical models than his other comedies, neverthe-
less, it is Aristophanic in the breadth and liveliness of its mirth and
in its unhesitating realism. Original in its scheme and subject,
dariug in its invention, it marks the highest development of the
comedy of humours as a national type. The kind of comedy wbich
it presents has continued in prose fiction, in Fielding, Smollett and
Dickens ; but, since the Elizabethan period, our theatre has never
permitted such robust fun and so unvarnished a presentation of
the absurdities of human nature.
The Divell is an Asse betrays a flagging invention, as was to
be expected after the prodigal expenditure of the four preceding
comedies. The machinery of the devils is not very happy. Pug, a
lesser devil, is despatched by Satan to do some mischief; but his -
stupidity renders his expedition unsuccessful, and, indeed, leaves it
without effect on the action of the play. Jonson, apparently, planned
to enlarge his collection of gulls by proving the devil one ; but the
result of this humorous conception is merely to add another stupid
and uninteresting person to the dramatis personae. The other
characters are more or less repetitions of those in earlier plays,
though the chief gull, Fitzdottrel, who aims to become 'Duke of
Brownlands' through taking part in a project for draining the
waste lands of the kingdom, gives rise to plenty of humour. The
satire is lively, especially that on the exorcism of supposed evil
spirits, and that on projectors and projects-among which is one
for ‘serving the whole state with toothpicks. ' Mrs Fitzdottrel is
## p. 25 (#43) ##############################################
Later Comedies
25
drawn with more sympathy than is common in the case of Jonson's
female characters, and all the characters are, as usual, carefully
differentiated. But the comic entanglements are cumbersome, and
the play moves heavily.
Nine years intervened before the appearance of Jonson's next
comedy, The Staple of Newes. Though his prologue is as boastful
as ever, yet, in the induction and the intercalary scenes, there are
nications that he felt the uncertainty of his powers and was driven
back to the stage by want. He went to Aristophanes for a model,
composing an allegorical satire based on Plutus, from which and
from The Wasps he borrowed certain passages. The main allegory
of Pecunia, Pennyboy, Mortgage and the rest, is tiresome; but
the secondary plot, dealing with the Staple-of-News office, has
excellent satire and fun. So, too, has the scheme of the Canters'
college. But the details of the plan are not fused into a dramatic
whole. More than any play since Cynthia's Revels, this production
lacks the movement and verisimilitude indispensable in comedy.
The remaining comedies come near to deserving Dryden's
harsh criticism: ‘mere dotages. ' The New Inne was incontinently
damned at its first representation, and published two years later
(1631) by Jonson with an angry address to the reader. The
improbable plot, dependent on the disguises of Lord Frampul as
an inn-keeper, his wife as a vulgar Irish beggar and their second
daughter as a boy, deals, mainly, with the winning of the elder
daughter by Lord Lovel, thanks to two elaborate orations on love
and valour before a mock court of love. The play aims at taking
avantage of the current interest in platonism’ fostered at court
by the queen"; and both the platonic Lady Frampul and her
guitor are treated sympathetically. But the platonic addresses
are dull; and so, indeed, is the low comedy supplied by Fly, Bat
Burst, Sir Glorious Tipto and others. The failure of the play
called forth Jonson's ode 'Come, leave the loathëd stage'; but
one's sympathies incline to remain with the audience. Four years
later, The Magnetick Lady : Or Humors Reconcil'd attempted a
continuation and conclusion of the series of comedies of humours
begun thirty-five years before. A marriageable young niece of the
magnetic lady is constituted the centre attractive, to draw thither
a diversity of guests, all persons of different humours, to make up
his (the author's) perimeter. ' This plan is carried out in a half-
hearted way, though with the usual elaborate attention to details,
1 On this topic, see Fletcher, J. B. , 'Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,' in The
Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. I, p. 125.
## p. 26 (#44) ##############################################
26
Ben Jonson
and explanatory intermezzos. But, while the acts conform to the
laws of protasis, epitasis and catastasis! , there is no life or wit.
A Tale of a Tub was acted in the same year. Various references
to the queen make it likely that the play was first written about
1597; but the satire on Inigo Jones as In and In Medley must have
been incorporated in the 1633 revision. The separation of the
early crudities and the later dotages is now impossible. The
action, of the trickster-tricked variety, deals entirely with rustico,
and presents considerable ingenuity and possibility of fun. The
characters, however, are all beneath interest, and the whole treat-
ment reveals neither fresh nor worthy impulse.
Two additional plays, which, on some seventeenth century
authority, have been ascribed in part to Jonson, probably owe
little or nothing to his pen. The Widdow, published (1652) as by
Jonson, Fletcher and Middleton, was, probably, wholly by Middle-
ton? The Bloody Brother (entered in the Stationers' register,
1639, as by 'B. J. ', and printed in 1640 as by ‘B. J. F. ') is, un-
doubtedly, in part by Fletcher Jonson's share can hardly have
extended beyond the second scene of act iv.
Jonson's qualities as a dramatist, with regard to which there is
general critical agreement, have, perhaps, been sufficiently indicated.
His wide and penetrating observation of manners, whether of city
or of court, and his ingenious and systematic construction of plots,
are obvious merits. But the great excellence of both his tragedies
and his comedies is their delineation of character. This is conditioned
less than in other Elizabethan dramatists by the story, but more
by classical models and rules, as in his observance of the unities,
or his fidelity to historical authorities, or his copying of the Plautian
plan and types. It is also conditioned by his method of making each
person the illustration of one trait or humour, and by his disposition
to substitute description for drama, and satire for fact, and to
exaggerate his satire into farce. Thus, in Every Man in His
Humour, only Bobadill represents the complete transformation
of a type into an indiyidual; and, in Bartholomew Fayre, the
individualisation follows the broad lines of caricature. Again,
each person is set forth with such distinctness of detail that, while
it aids visualisation, it often distracts from the interest of situation.
Only in The Alchemist is there an entire absence of this impeding
1 Cf. act i, ad fin.
9 See post, chap. III.
: See chap. v, and cf. Fleay, F. G. , The English Drama, vol. I, pp. 203——5, and
Oliphant, E. F. , Eng. Studien, vol. xv, pp. 353-5. Concerning the anonymous Latin
comedy Querolus as the source of the scene (1v, 2) attributed to Jonson, seo Garnett, R. ,
Mod. Phil. vol. 11, p. 491.
## p. 27 (#45) ##############################################
His Place in Literature
27
garrulity. Akin to this defect are Jonson's over-use of the long
monologue after the fashion of classical models, the heaviness and
coarseness which his realism often gives to his vocabulary and his
thoroughness, which refuses to let go person, speech, or situation
until it is absolutely exhausted. Yet, in spite of all these limita-
tions, Jonson's comic characterisation remains among the greatest
achievements of the English drama, because of its clearness and
certainty, its richness of humour and its dramatic veracity. A. W.
Ward is justified in giving him pre-eminence in the highest species
of comedy, that 'in which everything else is subordinated to the
dramatic unfolding of character. '
What most discourages the reader of Jonson is the absence
of charm. Jonson was certainly not incapable of depicting noble
passions or of writing winsome verse; but in his plays he resolutely
refused to attempt either. This refusal, in marked contrast with
the practice of his fellow Elizabethans, is precisely the negative
side of his most positive characteristics. He did not write of
passions, but of follies--not of fairyland, but of London; he often
deliberately preferred prose to poetry, and he always restrained
poetry to his subject. If poetry must, at times, have freedom, it
must, at times, have restraint ; if, at times, it may soar on fancy's
wing or evoke glorious or appalling habitants for our reflection,
at other times it may well cling to the actualities of daily existence.
Comedy, of all forms of literature, has its duties in the street or
tavern as well as in Arden or on the sea-coast of Bohemia. Jonson
found neither charm nor heroism in London streets, though
both were unquestionably there. He found neither the truth
and passion that lay at the heart of puritanism, nor the joy and
fancy that stirred the light-hearted moods of Fletcher, Shirley, or
Herrick. But he mirrored what he saw of men and manners with
an untiring fidelity, heightened and coloured his picture with a
hearty and virile humour and interpreted it by a sound and
cesorious morality. Imaginative idealism, characteristic of the
Elizabethan age and its literature, had another and a greater master;
but interest in the depiction and criticism of the actual life of the
day-an interest essential to vitality in the literature of any age,
and manifest in the golden days of the Armada as well as in
degenerate Jacobean times—had its chief exponent in Jonson.
