No More Learning

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.


## p. 66 (#84) ##############################################

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.
6


## p. 67 (#85) ##############################################

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. 'Bright Helena of this house, would thy Troy were
a-fire, for I am a-cold,' says someone, on no particular occasion.
The prose goes at a great rate, and carries you with it, while you
1
travel slowly with Rowley, whenever he takes Middleton's place.
And the verse is hardly less swift, galloping often on more feet
than the measure demands, but rarely jarring the measure. In
3
some of the plays, Middleton takes no care to modulate from
!
prose into verse, but jumps forward and backward with little
need, barely lifting the verse above the measure of the prose.
Gradually, the quality and adaptability of the verse improve;
developing directly out of the prose, it becomes not less flexible.
And we find him cultivating with increasing skill what had always
iu been a homely colloquial tendency, dealing in culinary and haber-
dashery similes, more at home with a dish or dress than with the
moon, and able to set dumb things into gesture, thus :
Troth, you speak wondrous well for your old house here;
'Twill shortly fall down at your feet to thank you,
Or stoop, when you go to bed, like a good child,
To ask your blessing.
Verse, to Middleton, is a native idiom; he speaks in it
naturally, bending it as he pleases, to any shade of meaning, filling
it with stuff alien to poetry and yet keeping its good metre. He
does not write for the sake of the verse, and only a native honesty
of ear keeps him from dropping clean out of it, without knowing,
into prose. Thus, he has few fine passages ; yet a few of them he
has, where imagination has fastened upon him, and dictated his
words. His lines run often, in his later work, to fourteen
syllables, yet their feet slide easily within the measure. As he
lets his lines grow longer, so he allows himself longer speeches,
because he knows that he can keep the ear awake and following
them. And, by the time of The Changeling, the versification has
become graver, with a new thrill in it, through which passion, and
not only the mind's energies, can now speak. Was it Rowley who
first showed Middleton the possibility of that passionate note, by
which drama becomes not only drama but poetry?
If, as has been conjectured, The Old Law leads the way from the
farcical comedies to the tragic comedies like A Faire Quarrell, it is
Ic
5–2


## p. 68 (#86) ##############################################

68
Middleton and Rowley
in that play that the influence of William Rowley may be first dis-
tinguished ; and it is impossible not to connect it with the change
which came about in the work of Middleton, a change from work
almost wholly comic, and of the city kind, to work partly tragic
and partly comic in a higher and more romantic sense.
We find
Rowley's name beside Middleton's on the title-pages of The Old
Law, A Faire Quarrell, The World tost at Tennis, The Spanish
Gipsie and The Changeling: most, that is, of the finest of
Middleton's later work, with only the two exceptions of Women
beware Women and A Game at Chesse. The manner and measure
of this collaboration is not so easy to discover as may at first
sight appear. It is his faults that are most obvious in Rowley, his
dissonant verse, his over-strained speech, his incapacity for con-
struction, something jagged and uneven in his whole work; and it
is only gradually that critics are beginning to realise that these
defects are not the essential part of him. His plays have had the
not unnatural misfortune to be chaotically printed ; verse and
prose never clearly distinguished from one another; and some of
them are only to be found in a few rare copies of the original
editions. It is difficult to be certain of his exact share in many
plays to which, rightly or wrongly, his name is appended. One
thing is certain : that the plays written by Rowley and Middleton
together are finer than any of the plays written by either
separately. And it is almost equally certain that Rowley's share
in the work was not confined to those scenes or passages in which
his actual hand can be distinguished in the versification, but that
there was a further and closer collaboration of a kind which no
tests of style or versification can ever disentangle. We have seen
Middleton working alone, and, to some extent, with Dekker; we
shall see him, at the end of his career, again working alone. We
have now to consider what is discoverable about Rowley, in such
work as he did by himself or in company with others, before we
can hope to arrive at any conclusion in regard to the work in
which he is the companion of Middleton.
The plays published under Rowley's name or initials are: A
new Wonder, A Woman never vext, 1632; Alls Lost by Lust,
1633 ; A Match at Midnight, 1633; and A Shoo-maker a Gentle-
man, 1638. Of these, A Match at Midnight has little resemblance
to any of his known work, while it has a close resemblance to
the early work of Middleton. It goes with something of the
rapidity of the wild and whirling comedies of about the time of
Your five Gallants, but would add more credit to an imitator


