The first scene
describes
the attempt and its failure.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v06
A scene in which Joyce, anxious
to hide the state of her heart, confounds and bewilders her lover,
first by her silence and then by her speech, recalls the vigorous
domestic comedy of Porter? It is curious that we should know
nothing whatever of 'Jo. Cooke,' and that, like Barry, he
should have just one play to his credit. The Hog hath lost his
Pearl is, again, the single play of a writer whose name—Robert
Tailor—is all that is known about him. Tailor's literary capacity
is below that of either Barry or Cooke. To a play of low comedy,
he tacks on a romantic plot of a painful character? which only a
master of dramatic art could make endurable. Tailor manages the
prose of his comedy much better than the verse of his moral
romance; the main interest of the play, however, is not in its style
or story but in the circumstances of its production. Sir Henry
Wotton, in a letter dated 16123, tells us that 'some sixteen
? See ante, vol. v, chap. XIII.
2 Otway's Orphan deals with the same plot.
3 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Smith, L. P. , vol. 1, p. 13.
## p. 220 (#238) ############################################
220 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
apprentices,' having secretly learnt their parts, 'took up the
White Fryers for their theatre,' and invited their friends to see
them perform The Hog hath lost his Pearl. The sheriffs inter-
vened before the end of the performance and carried off six or
seven of the apprentices to prison. He adds that it was supposed
that Sir John Swinnerton was meant by the hog, and the late
lord treasurer by the pearl. The prologue of the printed play
alludes to this incident, but says that
our swine,
Is not as divers critics did define,
Grunting at state affairs or invecting
Much at our city vices;
if the play pleases, 'we'll say 'tis fortunate, like Pericles. ' Like
the two plays mentioned before it, Tailor's is full of interest for
the student of Jacobean London.
We come now to the main stream of Jacobean dramatic work,
in which the influence of Jonson, both personal and by his art, is
all-pervasive.
Among the extant plays of the reign of king James, two by
Nathaniel Field are of such merit as to suggest that the writer,
probably, would have risen above the ranks of the lesser dramatists,
had he persevered in the prosecution of his art. He was born in
1587, a few months before his father's death. That father was the
famous preacher John Field, whose rousing discourse upon the
collapse of a gallery in Paris garden in 1583 has come down to
us? . It contains interesting details about the catastrophe and a
violent attack upon theatrical performances, with valuable in-
formation about London players and their theatres. Nat's elder
brother, Theophilus, was educated at Cambridge and rose to be
bishop of Hereford; and it is singular, therefore, that Nat Field's
name should be found first among the six 'principal comedians'
of the band of lads called the children of the queen’s revels, who
acted in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels in 1600. These boys were the
‘young eyases' discussed by Hamlet. For a time, as has been seen? ,
they rivalled men players in public favour; and Field, as he grew
older, maintained his position and may claim to have succeeded
Burbage as the leading actor on the English stage. Jonson, no
doubt, owed a debt to Field for his clever acting in Cynthia's Revels
and Poetaster, and the debt is repaid by the mention of Field, in
1614, in Bartholomew Fayre— Which is your Burbadge now? . . .
i Cf. , as to this incident, post, chap. XIV.
Cf. ante, chap. II, and post, chap. XI.
## p. 221 (#239) ############################################
Field's A Woman is a Weather-cocke 221
Your best actor, your Field ? ' Field joined the King's company
before he finally retired from the stage, and, in the 1623 folio of
Shakespeare's plays, he is seventeenth in the list there given of
twenty-six players. Jonson told Drummond that “Nat Field was
his scholar. An interesting proof of Jonson’s regard for Field is
afforded by the insertion of an extra sheet of commendatory
verses addressed by Field to Jonson in some copies of the 1607
quarto of Volpone. Field's verses are amateurish-he speaks
justly of his 'weak flame'-but they show a great awe of Jonson,
whom 'to dare commend were damnable presumption. The
lines should be compared with the much more mature address
'to his worthy and beloved friend Master Ben Jonson on his
Catiline3. ' Field had been educated by Mulcaster at the
Merchant Taylors' school, but 'taken' by N. Giles as one of the
company of the children of the revels. Giles was accused of
kidnapping boys against their parents' wishes, and we may con-
jecture that Field would not have been annexed, had his strenuous
father been alive to protect him.
Field's first play, A Woman is a Weather-cocke, was produced
in 1610. In the first scene, Scudmore is discovered reading a
vehement letter from Bellafront, the lady he loves. To him, thus
occupied, enters his friend Nevill on his way to a wedding. The
lover very prettily takes his friend into his confidence, enlarges
like a Romeo on his mistress,
Whose face brought concord and an end of jars,
and passionately proclaims,
She is the food, the sleep, the air I live by.
He ends with the lady's name; whereupon his friend blurts out in
amazement, ‘But that's the wedding I was going to. ' This dramatic
scene is put before us with a force and vividness remarkable in so
young a writer. In itself, it is an excellent beginning ; but the
Jonsonian 'humours' of the next scene jar a little. They are not
in the same key as the romantic passionate opening of the play.
But Field's wit is considerable and is not a mere copy of
Jonson. His manner has a sprightliness and good-humour, and
a
1 They read Horace and Martial together; see Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations
with Drummond, ed. Laing, D. , p. 11.
? It is contained in the British Museum copy, C 12, c. 17, which was presented by
Jonson to John Florio with an inscription in Ben's autograph to his loving father
and friend, the aid of his Muses. ' See Percy Simpson in Notes and Queries, Ser. VIII,
vol. VIII, p. 301.
But in this age where jigs and dances move
How few there are that this pure work approve.
.
## p. 222 (#240) ############################################
222 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
an occasional naturalness, which are his own, and differentiate
his comic style quite definitely from Jonson's.
The second act is constructed on the same plan as the first. It
begins with a semi-romantic scene and ends with 'humour. ' When
captain Pouts, who has been rejected by Katharine, publicly insults
her at the door of the church in which she has just been married
to Strange, she urges her new husband to vindicate her honour;
and, perhaps, no better example could be given of Field's capacity
as a writer of strong, direct, blank verse than her invective:
Thou wert ordained,
And in thy cradle marked to call me wife,
And in that title made as my defence,
Yet sufferedst him to go away with life,
Wounding my honour dead before thy face!
Redeem it on his head, and his own way,
Even by the sword, his long profession,
And set it clear amongst the tongues of men,
That all eyes may discern it slandered,
Or thou shalt ne'er enjoy me as a wife.
The verse is in the manner of Shakespeare in the Henry V
period, although with less music and very little imaginative
decoration, and the excellence of its directness and spontaneity
is due, no doubt, to Field's training as an actor. His use of
language, too, is free, like Shakespeare's—to be understood by
the audience though not always approved by the grammarian. In
the passage quoted, ‘his long profession, with the meaning, ‘for so
long a time his profession,' has a Shakespearean sound, as, also, has
the rather enigmatic, but still forcible, 'made' of the third line.
Strange's speech, a little later, about the law's inequalities, again,
is forcible, eloquent blank verse. But the second part of the plot
overloads the play as a whole. Field, as a scholar of Jonson,
desires to show his dexterity as a plotter ; but, like all young
writers of promise, and like all immature dramatists, he gives his
audience too much, and cannot endure to limit his own scope.
In this play, which is full both of matter and of varied promise
of dramatic ability, Ben Jonson is obviously the master most con-
sciously copied. The ‘humours' are in Jonson's manner, as are
the complicated plottings. The compression of the action into
exactly one day is in accordance with Ben's teaching. It might
be contended that a certain intensity in the serious scenes
copies the splendid passion of Volpone, which is the high water
mark of Jonson's art. This, however, would be a mistake. The
serious scenes of the play are essentially romantic and idealistic,
suggesting Romeo and Juliet rather than The Alchemist. But
a
## p. 223 (#241) ############################################
3
T
1
ป
It
Field's Amends for Ladies
223
Romeo has been brought up as a player and has appeared upon
the public stage from his childhood, and Ben Jonson has been his
schoolmaster. He has, therefore, lost all exterior softness and
sentiment, and, at first reading, a certain hardness and bravado
in his manner deceive the student. Field's second play, Amends
for Ladies, followed hard upon the first, and was intended to atone
for the many hard things said against women in the first play.
There are three heroines, the lady Honour, the lady Perfect and
the lady Bright, who, as maid, wife and widow, vindicate, respec-
tively, the claims of their sex to constancy and virtue. It will be
seen, therefore, that, again, the scheme of the play is too full of
incident; there are three plays in one. The second play, on the
whole, is a more hasty piece of work than the first; it has the
drawbacks of an after-thought; but there is a distinct maturity
and strengthening to be noted in its style. Field's natural bent
is, more obviously than before, to draw ideal heroes, headstrong
and indomitable. He does not yet show much power of characteri-
sation; his heroes and heroines are all repetitions of one type.
We remember that one of his great parts was Bussy D'Ambois,
and that Chapman addresses some lines 'to his loved son Nat
Field. ' The comic scenes of the second play are less original and
less amusing than those of the first. There is something perfunc-
tory about 'the merry prankes of Moll Cut-purse, Or, the humour
of roaring. And, again, all that part of the play which uses the
plot of 'The Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, in which a
husband, in order to prove his wife's virtue, eggs on his friend to
tempt her, is intolerable to modern feeling. Field's audacity and
directness of treatment make him, when his subject is unpleasant,
unusually outrageous, even for the Jacobean stage. Yet he
cherishes an ideal of incorruptible and unassailable virtue which
was rare in the drama of the period.
Besides writing these two comedies, Field collaborated both
with Fletcher and Massinger. Of these collaborations, we need
mention only The Fatall Dowry, produced about 1619, shortly
before Field retired from the stage? It has been common to
refer to Field the lighter parts of plays in which he collaborated ;
but what we have noted in his work will make it highly probable
that Field, quite as much as Massinger, was responsible for the
romantic side of the play and especially for the uncompromising
honesty of Romont. In this respect, Chapman was his master;
and, from Chapman and Jonson equally, he learnt to remind his
i Cf. ante, chap. VI.