His influence, commanding in his own day, has continued down
to the present. His comedies were imitated so soon as they
appeared ; witness Everie Woman in her Humor (1609, acted
by 1600). Beaumont and Fletcher studied in his school, as The
## p. 28 (#46) ##############################################
28
Ben Jonson
Woman Hater, written by the former! , testifies; and Marston,
Middleton and Chapman profited from his example. Oflater drama-
tists, Field, Randolph, Cartwright, Nabbes and May-to name
no others-employed Jonson's methods and wrote plays in his
manner. The comedy of humours became, in fact, an established
model, which few later writers altogether disregarded. All realistic
comedy owned its influence, and reminiscences of its most effective
scenes and types of character found their way into every kind vi
drama. There were other leaders in realistic comedy, Middleton
in particular, who may be said to have set an example of a less
satirical, less moral, but hardly less Plautian, representation of
London manners. But Jonson continued through his life time the
chief advocate and exemplar of serious realism.
After the Restoration, Jonson's reputation, for a time, increased.
Dryden's praise was echoed by Dennis and others, especially by
those who were most eager to see neo-classical rules and models
prevail in the theatres. Both his tragedies and his comedies were
held in high esteem. The former were revived, but did not long
hold the stage. The latter found a warm welcome on the stage
and maintained themselves there during the long period when
Shakespeare's romantic comedies failed to please. Bartholomeu
Fayre disappeared (1731), even before As You Like It returned to
the stage (1740), and, of Volpone, The Silent Woman and The
Alchemist' not one has outlasted the eighteenth century on the
public boards. The last three were revived by Garrick, who also
brought out a revision of Every Man in his Humour. That play
continued on the stage well into the nineteenth century.
Jonson's influence, moreover, has been felt in the novel as well
as in the drama. His plays have been constantly read and have
always encouraged a study of the absurdities of character and the
incongruities of manners. Fielding and Smollett were conscious of
their incentive, and Dickens, who knew them well and himself acted
Bobadill, must, to no inconsiderable extent, have been indebted to
their suggestion. Not only are there specific resemblances, as be-
tween Zeal-of-the-land Busy and Stiggins, but Dickens's comic inven-
tion and characterisation are often strikingly Jonsonian in method
and effect. Whether Jonson's comedies are ever again revived
on the stage or not, they are likely to continue long to encourage
in fiction a frank and searching presentation of foible and folly.
1 See below, chap. v.
: A droll, The Empiric (1676), and a farce, The Tobacconist (1771) were based on
The Alchemisi. A satirical tragedy, The Favourite, based on Sejunus, appeared in 1770.
## p. 29 (#47) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
CHAPMAN, MARSTON, DEKKER
AMBITIONS are naturally fired in an age of unusual achievement
in any field of human activity, and men of every variety of genius
or talent, however unfitted to command success in it, are drawn
to the glittering arena. Many men were dramatists in 1600 whose
gifts were not conspicuously dramatic, and whose instincts in another
epoch would hardly have driven them to the service of the stage. Of
these, George Chapman was an example. He was a poet; but his
muse did not point him towards the theatre, and, had she designed
him for drama, she would have delayed his birth. For, in 1600, when
Jonson was about twenty-seven and Dekker thirty, Chapman was
already forty years old. He was twenty-eight when Marlowe's
Tamburlaine was produced, and thus did not in early youth, nor
until his mind had already taken its mould, come under the dra-
matic influences or inspiration which formed Shakespeare and the
greater playwrights. Nor is it even certain that he was greatly
interested in drama till within five years of the close of the
century. He did not serve a youthful apprenticeship to the
theatrical art, and he never learnt to think in any character but
his own.
We gather from one of his early poems (Euthymiae Raptus)
that Chapman was born in or near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and,
from the title-page of his Homer, that his birth year was 1559.
It is frequently said that he studied at both universities, but there
is no certain evidence that he was at either. Wood asserts that
he spent some time at Oxford, in 1574 or thereabouts, 'where he
was most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic
or philosophy,' and that he left without taking a degree. Of his
personal affairs for the next twenty years, we know nothing. It
is not improbable that he travelled, and a passage in one of his
poems suggests that, like Jonson, he may have served in the
Netherlands. As a man of letters, his first appearance, apparently,
## p. 30 (#48) ##############################################
30
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
was made in a volume of poetry, The Shadow of Night, when
he was thirty-five. From this time, he was busy as poet and
dramatist until 1614, and seems to have achieved reputation and
gained distinguished friends, though he gathered little wealth.
Meres speaks of him in 1598 as a renowned scholar, tragedian
and comedian. We know that he found a patron in the earl of
Essex, and that, after the earl's execution in 1601, he was befriended
by prince Henry, to whom he was appointed 'server in ordinary. '
The prince encouraged him in his work of translating Homer, and
appears to have promised him a pension; but he died in 1612, and
Chapman received no further royal favours.
To all times future this time's mark extend,
Homer no patron found, nor Chapman friend.
In 1605, he had shared with Marston and Jonson the displeasure
of the authorities for the satire in Eastward Hoe on the Scottish
king's needy followers, and had suffered imprisonment. Again, in
1608, he narrowly escaped punishment for an unhappy reference to
the French queen in The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Duke of Byron, which roused the indignation of the French
ambassador. From 1614, Chapman appeared less frequently as an
author, and he died in no very prosperous circumstances in 1634.
He was buried in St Giles's in the Fields (Habington, in his Castara,
speaks of his tomb as without the church), and a monument by
his friend Inigo Jones, to whom he had dedicated his translation
of Musaeus, was then erected to his memory, as 'a Christian
Philosopher and Homericall Poett. '
It is difficult to escape the conviction that Minto was correct in
his identification of Chapman with the ‘rival poet' of Shakespeare's
Sonnets ; and it has been argued with great force and ingenuity?
that the rivalry here indicated may be traced elsewhere in the
work of both authors, and that the note of anger in the strain
of invective which frequently appears in Chapman's poems and
prefaces, hitherto interpreted in his favour as the natural scorn of
a great artist for inferior work, was the outcome of bitter personal
resentment at the success of the unlettered Shakespeare and was
directly aimed at him. According to this view, The Amorous Zodiac,
in the 1595 volume of poems, is the poem indicated by Shake-
speare in his twenty-first sonnet; Holofernes, in Love's Labour's
Lost, is a satirical portrait of Chapman in reply to his malevolent
attacks, and Troilus and Cressida an elaborate castigation of
1
1 Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, by Arthur Acheson, 1903.
## p. 31 (#49) ##############################################
31
Quality of Chapman's Poetry
Chapman's extravagant laudation of Homer, his praise of Greek
ideals and his contempt of all poets who were not his equals in
scholarship. Though not proven, the thesis cannot be lightly
dismissed.
We are told that Chapman was a student of the classics who
made little progress in philosophy; but his earliest works exhibit
him rather as a metaphysician in verse than as a disciple of the
canons of ancient art. Passages in The Shadow of Night (1594)
and in Ovid's Banquet of Sauce, containing A coronet for his
Mistress Philosophy, The amorous Zodiac and other poems (1595),
may be praised with justice; but they will never be widely
read. In the dedication of the second volume, he disclaims
all ambition to please the vulgar—'The profane multitude I
hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching
spirits, whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred. '
Yet, even among ‘searching spirits,' some reluctance to return to
poems in the main so warped and obscure as these may well
be found. Better work was to come. In his continuation of
Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman not unworthily
completed an incomparable fragment, and, in The Tears of
Peace (1609), dedicated to his young patron, prince Henry, he
reaches his happiest moods as an original poet. By Andromache
Liberata (1614), he added nothing to his reputation. The subject
was an unfortunate one—the marriage of the earl of Somerset
and Frances Howard, the divorced lady Essex—and was treated
in so enigmatic a manner as to make necessary a subsequent
prose justification of its aims and intentions. Distinction of mind
and intellectual vigour are apparent in all Chapman's work; but,
though he may occasionally soar, he never sings, and his finest
verses possess gnomic and didactic, rather than lyric, quality.
When it emerges from the entanglements amid which the current
of his reflections is usually split, his poetry can be as limpid as it
is stately. But not often do we hear such music as when he tells
us that Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse
Renews the golden world and holds through all
The holy laws of homely Pastoral,
Where flowers and founts and nymphs and semi-gods
And all the Graces find their old abodes.
Though Chapman was well known as a dramatist in 1598, only
two plays by his hand are extant which were produced before
that date-The Blinde begger of Alexandria (printed 1598) and
An Humerous dayes Myrth (printed 1599), probably the play
## p. 32 (#50) ##############################################
32
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
mentioned by Henslowe as The comodey of Umers in 1597. Both
are comedies; but neither deserves any particular notice, though
the first appears to have been successful on the stage, and the
second contains one or two characters drawn with some cleverness
and spirit. Al Fooles (printed 1605), another comedy, was first
produced under the title The World runs on Wheels, and displays
a surprising advance in dramatic technique. The plot, partly
borrowed from Terence, is ingenious and excellent, and makes
a good framework for a satirical sketch of humours developed
through amusing situations in the manner of Jonson. As a writer
of comedy, here, and in Eastward Hoe (to be noticed later), where,
however, he had collaborators, Chapman appears to the greatest
advantage. When dealing with lighter themes, he condescended,
though with apologies, to write an uninflated style; and, however
he may himself have preferred the heightened and fantastic rhetoric
of his tragedies, they are indisputably inferior in construction
and far less natural in tone than the dramas he affected to
despise.