## p. 69 (#87) ##############################################

Rowley as a Collaborator 69
than to Middleton. Here, as elsewhere, Rowley, in his capacity of
actor, may have made slight changes for acting purposes, which
would account for the use of his initials. There is no reason
for supposing that he had even so much as that to do with Fortune
by Land and Sea, published, in 1655, as by Heywood and Rowley,
or with The Thracian Wonder, attributed to Webster and
Rowley by Kirkman in 1661. There is little more probability in
the same publisher's attribution to the same writers of A Cure for
a Cuckold, which he brought out in the same year. Kirkman's
word is valueless as evidence, and there is nothing in the play of
which we can say with much probability that it is by either Webster
or Rowley. Only the slow and thoughtful quality of some of
the verse gives any real suggestion of Webster; and verse of
Webster's kind is quite possible to imitate. The drearily comic
prose is done after the pattern of the time, and there is nothing
in it distinguishable from similar hackwork, whether done by
Rowley or by others for the day's wage? .
In The Travailes of The three English Brothers, published in
1607, with a dedication signed 'John Day, William Rowley,
George Wilkins,' it is easy, but not very profitable, to trace the
share of Rowley. He probably put in Zaripha, the Shylock of the
play, and wrote some of the more pompous blank verse and of
the coarser verbal fooling. In The Maid in the Mil, licensed to
Fletcher and Rowley on 29 August 1623, and played at the Globe
with Rowley as one of the actors, his share and Fletcher's are
quite distinct, and they are divided pretty equally. Rowley's
verse, by the side of the winged verse of Fletcher, seems somewhat
crabbed and abstract, and the prose (interspersed with Fletcher's
songs) somewhat cold and laboured. In The Witch of Edmonton,
published in 1658 as 'a Tragi-Comedy By divers well-esteemed
Poets ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, etc. ,' where
Dekker and Ford are both equally evident, in their direction of
the two main currents, the share of Rowley is difficult to make
out, and could hardly have been considerable. There remains The
Birth of Merlin, which was published in 1662 as by Shakespeare
and Rowley. Langbaine tells us that William Rowley was not
only beloved by those great men, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and
Jonson, but likewise writ, with the former, The Birth of Merlin. '
The share of Shakespeare need not be discussed here; the
play is crude and lumpish ; it is stilted and monotonous in the
1 C1. , as to the indications of a cooperation by Webster in this play, post,
chap. VII.


## p. 70 (#88) ##############################################

70
Middleton and Rowley
<
a
6
verse, gross and tame in the prose. It would be pleasant to think
that Rowley had no more to do with it than Shakespeare; but it
is difficult to be positive in the matter after reading A Shoo-maker
a Gentleman
This incongruous and incoherent piece is a tragic farce, which
has never been reprinted from the execrable first edition of 1638,
where the printer, in his address to 'the honest and high-spirited
gentlemen of the never decaying art, called the gentle craft,'
admits with some candour: I know it may come short of that
accurateness both in plot and style that this witty age doth with
greater curiosity require'; yet excuses it, on the ground 'that as
plays were then, some twenty years ago, it was in the fashion. '
It is a sad jumble of cobblers, kings, 'a wise virgin in Wales' and
a Juliet's nurse ; at one moment, 'an angel ascends out of the
well and after descends again,' at another, there is drinking of
blood, and we hear in detail of tortures endured in war; the
language varies from 'Moulting tyrant, stop thy scandalous
breath,' used by quarrelling kings, to 'Clapperdudgeon' and
Knipperdolin,' flung as pet names by the cobbler at his wife.
The few good lines which we come across at rare intervals are
almost cruelly wasted; the farce which submerges them is a mere
desperate attempt at comic realism.
On the title-page of A new Wonder, Rowley is described as
one of his Majesties Servants'; he is mentioned among the
principal actors in The Maid in the Mill; in The Inner-Temple
Masque, he played Plumporridge ; and, in the list of persons in
Als Lost by Lust, we are told that Jaques, “a simple clownish
gentleman,' was 'personated by the poet. ' In the plays which he
wrote in collaboration with Middleton, his hand has been most
generally traced in the comic underplots, and, sometimes, as a dis-
turbing element there, working for hardly more than the ears of
the groundlings. In the low peasants' humour, earthy and almost
animal, over which he takes much trouble in all these plays, some-
times making it really droll, always making it emphatic and
telling, there seems to have been something which he really cared
to do, perhaps because it was what he could represent best on the
stage. In the two chief plays which he wrote by himself, he
wove comic prose not ineffectively into more serious substance;
but in A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, and, indeed, in most of the
work done with Middleton, it stands out in sharp contrast. And
1 As to The Birth of Merlin and its relation to Middleton's The Mayor of Quin-
borough, see ante, vol. v, chap. x.