1
6
3
## p. 224 (#242) ############################################
224 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
reader that 'a play is not so idle a thing as thou art, but a mirror
of men's lives and actions. ' And yet his profession irked him; 'thou
know'st where to hear of me for a year or two and no more,'
he says, in the address to the reader which we have quoted. He
married about 1619 and became a publisher, dying in 1633. In
1616, he addressed a letter to Sutton, the preacher at St Mary
Overy, who, like Field's own father, was a great denouncer of the
stage. Field very loyally defends his profession; but his letter is
very remarkable for its religious earnestness, which, in itself, is
enough to explain his retirement.
Richard Brome', like Field, was in a special sense educated by
Jonson, and it will be convenient to consider his work after Field's
The stagekeeper who opens the induction to Bartholomew
Fayre, having occasion to pronounce the play 'a very conceited,
scurvy one,' looks behind the arras ‘lest the poet hear me or his
man, Master Brome. ' This was in 1614. Prefixed to Brome's
Northern Lasse, and dated, therefore, not later than 1632, we have
Jonson's characteristic sonnet 'to my old faithful servant and by
his continued virtue my loving friend . . . Mr Richard Brome. In
the first line, 'I had you for a servant, once, Dick Brome,' we
almost hear Jonson speak. He goes on to say that Brome has
sedulously worked at his profession :
You learned it well, and for it served your time,
A prenticeship.
Fleay regards this apprenticeship as extending over the whole of
the seven years 1623 to 1629. In 1623, we first hear of Brome as
an author. A Fault in Friendship was licensed in that year,
‘written by Brome and young Jonson. ' Unfortunately, the play
has not survived; but we may allow ourselves to suppose that the
servant and the son pursued their dramatic studies together, under
the father's august and austere supervision. We know nothing of
Brome's parents; but a sonnet of some literary merit by a brother
Stephen is printed among the poems prefixed to The Northern
Lasse. We must beware, therefore, of assuming that Brome was
of very lowly rank and uneducated till Jonson took him in
hand. This notion is suggested by the low life in Brome's plays,
as well as by a humility towards public and private patrons in
Brome's prologues and epilogues, which, sometimes, is almost
servile. But the sonnet must not be ignored ; and, when we find
.
1 Pronounced Broom. '
## p. 225 (#243) ############################################
Richard Brome
225
Jonson, in a well known epigram', expecting his 'man' to read
'a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book' to his
guests at supper, we conjecture that the servant was not so much
a valet as a secretary and amanuensis, whose duties, from the first,
in connection with Jonson's dramatic and literary work, required
a grammar school education. The same inference is suggested by
the easy use of Latin in the sketch of the amusing pedant Sarpego
in The City Witt. Jonson is copied unblushingly. Sarpego’s
speech, ‘Diogenes Laertius on a certain time demanded of Cor-
nelius Tacitus, an areopagite of Syracusa, what was the most
commodious and expeditest method to kill the itch,' is modelled on
Clove's in Every Man out of His Humour: 'Aristotle in his dae-
monologia approves Scaliger for the best navigator in his time,
and in his hypercritics he reports him to be Heautontimoru-
menos 12' But there is very little of this misuse of long words and
classical names in the part; Sarpego redeems his promise, 'His
grace will see that we can speak true Latin and construe Ludovicus
Vives'; and his Latin has a sprightliness and comicality hardly
to be attained by a writer whose studies began after his school
days were over. But, if Brome's education was not much inferior to
Field's, the contrast between the personal characters of Jonson's
two ‘sons' is all the more striking. Field has more than a touch
of Jonson's arrogance, and inherits some of his strength of style.
Brome's meekness verges on servility. The note of self-depre-
ciation continually recurs:
A little wit, less learning, no poetry
This playmaker dares boast.
He is always reverent and loyal to Jonson; but his attitude of
deference to his audience, and his modest estimate of his own
powers as a writer, make quite clear his unlikeness to his master.
For all his sedulous imitation of Jonson's style and methods,
Brome has little of his master's soul in him. He can only be
Jonson on a small scale; but Jonson on a small scale is not
Jonson. Brome's sketches of London life are varied, minute,
careful, spirited, and yet they displease; they cannot be read
continuously without weariness, and are extremely coarse. Some
critics have been pleased to decide that Brome describes life from
the groom's point of view, and have ascribed his coarseness to bis
want of education and humble origin. The truer explanation is
1 Epigram ci.
? This parallel is noted in Faust's dissertation, Richard Brome, Halle, 1887, p. 52.
E. L. VI. CH, IX.
15
## p. 226 (#244) ############################################
226 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
that he uses Jonson's manner without Jonson's full-blooded,
massive humanity, without his satiric intensity, without his intel-
lectual power; so that the Jonsonian scenes in Brome, his
numerous efforts to describe the humours of London life, repel
or tire the reader.
Fifteen of Brome's plays have come down to us. Four of these
were published in quarto in Brome's lifetime ; five were printed
together, in 1653, shortly after his death ; five more in 1659; and
one other, in quarto, in 1657. The plays have been conveniently
classed under the headings of comedies of manners, romantic
comedies and romantic dramas of intrigue. These divisions ex-
hibit Brome's debt to Jonson, for the first class is much the
largest, including nine plays? . But these nine plays are not purely
Jonsonian. The Northern Lasse is the earliest of the extant
plays. It was printed in 1632 and, again, in 1635 and in 1663. It
was the most popular of Brome's plays and definitely made his
reputation as a writer. It is full of humours, which fill up the
scenes of an ingenious plot; but its popularity was mainly due
to the romantic note struck in the character of the northern lass
herself. The modern reader finds it hard to detect the charm of
Constance; she is very thinly and imperfectly drawn, and her
‘northern’ speech is clumsy ; but she pleased John Ford and
Thomas Dekker. It would appear that the seventeenth century
found in her some faint anticipation of the charm of the Scottish
heroines of The Waverley Novels. Brome did not get this romantic
note from Jonson, and the six romantic plays suggest to us that it
was more natural to him than Jonson's hard, intellectual satire,
and that he would have done better work if he had used it oftener.
But the nine plays of Jonsonian humour and plot have certain
merits. Brome always does his best. He works without enthusiasm,
but steadily and conscientiously, and, as pieces of stagecraft, the
plays are never contemptible. As a picture of the London of the
period, they are full of interest and value. If their outlook were
broader, if they depicted not only the vices and follies of life, but,
also, its virtues and amenities, they would be read with eagerness,
but it is not fair to blame Brome only for this defect. It is the
weakness of the satiric method of Jonson that it tends continually
to describe only what it can scourge, so that its world gets uglier
and uglier. Brome's temperament fitted him for a kindlier type
· The Northern Lasse, The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, Covent Garden Weeded,
The New Academy or The New Exchange, The Damoiselle, The Court Beggar, The
Madd Couple well matcht, The City Witt.
## p. 227 (#245) ############################################
Brome's Sparagus Garden
227
of comedy, and there are many indications in his plays that he
would have produced better work under a gentler master than
Jonson Jonson's satire is often mitigated by the introduction
of a purely comic idea, which is not vicious or even eccentric, but
merely whimsical, such as Morose's hatred of noise. Brome shows
a special aptitude in copying his master in this respect, and his
touch is lighter. Jonson is sometimes over-ingenious and his
workmanship heavy-handed. The Antipodes is Brome's best
effort in this kind.
Among the less interesting of the comedies of manners
which may be regarded as fairly representative of Brome's usual
work, The Sparagus Garden, acted 1635, takes its title from
the custom of going to eat asparagus in a garden where it
was grown. Such places were haunts of disreputable people of
both sexes, and the 'humours' of the garden are coarse though
sketched with much vivacity and some wit. They bulk so largely
in the play that it is justly classed as a comedy of manners.
The scenes in which Timothy Hoyden, a yeoman's son from the
country, is shown the way to become a fine gentleman, are ex-
cellent comedy ; they are whimsical as well as witty, and written
with a genuine gaiety. When Brome's humours have this gaiety
and lightness of touch, we are reminded of another master than
Jonson ; we are conscious of something of the spirit of Dekker.
Among the commendatory verses prefixed to The Northern Lasse
are some characteristic lines 'To my Sonne Broom and his Lasse,'
by Thomas Dekker. How much friendship these words imply we
have no means of discovering ; but Brome is more truly a 'son' of
Dekker than of Jonson. His best and happiest work is in the
vein of Dekker. But the scenes of our play are not all in the
asparagus garden. The first two suggest a quiet domestic drama
a
which might turn to tragedy or comedy, but would not harmonise
properly with the garden humours. Two young men decide to
attempt the reconcilement of two angry old men by proposing a
match between the son of one of them and the adopted daughter
of the other.
The first scene describes the attempt and its failure.
In the second scene, the two friends try to console the son for
their failure and resolve to help him. Brome's verse rises to an
almost passionate height, as Gilbert insists that
Love is wit itself,
And through a thousand lots will find a way
To his desired end.
Both these scenes describe common life simply and naturally, and
15—2
## p. 228 (#246) ############################################
228 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
with a touch of idealism not very common in Brome, who recants
a
his usual creed when he confesses:
Poets they are the life and death of things.
The play is a mine of allusions and references to the life of old
London. From this point of view, Brome will always be worth
reading.
The brightest and pleasantest of Brome's comedies of manners
is The City Witt, or The Woman wears the Breeches. It is the
best, just because it most successfully keeps in one key. Fleay
contends that it is the earliest of the extant dramas, and says:
* Dekker's influence is more clearly visible in it than in the other
plays. ' He means that the gaiety and lightness of touch which we
have noted as Dekker's rather than Jonson's are very noticeable
in the play. But the prologue, composed by Brome for a revival
of the play, states that it 'past with good applause in former
times'; adding that
It was written when
It bore just judgment and the seal of Ben.