For four or five years after the opening of the seventeenth
century, Chapman, doubtless because he was occupied with the
continuation of his translation of Homer, contributed nothing to
dramatic literature. By 1605, he had, evidently, resumed his
connection with the theatre; for two plays were printed in the
following year—The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur D'Olive.
In the first of these, Chapman threw his chief strength into a
romantic love episode introduced into the comic scheme of the
play, and succeeded in imparting to it an intensity and sweetness
foreign to his character and talent. Monsieur D'Olive opens
strongly; but the main plot is subsequently obscured by the
shifting of the centre of interest to the character who gives his
name to the piece. This cleverly conceived and diverting town
gull, whose wit and coolness in a trying situation are pleasantly
rendered, at once spoils the play as a work of art and keeps it
alive as an entertainment. Later in his career, Chapman wrote
two more comedies-May-Day (printed 1611), shown by Stiefel
to be an adaptation of the Allesandro of Allesandro Piccolomini,
and The Widdowes Teares (printed 1612) and took part with
Shirley in a third, The Ball (printed 1639). The last named owes
little to Chapman', and neither of the others rises to anything
approaching excellence. The Widdowes Teares, the idea of which
is borrowed from Petronius, is not altogether wanting in power and
1 Cf. post, chap. VIII.
9
## p. 33 (#51) ##############################################
Chapman's Historic Tragedies
33
has some characteristic passages, but entirely fails to arouse interest
in its characters or admiration for the contrivance of the action.
His translations apart, Chapman's fame rests upon his tragedies
founded on French history, of which Bussy D'Ambois (printed
1607) and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613)
have always and rightly received most attention. The subjects
here chosen were singularly adapted to display the qualities of
his genius, never impressive save on an elevated stage. Bussy
D'Ambois was by far the most successful of his dramas, its popu-
larity being due, in part, to its revival of recent history, in part to
the character and career of the chief figure, formed by nature for
an invincible hero of romance, and in part to the glowing rhetoric
which certainly rises in places to pure and impassioned poetry.
Some entries in Henslowe suggest that Bussy D'Ambois, and not
Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, as Collier thought, may have been
the play for which payments were made in 15981; but, if we assign
to it so early a date as this, we must allow a revision after the
death of Elizabeth, who is spoken of as the 'old Queene. ' The
sources of this drama have not been precisely determined-De
Thou's Historiae sui temporis and Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques,
from which it was supposed that the author derived his inci-
dents, were not published in 1607—and Chapman, therefore,
must have had recourse to contemporary accounts. The part
of Bussy was acted by Nathaniel Field. A revised version of
the play by Thomas D'Urfey was produced on the stage of the
Theatre Royal in 1691. For The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
and the tragedies The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Drike of Byron (printed 1608), he drew directly from a trans-
lation of Serres's Inventaire Général de THistoire de France
by Edward Grimeston, published in 1607%. Grimeston supple-
mented Serres, whose narrative ends in 1598, from Matthieu's
Histoire de France and other contemporary writers.
In his first tragedy, the court of Henry III is employed as a
frame for the full length portrait of the brilliant adventurer, Bussy,
whose love affair with Tamyra, countess of Montsorry, betrayal
to her husband and last stand when encircled by his enemies,
make an admirable drama of the heroic and melodramatic type.
It is successful in a style thoroughly Elizabethan (the antithesis of
the classic), in which violent scenes and extravagant rhetoric
1 Cf. Greg's Henslowe's Diary, part 11, pp. 198, 199, and Henslowe Papers, p. 120,
note.
2 Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. by Boas, F. S. , 1905.
E L VI. CH. II.
3
## p. 34 (#52) ##############################################
34 Chapman, Marston, Dekker
a
mingle with profound reflection and magnificent outbursts of
poetry—a strange compound of the fantastic and forbidding with
the noblest and most inspiring elements in art. Dryden, in his
famous depreciation of this play, went too far:
I have ometimes wondered in the reading (he said] what has become of
those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the
theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I
had been cozened with a jelly; nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered
no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in gigantic
words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles;
the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense ;
or, at best, a scantling of wit, which lay gasping for life, and groaning
beneath a heap of rubbish. A famous modern poet used to sacrifice every
year a Statius to Virgil's manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a
D'Ambois annually to the memory of Jonson.
We have here a typical example of Restoration feeling and criti-
cism. Chapman exhibits in excess precisely those Elizabethan
qualities which a later age found Gothic and barbaric. The faults
of the romantic school are all present in an exaggerated degree.
But Dryden overlooked the fiery energy, the imaginative splendours
and rich suggestiveness of phrase and imagery which were its glory,
and beside which the undeniable excellences of his own age of
literature seem the cold and lifeless offspring of uninspired labour.
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613), written after an
interval during which Chapman had produced his Byron tragedies,
though inferior as a drama for the stage, is stronger in its reflective
passages and contains by far the most interesting and profound
of Chapman's character studies. This is Clermont d'Ambois, a
brother of the dead Bussy invented by the dramatist, who is incited
by Bussy's ghost, as Hamlet is by his father's spirit, to under-
take the mission of revenge. Clermont, the senecal man,' who, like
Hamlet, is of a speculative habit of mind and disinclined towards
violence, only after delays accomplishes his task, and, in the end,
dies by his own hand. The Revenge is suffused with memories
of Shakespeare's play, to which, undoubtedly, it owes its plan and
many of its episodes, while Clermont's philosophy is largely drawn
from Epictetus. It is somewhat remarkable that this drama, the
interest of which is centred in a true philosopher moving amid the
intrigues and violences of a renascence court, makes him the
faithful follower of the infamous duke of Guise, whose portrait,
as given us here, is no less flattering than it is unhistorical-a
piece of perversity certainly not calculated to commend the play
to reformation England.
## p. 35 (#53) ##############################################
Tit
Other Plays by Chapman 35
If high intellectual interest and authentic eloquence sufficed to
constitute a dramatic masterpiece, The Conspiracie, And Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France might give Chapman
rank among great playwrights. But we have here rather ‘a small
epic in ten books or acts' than a drama. The verse runs more
smoothly, however, than in the Bussy plays, the poetry is less pestered
with the cloudy turbulence of his ‘full and heightened style,' and
nowhere does Chapman win more completely upon his reader.
In his next tragedy, Caesar and Pompey (printed 1631), he turned
from contemporary to classical history, and, standing on scholar's
ground, might have been expected to derive powerful inspiration
from his theme, but the design is feebly handled, and he fails, as
before, to communicate movement to the action or vitality to the
dramatis personal. Only the oratorical passages, especially those
placed in the mouth of Cato, can be read with much pleasure.
The remaining plays of Chapman were not published during
EUR his lifetime. In Chabot Admirall of France (printed 1639), for
which materials were drawn from Pasquier's Les Recherches de la
France, he had the assistance of Shirley, and it seems fruitless
to attempt the task of partitioning their respective contributions.
Revenge for Honour (printed 1654), an eastern tale of which the
scene is laid in Arabia, may have been written by Chapman; but the
play is by no means in his usual manner, and it is difficult to believe
that, in his old age, he could have assimilated the style of the later
dramatists. (A play printed for the same publisher and entitled The
me Paraside, a Revenge for Honour was entered in the register (1653)
as by Henry Glapthorne. ) Neither play possesses any great dis-
e tinction, though some critics have found in the variety of incident
and portraiture in the last named drama reason for assigning to it
ik
a high place among Chapman's works. It is certainly superior to
Alphonsus Emperour of Germany (printed 1654), also ascribed to
Chapman on more slender grounds. The intimate knowledge of
the German language and German life displayed by the author has
been variously explained. Either Chapman spent some time in
Germany, or he was assisted by some unknown writer intimately
acquainted with the language and customs of that country. There
ti remains the possibility that he had no hand in it. Zeal for
Chapman's reputation might easily be better expended than in the
attempt to prove this play his. Sir Gyles Goosecappe (printed 1606),
an anonymous play, has been ascribed to Chapman or a disciple
by several critics, on internal evidence of method and manner.
