No More Learning

Dekker cleverly introduces some of
Jonson's own characters, and even improves that of the swaggerer
Tucca, and, while this play falls far short of Poetaster in
construction, its mockery is more genial, its humour more subtle
and sparkling and the management of the whole is marked by a
delightful air of irresponsibility. Jonson is charged with having
‘arraigned two poets against all law and conscience. ' There are
a number of jocose references to his personal appearance, his
scholar's pride, his slow methods of composition, his early trade as
a bricklayer, his military service in the Netherlands, the duel in
which he killed his adversary. The ‘humourous poet'is ‘untrussed,
and condemned to wear a crown of nettles. He is no longer to
swear he will hang himself if he thinks any man could write as
well as he, nor to enter the gallery when his comedies are per-
formed, and there make vile and bad faces at every line to make
men have an eye to him and make the players afraid.
Besides, you must forsweare to venter on the stage, when your play is ended,
and to exchange curtezies, and complements with Gallants in the Lordes
roomes, to make all the house rise up in Armes, and to cry that's Horace,
that's he, that's he, that's he, that pennes and purges Humours and
diseases.


## p. 43 (#61) ##############################################

Ena of Marston's Quarrel with Jonson 43
And, again, 'when your plays are misse-likt at Court, you shall
not crye Mew like a Pusse-cat, and say you are glad you write out
of the Courtier's Element. ' 'We come,' says Crispinus, 'like your
Phisitions, to purge
Your sicke and daungerous minde of her disease. '
In yet another play was Jonson made the target of satirical
jest, Marston's What You Will, probably written (1601) before
Poetaster and revised later. But, while some investigators identify
Jonson with Lampatho and Marston with Quadratus, others re-
verse the portraits. The evidence is somewhat conflicting; yet,
if Marston intended anything but general satire, it would harmo-
nise with all we know of him that he should here introduce his
old nom de plume of Kinsayder, and thus present himself as
Lampatho. He engages in a hectoring match with Quadratus,
who abuses him as 'a ragged satirist, ‘an envy-starved cur,'
'a libertine'; but Marston, who' presented his poetry to Detraction,'
was indifferent to abuse, and prepared to invent and discharge it
against himself with the same zest that he hurled it at others.
Then do but rail at me-
No greater honour craves my poesy.
With this play the famous poetomachia comes to an end. In the
same year, we find Marston collaborating with Jonson in Love's
Martyr, and, with Chapman and Jonson, three years later, in
Eastward Hoe. He also dedicated to Jonson his Malcontent-
Benjamino Jonsonio poetae elegantissimo, gravissimo, amico suo,
candido et cordato—and, in an equally generous strain, praised
his Sejanus in 1605—
For never English shall, or hath before
Spoke fuller graced.
The chief interest today of this ancient literary logomachy,
waged on the boards of the Elizabethan theatre, lies in the
personalities which assist us to envisage men with whose works
we are familiar, and the attempt to identify in the plays the
authors represented finds its justification in our natural curiosity
to know these celebrities in their habits as they lived. Here, as
elsewhere, we are baffled by the elusive personality of Shakespeare,
for of the man in whom our interest is deepest no certain identi-
fication is possible, and the most plausible critical conjectures
lack convincing quality. Wellbred in Every Man in His Humour
may be Shakespeare, so may Posthast in Histrio-Mastix, Amorphus


## p. 44 (#62) ##############################################

44
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
in Cynthia's Revels, Planet in Jacke Drums Entertainment, Ovid
or Virgil in Poetaster, William Rufus, 'learning's True Maecenas,
poesy's king,' in Satiro-mastix. But for the passage in the anony-
mous Returne from Pernassus (1601) we might be spared all
speculation with respect to the part played by him in the theatrical
wars and conclude that he was never at any time found in either
camp. Yet the speech of Kemp to Burbage in that play draws
conjectures like a magnet and is encrusted with speculation.
Few of the university pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer
Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and
Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and
Ben Jonson too. And that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up
Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespere hath given him a
purge that made him beray his credit.
The 'purge' has been held to be the play of Troilus and Cressida,
which would make the characters Thersites and Ajax Marston
and Jonson. But, until we understand Troilus and Cressida
better, it is wise, perhaps, to regard the 'purge'as nothing more
than Shakespeare's triumph as a popular dramatist over the ablest
and most celebrated of his contemporaries. Yet, if Shakespeare
eludes us, we learn some interesting particulars about others of
the dramatic group. Marston's hair (he is Rufus) and thin legs
are a subject of continual mirth; if he desire to be a poet, he
is advised to change his hair’; ‘he is proud of his gentle birth,'
'a gentleman parcel-poet,' 'your legs do sufficiently show you are
a gentleman born, sir; for a man borne upon little legs is always
a gentleman born. ' Of Jonson we hear that, as Drummond also
tells us, he was a great lover and praiser of himself—Thou lovest
none,' says Tucca, ‘neither wisemen nor fools but thyself';
Demetrius speaks of his 'arrogancy and his impudence in com-
mending his own things'; we hear of his shabby clothes—that
Judas yonder that walks in rug'; his 'rocky face,' 'a very bad
face for a soldier,' a face 'puncht full of oylet-holes like the cover
of a warming pan,'
the most ungodly face . . . it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple,
when 'tis bruised. It's better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my
heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i' th' nose, and talks and
rants . . . like the poor fellow under Ludgate . . . its cake and pudding to me
to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets,
his slowness in composition, “Will he bee fifteene weekes about
this Cockatrice's egge too? ' Other identifications are very pre-
carious. Of Daniel, if Fastidious Brisk and Hedon be Daniel,


## p. 45 (#63) ##############################################

a
Marston as a Tragic Poet. Antonio & Mellida 45
as some suppose, we are told that he will 'creep and wriggle into
acquaintance with all the brave gallants about the town,' 'a light
voluptuous reveller,' a 'rhyme-given’ rascal who utters ‘sonnets
by the gross,' and will 'overflow you half a score or a dozen at
a sitting,''a neat, spruce, affecting courtier, one that wears clothes
well, and in fashion ; practiseth by his glass, how to salute,' who
'believes rich apparel hath strange virtues' and 'had three suits in
one year made three great ladies in love' with him,
has a rich wrought waistcoat to entertain his visitants in, with a cap almost
suitable. His curtain and bedding are thought to be his own; his bathing
tub is not suspected. He loves to have a fencer, a pedant and a musician
seen in his lodging &-mornings.
While some of the satire in these descriptions may have been
ill natured, it is hard to believe that much of it was more
than stage exaggeration of the good humoured banter which
passed between rivals at their actual meetings in tavern or
ordinary.
Marston's dramatic activity was confined to about eight years
in a lifetime of fifty-eight.
We may take it that the reference in Henslowe's diary to
a 'new poet' Maxton or Mastone, in 1599, referred to the author
of Antonio and Mellida, his first play, acted in 1600. The first
part deals with 'the comic crosses of true love,' the second,
Antonios Revenge, with a world of vice and passion. Here, as
elsewhere, Marston displays at moments a flash of tragic grandeur,
but as often falls away into bombast and mere verbal gesticulation.
It is impossible to deny to him in tragedy something of Marlowe's
passion and Webster's solemn splendour, yet, whether through haste,
or carelessness, or deficiency in taste, he is unable to maintain the
heights to which he occasionally attains. Scenes and passages,
such as Lamb selected, do not unfairly represent his power, but,
when read as a whole, the dramas from which they are taken
prove disappointing. Furious or monstrous characters, like duke
Piero in the play under notice,or Isabella in The Insatiate Countesse,
artificial rhetoric and the absence of reasonable construction, may not
have alienated the sympathies of spectators who delighted in The
Spanish Tragedie, but they distress and repel the modern reader.
The source of Antonio and Mellida-probably an Italian story-
is not known, but the drama belongs to the well known 'blood
and thunder' species, and irresistibly reminds us of Kyd's famous
play and, necessarily, also of Hamlet. In the second part,
we have the familiar ghost who clamours for revenge, the
6