We must suppose, therefore, that Dekker's influence was sub-
ordinate to Jonson's, and that Brome himself was unconscious of
the force of the former. Its strength was due to its suitability to
Brome's temperament. The lines prefixed to The Northern Lasse
were the last we have from Dekker's pen; he, probably, died
before the end of 1632.
In his plots, Brome is apt to be over-ingenious, so that the
action of his plays is either obscure or too episodical. It is the
merit of The City Witt that its episodes are all held together by
one central idea which is clear and simple, so that the play is well-
knit and easily keeps the attention of the spectator to the end.
A young citizen, Mr Crasy, by his kindness and easy-going dis-
position, has involved himself in many difficulties, and discovers
that his fairweather friends all fall away when he asks for their
help. He disappears, therefore, and returns disguised, with the
object of bringing his false friends to book for their meanness.
The play is a lively and laughable protest against worship of rank
and money, and has in it a true breath of that unworldly spirit
which is conspicuous in Dekker's best plays. The protest is all
the more effective as coming from the tradesman's level. In that
age, the development of trade brought with it new temptations.
Dishonest speculation and the making of fortunes by all sorts of
trickery were becoming common. At the same time, the new
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
Brome's City Witt
229
devices by which bankruptcy was made profitable were scorned
by oldfashioned tradesmen. Crasy declares
I must take nimble hold upon occasion
Or lie for ever in the bankrupt ditch
Where no man lends a hand to draw one out.
I will leap over it or fall bravely in't,
Scorning the bridge of baseness, composition,
Which doth infect a city like the plague,
And teach men knavery that were never born to 't.
His troubles are largely due to the odious malice of his mother-
in-law, Mistress Pyannet Sneakup, who illustrates the evil effect
upon tradesmen's wives of the degenerate times. Her son-in-law
asks gently, “May not an honest man—' when he is taken up by
the irate lady-
Honest man! Who the devil wished thee to be an honest man? Here's my
worshipfal husband, Mr Sneakup, that from a grasier is come to be a Justice of
Peace: and, what, as an honest man? He grew to be able to give nine
hundred pound with my daughter; and what, by honesty? Mr Sneakup and
I are come up to live i’ th City, and here we have lyen these three years;
and, what? for honesty? Honesty! What should the City do with honesty,
when 'tis enough to undoe a whole Corporation? Why are your wares
gumm’d; your shops dark; your prices writ in strange characters? what, for
honesty?
This 'woman of an eternal tongue, this creature of an ever-
lasting noise' is the most considerable character in the piece ;
but Sarpego is equally good in another direction. We have already
touched upon him. His sudden scraps of Latin are very comical-
O Dii! Quem video? Nonne Mr Sneakup? '-and one wonders
how far they were followed by the audience. Some of his para-
phrases are very happy—“Tempora mutantur; the town's ours
again'; 'Lupus in fabula ; the devil's in the woman's tongue’;
'Sic transit gloria mundi ; the learned is coney-caught. ' The
briskness and bustle of the play are maintained to the end, and,
if it were not for the absence of Mrs Tryman from the list of
dramatis personae, the dénouement would be a complete surprise.
Crasy's honesty, his ‘unsuspicious freeness' and 'most easy good-
ness' flavour the play and convince us that Brome, with all his
s
grossness, was unsophisticated.
By way of proving this point more fully and carrying further
the comparison of Brome with Dekker, we may next consider
Brome's masterpiece, A Joviall Crew, Or, The Merry Beggars.
It was the latest play written by Brome, being produced in 1641
and continuing on the stage till it came to be the very last play
acted before parliament closed the theatres in 1642—'it had the
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
luck to tumble last of all in the Epidemicall ruin of the Scene! '
In his prologue, Brome notes that his title promises mirth,
Which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days;
but, since he finds that plays are now liked which tediously and
tearfully relate lovers' distresses, up to the point at which
some impossibility
Concludes all strife and makes a comedy,
he, therefore, composes a kind of parody on this popular style, in
which he hopes the sadness will not make any woman weep. This
interesting account of the genesis of the play would hardly have
been surmised by the critic without the author's help. The finest
thing in the play, and, indeed, in all Brome's writings, is the
description of the steward Springlove's annual hunger for the
green grass and the careless content of the wandering beggar.
You kept a swallow in a cage that while.
I cannot, Sir, endure another summer
In that restraint with life: 'twas then my torment
But now my death.
We have to wait till the days of George Borrow and R. L. Steven-
son for a repetition of Brome's conception of the joy and glory of
vagabondage. The sketch of the beggars' content is combined
with a very natural picture of the kind and compassionate master
and squire. There is a touch of religious feeling in the picture of
Oldrents's kindness of heart, and his compassion for the poor and
unfortunate; the only drawback to the charm of the play is the
occasional coarseness of the realism in the description of the
jovial crew of beggars. The first act of this play is work of high
and rare merit. Brome's English is admirably plain, unaffected
and direct; his blank verse is unadorned, but clear and natural,
and he reaps the reward of his simplicity. To the student of
decadent romanticism, this play has the perfection of a cup of
cold water in a dry and thirsty land.
A Jovialt Crew is classed among Brome's romantic dramas
of intriguel; and two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The
Queenes Exchange, have been reckoned as pure romantic dramas.
This division, of course, is merely intended to meet the require-
ment of convenience. Of the six romantic plays, the last two
mentioned and The Love-sick Court best illustrate Brome's ideas
of romance and poetry, and thus call for some notice. Brome's
modest conception of himself as a playwright and not an author
1 With three others, The Love-sick Court, The Novella and The English Moor.
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
Brome's Romantic Dramas
231
or poet—his disinclination to indulge in imaginative effort-stamps
him as out of sympathy with the fashionable taste for lengthy
imaginative sentiment. He had a real sense of artistic form, and
recoiled not only from the sentimentality, but from the incoherence,
both in plan and metre, of the later Caroline drama. We have
already quoted his account of the composition of A Joviall Crew.
In the prologue to The Antipodes, he complains that 'opinion
cares only for plays that
carry state,
In scene magnificent and language high,
And cloathes worth all the rest, except the action.
The taste of the journeyman playwright, on this head, was certainly
far sounder than that of the king and his court. Yet Brome did
essay romantic drama, and with very interesting results. The
Love-sick Court was, probably, the earliest of the batch; The
Queenes Exchange dates from about 1632, and The Queen and
Concubine from after 1635. In these plays we see Brome manfully
striving to write as a poet and to achieve a good romantic play.
In the first two, he is often at a loss; his art fails him, and only
fumbling work is produced; but The Queen and Concubine marks
a very definite advance, and shows that Brome might have pro-
duced excellent romantic work if his public had asked for it
Shakespeare, rather than Fletcher, is the master from whom
Brome takes his suggestions, and the good queen Eulalia, whose
trials and virtues are touchingly described, is a blend of the
patient Grissill of Dekker and queen Katharine in Henry VIII,
There are two fine songs in the play; one of them—What if a
day, or a month, or a year’-possessing the true Elizabethan
charm of Campion or Dekker. The shining merit of Brome in
these plays, for all their feeble workmanship, is his capacity for
the unsophisticated and direct expression of emotion. We escape
from inflated sentiment and return to a simplicity of moral feeling
which belongs to the earlier days of the drama. Brome's humility
was described above as almost servile; and the suggestion was
made that his unaffected modesty is reflected in the restraint and
the naturalness of his art. Like Day, Brome proves his manliness
when he falls on evil days. He wrote his dedication of A Joviall
Crew, when it was printed in 1652, a few months before his death,
' in these anti-ingenious Times,' when the theatres had been closed
for ten years. Since the Times conspire to make us all Beggars,'
he says, 'let us make ourselves merry. That is what his play
drives at. ' He does not Ainch in his extremity: 'I am poor and
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
proud,' he tells us; ‘you know, Sir, I am old and cannot cringe. '
This is his last word.
Among Jonson's most eager admirers was Thomas Randolph;
but he was not, like Field and Brome, a pupil of the old poet.
He was a king's scholar of Westminster school, who became a
fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. At the end of 1629, a year
of plague broke up the schools at Cambridge, and Randolph made
Jonson's acquaintance during his stay in London; he was probably
adopted as a 'son' before he returned to Cambridge. He had written
by this time his two earliest ‘shews-Aristippus and The Conceited
Pedler, which were printed in 1630. These lively sketches recall
that early type of dramatic performance, the clown's jig, in which
a famous comedian, such as Tarlton, poured forth an improvisation
of his own, which was a mixture of prose, verse and antics. But
it is Randolph's command of racy English, his high spirits and his
exuberant wit that suggest this comparison. His pieces belong to
that large body of 'college drama' which is described in another
chapter? Aristippus, or, The Joviall Philosopher is a dispute on
the rival merits of ale and sack. All the technical terms of Aris-
totle's logic are crowded into a hilarious laudation of sack and a
decrying of malt liquor, which never flags. Randolph's classical
and scholastical learning supplies matter for a cataract of ingenious
puns and word play, and, therefore, his transference of Aristotelian
metaphysic into English farce is to be contrasted with, rather than
compared to, Robert Browning's profuse employment of the details
of Attic drama in his Aristophanes' Apology. Both poets, while
crammed with learning, have no pedantry in their nature. The
marvellous agility of some of the riming in Aristippus is another
point of contact with Browning's poetry.