Two of his plays, never printed, were destroyed in manuscript by
Te
3-2
## p. 36 (#54) ##############################################
36
,
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
а
Warburton's cook, The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son, and
Fatal Love, a French tragedy. Jonson told Drummond that 'next
himself, only Fletcher and Chapman,' both of whom ‘he loved,'
'could make a masque. ' Only one such composition by Chapman
is extant, The memorable Masque of the two honourable Houses
or Innes of Court; the Middle Temple, and Lyncolnes Inne,
performed at Whitehall in 1614. Probably he wrote others; the
merits of this piece afford insufficient warrant for Jonson’s com-
pliment. While it would be absurd to deny the presence of
masculine force and fervid poetry in Chapman's best tragedies,
it would be mere irony to claim for him fine sensibility or delicate
discrimination in the portrayal of character. He is not great either
in invention or construction, and, though his work abounds in
wise sayings, moral apophthegms and high pitched sentiments, and
though the talent for observation is not absent, there is an invincible
coarseness in his fibre. The comedies show all men either as
deceivers or deceived; his tragic heroes are often little more than
the embodiment of physical energy and tenacious will; pathos he
never attains; and he seems to have been incapable or undesirous
of painting the portrait of a lovable woman. Chapman's immense
pretensions and determination to storm Parnassus hardly win our
allegiance. Nor need we pay homage to his scholarship, though
reputed as vast. He was overburdened not so much by the
weight of his learning as by a mistaken sense of its importance
and authority. Approach him first by way of his original poems
and dramas, and it will not easily prove practicable to find the
measure of the man. Like Milton writing in prose, he is using, as
it were, his left hand. But approach him first under the spell of
Homer, who was 'angel to him, star and fate,' when both genius and
character are sublimated, and he will be known for what he is.
In Chapman's view, Homer was not only emperor among the poets,
he was the greatest of men and philosophers. 'Of all books extant
in all kinds, Homer is the first and best .
Carlo Buffone with Marston; but see Small's discussion, op. cit.
LL VI. CH. 1.
2
## p. 18 (#36) ##############################################
18
Ben Jonson
either rapid or amusing. The faults that beset all Jonson's sub-
sequent comedies, even the best, are manifest: an over-elaboration
of uninteresting characters, and a too detailed exposure of
folly.
Cynthia's Revels resembles Every Man out of His Humour
in its general plan of a group of would-be gallants and ladies
whose follies are exposed to ridicule and shame through the efforts
of a censor representing the author's attitude. The devices of
gods, a masque, an echo dialogue, the fountain of self-love and—to
some extent—the gallants and pages, remind one of the plays of
Lyly, which had recently been revived. Apparently, it was with
these suggestions from Lyly and his Aristophanic scheme that
Jonson set at work on his court entertainment. He also intro-
duced personal satire (perhaps already used in Every Man out of
His Humour), though the only part that can with much con-
fidence be identified is that of Anaides, which Dekker promptly
took to himself. In spite of the evident care taken in construction
and phrasing, the play is inordinately tedious, with the exception
of the lively induction. All the persons bathe in the fountain of
self-love, but, in the end, find restoration in the well of knowledge.
In the epilogue, Jonson forestalls the obvious taunt that he has
mistaken the fountain, and proclaims of the play:
By God 'tis good, and if you like't, you may.
Jonson's arrogance had occasioned enmities with his fellow
dramatists. In Poetaster, he undertook their castigation. The
scene is placed in Rome; the story of Ovid's love for Julia is
introduced ; and the satirical scheme is not unlike that in the
preceding comedies-a voluble captain, an actor, a beggar poet
and an affected gallant come in for exposure, and Vergil and
Horace (Jonson) are the censors. In the end, Demetrius (Dekker)
and Crispinus (Marston) are tried for calumniating Horace, and to
Crispinus is administered a purge which causes him to vomit up a
prodigious vocabulary. Probably, other personal references were
intended in addition to those indicated, but they are not dis-
cernible now. Jonson seems to have been attempting a further
extension of comedy on Aristophanic lines, satirical allegory,
praise of himself and direct personal satire.
Jonson now deserted comedy for a time. His additions to The
Spanish Tragedie and the non-extant Richard Crookback were
1 Act II, sc. 1 is based on Horace's ninth satire of book 1; and there are other
imitations of Horace, Lucian and Homer. See Koeppel, E. , Quellenstudien, 1895;
Small, The Stage Quarrel, pp. 25—27, and Mallory's ed. of the play, Yale Studios, 1905.
## p. 19 (#37) ##############################################
His Tragedies
19
acted within the next two years. In connection with Sejanus
(acted 1603)', we may consider Catiline (acted 1611) as repre-
senting Jonson's contribution to tragedy ; The Fall of Mortimer
is only a fragment, and, apparently, was intended to be even
more classical than Catiline.
In these two plays, Jonson attempted in tragedy a reform similar
to that which he had striven for in comedy. He sought to treat
Roman history with scholarly accuracy and to exemplify upon the
public stage what he regarded as the essential rules of tragic art.
Such representations of Roman history as Lodge's The Wounds of
Civill War, or the still more incongruous medley of Heywood's
Lucrece, must have excited in him even greater condemnation than
did the English chronicle plays. We know that Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar provoked a sneer or two from Jonson”, though its drama-
tisation of Plutarch's portraits apparently excited his emulation
and suggested much in his treatment of Sejanus and Catiline.
Mere spectacle and farce disappear, and events are treated in
accord with a well thought-out theory of historical tragedy. But
Jonson's theory proved hampering; while his effort to secure
fidelity to the historical authorities led him to encumber Sejanus
with an absurd paraphernalia of notes, and to transcribe large
portions of Cicero's orations into Catiline. And, as he was forced
to confess, the historical material and the style of action demanded
by the audiences of the day did not readily lend themselves to the
restrictions of classical rules.
His plays, it must be remembered, were intended for the
public stage, and are not to be classed with closet dramas like
those of Fulke Greville and William Alexander. Jonson had
already contributed to current popular forms of tragedy, and he
started with these as a basis, attempting to rebuild them into
something more like classical models. His cardinal error was his
acceptance of the belief of the classicists that the essential
difference between epic and dramatic fable lay in the observance
of the three unities and similar proprieties. In Sejanus, he
gave up unity of time, but kept that of place; he retained the
comic scenes of the courtesan, but avoided any grotesque mixture
of the comic and the tragic. He omitted battles, jigs and
1 In the address prefixed to the 1605 quarto of Sejanus, Jonson acknowledges the
share of. & second pen' in the play as first written and acted, for which he had sub-
stituted his own work in the published play. This ‘so happy a genius' has been
identified as Chapman among other dramatists; but there is no evidence to support
these conjectures.
: Bartholomew Fayre, act II, sc. 1.
2-2
## p. 20 (#38) ##############################################
20
Ben Jonson
.
spectacles, and secured a coherent and carefully integrated
development of the main action. In Catiline, which he boldly
proclaimed a 'dramatic poem,' he adopted the Senecan technique of
an introductory ghost and a segregated chorus. In both plays, he
was following both humanistic and popular practice in choosing
for his themes the evil effects of ambition resulting in conspiracy
and civil war.
When we consider the self-imposed restrictions by which he
was bound, his achievement must seem remarkable. His interest
lay largely in characterisation, and in this resides the chief merit
of the plays. Jonson, to be sure, never learned Shakespeare's art
of transforming incidents and events into terms of a spiritual
conflict His method is rather that of exposition, each scene
illustrating and emphasising some trait without securing much
illusion of life. Yet the chief persons, Sejanus and Tiberius,
Catiline and Cicero, are thoughtfully conceived and faithfully
represented. Moreover, the minor characters are depicted with
care and even with vivacity, so that the picture of Roman life
carries a strong impression of truthfulness, due to the whole-
hearted concentration of Jonson's imagination upon his task as
well as to his painstaking study of authorities. In their interpre-
tation of historical characters, his tragedies resemble those of his
friend Chapman ; but he lacks Chapman's extraordinary elo-
quence. Jonson's style, especially in long speeches, is too often
rhetorical, and rarely displays great beauty or dramatic power.
Yet it is masterly in its way, competent to its purposes and free
from obscurity or over-ornamentation. The two tragedies, how-
ever, in spite of their excellences, must be regarded as repre-
senting another failure to turn popular English tragedy back into
the classical mould.
Jonson's return to comedy after Sejanus was made in 1604/5,
in collaboration with Chapman and Marston, in Eastward Hoe.
No success has attended any endeavour to disentangle the con-
tributions of the three authors, and their cooperation was probably
very intimate! It seems likely that Jonson aided largely in plan
and suggestion, and that comparatively little of the prose text was
by him.
The four comedies which followed rank with Every Man in
His Humour as his masterpieces. They are all comedies of
humours; but each is a peculiar development of the type. In
!
· Cf. post, chap. 11, and see the edition of this play by Schelling, F. E. (Belles
Lettres Series), 1903.
1
## p. 21 (#39) ##############################################
Volpone
21
Volpone, the Plautian model appears only in the use of the clever
servant as the mainspring of the action, and of entanglements
based on the trickster-tricked type of plot. The subject and
persons, however, are different from those usual in either Latin
or English comedy? Volpone, a miser and sensualist, works on the
greed of his acquaintances, and, by false reports of his sickness
and death, excites their hopes of inheriting his fortune, and lures
them into all kinds of abominable knavery. A shameless lawyer,
a father who disinherits his son in order to satisfy his own greed
and a wittol who offers his wife in return for an inheritance, are
the chief dupes; while Sir Politick Would Be, a foolish English
traveller, and his affected wife, who quotes Plato and knows of
Pastor Fido and 'Montaignie,' play lesser parts. The play has
little mirth; but it is a vigorous exposure of greed and iniquity.