## p. 71 (#89) ##############################################

Rowley's Alls Lost by Lust
71
this is the more curious, as we shall find unmistakable signs of a
very different kind of influence exercised by him upon precisely
that serious substance.
For it is not as a comic poet that Rowley is most himself, or
most admirable.
Of his two remaining plays, one is a heroic
tragedy and the other a pathetic domestic comedy; and we find in
both, very differently exhibited, the same qualities of sincerity
and nobility, often turning to uncouthness or exaggeration, but
never, as in Middleton, losing the moral sense, the honesty of
insight. The action in each is strained beyond probability, and in
one becomes barbarous, in the other artificial ; the verse follows
the action, and halts not only through the treasons of a more than
usually treacherous printer. Yet, as the verse is but an emphasis
upon profoundly felt speech, so the action rests always on a strong
human foundation.
In Alls Lost by Lust (which deals with a subject made more
famous by Landor in Count Julian), Rowley shows himself a poet
by his comprehension of great passions, his sympathy with high
moods, and by a sheer and naked speech, which can grasp filth or
heroism with equal strength. He has no measure, though sometimes
constraint; no subtlety, though he will set consciences or clowns
arguing in terms of strange pedantry; no sentiment, though he
has all the violences of direct emotion; and he says what he wants
to say and then stops. He has no ease or grace, and often labours
to give point to his humour and weight to his serious utterances.
The kind of verse that characterises him at his best is
Thy soul is a hired lackey towards hell,
ལྗོངོ
and he can sharpen it thus :
Time's ancient bawd, opportunity,
Attends us now, and yet our flaming blood
Will soarce give leave to opportunity.
Often he will go beyond the bounds of natural speech, not on a
carrying imagination, but under the dragging weight of an
emphasis which eloquence can do better without. In some of
Blake's drawings of naked men with prodigious muscles, sweeping
beards and frantic eyes, the intense imitation of emotion has
gone further than nature can support. Just so does some of the
tragic speech in Rowley falter through defects of mere force.
'Rough Rowley, handling song with Esau's hand,' as Swinburne
bas called him in a significant line, sets himself to construct
imagery, and does it, sometimes with splendour, but a splendour
a


## p. 72 (#90) ##############################################

72
Middleton and Rowley
prolonged to extinction. Thus, he will develop a figure after this
manner :
We'll make so high to quench their silver moons
And on their caroases an isthmus make
To pass their straits again and forage them.
Both in fun and in earnest, he plays on words, and is capable of
writing ‘My heart's triangled,' as Donne might have done, and of
distinguishing the number and position of the points. More often
he does it in this wholly Elizabethan manner :
My honoured friends,
What we all thought to have borne home in triumph
Must now be seen there in a funeral,
Wrecked honour being chief mourner; here's the hearse
Which we'll all follow.
Even his 'virgin martyrs,' like Jacinta, who act nobly, are some-
times set talking with horrible detail, as, like Jacinta, they spit at
their tormentors and wish
that my tongue
Were pointed with a fiery Pyramis
To strike thee through.
It is impossible for him to realise, even in his Dionysia, who dies
with some of the ecstasy of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, that a woman
can be lascivious without talking like a courtesan. His men can say
memorable things, in which there is some of the passion of medita-
tion; but, however well he knew what kind of thing a man's
heart' is, he did not know how to give continuously adequate
speech to those passions of whose habitation there he was aware.
In A new Wonder, of which the scene lies in London, and which
shows us the strange vehement passions, both petty and ardent, of
business men, their small prides and large resolutions, we have
a speech more easily on the level of the occasion, whether in this
heightened way:
Then be not angry, gentle sir,
If now a string be touch'd, which hath too long
Sounded so harshly over all the city;
I now would wind it to a musical height;
or whether the unrelenting father in prison repels his son with the
direct cry:
Ha! what art thou? Call for the keeper there,
And thrust him out of doors, or lock me up.
Here, as elsewhere, the language is sometimes injured by em-
phasis, yet there is nothing of Middleton's aim at point and