In March 1632, king Charles visited Cambridge, and the
Trinity men acted before him The Jealous Lovers, written for
the occasion. It is Randolph's only failure. Its dramatic character
is so bad that the ability of the writing cannot redeem it. After
the king's visit, Randolph left Cambridge for London, 'called thence
to keep the flock of Corydon. ' In An Eglogue to Mr Johnson, he
describes how he had relished his Aristotelian studies—those deep
and learned layes' which 'the shepherd of Stagira used to sing';
but now he has to keep another's flock,' and not he but 'the Master
shears the sheep. ' Fleay's interpretation of this passage is that
Randolph was manager of prince Charles's men acting at Salisbury
? See post, chap. XII, where more is said about The Jealous Lovers.
· I. . . Ben Jonson.
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Thomas Randolph
233
court in 1632 and 1633. At Salisbury court theatre, Fleay thinks.
The Muses Looking-Glasse was presented towards the end of 1632.
(It was not printed till 1638, when the writer was dead. ) This
theory accords very well with the character of Randolph's master-
piece, and explains the genesis of this new and distinct type of
dramatic art. It is just such a work as the writer of Aristippus
might be expected to produce if he were called upon to expand
his short shew' into something that could compete in length,
interest and dignity with the plays of a better class. Randolph's
creative capacity had been stimulated to this effort by close con-
tact with the drama of the London stage; but the Aristotelian
student is still in evidence. The main part of the piece consists
of a series of fifteen scenes, in which the vices of Aristotle's Ethics
appear in couples or singly and, in accordance with the theory
of comedy put forward in the first act of the piece, hold up a
mirror in which spectators may note their own defects; this is
how comedies ‘laugh' people 'into wit and virtue. ' These scenes,
therefore, are planned like the colloquies' of Day's Parliament of
Bees; but the contrast is great between Day's delicate rimes and
Randolph's masculine and emphatic blank verse, which only
occasionally uses the heroic couplet. Kolax, the flatterer, remains
on all the time because 'Any vice yields work for flattery. In
these strongly written scenes, the influence of Jonson's satiric
plays is very obvious. In act I, there is an excellent scene in
which Comedy, Tragedy, Mime and Satire dispute together and
expound their functions according to classic theory. Before the
vices come in, we have a masque,
a rude dance,
Presented by the seven deadly sing.
In act v, after Mediocrity, the mother of virtues, has expounded
in a bundred lines Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, she presents a
masque of her daughters, 'wherein all the Vertues dance together. '
The invention of all this is both copious and happy. The author
describes his work as containing
No plot at all, but a meer Olla Podrida,
A medley of ill plac'd and worse penned Humours,
borrowed from the man
to whom he owes
All the poor skill he has, great Aristotle.
Randolph is pleasantly unconscious that the creative and artistic
faculty is too often, as in Jonson's case, smothered, rather than
nourished, by theory, however sound. But we have still to mention
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
the most delightful feature of the play. The 'moralising 'scenes
are presented before Bird, a feather-man, and Mistress Flowerdew,
wife to a Haberdasher of Small Wares. ' These worthies bring
feathers and pins and looking glasses to sell to the players; but
they belong to the Sanctified Fraternity of Black-Fryers': that is
to say, they are puritans. This device is not new. Beaumont used
it admirably in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But Randolph
employs it to lighten the didactic tendency of his main scenes;
moreover, his two puritans are to be converted to the theory of
comedy put forward in the play; they are, therefore, described
with more good humour, with more restraint and naturalness,
than is usual in Elizabethan comedy. When the virtues are to be
presented, Bird hopes there are no 'cardinal vertues'-
I hate a vertue
That will be made a Cardinal,
-he adds that even ‘Bishop vertues are unwarrantable,' and,
generally,
Vertnes in Orders are unsanctified.
He is disturbed when the virtues dance:
O vile, absurd, Maypole-Maid-Marian Vertue!
Yet, as the play goes on, Mistress Flowerdew begins to relent:
I have picked
Out of the garden of this play a good
And wholesome salad of instruction.
And, finally, both are mollified Bird says
.
I'll teach devotion now a milder temper,
while Mistress Flowerdew admits,
I might have gone to hell the narrow way.
We have called The Muses Looking-Glasse Randolph's masterpiece,
though this title might be claimed for his fine pastoral Amyntas.
But the later production has to compete with even finer work
by Jonson and Fletcher, while the former is unique of its kind.
Randolph died in 1635, at the age of twenty-nine; and he is to be
counted among those poets whose achievement, considerable as it is,
is an earnest only of what his matured powers might have given us.
It remains to attempt a hurried survey of the lesser dramatists
of the end of the age, who were writing from the later years of
James until the closing of the theatres. They exhibit very clearly
the exhaustion of the great dramatic impulse which begins with
Marlowe and ends with Shirley and Brome. A tasteless and
featureless mediocrity or a pretentious extravagance are the
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
May. Davenport
235
characteristics of work which was ceasing to conform to type
and losing all sense of true dramatic form. On a first casual
inspection, the more meritorious of these plays seem better written
and more judiciously planned than much of the Elizabethan work
which has survived; but a closer study reveals the essential
insipidity of the later work, due, in the first place, to exhaustion
of the dramatic impulse, and, in the second, to the deterioration
of the audiences and the practical cessation of a demand for good
plays
Thomas May, the historian of the Long parliament, whose
character Clarendon and Marvell? unite in decrying, began his
literary career with two comedies, The Heir and The Old Couple,
written about 1620. The Heir is a Fletcherian tragicomedy; The
Old Couple, which Fleay thinks the earlier of the pair, a play of
Jonsonian intrigue and manners. After producing these plays, May
turned to the work by which he is best known-his translations of
the Georgics and of Lucan's Pharsalia. Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq. ,'
and May was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius. Jonson's influence
and that of the classics would seem to have turned May to classical
drama, and he produced three tragedies, of which the first, Antigone,
the Theban Princess is dedicated to Endymion Porter, and may
have been written before 1626. Fleay has suggested that May
is the author of the anonymous Nero, printed 1624. We are to
suppose that the fire and energy of this fine play were the result
of May's first study of Tacitus, perhaps before he had been too
much obsessed by Jonson's influence and method. But May's
study of Tacitus would seem to have been later than 1624. His
Cleopatra is dated 1626, and Julia Agrippina 1628. May's
imagination is pedestrian; his style is regular and painstaking.
Nero is the work of a scholar whose imagination is fiery and
strong, and who contrives to crowd into his play a great deal
of the excitement, the incident and the underlying unity of the
Roman historian's picture of the tyrant. May's first two plays
are meritorious; there is care and correctness in the blank verse,
and much careful invention in the plot and the conception of the
characters; but his classical plays are no better and no worse
than his continuation of Pharsalia. They are pale reflections of
Jonson's work in Sejanus and Catiline. May is nothing more than
a 'son' of Ben, who copied his adoptive father's least inspired work.
Meritorious, like May's, was the work of Robert Davenport,
1 Most servile wit and mercenary pen. '
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
whose activity begins in 1624. Three of his plays survive, two
comedies and a tragedy. The tragedy is a careful rewriting of
Munday and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington!
Chettle's drama is stripped of its crudities and banalities ; so
far as may be, the horrible is replaced by the pathetic, and a
considerable adornment of poetic diction and imagery is added.
The versification, of course, is brought up to date and irregularities
disappear. The old play has a deeper significance than that which
it expresses: we read it with impatience; but we remember it with
interest, because of its suggestion of horror and gloom. Davenport,
on the other hand, we read with respect for his industry, and we
forget him at once. It is a plausible conjecture that his comedies
were remodellings of older material; so that all his work looks
backward. But The City-Night-Cap and A New Tricke to Cheat
the Divell are, both of them, interesting and able comedies, like
the two plays of May which we have just considered. The former
dates from 1624. As this play takes its main story from “The
Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, there can be nothing sur-
prising in the fact that, in some respects, it is unpleasant; indeed,
its comic part is intolerable; but, on the romantic side, it has merit
It contains echoes of Measure for Measure, of Cymbeline and of
A Winter's Tale; it is highminded, with some grace of diction
and force of eloquence, but dramatically unreasonable and wrong.
The other play is slighter and more humorous, and, on the whole,
more agreeable. Two of Davenport's friends were players; of his
circumstances nothing is known.
Thomas Nabbes seems to have belonged to the same social
level as Davenport, and, like him, to have produced his tragedy,
Hannibal and Scipio, by revising an older play; he was a friend
of Richard Brome. His Microcosmus is a morality play which he
calls a masque. His best work is to be found in his three comedies,
Covent-Garden, 1632, Totenham-Court, 1633, and The Bride, 1638.
Nabbes breaks away from the prevailing coarse type of comedy,
intended to hit the taste of the man about town, and takes pains
and pleasure in representing people of virtuous life and con-
versation. With just a little more distinction and force, both in
his writing and in his characterisation, Nabbes would have risen
above the ranks of third-rate dramatists. The Bride is a comedy
of considerable effectiveness, distinguished among the plays of its
time by the goodness and purity to be found in its men and women.
His heroes and heroines are amiable and sincere; somewhat colour-
1 Cf. ante, vol. V, chap. XIII,
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
>
coarse.
Cartwright. Mayne 237
less when compared with stronger dramatic work; but without the
two diseases of the time, the convention of coarseness, and the
convention of fantastic sentiment
Two writers who were among the sons' of Ben and of great
repute in their day need not detain us long. William Cartwright
was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester. He was educated at
Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and rose to be the most
noted man in his university as a strenuous scholar, an admired
dramatist and a 'seraphical' preacher. His first play, probably, was
his comedy The Ordinary, produced about 1635. This was followed
by three tragicomedies, The Lady Errant, The Royall Slave and
The Siedge or Love's Convert. After taking holy orders in 1638, he
did not write any more plays. He died in 1642. His plays, therefore,
were probably composed hurriedly. They are essentially the work
of a man of parts, who writes for reputation without any true
respect either for his art or for himself.
to hide the state of her heart, confounds and bewilders her lover,
first by her silence and then by her speech, recalls the vigorous
domestic comedy of Porter? It is curious that we should know
nothing whatever of 'Jo. Cooke,' and that, like Barry, he
should have just one play to his credit. The Hog hath lost his
Pearl is, again, the single play of a writer whose name—Robert
Tailor—is all that is known about him. Tailor's literary capacity
is below that of either Barry or Cooke. To a play of low comedy,
he tacks on a romantic plot of a painful character? which only a
master of dramatic art could make endurable. Tailor manages the
prose of his comedy much better than the verse of his moral
romance; the main interest of the play, however, is not in its style
or story but in the circumstances of its production. Sir Henry
Wotton, in a letter dated 16123, tells us that 'some sixteen
? See ante, vol. v, chap. XIII.