Its purpose is not amusement but satire, its subject not folly but
vice, its protagonist not the managing servant but his master,
a inobster of villainy. Utterly bad men are common in Elizabethan
tragedy, and are found, occasionally, in comedy. But nowhere
else, unless in Iago, has vice been drawn with such fulness of
detail and yet with such consistency as in Volpone. No tragic
elevation lends majesty to the theme. The play depicts human
meanness, unrelieved by any greatness of purpose or unselfishness
of passion. It presents men as beasts, with the greed of swine, the
craft of foxes and the rapacity of wolves.
Plot, characters and blank verse, unusually vigorous and
flowing, all show Jonson at his best ; and he was justly proud, as
he boasted in the prologue, of having written in five weeks a
comedy that observed the laws of time, place and persons, and
swerved from no needful rule. In the dedication to both
universities, he excuses the punishment of the vicious in comedy,
defending himself by the example of the ancients, and still more
because 'it is the office of a comic poet to imitate justice, and
instruct to life. ' This is interesting as an adumbration of Rymer's
'poetic justice,' and as an expression of the purpose of Jonson's
satiric comedy. Other passages in this same dedication give noble
expression to the aims at which his art had now arrived,
to reluce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene, the easiness,
the propriety, the innocence, and last, the doctrine, which is the principal
end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living.
? As to the actual source, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, r—Ix, see Adams, J. Q. ,
Molern Philology, vol. II, p. 289 (1905), and Browne, W. H. , Modern Language
$('? B, vol. III, p. 113 (1906).
## p. 22 (#40) ##############################################
22
Ben Jonson
It must be confessed, however, that Jonson's vainglorious pro-
clamation of reform exhibits an insolent disregard of his great
predecessors and contemporaries. He promises
the maturing of some worthier fruits; wherein, if my muses be true to me,
I shall raise the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her out of
those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form,
restore her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her
worthy to be embraced and kist of all the great and master-spirits of our
world.
The Silent Woman' is much less intent on moral castigation
than is Volpone, and, also, much merrier. Its plot is farcical,
.
dealing with the entrapping of Morose, who hates noise, into
marriage with Epicoene, who turns out to be a noisy tartar,
and, after Morose has forgiven his nephew, proves to be a boy.
Sir Dauphine, the nephew, and his friends, are the wits; Daw,
La Foole and the Ladies Collegiates, the butts of their jests.
There is abundant satire of the manners and affectations of the
day; but the skilfully complicated action depends on numerous
disguises, and does not rise above the level of admirable farce.
In The Alchemist, Jonson essays another large canvas of
tricksters and gulls. Subtle, the alchemist, Dol Conmon and Face,
a housekeeper, have set up their snares in the house of Face's
master. Hither come an extraordinary procession of gulls, whose
very names are enough to recall the lifelike characters-Dapper, a
lawyer's clerk; Abel Drugger, a credulous tobacco man; Sir Epicure
Mammon, a voluptuary with a Micawber-like gift of eloquent
anticipation ; Pertinax Surly, a doubting Thomas; Tribulation
Wholesome and Ananias, two brethren of Amsterdam, who make
an effort to serve both God and Mammon, without forgetting the
weaker brethren; Kastrill, a foolish heir and Dame Pliant, his sister,
a widow. One after another, they expose their folly and greed, and
add to the fun and entanglement, until the master of the house
returns and joins with Face to keep the spoils, including the
widow, and to lock the doors on dupers and duped. Perhaps
in no other play has Jonson so completely succeeded in accom-
plishing what he intended as he has in this. There are no tiresome
excursuses, as in Volpone and Bartholomew Fayre; in everything,
he uses 'election and a mean. ' The entire play is in blank verse,
1 The edition of the play by Aurelia Henry, Yale Studies, 1906, discusses
suggestions for this play in Libanius and Plautus.
2 On the relation of The Alchemist to Il Candelaio of Giordano Bruno, see a note by
Child, C. G. , in The Nation, 28 July 1904. See, also, Schelling, Elix. Drama,
vol. 1, pp. 540, 541.
.
## p. 23 (#41) ##############################################
23
Bartholomew Fayre
which is most-skilfully adapted to the rapid dialogue or to the
orations of Tribulation and Sir Epicure. The language is varied,
idiomatic and precise ; the style, finished and animated. The
ingenuity of the plot, which Coleridge ranked among the three
most perfect in literature, the liveliness of the action and the
delineation of manners, harmonise in a work which, of its kind,
could hardly be bettered. The satire on alchemy, which was not
.
winout daring in the days of Simon Forman, flavours the fun
without destroying it; and the picture of Elizabethan London is L
without an equal, unless it be in Bartholomew Fayre.
In the presentation of manners and character, Bartholomew
Fayre may, indeed, be held to outrank even The Alchemist. In
many respects, however, its inferiority is palpable. It is unwieldy
in structure; its fun is often gross and farcical ; and it is over-
crowded with persons and incidents. There are thirty speaking
parts and many supernumeraries. Nowhere else, perhaps, in
literature, have so many people been so vividly presented in a
three hour entertainment as here. The usual pair of witty friends, a
pompous judge bent on reform, a proctor who has written a puppet
show! , a foolish widow, a puritan zealot, Cokes, a booby, and his
rran Waspe, mingle in the fair with a cutpurse, a ballad singer, a
tapster, a bawd, a bully and that Falstaffia of the stews, Ursula
the pig woman. The trouble here, as in other plays by Jonson, is
tl at every character is worked out with elaborate detail. If some
of the subordinate parts were removed, and others reduced in
proportion, the play, doubtless, would be improved. Certainly,
much of Littlewit's puppet play could be spared. But all the
personages mentioned, and as many more, are drawn not only with
painstaking exactness, but, also, with unflagging animation. A
play which unites such masterpieces of comic characterisation as
justice Overdo, Cokes and Zeal-of-the-land Busy, together with
much uproarious fun, must, surely, be accounted an amazing
arliievement of comic invention.
In the amusing induction, Jonson protests against the attribu-
tion of personal satire to the play, and against the tendency of
the public to judge everything by their old favourites, such as
Jeronimo and Andronicus. His protests, in fact, are directed at
the whole field of romantic drama, and include scoffs at A
Winter's Tale and The Tempest.
If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he
the author of Bartholomew Fayre] says, nor a nest of antiques ? he is loth
| Littlewit is identified by Fleay, Penniman and Schelling with the poet Daniel.
1
1
## p. 24 (#42) ##############################################
24
Ben Jonson
to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempeste,
and such like drollerier, to mix his head with other men's heels; let the
concupiscence of jigs and dances reign as strong as it will amongst you ;
yet if the puppets please any body, they shall be intreated to come in.
* The concupiscence of jigs and dances,' to which he also alludes in
the address 'To the Reader' prefixed to The Alchemist, seems to refur
to the introduction of dances and other elements from court masques
into comedy, as in A Winter's Tale, The Tempest and other con-
temporary plays. Jonson, always a precisian, preferred to keep his
masques and comedies separate. It seems clear that he intended to
make Bartholomeu Fayre an example of pure realism. Perhaps for
this reason he wrote it, like Epicoene, wholly in prose, remarkable
for its clearness and flexibility, admirably suited to the different
speakers and imitative of the manners of the time. Characters and
incidents, also, are freer from imitation of Plautus or Aristophanes
than are those of any other of his comedies, though the usual
scheme of gulls and knaves is preserved and amplified. Further
removed from classical models than his other comedies, neverthe-
less, it is Aristophanic in the breadth and liveliness of its mirth and
in its unhesitating realism. Original in its scheme and subject,
dariug in its invention, it marks the highest development of the
comedy of humours as a national type. The kind of comedy wbich
it presents has continued in prose fiction, in Fielding, Smollett and
Dickens ; but, since the Elizabethan period, our theatre has never
permitted such robust fun and so unvarnished a presentation of
the absurdities of human nature.
The Divell is an Asse betrays a flagging invention, as was to
be expected after the prodigal expenditure of the four preceding
comedies. The machinery of the devils is not very happy. Pug, a
lesser devil, is despatched by Satan to do some mischief; but his -
stupidity renders his expedition unsuccessful, and, indeed, leaves it
without effect on the action of the play. Jonson, apparently, planned
to enlarge his collection of gulls by proving the devil one ; but the
result of this humorous conception is merely to add another stupid
and uninteresting person to the dramatis personae. The other
characters are more or less repetitions of those in earlier plays,
though the chief gull, Fitzdottrel, who aims to become 'Duke of
Brownlands' through taking part in a project for draining the
waste lands of the kingdom, gives rise to plenty of humour. The
satire is lively, especially that on the exorcism of supposed evil
spirits, and that on projectors and projects-among which is one
for ‘serving the whole state with toothpicks. ' Mrs Fitzdottrel is
## p. 25 (#43) ##############################################
Later Comedies
25
drawn with more sympathy than is common in the case of Jonson's
female characters, and all the characters are, as usual, carefully
differentiated. But the comic entanglements are cumbersome, and
the play moves heavily.