## p. 46 (#64) ##############################################

46
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
device of the dumb-show and the horrors of mutilation as
well as death, repeated from The Spanish Tragedie. It is clear
that Marston was a student of Seneca and knew Shakespeare's
work, for there are quotations from Thyestes and reminiscences
of Richard II and Richard III. Marston's first play, which was
produced when he was twenty-four, bears all the signs of youth
and must be described as a patchwork of such violent scenes
as delighted the groundlings, entirely destitute of unity or skill
in characterisation.
A marked advance is apparent in The Malcontent. Of this
comedy, there exist two editions of 1604, one of which ascribes
the authorship of the play to Webster and the augmentations
to Marston. That it is chiefly Marston's work is clear, how-
ever, from the preface, in which he expresses regret that scenes
invented merely to be spoken should be printed for readers,
but concludes that the least hurt he can receive is to do himself
the wrong. Here, again, we have an Italian story, of which the
source is unknown; but we are once more reminded of Hamlet
in the person of the hero, and of Richard III in the villain
Mendozo. The malcontent, a banished duke, returns in disguise
to his former court. Like Hamlet's, ' his own soule is at variance
within herselfe,' and, under the guise of a mad humour, he
contrives to speak the bitterest home traths. The situation has
great possibilities, of which, perhaps, the fullest advantage is
hardly taken; but Marston had already learnt important lessons
in stagecraft and the delineation of character. In the cynical
hero, we find depicted a type of mind somewhat akin to that
of the author, and the humour of the piece is of the satirical
variety which he himself appears most to have affected.
The Dutch Courtezan, published in 1605, shows a further advance
in the handling of plot and character. There are scenes both serious
and comic which revive memories of Beatrice and her cousin, and
of Dogberry and the watch, in Much Ado about Nothing; both the
men and women are fairly drawn and contrasted; the secondary
plot—in part borrowed from the last novel in The Palace of
Pleasure—with the knavish tricks of Cockledemoy, makes ex-
cellent fooling. The prologue apologises for the 'slight hastie
labours in this easie play' and declares that it was meant not for
instruction but delight. It needs no apology, however, and,
though charged by Antony Nixon (The Black Year, 1606) with
'corrupting English conditions,' only the sourest of moralists
could feel resentment against the author of the comedy, one of


## p. 47 (#65) ##############################################

Eastward Hoe
47
the cleverest and most amusing of its time. It was revived late
in the seventeenth century, with the alterations of Betterton, the
actor, under the title The Revenge, or The Match in Newgate.
The Dutch Courtezan, though a capital play, is surpassed by
Eastward Hoe, but, since the drama was written in conjunction
with Chapman and Jonson, the entire credit for this brilliant
and delightful performance cannot be claimed for Marston. While
it might not be difficult to assign with some confidence certain
scenes to each of these writers, the attempt exactly to apportion
their respective contributions would lead to a succession of un-
verifiable conjectures. All must share in the praise due to it,
as all were partakers in the misfortune to which it led. It was
written shortly after the accession of James I to the throne of
England, and contained sarcastic references to the multitude of
needy Scottish adventurers who came south with their king, and
many of whom successfully claimed place and fortune. Stage jesting
at the expense of Scottish men and manners had been complained
of to lord Burghley by the English agent at the Edinburgh court
in 1598, and it had now become possible to deal with it. Attention
was called by Sir James Graham, who may himself have been
glanced at in the play, to a passage in the third act, in which
captain Seagull remarks
But as for them (the Scots] there are no greater friends to Englishmen
and England, when they are out on't, in the world, than they are. And for
my part, I would a hundred thousand of 'hem were there, for we are all one
countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of
them there than we do here.
The consequences of the mild freedom of comment which the
dramatists here allowed themselves was related by Ben Jonson
to Drummond
He was dilated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something
against the Scots, in a play Eastward Hoe, and voluntarily imprisoned him-
self with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them. The
report was, that they should then (have) had their ears cut and noses. After
their delivery, he banqueted all his friends; there was Camden, Selden and
others; at the midst of the feast his old mother dranke to him, and shew him
a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed
in the prisson among his drinke, which was full of lustie strong poison, and
that she was no churle, she told, she minded first to have drunk of it herself.
Some copies of the play, of which several editions appeared in
1605, omit the matter complained of, and other slight variations
are to be found in the extant copies. A version by Tate was
acted in 1685 under the title Cuckold's Haven, or An Alderman


## p. 48 (#66) ##############################################

48
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
no Conjurer. As a picture of city life, Eastward Hoe has no
superior in our dramatic history. The old goldsmith Touchstone,
with his wife and daughters, and the idle and the industrious
apprentice, form an admirable and life-like group, which instantly
engages interest and attention. The reckless and extravagant
Sir Petronel Flush, burning to repair his fortunes and escape his
creditors by a treasure seeking voyage to Virginia, and ravished by
Seagull's account of its wealth, declares
I tell thee, golde is more plentiful there than copper is with us . . . all the
chaines with which they chaine up their streets are massie gold; all the
prisoners they take are feterd in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go
forth on holydayes and gather 'hem by the sea-shore.
This adventurer, with his companions, gives the authors an
admirable opportunity for depicting the shifty society of the city
which lives by its wits, and a vivid contrast is thus furnished to the
household of the honest tradesman. The plot is complicated by
intrigue, and well managed, the action has a lively movement and
the conclusion contrives to reconcile us to ourselves and to human
nature. Few Elizabethan comedies can be praised so unreservedly
as this.
6
'Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read ; remember the
life of these things consists in action,' remarks the author in
the preface to his play entitled Parasitaster, Or The Fawne
(printed in two editions 1606), and certainly, though no doubt
fairly successful on the stage, this drama has no great literary
merit. The chief character, duke Hercules, appears in disguise at
the court of Urbino, whither he has sent his son as an ambassador
of love, and the situation reminds us of The Malcontent. The
heroine, Dulcimel, is of the type already portrayed in Crispinella
(The Dutch Courtezan) and Rossaline in Antonio and Mellida,
the gay, sparkling and vivacious damsel, who holds her own in the
company of men. In Beatrice, the sister of Crispinella, and in
Mildred (Eastward Hoe) we have another of Marston's favourite
types of feminine character, the good, simple girl, modest and
affectionate. Marston is not rich in female types, and if we add,
to those mentioned, the strong-willed passionate woman who
appears in some of his tragedies, we exhaust his range. The story
is taken from the third novel of the third day of The Decameron;
but the idea is an old one and had already been employed by
Terence in his Adelphi.
In The Fawne, Marston had promised shortly 'to present a
tragedy which should boldly abide the most curious perusal. ' But