2 Otway's Orphan deals with the same plot.
3 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Smith, L. P. , vol. 1, p. 13.
## p. 220 (#238) ############################################
220 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
apprentices,' having secretly learnt their parts, 'took up the
White Fryers for their theatre,' and invited their friends to see
them perform The Hog hath lost his Pearl. The sheriffs inter-
vened before the end of the performance and carried off six or
seven of the apprentices to prison. He adds that it was supposed
that Sir John Swinnerton was meant by the hog, and the late
lord treasurer by the pearl. The prologue of the printed play
alludes to this incident, but says that
our swine,
Is not as divers critics did define,
Grunting at state affairs or invecting
Much at our city vices;
if the play pleases, 'we'll say 'tis fortunate, like Pericles. ' Like
the two plays mentioned before it, Tailor's is full of interest for
the student of Jacobean London.
We come now to the main stream of Jacobean dramatic work,
in which the influence of Jonson, both personal and by his art, is
all-pervasive.
Among the extant plays of the reign of king James, two by
Nathaniel Field are of such merit as to suggest that the writer,
probably, would have risen above the ranks of the lesser dramatists,
had he persevered in the prosecution of his art. He was born in
1587, a few months before his father's death. That father was the
famous preacher John Field, whose rousing discourse upon the
collapse of a gallery in Paris garden in 1583 has come down to
us? . It contains interesting details about the catastrophe and a
violent attack upon theatrical performances, with valuable in-
formation about London players and their theatres. Nat's elder
brother, Theophilus, was educated at Cambridge and rose to be
bishop of Hereford; and it is singular, therefore, that Nat Field's
name should be found first among the six 'principal comedians'
of the band of lads called the children of the queen’s revels, who
acted in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels in 1600. These boys were the
‘young eyases' discussed by Hamlet. For a time, as has been seen? ,
they rivalled men players in public favour; and Field, as he grew
older, maintained his position and may claim to have succeeded
Burbage as the leading actor on the English stage. Jonson, no
doubt, owed a debt to Field for his clever acting in Cynthia's Revels
and Poetaster, and the debt is repaid by the mention of Field, in
1614, in Bartholomew Fayre— Which is your Burbadge now? . . .
i Cf. , as to this incident, post, chap. XIV.
Cf. ante, chap. II, and post, chap. XI.
## p. 221 (#239) ############################################
Field's A Woman is a Weather-cocke 221
Your best actor, your Field ? ' Field joined the King's company
before he finally retired from the stage, and, in the 1623 folio of
Shakespeare's plays, he is seventeenth in the list there given of
twenty-six players. Jonson told Drummond that “Nat Field was
his scholar. An interesting proof of Jonson’s regard for Field is
afforded by the insertion of an extra sheet of commendatory
verses addressed by Field to Jonson in some copies of the 1607
quarto of Volpone. Field's verses are amateurish-he speaks
justly of his 'weak flame'-but they show a great awe of Jonson,
whom 'to dare commend were damnable presumption. The
lines should be compared with the much more mature address
'to his worthy and beloved friend Master Ben Jonson on his
Catiline3. ' Field had been educated by Mulcaster at the
Merchant Taylors' school, but 'taken' by N. Giles as one of the
company of the children of the revels. Giles was accused of
kidnapping boys against their parents' wishes, and we may con-
jecture that Field would not have been annexed, had his strenuous
father been alive to protect him.
Field's first play, A Woman is a Weather-cocke, was produced
in 1610. In the first scene, Scudmore is discovered reading a
vehement letter from Bellafront, the lady he loves. To him, thus
occupied, enters his friend Nevill on his way to a wedding. The
lover very prettily takes his friend into his confidence, enlarges
like a Romeo on his mistress,
Whose face brought concord and an end of jars,
and passionately proclaims,
She is the food, the sleep, the air I live by.
He ends with the lady's name; whereupon his friend blurts out in
amazement, ‘But that's the wedding I was going to. ' This dramatic
scene is put before us with a force and vividness remarkable in so
young a writer. In itself, it is an excellent beginning ; but the
Jonsonian 'humours' of the next scene jar a little. They are not
in the same key as the romantic passionate opening of the play.
But Field's wit is considerable and is not a mere copy of
Jonson. His manner has a sprightliness and good-humour, and
a
1 They read Horace and Martial together; see Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations
with Drummond, ed. Laing, D. , p. 11.
? It is contained in the British Museum copy, C 12, c. 17, which was presented by
Jonson to John Florio with an inscription in Ben's autograph to his loving father
and friend, the aid of his Muses. ' See Percy Simpson in Notes and Queries, Ser. VIII,
vol. VIII, p. 301.
But in this age where jigs and dances move
How few there are that this pure work approve.
.
## p. 222 (#240) ############################################
222 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
an occasional naturalness, which are his own, and differentiate
his comic style quite definitely from Jonson's.
The second act is constructed on the same plan as the first. It
begins with a semi-romantic scene and ends with 'humour. ' When
captain Pouts, who has been rejected by Katharine, publicly insults
her at the door of the church in which she has just been married
to Strange, she urges her new husband to vindicate her honour;
and, perhaps, no better example could be given of Field's capacity
as a writer of strong, direct, blank verse than her invective:
Thou wert ordained,
And in thy cradle marked to call me wife,
And in that title made as my defence,
Yet sufferedst him to go away with life,
Wounding my honour dead before thy face!
Redeem it on his head, and his own way,
Even by the sword, his long profession,
And set it clear amongst the tongues of men,
That all eyes may discern it slandered,
Or thou shalt ne'er enjoy me as a wife.
The verse is in the manner of Shakespeare in the Henry V
period, although with less music and very little imaginative
decoration, and the excellence of its directness and spontaneity
is due, no doubt, to Field's training as an actor. His use of
language, too, is free, like Shakespeare's—to be understood by
the audience though not always approved by the grammarian. In
the passage quoted, ‘his long profession, with the meaning, ‘for so
long a time his profession,' has a Shakespearean sound, as, also, has
the rather enigmatic, but still forcible, 'made' of the third line.
Strange's speech, a little later, about the law's inequalities, again,
is forcible, eloquent blank verse. But the second part of the plot
overloads the play as a whole. Field, as a scholar of Jonson,
desires to show his dexterity as a plotter ; but, like all young
writers of promise, and like all immature dramatists, he gives his
audience too much, and cannot endure to limit his own scope.
In this play, which is full both of matter and of varied promise
of dramatic ability, Ben Jonson is obviously the master most con-
sciously copied. The ‘humours' are in Jonson's manner, as are
the complicated plottings. The compression of the action into
exactly one day is in accordance with Ben's teaching. It might
be contended that a certain intensity in the serious scenes
copies the splendid passion of Volpone, which is the high water
mark of Jonson's art. This, however, would be a mistake. The
serious scenes of the play are essentially romantic and idealistic,
suggesting Romeo and Juliet rather than The Alchemist. But
a
## p. 223 (#241) ############################################
3
T
1
ป
It
Field's Amends for Ladies
223
Romeo has been brought up as a player and has appeared upon
the public stage from his childhood, and Ben Jonson has been his
schoolmaster. He has, therefore, lost all exterior softness and
sentiment, and, at first reading, a certain hardness and bravado
in his manner deceive the student. Field's second play, Amends
for Ladies, followed hard upon the first, and was intended to atone
for the many hard things said against women in the first play.
There are three heroines, the lady Honour, the lady Perfect and
the lady Bright, who, as maid, wife and widow, vindicate, respec-
tively, the claims of their sex to constancy and virtue. It will be
seen, therefore, that, again, the scheme of the play is too full of
incident; there are three plays in one. The second play, on the
whole, is a more hasty piece of work than the first; it has the
drawbacks of an after-thought; but there is a distinct maturity
and strengthening to be noted in its style. Field's natural bent
is, more obviously than before, to draw ideal heroes, headstrong
and indomitable. He does not yet show much power of characteri-
sation; his heroes and heroines are all repetitions of one type.
We remember that one of his great parts was Bussy D'Ambois,
and that Chapman addresses some lines 'to his loved son Nat
Field. ' The comic scenes of the second play are less original and
less amusing than those of the first. There is something perfunc-
tory about 'the merry prankes of Moll Cut-purse, Or, the humour
of roaring. And, again, all that part of the play which uses the
plot of 'The Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, in which a
husband, in order to prove his wife's virtue, eggs on his friend to
tempt her, is intolerable to modern feeling. Field's audacity and
directness of treatment make him, when his subject is unpleasant,
unusually outrageous, even for the Jacobean stage. Yet he
cherishes an ideal of incorruptible and unassailable virtue which
was rare in the drama of the period.
Besides writing these two comedies, Field collaborated both
with Fletcher and Massinger. Of these collaborations, we need
mention only The Fatall Dowry, produced about 1619, shortly
before Field retired from the stage? It has been common to
refer to Field the lighter parts of plays in which he collaborated ;
but what we have noted in his work will make it highly probable
that Field, quite as much as Massinger, was responsible for the
romantic side of the play and especially for the uncompromising
honesty of Romont. In this respect, Chapman was his master;
and, from Chapman and Jonson equally, he learnt to remind his
i Cf. ante, chap. VI.