Nine years intervened before the appearance of Jonson's next
comedy, The Staple of Newes. Though his prologue is as boastful
as ever, yet, in the induction and the intercalary scenes, there are
nications that he felt the uncertainty of his powers and was driven
back to the stage by want. He went to Aristophanes for a model,
composing an allegorical satire based on Plutus, from which and
from The Wasps he borrowed certain passages. The main allegory
of Pecunia, Pennyboy, Mortgage and the rest, is tiresome; but
the secondary plot, dealing with the Staple-of-News office, has
excellent satire and fun. So, too, has the scheme of the Canters'
college. But the details of the plan are not fused into a dramatic
whole. More than any play since Cynthia's Revels, this production
lacks the movement and verisimilitude indispensable in comedy.
The remaining comedies come near to deserving Dryden's
harsh criticism: ‘mere dotages. ' The New Inne was incontinently
damned at its first representation, and published two years later
(1631) by Jonson with an angry address to the reader. The
improbable plot, dependent on the disguises of Lord Frampul as
an inn-keeper, his wife as a vulgar Irish beggar and their second
daughter as a boy, deals, mainly, with the winning of the elder
daughter by Lord Lovel, thanks to two elaborate orations on love
and valour before a mock court of love. The play aims at taking
avantage of the current interest in platonism’ fostered at court
by the queen"; and both the platonic Lady Frampul and her
guitor are treated sympathetically. But the platonic addresses
are dull; and so, indeed, is the low comedy supplied by Fly, Bat
Burst, Sir Glorious Tipto and others. The failure of the play
called forth Jonson's ode 'Come, leave the loathëd stage'; but
one's sympathies incline to remain with the audience. Four years
later, The Magnetick Lady : Or Humors Reconcil'd attempted a
continuation and conclusion of the series of comedies of humours
begun thirty-five years before. A marriageable young niece of the
magnetic lady is constituted the centre attractive, to draw thither
a diversity of guests, all persons of different humours, to make up
his (the author's) perimeter. ' This plan is carried out in a half-
hearted way, though with the usual elaborate attention to details,
1 On this topic, see Fletcher, J. B. , 'Précieuses at the Court of Charles I,' in The
Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. I, p. 125.
## p. 26 (#44) ##############################################
26
Ben Jonson
and explanatory intermezzos. But, while the acts conform to the
laws of protasis, epitasis and catastasis! , there is no life or wit.
A Tale of a Tub was acted in the same year. Various references
to the queen make it likely that the play was first written about
1597; but the satire on Inigo Jones as In and In Medley must have
been incorporated in the 1633 revision. The separation of the
early crudities and the later dotages is now impossible. The
action, of the trickster-tricked variety, deals entirely with rustico,
and presents considerable ingenuity and possibility of fun. The
characters, however, are all beneath interest, and the whole treat-
ment reveals neither fresh nor worthy impulse.
Two additional plays, which, on some seventeenth century
authority, have been ascribed in part to Jonson, probably owe
little or nothing to his pen. The Widdow, published (1652) as by
Jonson, Fletcher and Middleton, was, probably, wholly by Middle-
ton? The Bloody Brother (entered in the Stationers' register,
1639, as by 'B. J. ', and printed in 1640 as by ‘B. J. F. ') is, un-
doubtedly, in part by Fletcher Jonson's share can hardly have
extended beyond the second scene of act iv.
Jonson's qualities as a dramatist, with regard to which there is
general critical agreement, have, perhaps, been sufficiently indicated.
His wide and penetrating observation of manners, whether of city
or of court, and his ingenious and systematic construction of plots,
are obvious merits. But the great excellence of both his tragedies
and his comedies is their delineation of character. This is conditioned
less than in other Elizabethan dramatists by the story, but more
by classical models and rules, as in his observance of the unities,
or his fidelity to historical authorities, or his copying of the Plautian
plan and types. It is also conditioned by his method of making each
person the illustration of one trait or humour, and by his disposition
to substitute description for drama, and satire for fact, and to
exaggerate his satire into farce. Thus, in Every Man in His
Humour, only Bobadill represents the complete transformation
of a type into an indiyidual; and, in Bartholomew Fayre, the
individualisation follows the broad lines of caricature. Again,
each person is set forth with such distinctness of detail that, while
it aids visualisation, it often distracts from the interest of situation.
Only in The Alchemist is there an entire absence of this impeding
1 Cf. act i, ad fin.
9 See post, chap. III.
: See chap. v, and cf. Fleay, F. G. , The English Drama, vol. I, pp. 203——5, and
Oliphant, E. F. , Eng. Studien, vol. xv, pp. 353-5. Concerning the anonymous Latin
comedy Querolus as the source of the scene (1v, 2) attributed to Jonson, seo Garnett, R. ,
Mod. Phil. vol. 11, p. 491.
## p. 27 (#45) ##############################################
His Place in Literature
27
garrulity. Akin to this defect are Jonson's over-use of the long
monologue after the fashion of classical models, the heaviness and
coarseness which his realism often gives to his vocabulary and his
thoroughness, which refuses to let go person, speech, or situation
until it is absolutely exhausted. Yet, in spite of all these limita-
tions, Jonson's comic characterisation remains among the greatest
achievements of the English drama, because of its clearness and
certainty, its richness of humour and its dramatic veracity. A. W.
Ward is justified in giving him pre-eminence in the highest species
of comedy, that 'in which everything else is subordinated to the
dramatic unfolding of character. '
What most discourages the reader of Jonson is the absence
of charm. Jonson was certainly not incapable of depicting noble
passions or of writing winsome verse; but in his plays he resolutely
refused to attempt either. This refusal, in marked contrast with
the practice of his fellow Elizabethans, is precisely the negative
side of his most positive characteristics. He did not write of
passions, but of follies--not of fairyland, but of London; he often
deliberately preferred prose to poetry, and he always restrained
poetry to his subject. If poetry must, at times, have freedom, it
must, at times, have restraint ; if, at times, it may soar on fancy's
wing or evoke glorious or appalling habitants for our reflection,
at other times it may well cling to the actualities of daily existence.
Comedy, of all forms of literature, has its duties in the street or
tavern as well as in Arden or on the sea-coast of Bohemia. Jonson
found neither charm nor heroism in London streets, though
both were unquestionably there. He found neither the truth
and passion that lay at the heart of puritanism, nor the joy and
fancy that stirred the light-hearted moods of Fletcher, Shirley, or
Herrick. But he mirrored what he saw of men and manners with
an untiring fidelity, heightened and coloured his picture with a
hearty and virile humour and interpreted it by a sound and
cesorious morality. Imaginative idealism, characteristic of the
Elizabethan age and its literature, had another and a greater master;
but interest in the depiction and criticism of the actual life of the
day-an interest essential to vitality in the literature of any age,
and manifest in the golden days of the Armada as well as in
degenerate Jacobean times—had its chief exponent in Jonson.
His influence, commanding in his own day, has continued down
to the present. His comedies were imitated so soon as they
appeared ; witness Everie Woman in her Humor (1609, acted
by 1600). Beaumont and Fletcher studied in his school, as The
## p. 28 (#46) ##############################################
28
Ben Jonson
Woman Hater, written by the former! , testifies; and Marston,
Middleton and Chapman profited from his example. Oflater drama-
tists, Field, Randolph, Cartwright, Nabbes and May-to name
no others-employed Jonson's methods and wrote plays in his
manner. The comedy of humours became, in fact, an established
model, which few later writers altogether disregarded. All realistic
comedy owned its influence, and reminiscences of its most effective
scenes and types of character found their way into every kind vi
drama. There were other leaders in realistic comedy, Middleton
in particular, who may be said to have set an example of a less
satirical, less moral, but hardly less Plautian, representation of
London manners. But Jonson continued through his life time the
chief advocate and exemplar of serious realism.
After the Restoration, Jonson's reputation, for a time, increased.
Dryden's praise was echoed by Dennis and others, especially by
those who were most eager to see neo-classical rules and models
prevail in the theatres. Both his tragedies and his comedies were
held in high esteem. The former were revived, but did not long
hold the stage. The latter found a warm welcome on the stage
and maintained themselves there during the long period when
Shakespeare's romantic comedies failed to please. Bartholomeu
Fayre disappeared (1731), even before As You Like It returned to
the stage (1740), and, of Volpone, The Silent Woman and The
Alchemist' not one has outlasted the eighteenth century on the
public boards. The last three were revived by Garrick, who also
brought out a revision of Every Man in his Humour. That play
continued on the stage well into the nineteenth century.