## p. 49 (#67) ##############################################

Sophonisba. The Insatiate Countesse 49
the tragedy, when it came, certainly belied the author's promise.
The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonisba is the
crudest of Marston's performances. The story, told by Livy and
other historians, has been frequently dramatised—in English by
Lee (1706) and Thomson (1730); in French by Corneille (1663),
and in German by various hands. Sophonisba herself is rendered
not without force and skill, but, for the rest, the play is a singularly
feeble attempt to do justice to a powerful tragic theme. The
witch Erichto and the scenes in which she appears are almost
ludicrous in their failure to produce the intended impression of
mystery and horror. It is difficult to understand how the author
could have believed the piece to possess any literary quality; it is
easy to see that he has overleaped the limits of his power.
Marston's last play, The Insatiate Countesse (printed 1613),
does not appear in the 1633 edition of his works, and in an extant
copy of 1631 its authorship is assigned to William Barkstead. It
is generally, and, no doubt, correctly, assumed that this was the
actor William Barkstead, author of two poems-Mirrha, the
Mother of Adonis (1617) and Hiren, or the Faire Greeke (1611).
Two of the best lines in the play are found in the first named
poem-
Night, like a masque, is entered heaven's great hall
With thousand torches ushering the way.
Of tragedies assigned to Marston, this contains the most interesting
work, but much of it, clearly, is by another hand. The text is
corrupt, and it seems probable that Marston devised the plot
(taken from the fourth and fifteenth novels of Bandello and
reproduced in The Palace of Pleasure), that he wrote the first
draft and that the play was then completed by Barkstead, and
finally printed without revision from a stage copy. Marston, evi-
dently, was attracted by Shakespeare, and Shakespeare reverberates
through this play. It echoes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth,
Richard II and Henry IV; but some of these echoes may be due
to the player Barkstead's unconscious memories. The subject of
the drama—the unbridled passions of Isabella, countess of Swevia,
and her dealings with her many lovers—is too remote from nature
and modern life to command our sympathy; but there are scenes
which it is impossible to read without a thrill of admiration.
Webster alone has excelled them in their own kind, while passing
through the same dark region of things violent and forbidding,
lust, cruelty, madness and death. A Latin pageant for the visit of
king Christian of Denmark to England in 1606 and an entertainment
4
E. L. VI.
CH. II.


## p. 50 (#68) ##############################################

50
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
for a visit of the countess of Derby to her son-in-law, lord
Huntingdon, complete the list of Marston's extant works, unless,
with Collier, we attribute to him the amusing Mountebank's
Masque, performed in 1616.
The texture of Marston's genius was singularly unequal, and he
constantly promises more than he performs. In comedy only can
it be truly said that he achieved success, yet in his more ambitious
and less successful work there resides an arresting quality. When
we are about to condemn unreservedly, he flashes into unexpected
splendour; when we lay down the book, his characters refuse to be
altogether dismissed into the limbo of forgotten things. Marston,
as he himself tells us, was powerfully ‘enticed with the delights of
poetry,' and confesses that, above better desert,' he was 'fortunate
in these stage pleasings. ' As a young man, he essayed what all
young men of talent were essaying, the highest reaches of a most
difficult art. Nor was his measure of success inconsiderable, for
we are told by Wood that he was ‘in great renown for his wit and
ingenuity in 1606. Yet it was at this time, while still a young
man and on the very threshold of fame, that he resolutely turned
away to take up the unexciting routine of parish business. Too
little notice has been taken of this remarkable renunciation, and
Marston's character too much obscured by the unrelieved emphasis
laid upon the heady violences of his satirical youth and his extrava-
gances of diction and humour in the theatrical wars. He outgrew
these affectations and absurdities; but, at the same time, he out-
grew the passion for distinction. There seems no good reason to
doubt the sincerity of his own statements,- of men of my own
addiction I love most, pitie some, hate none'; 'I have ever more
endeavoured to know myself than be known of others'-and,
without hesitation, we may ascribe his neglect of his ‘unfenced
reputation, and his retirement from the pursuit of fame, to bis
having deliberately 'esteemed felicity a more solid contentment,'
and readily responded to the summons, when life's current ran
less turbulently, of ‘his bosom friend, good Epictetus,' to the quiet
meadows and sober pleasures of philosophy.
Thomas Dekker, in whose case, as in that of many of his con-
temporaries, we possess no certain record of the facts of his life,
was born and bred in London—thou beautifullest daughter of the
two united Monarchies ! from thy womb received I my being ;
from thy breasts my nourishment. ' He spoke of himself as 'old'
in 1628, of his three score years,' a vague phrase, in 1637; and we


## p. 51 (#69) ##############################################

Biographical Data concerning Dekker 51
may take it he was born, or not long in the world, in the year
1570. The first mention of Dekker, as author of a book called
Phaeton, appears in Henglowe's diary in 1597, and his name
appears again in 1599, when he is associated with Chettle, an
experienced playwright, in the production of a play entitled
Troilus and Cressida. In the same year, he received various
payments for other pieces of work. And, though the popular
narrative poem Canaan's Calamitie(1598), signed T. D. , is, probably,
Deloney's and not Dekker's, it is evident that he was early involved
in the multifarious literary activities to which his life appears to
have been devoted without cessation. Of his parentage and edu-
cation, we know nothing, but it is improbable that he was ever a
student at either of the universities. Since the theatre of the time
offered the only remunerative career to poetical talents, to the
theatre Dekker betook himself; but his energies, stimulated by ne-
cessity, overflowed into other channels. Plays, pageants, pamphlets
,
followed each other with amazing rapidity. Yet, despite all his
labours, early in life he made acquaintance with the misfortunes
which dog the steps of poverty. In 1598, Henslowe provided forty
shillings to secure his release from the 'Counter in the Poultrey,'
and we are told by Oldys that he was in prison from 1613 to 1616,
and how much longer he could not tell. ' It has been conjectured,
not without probability, that his phrase 'the Bed in which seven
years I lay Dreaming' (Dekker his Dreame, 1620) has reference to
this unhappy period. Some letters to Alleyn which have been
preserved prove that he was several times befriended by that
open-handed actor. For the rest, we know that Dekker was married
before 1594, and that his last book was printed in 1637. Here the
story ends; but, if the details of his private life, like those of Shake-
speare, are hidden in the cloud, his work, like Shakespeare's,
offers an ample field for the study of the author's personality.
Many of his writings of which the titles survive have been lost,
and others, doubtless, have perished with them; yet so much
remains that, even in the absence of personal knowledge of the
man, it is possible to estimate his genius and character with
unusual precision. To the mental energy and literary facility of
Defoe, he added the unpractical temperament, the genial kindliness,
the happy heart of Goldsmith. Of the Elizabethan playwrights,
excluding Shakespeare, he is not the greatest, but he is the most
lovable, not the most learned but the most sympathetic; he was not
the most skilful craftsman among them, but he possessed the most
natural vein of inspiration. Dekker was a rogue,' said Jonson;
4-2