1
6
3
## p. 224 (#242) ############################################
224 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
reader that 'a play is not so idle a thing as thou art, but a mirror
of men's lives and actions. ' And yet his profession irked him; 'thou
know'st where to hear of me for a year or two and no more,'
he says, in the address to the reader which we have quoted. He
married about 1619 and became a publisher, dying in 1633. In
1616, he addressed a letter to Sutton, the preacher at St Mary
Overy, who, like Field's own father, was a great denouncer of the
stage. Field very loyally defends his profession; but his letter is
very remarkable for its religious earnestness, which, in itself, is
enough to explain his retirement.
Richard Brome', like Field, was in a special sense educated by
Jonson, and it will be convenient to consider his work after Field's
The stagekeeper who opens the induction to Bartholomew
Fayre, having occasion to pronounce the play 'a very conceited,
scurvy one,' looks behind the arras ‘lest the poet hear me or his
man, Master Brome. ' This was in 1614. Prefixed to Brome's
Northern Lasse, and dated, therefore, not later than 1632, we have
Jonson's characteristic sonnet 'to my old faithful servant and by
his continued virtue my loving friend . . . Mr Richard Brome. In
the first line, 'I had you for a servant, once, Dick Brome,' we
almost hear Jonson speak. He goes on to say that Brome has
sedulously worked at his profession :
You learned it well, and for it served your time,
A prenticeship.
Fleay regards this apprenticeship as extending over the whole of
the seven years 1623 to 1629. In 1623, we first hear of Brome as
an author. A Fault in Friendship was licensed in that year,
‘written by Brome and young Jonson. ' Unfortunately, the play
has not survived; but we may allow ourselves to suppose that the
servant and the son pursued their dramatic studies together, under
the father's august and austere supervision. We know nothing of
Brome's parents; but a sonnet of some literary merit by a brother
Stephen is printed among the poems prefixed to The Northern
Lasse. We must beware, therefore, of assuming that Brome was
of very lowly rank and uneducated till Jonson took him in
hand. This notion is suggested by the low life in Brome's plays,
as well as by a humility towards public and private patrons in
Brome's prologues and epilogues, which, sometimes, is almost
servile. But the sonnet must not be ignored ; and, when we find
.
1 Pronounced Broom. '
## p. 225 (#243) ############################################
Richard Brome
225
Jonson, in a well known epigram', expecting his 'man' to read
'a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book' to his
guests at supper, we conjecture that the servant was not so much
a valet as a secretary and amanuensis, whose duties, from the first,
in connection with Jonson's dramatic and literary work, required
a grammar school education. The same inference is suggested by
the easy use of Latin in the sketch of the amusing pedant Sarpego
in The City Witt. Jonson is copied unblushingly. Sarpego’s
speech, ‘Diogenes Laertius on a certain time demanded of Cor-
nelius Tacitus, an areopagite of Syracusa, what was the most
commodious and expeditest method to kill the itch,' is modelled on
Clove's in Every Man out of His Humour: 'Aristotle in his dae-
monologia approves Scaliger for the best navigator in his time,
and in his hypercritics he reports him to be Heautontimoru-
menos 12' But there is very little of this misuse of long words and
classical names in the part; Sarpego redeems his promise, 'His
grace will see that we can speak true Latin and construe Ludovicus
Vives'; and his Latin has a sprightliness and comicality hardly
to be attained by a writer whose studies began after his school
days were over. But, if Brome's education was not much inferior to
Field's, the contrast between the personal characters of Jonson's
two ‘sons' is all the more striking. Field has more than a touch
of Jonson's arrogance, and inherits some of his strength of style.
Brome's meekness verges on servility. The note of self-depre-
ciation continually recurs:
A little wit, less learning, no poetry
This playmaker dares boast.
He is always reverent and loyal to Jonson; but his attitude of
deference to his audience, and his modest estimate of his own
powers as a writer, make quite clear his unlikeness to his master.
For all his sedulous imitation of Jonson's style and methods,
Brome has little of his master's soul in him. He can only be
Jonson on a small scale; but Jonson on a small scale is not
Jonson. Brome's sketches of London life are varied, minute,
careful, spirited, and yet they displease; they cannot be read
continuously without weariness, and are extremely coarse. Some
critics have been pleased to decide that Brome describes life from
the groom's point of view, and have ascribed his coarseness to bis
want of education and humble origin. The truer explanation is
1 Epigram ci.
? This parallel is noted in Faust's dissertation, Richard Brome, Halle, 1887, p. 52.
E. L. VI. CH, IX.
15
## p. 226 (#244) ############################################
226 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
that he uses Jonson's manner without Jonson's full-blooded,
massive humanity, without his satiric intensity, without his intel-
lectual power; so that the Jonsonian scenes in Brome, his
numerous efforts to describe the humours of London life, repel
or tire the reader.
Fifteen of Brome's plays have come down to us. Four of these
were published in quarto in Brome's lifetime ; five were printed
together, in 1653, shortly after his death ; five more in 1659; and
one other, in quarto, in 1657. The plays have been conveniently
classed under the headings of comedies of manners, romantic
comedies and romantic dramas of intrigue. These divisions ex-
hibit Brome's debt to Jonson, for the first class is much the
largest, including nine plays? . But these nine plays are not purely
Jonsonian. The Northern Lasse is the earliest of the extant
plays. It was printed in 1632 and, again, in 1635 and in 1663. It
was the most popular of Brome's plays and definitely made his
reputation as a writer. It is full of humours, which fill up the
scenes of an ingenious plot; but its popularity was mainly due
to the romantic note struck in the character of the northern lass
herself. The modern reader finds it hard to detect the charm of
Constance; she is very thinly and imperfectly drawn, and her
‘northern’ speech is clumsy ; but she pleased John Ford and
Thomas Dekker. It would appear that the seventeenth century
found in her some faint anticipation of the charm of the Scottish
heroines of The Waverley Novels. Brome did not get this romantic
note from Jonson, and the six romantic plays suggest to us that it
was more natural to him than Jonson's hard, intellectual satire,
and that he would have done better work if he had used it oftener.
But the nine plays of Jonsonian humour and plot have certain
merits. Brome always does his best. He works without enthusiasm,
but steadily and conscientiously, and, as pieces of stagecraft, the
plays are never contemptible. As a picture of the London of the
period, they are full of interest and value. If their outlook were
broader, if they depicted not only the vices and follies of life, but,
also, its virtues and amenities, they would be read with eagerness,
but it is not fair to blame Brome only for this defect. It is the
weakness of the satiric method of Jonson that it tends continually
to describe only what it can scourge, so that its world gets uglier
and uglier. Brome's temperament fitted him for a kindlier type
· The Northern Lasse, The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, Covent Garden Weeded,
The New Academy or The New Exchange, The Damoiselle, The Court Beggar, The
Madd Couple well matcht, The City Witt.
## p. 227 (#245) ############################################
Brome's Sparagus Garden
227
of comedy, and there are many indications in his plays that he
would have produced better work under a gentler master than
Jonson Jonson's satire is often mitigated by the introduction
of a purely comic idea, which is not vicious or even eccentric, but
merely whimsical, such as Morose's hatred of noise. Brome shows
a special aptitude in copying his master in this respect, and his
touch is lighter. Jonson is sometimes over-ingenious and his
workmanship heavy-handed. The Antipodes is Brome's best
effort in this kind.
Among the less interesting of the comedies of manners
which may be regarded as fairly representative of Brome's usual
work, The Sparagus Garden, acted 1635, takes its title from
the custom of going to eat asparagus in a garden where it
was grown. Such places were haunts of disreputable people of
both sexes, and the 'humours' of the garden are coarse though
sketched with much vivacity and some wit. They bulk so largely
in the play that it is justly classed as a comedy of manners.
The scenes in which Timothy Hoyden, a yeoman's son from the
country, is shown the way to become a fine gentleman, are ex-
cellent comedy ; they are whimsical as well as witty, and written
with a genuine gaiety. When Brome's humours have this gaiety
and lightness of touch, we are reminded of another master than
Jonson ; we are conscious of something of the spirit of Dekker.
Among the commendatory verses prefixed to The Northern Lasse
are some characteristic lines 'To my Sonne Broom and his Lasse,'
by Thomas Dekker. How much friendship these words imply we
have no means of discovering ; but Brome is more truly a 'son' of
Dekker than of Jonson. His best and happiest work is in the
vein of Dekker. But the scenes of our play are not all in the
asparagus garden. The first two suggest a quiet domestic drama
a
which might turn to tragedy or comedy, but would not harmonise
properly with the garden humours. Two young men decide to
attempt the reconcilement of two angry old men by proposing a
match between the son of one of them and the adopted daughter
of the other.
The first scene describes the attempt and its failure.
In the second scene, the two friends try to console the son for
their failure and resolve to help him. Brome's verse rises to an
almost passionate height, as Gilbert insists that
Love is wit itself,
And through a thousand lots will find a way
To his desired end.
Both these scenes describe common life simply and naturally, and
15—2
## p. 228 (#246) ############################################
228 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
with a touch of idealism not very common in Brome, who recants
a
his usual creed when he confesses:
Poets they are the life and death of things.
The play is a mine of allusions and references to the life of old
London. From this point of view, Brome will always be worth
reading.
The brightest and pleasantest of Brome's comedies of manners
is The City Witt, or The Woman wears the Breeches. It is the
best, just because it most successfully keeps in one key. Fleay
contends that it is the earliest of the extant dramas, and says:
* Dekker's influence is more clearly visible in it than in the other
plays. ' He means that the gaiety and lightness of touch which we
have noted as Dekker's rather than Jonson's are very noticeable
in the play. But the prologue, composed by Brome for a revival
of the play, states that it 'past with good applause in former
times'; adding that
It was written when
It bore just judgment and the seal of Ben.