Jonson's influence, moreover, has been felt in the novel as well
as in the drama. His plays have been constantly read and have
always encouraged a study of the absurdities of character and the
incongruities of manners. Fielding and Smollett were conscious of
their incentive, and Dickens, who knew them well and himself acted
Bobadill, must, to no inconsiderable extent, have been indebted to
their suggestion. Not only are there specific resemblances, as be-
tween Zeal-of-the-land Busy and Stiggins, but Dickens's comic inven-
tion and characterisation are often strikingly Jonsonian in method
and effect. Whether Jonson's comedies are ever again revived
on the stage or not, they are likely to continue long to encourage
in fiction a frank and searching presentation of foible and folly.
1 See below, chap. v.
: A droll, The Empiric (1676), and a farce, The Tobacconist (1771) were based on
The Alchemisi. A satirical tragedy, The Favourite, based on Sejunus, appeared in 1770.
## p. 29 (#47) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
CHAPMAN, MARSTON, DEKKER
AMBITIONS are naturally fired in an age of unusual achievement
in any field of human activity, and men of every variety of genius
or talent, however unfitted to command success in it, are drawn
to the glittering arena. Many men were dramatists in 1600 whose
gifts were not conspicuously dramatic, and whose instincts in another
epoch would hardly have driven them to the service of the stage. Of
these, George Chapman was an example. He was a poet; but his
muse did not point him towards the theatre, and, had she designed
him for drama, she would have delayed his birth. For, in 1600, when
Jonson was about twenty-seven and Dekker thirty, Chapman was
already forty years old. He was twenty-eight when Marlowe's
Tamburlaine was produced, and thus did not in early youth, nor
until his mind had already taken its mould, come under the dra-
matic influences or inspiration which formed Shakespeare and the
greater playwrights. Nor is it even certain that he was greatly
interested in drama till within five years of the close of the
century. He did not serve a youthful apprenticeship to the
theatrical art, and he never learnt to think in any character but
his own.
We gather from one of his early poems (Euthymiae Raptus)
that Chapman was born in or near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and,
from the title-page of his Homer, that his birth year was 1559.
It is frequently said that he studied at both universities, but there
is no certain evidence that he was at either. Wood asserts that
he spent some time at Oxford, in 1574 or thereabouts, 'where he
was most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic
or philosophy,' and that he left without taking a degree. Of his
personal affairs for the next twenty years, we know nothing. It
is not improbable that he travelled, and a passage in one of his
poems suggests that, like Jonson, he may have served in the
Netherlands. As a man of letters, his first appearance, apparently,
## p. 30 (#48) ##############################################
30
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
was made in a volume of poetry, The Shadow of Night, when
he was thirty-five. From this time, he was busy as poet and
dramatist until 1614, and seems to have achieved reputation and
gained distinguished friends, though he gathered little wealth.
Meres speaks of him in 1598 as a renowned scholar, tragedian
and comedian. We know that he found a patron in the earl of
Essex, and that, after the earl's execution in 1601, he was befriended
by prince Henry, to whom he was appointed 'server in ordinary. '
The prince encouraged him in his work of translating Homer, and
appears to have promised him a pension; but he died in 1612, and
Chapman received no further royal favours.
To all times future this time's mark extend,
Homer no patron found, nor Chapman friend.
In 1605, he had shared with Marston and Jonson the displeasure
of the authorities for the satire in Eastward Hoe on the Scottish
king's needy followers, and had suffered imprisonment. Again, in
1608, he narrowly escaped punishment for an unhappy reference to
the French queen in The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Duke of Byron, which roused the indignation of the French
ambassador. From 1614, Chapman appeared less frequently as an
author, and he died in no very prosperous circumstances in 1634.
He was buried in St Giles's in the Fields (Habington, in his Castara,
speaks of his tomb as without the church), and a monument by
his friend Inigo Jones, to whom he had dedicated his translation
of Musaeus, was then erected to his memory, as 'a Christian
Philosopher and Homericall Poett. '
It is difficult to escape the conviction that Minto was correct in
his identification of Chapman with the ‘rival poet' of Shakespeare's
Sonnets ; and it has been argued with great force and ingenuity?
that the rivalry here indicated may be traced elsewhere in the
work of both authors, and that the note of anger in the strain
of invective which frequently appears in Chapman's poems and
prefaces, hitherto interpreted in his favour as the natural scorn of
a great artist for inferior work, was the outcome of bitter personal
resentment at the success of the unlettered Shakespeare and was
directly aimed at him. According to this view, The Amorous Zodiac,
in the 1595 volume of poems, is the poem indicated by Shake-
speare in his twenty-first sonnet; Holofernes, in Love's Labour's
Lost, is a satirical portrait of Chapman in reply to his malevolent
attacks, and Troilus and Cressida an elaborate castigation of
1
1 Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, by Arthur Acheson, 1903.
## p. 31 (#49) ##############################################
31
Quality of Chapman's Poetry
Chapman's extravagant laudation of Homer, his praise of Greek
ideals and his contempt of all poets who were not his equals in
scholarship. Though not proven, the thesis cannot be lightly
dismissed.
We are told that Chapman was a student of the classics who
made little progress in philosophy; but his earliest works exhibit
him rather as a metaphysician in verse than as a disciple of the
canons of ancient art. Passages in The Shadow of Night (1594)
and in Ovid's Banquet of Sauce, containing A coronet for his
Mistress Philosophy, The amorous Zodiac and other poems (1595),
may be praised with justice; but they will never be widely
read. In the dedication of the second volume, he disclaims
all ambition to please the vulgar—'The profane multitude I
hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching
spirits, whom learning hath made noble and nobility sacred. '
Yet, even among ‘searching spirits,' some reluctance to return to
poems in the main so warped and obscure as these may well
be found. Better work was to come. In his continuation of
Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman not unworthily
completed an incomparable fragment, and, in The Tears of
Peace (1609), dedicated to his young patron, prince Henry, he
reaches his happiest moods as an original poet. By Andromache
Liberata (1614), he added nothing to his reputation. The subject
was an unfortunate one—the marriage of the earl of Somerset
and Frances Howard, the divorced lady Essex—and was treated
in so enigmatic a manner as to make necessary a subsequent
prose justification of its aims and intentions. Distinction of mind
and intellectual vigour are apparent in all Chapman's work; but,
though he may occasionally soar, he never sings, and his finest
verses possess gnomic and didactic, rather than lyric, quality.
When it emerges from the entanglements amid which the current
of his reflections is usually split, his poetry can be as limpid as it
is stately. But not often do we hear such music as when he tells
us that Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse
Renews the golden world and holds through all
The holy laws of homely Pastoral,
Where flowers and founts and nymphs and semi-gods
And all the Graces find their old abodes.
Though Chapman was well known as a dramatist in 1598, only
two plays by his hand are extant which were produced before
that date-The Blinde begger of Alexandria (printed 1598) and
An Humerous dayes Myrth (printed 1599), probably the play
## p. 32 (#50) ##############################################
32
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
mentioned by Henslowe as The comodey of Umers in 1597. Both
are comedies; but neither deserves any particular notice, though
the first appears to have been successful on the stage, and the
second contains one or two characters drawn with some cleverness
and spirit. Al Fooles (printed 1605), another comedy, was first
produced under the title The World runs on Wheels, and displays
a surprising advance in dramatic technique. The plot, partly
borrowed from Terence, is ingenious and excellent, and makes
a good framework for a satirical sketch of humours developed
through amusing situations in the manner of Jonson. As a writer
of comedy, here, and in Eastward Hoe (to be noticed later), where,
however, he had collaborators, Chapman appears to the greatest
advantage. When dealing with lighter themes, he condescended,
though with apologies, to write an uninflated style; and, however
he may himself have preferred the heightened and fantastic rhetoric
of his tragedies, they are indisputably inferior in construction
and far less natural in tone than the dramas he affected to
despise.
For four or five years after the opening of the seventeenth
century, Chapman, doubtless because he was occupied with the
continuation of his translation of Homer, contributed nothing to
dramatic literature. By 1605, he had, evidently, resumed his
connection with the theatre; for two plays were printed in the
following year—The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur D'Olive.
In the first of these, Chapman threw his chief strength into a
romantic love episode introduced into the comic scheme of the
play, and succeeded in imparting to it an intensity and sweetness
foreign to his character and talent. Monsieur D'Olive opens
strongly; but the main plot is subsequently obscured by the
shifting of the centre of interest to the character who gives his
name to the piece. This cleverly conceived and diverting town
gull, whose wit and coolness in a trying situation are pleasantly
rendered, at once spoils the play as a work of art and keeps it
alive as an entertainment. Later in his career, Chapman wrote
two more comedies-May-Day (printed 1611), shown by Stiefel
to be an adaptation of the Allesandro of Allesandro Piccolomini,
and The Widdowes Teares (printed 1612) and took part with
Shirley in a third, The Ball (printed 1639). The last named owes
little to Chapman', and neither of the others rises to anything
approaching excellence. The Widdowes Teares, the idea of which
is borrowed from Petronius, is not altogether wanting in power and
1 Cf. post, chap. VIII.
9
## p. 33 (#51) ##############################################
Chapman's Historic Tragedies
33
has some characteristic passages, but entirely fails to arouse interest
in its characters or admiration for the contrivance of the action.