## p. 52 (#70) ##############################################

52
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
but we are not prepared to believe it of so sweet and so good-
humoured a disposition as his. There is no such mirror of con-
temporary Elizabethan and Jacobean life and ways as is offered us
in the works of Dekker? In his natural sympathies and in his
choice of subjects, he clings more closely to his own country than
any dramatist of his age. No writer since Chaucer, with whom
Dekker may fruitfully be compared, has painted so many essentially
English pictures of men and manners in so natural and realistic a
style. In his first extant play, the comedy entitled The Sho-
makers Holiday (printed 1600), his admirable talent and charac-
teristic interests are displayed. The rise in fortune of the jovial
and honest shoemaker, Simon Eyre, gives the poet opportunity
to depict the life of the London he knew-rich in shifting
scenes of love, intrigue, commerce and domestic doings. The
canvas is crowded with portraits of tradesmen, apprentices, alder-
men, courtiers, their wives, daughters and sweethearts, a motley
procession surging through the streets, each elbowing the other
in shop and tavern. No dramatist of the day supplies so vivid
and humorous a spectacle of the city world which lay around
him—the world for which his plays were written-as Dekker. In
the same year was printed The Pleasant Comedie of old Fortuna-
tus, a drama in which the poet in Dekker emerges rather than the
observing humorist. As in the well known fifteenth century
romance, Fortunatus meets lady Fortune, and, of her gifts—'wisdom,
strength, health, beauty, long life and riches'-a choice among which
is offered him, he selects riches, and receives a purse which is never
empty however much may be withdrawn from it. His travels
after his unwise choice, and his unhappy fåte, with that of his sons,
make up the story of the play. The theme is simple, the con-
struction somewhat rambling; but much of the poetry is exquisite.
It was, perhaps, revised for a performance at court. Dekker never
surpassed these early dramas. His rapid, careless methods be-
trayed him, and, though he preserved to the last something of the
sweetness of fancy, the quickness of invention and the lightness of
touch for which he is justly famed, he constantly offends against
the stricter canons of art which require unity of design, coherence
and precision in construction and character. In these and other
plays, Dekker followed Shakespeare in the mingling of prose and
verse. Where prose serves his purpose, as in the humorous scenes
of ordinary life, he employs it freely, exchanging it for verse where
1 See vol. iv, chap. XVI, pp. 351–7, where his contributions to pamphlet literature
are discussed at length.


## p. 53 (#71) ##############################################

The Honest Whore
53
a deeper key of feeling, a higher pitch of passion or sentiment is
reached, passing into rimed verse in tender or pathetic passages.
The singing note is heard throughout his best work, and to the
charming lyrical vein in his genius we owe such perfect songs as
the familiar
Art thon poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers,
where the melody breaks into a child-like overflow of almost in-
articulate joyful emotion. After Satiro-mastix, already referred
to, in which he took up arms against Jonson, Dekker reverted to
a more congenial sphere in The Honest Whore. Although he had
been one of the screaming grasshoppers held by the wings of
Jonson's Poetaster, Dekker, in his reply, had exhibited no male-
volence, nor did he return to the attack. In the first part of
The Honest Whore (printed 1604), Middleton, as proved by an
entry in Henslowe, had a share; the second and superior part
is wholly Dekker's (printed 1630), and indisputably a masterpiece
as well in execution as invention. The father of Bellafront (whose
return to virtue makes the point of the action) is one of the most
interesting characters in Elizabethan fiction, and the conception
would have done honour to any dramatist. Orlando Friscobaldo,
as Hazlitt wrote in his admirable appreciation, is one of the
characters who raise, revive and give a new zest to our being. '
Bellafront's husband, Matheo, is an equally life-like portrait of the
unprincipled libertine whose vices are due as much to lack of
brain as lack of heart. No single play by Dekker more worthily
represents him, or better reflects the blend of humour, pathos and
poetry which made the man. But he was never a sure artist. In
The Whore of Babylon (printed 1607), we have a play without
merit, whose only interest lies in some few passages descriptive
of London manners and fashions, and in its exhibition of protestant
and patriotic sentiment, displayed in references to queen Elizabeth,
under the name of Titania, to the Armada and to the Drake,
Who from their rivers beat their water fowl,
Tore silver feathers from their fairest swans,
And plucked the Halcyon's wings that rove at sea.
If It Be Not Good, the Divel is in it (printed 1612) is a sufficiently
extraordinary title for a worthless dramatic fantasy, based upon
The Pleasant History of Friar Rush (1567), which presents a
bewildering group of human and superhuman beings, from Ravaillac
and Guy Faux to Pluto and Charon. If, to these last named
works, we add Match mee in London (printed 1631) and The


## p. 54 (#72) ##############################################

54 Chapman, Marston, Dekker
8
a
Wonder of A Kingdome (printed 1636), neither of which add much
to Dekker’s laurels, we exhaust the list of plays which can with any
confidence be assigned to his unassisted pen. But there remain a
number of dramas to which he was a contributor and of some of
which, perhaps, he was the chief architect. The habit of collabora-
tion, the noble practice of the times,' in which Elizabethan play-
wrights freely indulged, left to criticism numerous problems not yet
solved-many, no doubt, never to be solved. Dekker had partners,
good and bad, in various theatrical ventures. We know that
Middleton had a share in the first part of The Honest Whore, and
a share, almost certainly the largest, in The Roaring Girle (1611),
whose heroine, Moll Cutpurse, masquerades as a London gallant;
we know that Webster took part in the composition of West-Ward,
Hoe and North-Ward Hoe, comedies of intrigue, and The Famous
History of Sir Thomas Wyat (all printed 1607), possibly an
unfinished or unskilful attempt to recast an older historical play
on the subject of lady Jane Grey in two parts, both mentioned by
Henslowe. We find Massinger's name associated with Dekker's in
connection with The Virgin Martir (printed 1622) and, though the
comic scenes and the characters of Dorothea and Angelo have been
claimed for Dekker, the conception and framework of the play may,
without injustice, be assigned to the younger dramatist? The
Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill, printed anonymously in 1603;
but, in all probability (though Jonson may have had a hand in a
revision), rightly assigned, on the evidence of certain entries in
Henslowe, to Chettle, Haughton and Dekker, is generally believed
to owe its two beautiful lyrics and much of its merit to the most
celebrated of its three authors?
The Witch of Edmonton (printed
1658), a fine play, raises some very difficult questions. The witch
scenes, in which an aching spirit of human sympathy appears, and
the tender character of Susan, have been very generally allotted
to Dekker, but Mother Sawyer is by some critics thought to have
been a creation of Rowley. The first act, the plan and general
management of the piece, indisputably belong to Ford®. To Ford,
also, may, without hesitation, be assigned a large part, probably the
last two acts at least, in The Sun's-Darling: A Moral Masque
(1656), which, perhaps, is a hasty revision of Dekker's Phaeton.
Another masque by the same authors, entitled The Fairy Knight
(licensed in 1624), has not come down to us, and we know the names
of a number of other dramas in which Dekker assisted or was
assisted by Jonson (Robert the Second, and Page of Plymouth), by
1 See post, chap. VI. 2 See ante, vol. v, chap. XIII. 8 See post, chap. vin.