We must suppose, therefore, that Dekker's influence was sub-
ordinate to Jonson's, and that Brome himself was unconscious of
the force of the former. Its strength was due to its suitability to
Brome's temperament. The lines prefixed to The Northern Lasse
were the last we have from Dekker's pen; he, probably, died
before the end of 1632.
In his plots, Brome is apt to be over-ingenious, so that the
action of his plays is either obscure or too episodical. It is the
merit of The City Witt that its episodes are all held together by
one central idea which is clear and simple, so that the play is well-
knit and easily keeps the attention of the spectator to the end.
A young citizen, Mr Crasy, by his kindness and easy-going dis-
position, has involved himself in many difficulties, and discovers
that his fairweather friends all fall away when he asks for their
help. He disappears, therefore, and returns disguised, with the
object of bringing his false friends to book for their meanness.
The play is a lively and laughable protest against worship of rank
and money, and has in it a true breath of that unworldly spirit
which is conspicuous in Dekker's best plays. The protest is all
the more effective as coming from the tradesman's level. In that
age, the development of trade brought with it new temptations.
Dishonest speculation and the making of fortunes by all sorts of
trickery were becoming common. At the same time, the new
## p. 229 (#247) ############################################
Brome's City Witt
229
devices by which bankruptcy was made profitable were scorned
by oldfashioned tradesmen. Crasy declares
I must take nimble hold upon occasion
Or lie for ever in the bankrupt ditch
Where no man lends a hand to draw one out.
I will leap over it or fall bravely in't,
Scorning the bridge of baseness, composition,
Which doth infect a city like the plague,
And teach men knavery that were never born to 't.
His troubles are largely due to the odious malice of his mother-
in-law, Mistress Pyannet Sneakup, who illustrates the evil effect
upon tradesmen's wives of the degenerate times. Her son-in-law
asks gently, “May not an honest man—' when he is taken up by
the irate lady-
Honest man! Who the devil wished thee to be an honest man? Here's my
worshipfal husband, Mr Sneakup, that from a grasier is come to be a Justice of
Peace: and, what, as an honest man? He grew to be able to give nine
hundred pound with my daughter; and what, by honesty? Mr Sneakup and
I are come up to live i’ th City, and here we have lyen these three years;
and, what? for honesty? Honesty! What should the City do with honesty,
when 'tis enough to undoe a whole Corporation? Why are your wares
gumm’d; your shops dark; your prices writ in strange characters? what, for
honesty?
This 'woman of an eternal tongue, this creature of an ever-
lasting noise' is the most considerable character in the piece ;
but Sarpego is equally good in another direction. We have already
touched upon him. His sudden scraps of Latin are very comical-
O Dii! Quem video? Nonne Mr Sneakup? '-and one wonders
how far they were followed by the audience. Some of his para-
phrases are very happy—“Tempora mutantur; the town's ours
again'; 'Lupus in fabula ; the devil's in the woman's tongue’;
'Sic transit gloria mundi ; the learned is coney-caught. ' The
briskness and bustle of the play are maintained to the end, and,
if it were not for the absence of Mrs Tryman from the list of
dramatis personae, the dénouement would be a complete surprise.
Crasy's honesty, his ‘unsuspicious freeness' and 'most easy good-
ness' flavour the play and convince us that Brome, with all his
s
grossness, was unsophisticated.
By way of proving this point more fully and carrying further
the comparison of Brome with Dekker, we may next consider
Brome's masterpiece, A Joviall Crew, Or, The Merry Beggars.
It was the latest play written by Brome, being produced in 1641
and continuing on the stage till it came to be the very last play
acted before parliament closed the theatres in 1642—'it had the
## p. 230 (#248) ############################################
230 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
luck to tumble last of all in the Epidemicall ruin of the Scene! '
In his prologue, Brome notes that his title promises mirth,
Which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days;
but, since he finds that plays are now liked which tediously and
tearfully relate lovers' distresses, up to the point at which
some impossibility
Concludes all strife and makes a comedy,
he, therefore, composes a kind of parody on this popular style, in
which he hopes the sadness will not make any woman weep. This
interesting account of the genesis of the play would hardly have
been surmised by the critic without the author's help. The finest
thing in the play, and, indeed, in all Brome's writings, is the
description of the steward Springlove's annual hunger for the
green grass and the careless content of the wandering beggar.
You kept a swallow in a cage that while.
I cannot, Sir, endure another summer
In that restraint with life: 'twas then my torment
But now my death.
We have to wait till the days of George Borrow and R. L. Steven-
son for a repetition of Brome's conception of the joy and glory of
vagabondage. The sketch of the beggars' content is combined
with a very natural picture of the kind and compassionate master
and squire. There is a touch of religious feeling in the picture of
Oldrents's kindness of heart, and his compassion for the poor and
unfortunate; the only drawback to the charm of the play is the
occasional coarseness of the realism in the description of the
jovial crew of beggars. The first act of this play is work of high
and rare merit. Brome's English is admirably plain, unaffected
and direct; his blank verse is unadorned, but clear and natural,
and he reaps the reward of his simplicity. To the student of
decadent romanticism, this play has the perfection of a cup of
cold water in a dry and thirsty land.
A Jovialt Crew is classed among Brome's romantic dramas
of intriguel; and two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The
Queenes Exchange, have been reckoned as pure romantic dramas.
This division, of course, is merely intended to meet the require-
ment of convenience. Of the six romantic plays, the last two
mentioned and The Love-sick Court best illustrate Brome's ideas
of romance and poetry, and thus call for some notice. Brome's
modest conception of himself as a playwright and not an author
1 With three others, The Love-sick Court, The Novella and The English Moor.
## p. 231 (#249) ############################################
Brome's Romantic Dramas
231
or poet—his disinclination to indulge in imaginative effort-stamps
him as out of sympathy with the fashionable taste for lengthy
imaginative sentiment. He had a real sense of artistic form, and
recoiled not only from the sentimentality, but from the incoherence,
both in plan and metre, of the later Caroline drama. We have
already quoted his account of the composition of A Joviall Crew.
In the prologue to The Antipodes, he complains that 'opinion
cares only for plays that
carry state,
In scene magnificent and language high,
And cloathes worth all the rest, except the action.
The taste of the journeyman playwright, on this head, was certainly
far sounder than that of the king and his court. Yet Brome did
essay romantic drama, and with very interesting results. The
Love-sick Court was, probably, the earliest of the batch; The
Queenes Exchange dates from about 1632, and The Queen and
Concubine from after 1635. In these plays we see Brome manfully
striving to write as a poet and to achieve a good romantic play.
In the first two, he is often at a loss; his art fails him, and only
fumbling work is produced; but The Queen and Concubine marks
a very definite advance, and shows that Brome might have pro-
duced excellent romantic work if his public had asked for it
Shakespeare, rather than Fletcher, is the master from whom
Brome takes his suggestions, and the good queen Eulalia, whose
trials and virtues are touchingly described, is a blend of the
patient Grissill of Dekker and queen Katharine in Henry VIII,
There are two fine songs in the play; one of them—What if a
day, or a month, or a year’-possessing the true Elizabethan
charm of Campion or Dekker. The shining merit of Brome in
these plays, for all their feeble workmanship, is his capacity for
the unsophisticated and direct expression of emotion. We escape
from inflated sentiment and return to a simplicity of moral feeling
which belongs to the earlier days of the drama. Brome's humility
was described above as almost servile; and the suggestion was
made that his unaffected modesty is reflected in the restraint and
the naturalness of his art. Like Day, Brome proves his manliness
when he falls on evil days. He wrote his dedication of A Joviall
Crew, when it was printed in 1652, a few months before his death,
' in these anti-ingenious Times,' when the theatres had been closed
for ten years. Since the Times conspire to make us all Beggars,'
he says, 'let us make ourselves merry. That is what his play
drives at. ' He does not Ainch in his extremity: 'I am poor and
## p. 232 (#250) ############################################
232 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
proud,' he tells us; ‘you know, Sir, I am old and cannot cringe. '
This is his last word.
Among Jonson's most eager admirers was Thomas Randolph;
but he was not, like Field and Brome, a pupil of the old poet.
He was a king's scholar of Westminster school, who became a
fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. At the end of 1629, a year
of plague broke up the schools at Cambridge, and Randolph made
Jonson's acquaintance during his stay in London; he was probably
adopted as a 'son' before he returned to Cambridge. He had written
by this time his two earliest ‘shews-Aristippus and The Conceited
Pedler, which were printed in 1630. These lively sketches recall
that early type of dramatic performance, the clown's jig, in which
a famous comedian, such as Tarlton, poured forth an improvisation
of his own, which was a mixture of prose, verse and antics. But
it is Randolph's command of racy English, his high spirits and his
exuberant wit that suggest this comparison. His pieces belong to
that large body of 'college drama' which is described in another
chapter? Aristippus, or, The Joviall Philosopher is a dispute on
the rival merits of ale and sack. All the technical terms of Aris-
totle's logic are crowded into a hilarious laudation of sack and a
decrying of malt liquor, which never flags. Randolph's classical
and scholastical learning supplies matter for a cataract of ingenious
puns and word play, and, therefore, his transference of Aristotelian
metaphysic into English farce is to be contrasted with, rather than
compared to, Robert Browning's profuse employment of the details
of Attic drama in his Aristophanes' Apology. Both poets, while
crammed with learning, have no pedantry in their nature. The
marvellous agility of some of the riming in Aristippus is another
point of contact with Browning's poetry.