His translations apart, Chapman's fame rests upon his tragedies
founded on French history, of which Bussy D'Ambois (printed
1607) and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613)
have always and rightly received most attention. The subjects
here chosen were singularly adapted to display the qualities of
his genius, never impressive save on an elevated stage. Bussy
D'Ambois was by far the most successful of his dramas, its popu-
larity being due, in part, to its revival of recent history, in part to
the character and career of the chief figure, formed by nature for
an invincible hero of romance, and in part to the glowing rhetoric
which certainly rises in places to pure and impassioned poetry.
Some entries in Henslowe suggest that Bussy D'Ambois, and not
Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, as Collier thought, may have been
the play for which payments were made in 15981; but, if we assign
to it so early a date as this, we must allow a revision after the
death of Elizabeth, who is spoken of as the 'old Queene. ' The
sources of this drama have not been precisely determined-De
Thou's Historiae sui temporis and Rosset’s Histoires Tragiques,
from which it was supposed that the author derived his inci-
dents, were not published in 1607—and Chapman, therefore,
must have had recourse to contemporary accounts. The part
of Bussy was acted by Nathaniel Field. A revised version of
the play by Thomas D'Urfey was produced on the stage of the
Theatre Royal in 1691. For The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
and the tragedies The Conspiracie, And Tragedie of Charles
Drike of Byron (printed 1608), he drew directly from a trans-
lation of Serres's Inventaire Général de THistoire de France
by Edward Grimeston, published in 1607%. Grimeston supple-
mented Serres, whose narrative ends in 1598, from Matthieu's
Histoire de France and other contemporary writers.
In his first tragedy, the court of Henry III is employed as a
frame for the full length portrait of the brilliant adventurer, Bussy,
whose love affair with Tamyra, countess of Montsorry, betrayal
to her husband and last stand when encircled by his enemies,
make an admirable drama of the heroic and melodramatic type.
It is successful in a style thoroughly Elizabethan (the antithesis of
the classic), in which violent scenes and extravagant rhetoric
1 Cf. Greg's Henslowe's Diary, part 11, pp. 198, 199, and Henslowe Papers, p. 120,
note.
2 Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. by Boas, F. S. , 1905.
E L VI. CH. II.
3
## p. 34 (#52) ##############################################
34 Chapman, Marston, Dekker
a
mingle with profound reflection and magnificent outbursts of
poetry—a strange compound of the fantastic and forbidding with
the noblest and most inspiring elements in art. Dryden, in his
famous depreciation of this play, went too far:
I have ometimes wondered in the reading (he said] what has become of
those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the
theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I
had been cozened with a jelly; nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered
no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in gigantic
words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles;
the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense ;
or, at best, a scantling of wit, which lay gasping for life, and groaning
beneath a heap of rubbish. A famous modern poet used to sacrifice every
year a Statius to Virgil's manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a
D'Ambois annually to the memory of Jonson.
We have here a typical example of Restoration feeling and criti-
cism. Chapman exhibits in excess precisely those Elizabethan
qualities which a later age found Gothic and barbaric. The faults
of the romantic school are all present in an exaggerated degree.
But Dryden overlooked the fiery energy, the imaginative splendours
and rich suggestiveness of phrase and imagery which were its glory,
and beside which the undeniable excellences of his own age of
literature seem the cold and lifeless offspring of uninspired labour.
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (printed 1613), written after an
interval during which Chapman had produced his Byron tragedies,
though inferior as a drama for the stage, is stronger in its reflective
passages and contains by far the most interesting and profound
of Chapman's character studies. This is Clermont d'Ambois, a
brother of the dead Bussy invented by the dramatist, who is incited
by Bussy's ghost, as Hamlet is by his father's spirit, to under-
take the mission of revenge. Clermont, the senecal man,' who, like
Hamlet, is of a speculative habit of mind and disinclined towards
violence, only after delays accomplishes his task, and, in the end,
dies by his own hand. The Revenge is suffused with memories
of Shakespeare's play, to which, undoubtedly, it owes its plan and
many of its episodes, while Clermont's philosophy is largely drawn
from Epictetus. It is somewhat remarkable that this drama, the
interest of which is centred in a true philosopher moving amid the
intrigues and violences of a renascence court, makes him the
faithful follower of the infamous duke of Guise, whose portrait,
as given us here, is no less flattering than it is unhistorical-a
piece of perversity certainly not calculated to commend the play
to reformation England.
## p. 35 (#53) ##############################################
Tit
Other Plays by Chapman 35
If high intellectual interest and authentic eloquence sufficed to
constitute a dramatic masterpiece, The Conspiracie, And Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France might give Chapman
rank among great playwrights. But we have here rather ‘a small
epic in ten books or acts' than a drama. The verse runs more
smoothly, however, than in the Bussy plays, the poetry is less pestered
with the cloudy turbulence of his ‘full and heightened style,' and
nowhere does Chapman win more completely upon his reader.
In his next tragedy, Caesar and Pompey (printed 1631), he turned
from contemporary to classical history, and, standing on scholar's
ground, might have been expected to derive powerful inspiration
from his theme, but the design is feebly handled, and he fails, as
before, to communicate movement to the action or vitality to the
dramatis personal. Only the oratorical passages, especially those
placed in the mouth of Cato, can be read with much pleasure.
The remaining plays of Chapman were not published during
EUR his lifetime. In Chabot Admirall of France (printed 1639), for
which materials were drawn from Pasquier's Les Recherches de la
France, he had the assistance of Shirley, and it seems fruitless
to attempt the task of partitioning their respective contributions.
Revenge for Honour (printed 1654), an eastern tale of which the
scene is laid in Arabia, may have been written by Chapman; but the
play is by no means in his usual manner, and it is difficult to believe
that, in his old age, he could have assimilated the style of the later
dramatists. (A play printed for the same publisher and entitled The
me Paraside, a Revenge for Honour was entered in the register (1653)
as by Henry Glapthorne. ) Neither play possesses any great dis-
e tinction, though some critics have found in the variety of incident
and portraiture in the last named drama reason for assigning to it
ik
a high place among Chapman's works. It is certainly superior to
Alphonsus Emperour of Germany (printed 1654), also ascribed to
Chapman on more slender grounds. The intimate knowledge of
the German language and German life displayed by the author has
been variously explained. Either Chapman spent some time in
Germany, or he was assisted by some unknown writer intimately
acquainted with the language and customs of that country. There
ti remains the possibility that he had no hand in it. Zeal for
Chapman's reputation might easily be better expended than in the
attempt to prove this play his. Sir Gyles Goosecappe (printed 1606),
an anonymous play, has been ascribed to Chapman or a disciple
by several critics, on internal evidence of method and manner.
Two of his plays, never printed, were destroyed in manuscript by
Te
3-2
## p. 36 (#54) ##############################################
36
,
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
а
Warburton's cook, The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son, and
Fatal Love, a French tragedy. Jonson told Drummond that 'next
himself, only Fletcher and Chapman,' both of whom ‘he loved,'
'could make a masque. ' Only one such composition by Chapman
is extant, The memorable Masque of the two honourable Houses
or Innes of Court; the Middle Temple, and Lyncolnes Inne,
performed at Whitehall in 1614. Probably he wrote others; the
merits of this piece afford insufficient warrant for Jonson’s com-
pliment. While it would be absurd to deny the presence of
masculine force and fervid poetry in Chapman's best tragedies,
it would be mere irony to claim for him fine sensibility or delicate
discrimination in the portrayal of character. He is not great either
in invention or construction, and, though his work abounds in
wise sayings, moral apophthegms and high pitched sentiments, and
though the talent for observation is not absent, there is an invincible
coarseness in his fibre. The comedies show all men either as
deceivers or deceived; his tragic heroes are often little more than
the embodiment of physical energy and tenacious will; pathos he
never attains; and he seems to have been incapable or undesirous
of painting the portrait of a lovable woman. Chapman's immense
pretensions and determination to storm Parnassus hardly win our
allegiance. Nor need we pay homage to his scholarship, though
reputed as vast. He was overburdened not so much by the
weight of his learning as by a mistaken sense of its importance
and authority. Approach him first by way of his original poems
and dramas, and it will not easily prove practicable to find the
measure of the man. Like Milton writing in prose, he is using, as
it were, his left hand. But approach him first under the spell of
Homer, who was 'angel to him, star and fate,' when both genius and
character are sublimated, and he will be known for what he is.
In Chapman's view, Homer was not only emperor among the poets,
he was the greatest of men and philosophers. 'Of all books extant
in all kinds, Homer is the first and best .