## p. 55 (#73) ##############################################

Dekker's Place as a Dramatist
55
Drayton (The Civil Wars in France) and by Haughton and Day
(The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, identified by some critics with Lnists
Dominion, at one time ascribed to Marlowe, but not published
till 1657). There are passages in Lusts Dominion which certainly
suggest Dekker, and, whether we identify it or not with the last
drama, we may grant it as possible that he had a hand in it.
The magnificent Entertainment: Given to King James (1603),
in which Jonson joined, and to which Middleton contributed a
speech, and various civic pageants, are evidence of contemporary
appreciation of Dekker's versatile talent, but possess no serious
literary interest.
Quick, impulsive sympathies and a deep vein of humanity
were the qualities beyond price in Dekker's dramatic equip-
ment, and to these good gifts of nature the muses added their
authentic inspiration. ‘A priest in Apollo's temple many years,'
as he said, his place and honours were acknowledged by his own
age and remain unchallenged. The 'poetry enough for anything,'
of which Lamb spoke, was joined in Dekker to an amazing and
unflagging interest in life, without touch or trace of weariness
or cynicism. It would be absurd to claim for him the intellectual
range, the sure-footed judgment or unerring taste of the great
masters, and perilous to assert that his faults became him; yet, from
his very artlessness, there shines a charm denied to better considered
and far more perfect work. By the way of unaffected simplicity,
Dekker almost captured greatness, and, while some of his fellows
have secured a larger share of the admiration of posterity, he has
crept into its more affectionate remembrance. If we incline to
criticise his haste and carelessness, we ought to remember that
he wrote 'with the printer's devil and the bailiff always at his
elbow,' and we may well be astonished not so much at the demerits
as at the wealth and value of his performance. “The right happy
and copious industry' which, in Webster's estimate, placed 'Master
Dekker' beside ‘Master Shakespeare,' is a tribute from a critic
who knew what excellence was, and against what mighty currents
men must struggle to attain it. As a humorist, London was his
province, a sufficient field. Sinful humanity did not lie beyond
his pale, but the sunny breadth of mind which was his, while he
retained reverence for the things that call for reverence, transforms
and transfigures the world, and we are the more reluctant to
dismiss it as merely common and unclean. Dekker's satire is
without sting, for, while he laughs, he loves, and is honest without
being angry. He only among the men of his time seems to have
a
6
q


## p. 56 (#74) ##############################################

56
Chapman, Marston, Dekker
recognised the whole hardness of the fate of the poor, and to
have ranged himself on the side of distressed persons, maltreated
animals, misjudged, lonely and eccentric members of society.
For the student of Elizabethan social life, Dekker's prose is
even more important than his plays. There are no surviving
documents so rich in material for the reconstruction of its manners
and fashions as these vivid and entertaining pamphlets. Of some
of these an account has been given in a previous volume of the
present work? Both in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) and in A Rod
for Runawayes (1625), which also deals with appalling incidents of
the plague and upbraids those who fled from the city in its need,
Dekker anticipates Defoe in the realism and force of his descriptions,
not unmingled in the former work with certain grimly humorous
narratives, designed, as he said, “like a merry Epilogue to a dull
Play, to shorten the lives of long winter's nights, that lie watching
in the dark for us. ' Worke for Armorours, or the Peace is
broken (1609), with its motto, 'God help the Poor, the rich can
shift,' allegorises the eternal conflict of classes in the war of the
rival queens, Money and Poverty, and the perplexed social
problems of our own no less than Dekker's day are poignantly
presented. Here, again, Dekker refers to 'the purple whip of
vengeance,' the plague, and its effects on the city life. Like many
others, the poets and players are in evil case, the playhouses are
closed, their flags and bushes taken down, the muses more sullen
than monkeys,
no good doing in these dayes but amongst Lawyers, amongst Vintners, in
Bawdy houses and at Pimlico. There is all the Musick (that is of any
reckning), there all the meetings, there all the mirth, and there all the
money.
Among incidental descriptions which give interesting glimpses
into the city's life is that of the bear pit, 'the Dogges, like so
many Divels inflicting torments upon it,' in which savage enter-
tainment was included sport with a blind bear, not baited by
dogs, but whipped 'till the blood ran down his old shoulders'
by 'a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces
of christians. '
Methonght [says Dekker) this whipping of the blinde Beare, moved as
much pittie in my breast towards him, as ye leading of poore starved wretches
to the whipping posts in London (when they had more neede to be releeved
with foode) ought to move the hearts of cittizens, though it be the fashion now
to laugh at the punishment.
1 See the passages in vol. iv, chap. XVI, and bibl. , to which reference has already
been made.


## p. 57 (#75) ##############################################

Dekker's Prose
57
1
Dekker's prose is not always faultless, but it is clear to any
student of Shakespeare or of Elizabethan literature in general
that what Arnold called the victory of the prose style, clear,
plain and short' was already won by our dramatists before the
advent of Dryden, the virtues of whose prose were derived from
his studies in their school. At his best, Dekker is as simple and
lucid and direct as any later writer. Take this, from the complaint
of Paules steeple in The Dead Tearme (1608)
The Marriner there called mee his sea-marke, for to him I stood as a
watch-tower to guide him safely to our English shore. No sooner did the
traveller by land see me but his heart leaped for joy, and the wearisomnesse
of his way seemed to go from him, because he knew he was in sight of the
most goodly Cittie which he loved.
Dekker his Dreame (1620) (to which was prefixed a woodcut
representing the poet asleep in bed) is a mixture of prose and
verse, which opens with an apocalyptic vision of the end of all
things and the last judgment, and describes the author's progress
through the infernal regions. It reveals an intense and vivid
consciousness of the guilt and peril of sin but is singularly devoid
of the natural grace and distinction of another religious book,
Fowre Birds of Noahs Arke (1609). This is a very remarkable
collection of prayers, distinguished by a deep spirit of devotion,
exquisite feeling and perfection of phrasing. There is probably
no prayer book in the language from a single hand which can bear
comparison with this for simplicity and beauty.
+