In March 1632, king Charles visited Cambridge, and the
Trinity men acted before him The Jealous Lovers, written for
the occasion. It is Randolph's only failure. Its dramatic character
is so bad that the ability of the writing cannot redeem it. After
the king's visit, Randolph left Cambridge for London, 'called thence
to keep the flock of Corydon. ' In An Eglogue to Mr Johnson, he
describes how he had relished his Aristotelian studies—those deep
and learned layes' which 'the shepherd of Stagira used to sing';
but now he has to keep another's flock,' and not he but 'the Master
shears the sheep. ' Fleay's interpretation of this passage is that
Randolph was manager of prince Charles's men acting at Salisbury
? See post, chap. XII, where more is said about The Jealous Lovers.
· I. . . Ben Jonson.
## p. 233 (#251) ############################################
Thomas Randolph
233
court in 1632 and 1633. At Salisbury court theatre, Fleay thinks.
The Muses Looking-Glasse was presented towards the end of 1632.
(It was not printed till 1638, when the writer was dead. ) This
theory accords very well with the character of Randolph's master-
piece, and explains the genesis of this new and distinct type of
dramatic art. It is just such a work as the writer of Aristippus
might be expected to produce if he were called upon to expand
his short shew' into something that could compete in length,
interest and dignity with the plays of a better class. Randolph's
creative capacity had been stimulated to this effort by close con-
tact with the drama of the London stage; but the Aristotelian
student is still in evidence. The main part of the piece consists
of a series of fifteen scenes, in which the vices of Aristotle's Ethics
appear in couples or singly and, in accordance with the theory
of comedy put forward in the first act of the piece, hold up a
mirror in which spectators may note their own defects; this is
how comedies ‘laugh' people 'into wit and virtue. ' These scenes,
therefore, are planned like the colloquies' of Day's Parliament of
Bees; but the contrast is great between Day's delicate rimes and
Randolph's masculine and emphatic blank verse, which only
occasionally uses the heroic couplet. Kolax, the flatterer, remains
on all the time because 'Any vice yields work for flattery. In
these strongly written scenes, the influence of Jonson's satiric
plays is very obvious. In act I, there is an excellent scene in
which Comedy, Tragedy, Mime and Satire dispute together and
expound their functions according to classic theory. Before the
vices come in, we have a masque,
a rude dance,
Presented by the seven deadly sing.
In act v, after Mediocrity, the mother of virtues, has expounded
in a bundred lines Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, she presents a
masque of her daughters, 'wherein all the Vertues dance together. '
The invention of all this is both copious and happy. The author
describes his work as containing
No plot at all, but a meer Olla Podrida,
A medley of ill plac'd and worse penned Humours,
borrowed from the man
to whom he owes
All the poor skill he has, great Aristotle.
Randolph is pleasantly unconscious that the creative and artistic
faculty is too often, as in Jonson's case, smothered, rather than
nourished, by theory, however sound. But we have still to mention
## p. 234 (#252) ############################################
234 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
the most delightful feature of the play. The 'moralising 'scenes
are presented before Bird, a feather-man, and Mistress Flowerdew,
wife to a Haberdasher of Small Wares. ' These worthies bring
feathers and pins and looking glasses to sell to the players; but
they belong to the Sanctified Fraternity of Black-Fryers': that is
to say, they are puritans. This device is not new. Beaumont used
it admirably in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But Randolph
employs it to lighten the didactic tendency of his main scenes;
moreover, his two puritans are to be converted to the theory of
comedy put forward in the play; they are, therefore, described
with more good humour, with more restraint and naturalness,
than is usual in Elizabethan comedy. When the virtues are to be
presented, Bird hopes there are no 'cardinal vertues'-
I hate a vertue
That will be made a Cardinal,
-he adds that even ‘Bishop vertues are unwarrantable,' and,
generally,
Vertnes in Orders are unsanctified.
He is disturbed when the virtues dance:
O vile, absurd, Maypole-Maid-Marian Vertue!
Yet, as the play goes on, Mistress Flowerdew begins to relent:
I have picked
Out of the garden of this play a good
And wholesome salad of instruction.
And, finally, both are mollified Bird says
.
I'll teach devotion now a milder temper,
while Mistress Flowerdew admits,
I might have gone to hell the narrow way.
We have called The Muses Looking-Glasse Randolph's masterpiece,
though this title might be claimed for his fine pastoral Amyntas.
But the later production has to compete with even finer work
by Jonson and Fletcher, while the former is unique of its kind.
Randolph died in 1635, at the age of twenty-nine; and he is to be
counted among those poets whose achievement, considerable as it is,
is an earnest only of what his matured powers might have given us.
It remains to attempt a hurried survey of the lesser dramatists
of the end of the age, who were writing from the later years of
James until the closing of the theatres. They exhibit very clearly
the exhaustion of the great dramatic impulse which begins with
Marlowe and ends with Shirley and Brome. A tasteless and
featureless mediocrity or a pretentious extravagance are the
## p. 235 (#253) ############################################
May. Davenport
235
characteristics of work which was ceasing to conform to type
and losing all sense of true dramatic form. On a first casual
inspection, the more meritorious of these plays seem better written
and more judiciously planned than much of the Elizabethan work
which has survived; but a closer study reveals the essential
insipidity of the later work, due, in the first place, to exhaustion
of the dramatic impulse, and, in the second, to the deterioration
of the audiences and the practical cessation of a demand for good
plays
Thomas May, the historian of the Long parliament, whose
character Clarendon and Marvell? unite in decrying, began his
literary career with two comedies, The Heir and The Old Couple,
written about 1620. The Heir is a Fletcherian tragicomedy; The
Old Couple, which Fleay thinks the earlier of the pair, a play of
Jonsonian intrigue and manners. After producing these plays, May
turned to the work by which he is best known-his translations of
the Georgics and of Lucan's Pharsalia. Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq. ,'
and May was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius. Jonson's influence
and that of the classics would seem to have turned May to classical
drama, and he produced three tragedies, of which the first, Antigone,
the Theban Princess is dedicated to Endymion Porter, and may
have been written before 1626. Fleay has suggested that May
is the author of the anonymous Nero, printed 1624. We are to
suppose that the fire and energy of this fine play were the result
of May's first study of Tacitus, perhaps before he had been too
much obsessed by Jonson's influence and method. But May's
study of Tacitus would seem to have been later than 1624. His
Cleopatra is dated 1626, and Julia Agrippina 1628. May's
imagination is pedestrian; his style is regular and painstaking.
Nero is the work of a scholar whose imagination is fiery and
strong, and who contrives to crowd into his play a great deal
of the excitement, the incident and the underlying unity of the
Roman historian's picture of the tyrant. May's first two plays
are meritorious; there is care and correctness in the blank verse,
and much careful invention in the plot and the conception of the
characters; but his classical plays are no better and no worse
than his continuation of Pharsalia. They are pale reflections of
Jonson's work in Sejanus and Catiline. May is nothing more than
a 'son' of Ben, who copied his adoptive father's least inspired work.
Meritorious, like May's, was the work of Robert Davenport,
1 Most servile wit and mercenary pen. '
## p. 236 (#254) ############################################
236 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
whose activity begins in 1624. Three of his plays survive, two
comedies and a tragedy. The tragedy is a careful rewriting of
Munday and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington!
Chettle's drama is stripped of its crudities and banalities ; so
far as may be, the horrible is replaced by the pathetic, and a
considerable adornment of poetic diction and imagery is added.
The versification, of course, is brought up to date and irregularities
disappear. The old play has a deeper significance than that which
it expresses: we read it with impatience; but we remember it with
interest, because of its suggestion of horror and gloom. Davenport,
on the other hand, we read with respect for his industry, and we
forget him at once. It is a plausible conjecture that his comedies
were remodellings of older material; so that all his work looks
backward. But The City-Night-Cap and A New Tricke to Cheat
the Divell are, both of them, interesting and able comedies, like
the two plays of May which we have just considered. The former
dates from 1624. As this play takes its main story from “The
Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, there can be nothing sur-
prising in the fact that, in some respects, it is unpleasant; indeed,
its comic part is intolerable; but, on the romantic side, it has merit
It contains echoes of Measure for Measure, of Cymbeline and of
A Winter's Tale; it is highminded, with some grace of diction
and force of eloquence, but dramatically unreasonable and wrong.
The other play is slighter and more humorous, and, on the whole,
more agreeable. Two of Davenport's friends were players; of his
circumstances nothing is known.
Thomas Nabbes seems to have belonged to the same social
level as Davenport, and, like him, to have produced his tragedy,
Hannibal and Scipio, by revising an older play; he was a friend
of Richard Brome. His Microcosmus is a morality play which he
calls a masque. His best work is to be found in his three comedies,
Covent-Garden, 1632, Totenham-Court, 1633, and The Bride, 1638.
Nabbes breaks away from the prevailing coarse type of comedy,
intended to hit the taste of the man about town, and takes pains
and pleasure in representing people of virtuous life and con-
versation. With just a little more distinction and force, both in
his writing and in his characterisation, Nabbes would have risen
above the ranks of third-rate dramatists. The Bride is a comedy
of considerable effectiveness, distinguished among the plays of its
time by the goodness and purity to be found in its men and women.
His heroes and heroines are amiable and sincere; somewhat colour-
1 Cf. ante, vol. V, chap. XIII,
## p. 237 (#255) ############################################
>
coarse.
Cartwright. Mayne 237
less when compared with stronger dramatic work; but without the
two diseases of the time, the convention of coarseness, and the
convention of fantastic sentiment
Two writers who were among the sons' of Ben and of great
repute in their day need not detain us long. William Cartwright
was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester. He was educated at
Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and rose to be the most
noted man in his university as a strenuous scholar, an admired
dramatist and a 'seraphical' preacher. His first play, probably, was
his comedy The Ordinary, produced about 1635. This was followed
by three tragicomedies, The Lady Errant, The Royall Slave and
The Siedge or Love's Convert. After taking holy orders in 1638, he
did not write any more plays. He died in 1642. His plays, therefore,
were probably composed hurriedly. They are essentially the work
of a man of parts, who writes for reputation without any true
respect either for his art or for himself.