## p. 73 (#91) ##############################################

Middleton and Rowley's A Faire Quarrell
73
cleverness, but a speech vividly, and sometimes grossly, natural,
which sticks close to the matter. Its comedy is a kind of
literalness, and so is its pathos ; both are crammed with fine
substance, thoughtful humour and thoughtful pity, with that
simple acceptance and rendering of things as they are which
Lamb noted in the play with much satisfaction. It is of this play
that he says : ‘The old play-writers are distinguished by an honest
boldness of exhibition, they show everything without being
ashamed. ' Here, there is coarseness and there is clumsiness, but
there is no flaw in the essential truthfulness and reality of the
contest in hearts, in which a natural human charity has its way
with invincible softness.
Now, if we begin to look for the influence of Rowley upon
Middleton, we shall find it not so much in the set scenes of low
comedy which he inserted among Middleton's verse, as in a new
capacity for the rendering of great passions and a loftiness in
good and evil which is not to be recognised as an element in
Middleton's brilliant and showy genius, and which hardly survives
the end of his collaboration with Rowley. The whole range of
subject suddenly lifts; a new, more real and more romantic world
(more real and more romantic because imagination, rather than
memory, is at work) is seen upon the stage; and, by some trans-
formation which could hardly have been mere natural growth,
Middleton finds himself to be a poet.
That Middleton learnt from Rowley, or did, with his help, more
than either of them could do by himself, is evident for the first
time clearly in A Faire Quarrell. The best part of the actual
writing is not Rowley's. Middleton was a man of flexible mind,
and we find in him everywhere a marvellous tact of matching his
matter and manner. Never, in his wild comedies, does he bring in
false heroics ; he can keep on a due actual level beyond any
dramatist of his time ; and, when a great human moment comes to
him, and has to be dealt with, he rises easily, and is no less
adequate. He does not rise of himself-his material compels him,
he is obedient to it, and, as it would seem, awake to a fierier
impulse like Rowley's. It is certain that Rowley could not have
written the two great captain Ager scenes as they stand; but it
is equally certain that, with all his promptness of response to an
emotion, Middleton could not have begun to render, at such a
moral height, such an 'absolute man,' without some spiritual aid
or lift from Rowley. When there, when started, he drew his
poetry, as he was wont to do, directly from his subject, and the


## p. 74 (#92) ##############################################

74
Middleton and Rowley
natural emotion of it ; and made a great scene where a weak one
would have been contemptible. Can nature and poetry go further
together, poetry hardly distinguishable from the direct speech of
nature, so warmed is it by human breath? Captain Ager's last
words to his mother shine like fire and cut like steel, and are
mere plain words with no more rhetoric in them than in this line,
which strikes straight :
I never shall have need of honour more.
In the scene of the duel, when all this fire in the man's soul is
out, the tamer verses are not less absolute in their disheartened
speech :
What shall be done in such a worthless business
But to be sorry,
and to be forgiven;
You, sir, to bring repentance, and I pardon ?
That the writing, in the two great scenes of captain Ager, is
Middleton's, and owes nothing in form, whatever it may owe in
substance, to Rowley, can be proved beyond doubt by a mere
reading over together of two speeches, one in this play, one in a
play so wholly and characteristically Middleton's as A Chast
Mayd in Cheape-side—the speech of captain Ager, which begins
Mine? think me not so miserable,
and ends
Without which I'm ten fathoms under coward,
That now am ten degrees above a man,
Which is but one of virtue's easiest wonderg);
and the speech of Sir Walter which begins
0 death! is this
A place for you to weep?
and ends
this shows like
The fruitless sorrow of a careless mother,
That brings her son with dalliance to the gallows,
And then stands by and weeps to see him suffer.
The difference is all in the feeling ; there is none in the phrasing.
But the difference in the feeling! There is no indication, in
anything which Middleton has so far written by himself, that he
was capable of conceiving a character like captain Ager, or of
keeping such a character on a single level of high emotion. This
Rowley could do, and it can scarcely be doubted that he was the
‘only begetter' of what he left to Middleton to develop. It is Rowley
who writes the dedication, and it is evident that he takes much of
1 Act 11, sc. 1.
2 Act v, so.