## p. 58 (#76) ##############################################

CHAPTER III
MIDDLETON AND ROWLEY
It is believed that Thomas Middleton was born in London
about 1570; he died there, and was buried at Newington Butts on
4 July 1627. The known facts about his life are that he married
a daughter of one of the six clerks in chancery, and had a son in
1604; that he was city chronologer from 1620 till the time of his
death, when he was succeeded by Ben Jonson ; that, in 1624, he
was summoned before the privy council, with the actors who had
played in his Game at Chesse, and, it appears, put in prison at the
instigation of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador; and that, in
1619, Ben Jonson spoke of him to Drummond of Hawthornden as
'a base fellow. ' This hard saying may, after all, have been meant
as no more than a literary criticism. The words are: 'that
Markham (who added his English Arcadia) was not of the number
of the Faithful, i. e. Poets, and but a base fellow. That such were
Day and Middleton. ' This might mean no more than that, to
Jonson, Middleton's art or verse seemed 'base,' in the sense of
pedestrian, or going on a low level. Nothing more was said about
him by anyone of consequence, except a passing word from Scott,
before the appearance, in 1808, of Lamb's Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets. Lamb gave copious and carefully chosen ex-
tracts from his plays, and said almost all the essential things about
him ; Leigh Hunt followed, picking up the one grain left over by
Lamb; and, in 1860, Dyce brought out a complete edition of the
plays, which was re-edited and extended by Bullen in 1885.
Of William Rowley, there has never been any edition, and we
know even less of him than of Middleton. It is conjectured that he
was born about 1585 and died some time after 1637, the year of his
marriage. He was an actor in various companies, and is supposed
to have revised plays for new performances. For the most part,
he collaborated with other playwrights, especially with Middleton;
and the finest work of both Middleton and Rowley was done in this


## p. 59 (#77) ##############################################

Early Writings by Middleton
59
collaboration. Rowley's chief play, Alls Lost by Luist, has never
been reprinted from the scarce original edition of 1633. Besides
the plays, he published, in 1609, A Search for Money; or, the
Lamentable Complaint for the Loss of the Wandering Knight,
Monsieur L'Argent, a pamphlet in the manner of the time, full
of crude realistic satire, written in his abrupt, lean and straight-
forward prose.
The earliest work attributed to Middleton is an endless com-
position in six-lined stanzas called The Wisdom of Solomon Para-
phrased, published in 1597. The dedication to lord Devereux, and
an address, wanting in some copies, 'To the Gentlemen-Readers,'
are both signed Thomas Middleton, and we can but hope
that it was someone else of the same name. Addressing critics
as Momus and Zoilus, the writer regrets, not quite truthfully,
'I lack a scarecrow,' and bids them ‘if you gape for stuffing, hie
you to dead carrion carcases, and make them your ordinaries. '
But no better fare is provided, and a sufficient scarecrow has been
set up over this unploughed field by every subsequent editor.
The task, if he really endured it, must have effectually cured
Middleton of any further inclination for preaching. 'O weak
capacity of strongest wit ! 'he laments, and with justice; yet, two
years afterwards, he seems to have attempted satire with no less
futility than sermonising. Micro-cynicon. Sixe Snarling Satyres,
published in 1599, has been attributed to Middleton for no more
certain reason than the signature 'T. M. Gent,' following the
introductory Defiance to Envy with which the writer, in imitation
of Hall, introduces his first and only book of satires. They are
weakly imitated from Marston.
a
My pen's two nebs shall turn into a fork,
Chasing old Envy from so young a work,
the writer threatens; but the threat could not possibly have been
needed. The 'snarling Muse' that 'now thundered rhyme' thus
feebly must have been beyond the reach of envy, and has become
too insignificant to need identification. But Middleton was an un-
equal writer, and it is impossible to regard even such bad work as
this unlikely, because unworthy, to have been written by him.
His mark is much more distinctly to be traced in two pamphlets
published in 1604, signed “T. M. ' in their epistles to the reader.
The less interesting of these is Father Hubburd's Tales, which
contains a good deal of indifferent verse, no better than Middleton's
lyric verse usually is. Its main interest for us is in the very


## p. 60 (#78) ##############################################

60
Middleton and Rowley
kindly and regretful praise of Nashe, whom he calls 'honest soul,'
'too slothful to thyself,' 'cut off in thy best blooming May':
6
Drones eat thy honey: thou wast the true bee.
The tract is one of the allegorising satires of the time, written in
a slow narrative style, with abundant detail of the manners and
fashions censured, and a good deal of quite sober realism in the
descriptions and incidents. The Black Book is more extravagant
and more pungent, and is like a sample of the raw material,
presented to us by the writer in his first self-conscious pose as
moralist. He parades as one 'diving into the deep of this cunning
age' and bringing to light the infectious bulks of craft, cozenage,
and panderism, the three bloodhounds of a commonwealth. He
professes that his lively exposures are meant for the warning
and confirming of the 'truly virtuous,' and commends himself for
the modesty of my phrases, that even blush when they discover
vices and unmask the world's shadowed villanies. ' The tale is
put into the mouth of Lucifer, who speaks his own prologue in
a vigorous piece of blank verse and rime, by way of response to
Nashe's dedication of Pierce Penilesse to 'the high and mightie
Prince of darknesse, Donsell dell Lucifer, King of Acheron, Stix
and Phlegeton, Duke of Tartary, Marquesse of Cocytus, and Lord
high Regent of Lymbo. ' The pamphlet is done in Nashe's manner,
and shows a knowledge of its subject not inferior to Nashe's own.
It describes what may possibly have been Nashe's actual deathbed,
seen by the sullen blaze of a melancholy lamp that burnt very
tragically upon the narrow desk of a half-bedstead, which descried
all the pitiful ruins throughout the whole chamber. ' It shows
glimpses of your twelve tribes of villany,' engaged in much the
same machinations as in the plays; and the devil, having gone to
and fro in London, 'to gorge every vice full of poison,' sits down to
make out his last will and testament, leaving legacies ‘like ratsbane,
to poison the realm,' in a catalogue of the more profitable of the
vices. We see Middleton, for all his drawing of a moral, very
interested and at home in the details of all that he denounces ;
preparing himself, deliberately or not, for his work as a writer
of dramatic comedy.
It is quite possible that The Mayor of Quinborough, which
was printed with Middleton's name in 1661, is the earliest play
of his that we have; and quite possible that we have it only in
a revised state. Such merit as there is in the play lies almost
wholly in individual lines and passages, which stand out from a
a


## p. 61 (#79) ##############################################

The Mayor of Quinborough. The Old Law 61
confused and rather hideous mingling of tragic bombast and strained
farce. The dumb-show and choruses between the acts are not less
immature than the horrors in action by which we can imagine
Middleton to be trying to force himself to be tragic. No trace of
Rowley is to be seen anywhere in the play, least of all in the comic
scenes, which have distinct traces of the manner of Middleton.
The whole play seems to be the premature attempt of a man,
not naturally equipped for tragic or romantic writing, to do the
tragic comedy then in fashion; and this attempt was probably
continued in the plays, now lost, at which we know Middleton
was working in 1602: Caesar's Fall, with Munday, Drayton and
Webster; The Two Harpies, with the same and Dekker; and
The Chester Tragedy. In Blurt Master-Constable, which belongs
to the same year and is the first of his published plays, we see
him recovering himself after his false start, and setting off
spiritedly on the comedies of intrigue which were to form the
first division of his work. The prose has become alive, and swift
of foot; the dialogue slips easily from prose into verse and
back again; the action, and the unchastened tongues, gallop.
Middleton has found a theme and a technique; and to these he
will be almost wholly faithful for the long first half of his career,
the fifteen years of comedy.
That is, unless we are to believe, on the strength of a dubious
allusion, that Middleton, before writing The Mayor of Quin-
borough, wrote The Old Law, or part of it, and that Massinger
and Rowley, who would both have been too young to have col-
laborated with him at the time, added large portions later. Of
Massinger, though he may conceivably have revised it at a much
later date than that of its original production, there is no trace in
the play? ; but of Rowley the traces are unmistakable, not so much
in the actual writing of the comic parts as in the whole conception
of the main scenes and characters. In a sense the play is the
preparation for A Faire Quarrell (1617), which both wrote
together; it seems to mark the beginning of the collaboration,
and of that new influence which came into Middleton's work with
Rowley. It is in these two plays that we find, for the first time,
that “exquisiteness of moral sensibility' which Lamb divined in
the one, and that 'delicacy of perception in matters of right and
wrong' which he distinguished in the other.
From 1602, the date of Blurt Master-Constable, to 1617, the
date of A Faire Quarrell, almost the whole of Middleton's work
1 Cf. post, chap. vi.
9


## p. 62 (#80) ##############################################

62
Middleton and Rowley
is in farcical comedy, at once realistic and satirical. It is to the
early part of this period that a play is generally attributed into
whose authorship no one would have troubled to enquire if it had
not been published as written by W. S. ' The Puritane is still
printed among what are called the 'doubtful plays' of Shakespeare.
When Swinburne says that it is ‘much more like Rowley's than
like Middleton's worst work' he is strictly correct; but he is not
to be taken to mean that Rowley wrote it. There is nothing
sufficiently individual in the play to give so much as a solid
starting-point for conjecture. Compare it with the worst of
Middleton's comedies, The Famelie of Love, and it will be found
that, in that tedious satire, there is at least some intention, though
it is now mainly lost to us; we have here the realist's attempt to
show up the dulness of dull people by making them speak and act
no more nimbly than was natural to them. The parody, appar-
ently, is so close that we can mistake it for the original. But the
diction, though creeping, is not ignoble; it is like the fumbling of
a man on an instrument which he is on the way to master. The
fumbler of The Puritane will get no further?
In 1604, Middleton had some, but no very considerable, share
in The Honest Whore of Dekker, so far as his manner can be
traced there; and, seven years later, we find him collaborating
again with Dekker in The Roaring Girle, though here, also, what
is finest in the play seems to be Dekker's. Apart from these two
divergences, and an occasional masque or pageant, done to order,
Middleton's course is direct, and his main concern, as he defines it
later, in commending The World tost at Tennis to the reader and
understander, is to be ‘neither too bitterly taxing, nor too soothingly
telling, the world's broad abuses. ' In a prefatory address to the
'comic play-readers' of The Roaring Girle, he is still more
explicit
"The fashion,' he says, 'of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so
naturally as the alteration in apparel; for in the time of the great crop
doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean
purpose, was only then in fashion: and as the doublet fell, neater inventions
began to set up. Now, in the time of spruceness, our plays follow the
niceness of our garments; single plots, quaint conceits, lecherous jests, drest
ap in hanging sleeves: and those are fit for the times and the termers.
Such a kind of light-colour summer stuff, mingled with divers colours,
you shall find this published comedy. '
The early comedy of Middleton is as light, rancid and enter-
taining as anything in Elizabethan drama.
It is irresponsible
1 As to The Puritane, cf. ante, vol. v, chap. x.
6


## p. 63 (#81) ##############################################

Middleton's Early Comedy
63
rather than immoral, and does not exactly recommend, or approve
of, the trickeries and debaucheries which it represents in a life-
like way, under improbable conditions. Yet the writer is no
more careful of his ethical than of his other probabilities, and
takes little trouble to keep up any consistency in the minds or
morals of his agile puppets. His aim is at effect, and he rarely
fails in his aim. Even when we do not believe in the persons,
and do not care about the upshot of the action, we are almost
constantly enlivened, and, willingly or unwillingly, carried along.
The main material of his comedy is in the acts and moods of
the human animal. The idea of sex dominates the whole Eliza-
bethan drama ; here, however, it is not a terror, a fascination, or a
sin, but an occupation. A passage in The Phoenix might be
applied to almost any of these plays:
What monstrous days are these!
Not only to be vicious most men study,
But in it to be ugly; strive to exceed
Each other in the most deformed deed.
Is it a merit in Middleton that he shows us vice always as an
ugly thing, even when he seems to take pleasure in it, and to
forget to condemn it? The 'beggarly fools and swarming knaves,'
to use a phrase of his own, who traffic in souls, bodies and
possessions throughout the travesties, confusions and familiar
accidents which happen in town,' are set agog by no moralist,
but by so keen and unprejudiced an observer of the human comedy
that, for the most part, they come out in their naked colours,
almost against his intention. And, as he lets vice peep through
all cloaks and stand self-condemned, so he shows us a certain
hardly conscious 'soul of goodness in things evil. ' There is true
and good human feeling in some of the most shameless scenes of
Your five Gallants, where a whole lost and despised world of
'strange devils and pretty damnable affections' is stirred up into
plausible action. They take place where there is ‘violet air, curious
garden, quaint walks, fantastical arbours, three back-doors, and a
coach-gate,' in a ‘music-school or Maison Tellier of the period,
and the very names of the characters are hardly quotable. The
humanity is accidental, and comes from absolute knowledge of a
world where 'every part shoots up daily into new subtlety; the
very spider weaves her cauls with more art and cunning to entrap
the fly. Middleton, though the spider preoccupies him, and lends
him a web for spinning, puts the fly, too, into the pattern.
a
If we seek a reason for the almost universal choice of brothels


## p. 64 (#82) ##############################################

64
Middleton and Rowley
and taverns as favourite scenes of Elizabethan comedy, we shall
find it partly in a theory, taken over from Latin and Italian drama,
that this was the proper province of the comic muse. The acci-
dents of a player's or professional writer's life gave opportunities
for knowledge of just that world into which he was naturally
thrust. The Elizabethan audience was accustomed from the first
to the two extremes of noble tragedy and brutal comedy. This
violent contrast appealed to a taste always hungering and thirst-
ing for strong meat and strong drink. Puritan limits had not
yet fixed themselves; they were but divined as a thing one could
be aware of and mock at. At the same time, the stage was not
exactly respected; it had no character to keep up. Thus, the
dramatist, being as free as a modern French caricaturist to make
his appeal in the most direct way, to the animal through the
animal, had no hesitation in using the gross material at hand
grossly. In the more serious dramatists, we get no more than
painful attempts to please a taste which Middleton must have
found it easy to gratify. He was no dreamer; he was not a poet
in the instinctive irrepressible sense in which Dekker, for instance,
was a poet; and he shared a love which was common to Dekker
and to others at that time, for mean adventures of loose people in
cities, knaves who gulled and fools who were gulled, sharpers
and, outside cities, highwaymen and gipsies. His eyes were open
to every folly of fashion or freak of religion ; he knew his law
and his lawyers, and he saw their capabilities for entertainment;
he had all the terms of astrological and other cant at his fingers'
ends, and realised the savour of the oddities of popular speech. It
was easy for him to set these people talking as they would really
talk, or rith just that heightening which his sense of pungent and
appropriate words gave him; and he could set scene after scene
galloping across the stage, without taking more trouble than his
public demanded as to making his plots consistent or probable, so
long as they went at full speed along familiar ways; not caring,
most of the time, to create individual characters, but relying upon
the effect of vividly realised moods, of people very much alive for a
given moment. A character so ripely developed as Sir Bounteous
Progress in A Mad World, My Masters is rare among these nimble
types and instances of fixed follies or ascertained 'humours. '
We remember Middleton's comedies, not for their separate
characters, but for their brace of gallants, their school' of
wantons, their clash of cozener with cozener, their ingenuities of
deceit, the heat of fury' of their entangled action. We remember


## p. 65 (#83) ##############################################

Middleton's Realism
65
single scenes, of a marvellous and sometimes cruelly comic reality,
like the deathbed of Dampit the drunkard in A Trick to catch
the Old-one, or that other death scene in A Chast Mayd in
Cheape-side, where an old sinner makes his exit in grotesque
and frightened repentance, while the man and woman whom he
may be supposed to have most wronged remember the fact for
the first time, as they foresee the stopping of their shameful
revenue. Here, as often in Middleton, irony comes out of the
mere faithfulness with which he sets before us exactly what
would happen at such a moment. His plays are full of these
paradoxes of event, which it is the custom to call unpleasant-and
which, sometimes, certainly are unpleasant, when the playwright
seems to be unaware that some hideous piece of villainy is being
set to rights (so far as relative justice is concerned) by a trick of
'virtue’ hardly less pardonable.
If Bullen is right in his conjecture that The Widdow (a play
published in 1652 as a 'lively piece, drawn by the art of Jonson,
Fletcher, and Middleton') belongs to about this date, though revised
later, it would seem to be curiously innocent, for a play by Middleton,
notwithstanding all its vivid banter and thieves' foolery. In how
many plays of this period could the characters say to one another
at the close, without irony, ‘Be good' and 'Be honest,' as two of
the characters do in this ? Jonson is for nothing in it, unless as a
passing influence; but it is hard to see why Fletcher might not have
been the reviser, as well as the writer of one or two of the songs.
But the main part, unmistakably, is Middleton's, and it is, perhaps,
in this play that the romantic element first shows itself among the
incidents and actualities of knavery.
It took Middleton a long time to recognise, as a dramatist, that
there was such a thing as honour, even in transactions which he
felt it his business to watch from the knaves' point of view because
that view was the one which would best entertain his audience. He
chose stories, persons and surroundings for their immediate stage
effect, making them as real and amusing as he could, scene by scene;
and it was so rarely that it occurred to him to temper the trick-
eries of his plots by some honest motive that we find him confusing
moral values without due indication of his being aware of it.
There is no doubt that he wrote hastily, and with ease, and a man
who writes hastily and with ease for the stage will readily sacrifice
a point of conscience to a theatrical solution. Once, in The Roar-
ing Girle, some frank and convincing honesty comes into the bad
company, and has the best of it there. But how much of what
5
E. L. VI.
CH. III.


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66
Middleton and Rowley
gives a pleasant quality to that play is Middleton's, though the play
is not less astir than the others with his usual crew and company ?
Though the work of each overlaps occasionally, there can be
little doubt of the main shares of Middleton and Dekker in The
Roaring Girle'. It was Dekker, undoubtedly, who created, and
mainly set in action, the good honest hoyden who masquerades
through the play in the name of Moll Cutpurse-a creature of
another colour, if we can believe contemporary records. 'Worse
things I must needs confess,' says Middleton in his preface 'To
the Comic Play-Readers,''the world has taxed her for than has
been written of her ; but 'tis the excellency of a writer to leave
things better than they are. ' To paint a woman who asks justly,
'
must you have
A black ill name, because ill things you know?
and to show her talking thieves' slang among thieves with an easy
familiarity, and yet going through this evil company like a
knight-errant, helping honest lovers and putting down knaves,
was a task more within the power of Dekker than of Middleton,
whose metre and manner come and go with the gallipots and
rattling roguish shopkeepers who cry their wares and carry on their
complicated private doings through the whole underplot of the play.
But little of the really significant speech of Moll can be attributed
to Middleton, and, though much of the business and movement of
the play is his, and much of the 'manners, Dekker, too, is
responsible for the fifth act with its almost too liberal local colour
of 'canting. The play is untidy, but very much alive ; and
Dekker seems to bring fresh air into musty rooms, not only by the
presence of this vital woman, not to be paralleled elsewhere in
his associate's comedies, but by a way of writing which is more a
poet's way than Middleton's. The very sound of the lines has a
lilt and spring in them, as in a casual image of this kind :
my thoughts must run,
As a horse runs that's blind round in a mill,
Out every step, yet keeping one path still.
Middleton's verse, for all its sinews, could not have given just that
turn to a line; and Dekker brings with him that beauty which
was always a natural accident in his speech.
The prose of Middleton, as we see it in the comedies, where it
is employed more largely than verse, but drops easily into and out
of verse, is a pungent, fluent, very natural and speakable prose.
1 For the view, according to which the larger part of this play was Middleton's, see
ante, chap. 11.
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Middleton's Prose and Verse
67
1
It has lightness and yet is not empty, is often witty without going
unduly beyond the probabilities of talk; only at times, as in The
Famelie of Love, does it become pedantic ; and it rarely loses a
Tube
certain deftness even when it drops into coarseness. Touches of
the edged speech of the period, which shines and strikes, are not
wanting.