## p. 75 (#93) ##############################################

The World tost at Tennis. The Witch
75
L:
the credit of the play to himself. “You see, sir,' he says, 'I write
as I speak, and I speak as I am, and that's excuse enough for me. '
His share in the actual writing, indeed, is almost too evident ;
there is cold, pedantic, sour and crabbed prose, aping comedy,
and, in the scene between Jane and the physician, a hard, reason-
ing kind of serious verse which jars singularly on the rich and
copious verse of Middleton, in the finer parts of the play. Some
of the worst of the mechanical fooling in prose was added in a
second edition, and (the public being much the same in all ages) it
was probably added because the original sample had given much
satisfaction. Rowley worked for hire, and this is some of his
hired work.
It was not long after the time of A Faire Quarrell that
Middleton and Rowley collaborated together in the admirable and
entertaining masque, The World tost at Tennis. For the most
part, Middleton's masques are tame and tedious, without origi-
nality in the invention of lyrical quality in the songs. In one only,
The Inner-Temple Masque, is there any natural gaiety, any real
quaintness or humour; and, as we find Rowley's name among the
actors, in the humorous peasant part of Plumporridge, may it not
be conjectured that he had some share in the writing? His
heavy tread is as distinctly heard through all the opening part of
The World tost at Tennis, as Middleton's new voice is heard in
the later part. Middleton rarely wrote a lovelier succession of
cadences than in these lines spoken by Deceit to Simplicity :
The world, sweetheart, is full of cares and troubles,
No match for thee; thou art a tender thing,
A harmless, quiet thing, a gentle fool,
Fit for the fellowship of ewes and rams;
Go, take thine ease and pipe; give me the burden,
The clog, the torment, the heart-break, the world:
Here's for thee, lamb, a dainty oaten pipe.
And there is suavity, swiftness and a quaint fantastic colouring in
the verse chattered against hypocrites and puritans by the Five
Starches.
It was probably about the time when he was engaged on his
masques that Middleton wrote The Witch; and this may well have
been his first attempt at a purely romantic play. The versification
is done with astonishing ease, in long, loose, rapid lines ; and, in
the witches' songs, there is not only a ghastly fancy awake, but
something nearer to a fine lyric cadence than he ever caught before
a
or since. It is through the interpolation, as it obviously was, of
some of these lines in the very imperfect text of Macbeth, that a


## p. 76 (#94) ##############################################

76
Miadleton and Rowley
6
play in which the main action is almost a parody of the romantic
drama has come to be looked upon as one of Middleton's chief
works. The mere writing throughout is good; but the easy
eloquent dialogue covers no more than the gaps and deformations
of the main outline. The witches bring a new element into
Middleton's work, a wild fancy, of which he had shown hardly a
trace; in the rest of the play, he does but practise in the romantic
manner. They stand in dim middle air, between the old vile
pitiable crone of Dekker in The Witch of Edmonton, who is
dreadfully human, and the crowned empress of the nether clefts
of hell'in Macbeth, who bears no resemblance to the other
Hecate but in her name, and who is more dreadful because she is
not human. But Lamb has said finally all that need be said on
these fundamental differences.
After the experiment of The Witch, Middleton seems to have
returned to his collaboration with Rowley, and it is to this period
that we must assign the play by which both are now chiefly re-
membered, the tragedy called The Changeling. It is Rowley who
begins the play, and thus introduces and characterises both Beatrice
and De Flores. The germ of both is there, and the rest of the
play is but its growth. But, even in this opening, there are distinct,
though slight, traces of Middleton, as if collaboration had begun
already. Middleton takes up the thread in the second act, and has
both hands upon it in the third, though, at the end of the great
scene, Rowley seems to snatch the whole web out of his hands and
to twist it into an abrupt end. In all this part, mainly written by
Middleton, there is a restraint never paralleled elsewhere in his
work; nowhere else are words used with such fruitful frugality, or
80 much said in so little. And this bareness, this fierce reticence,
lead up, with a stealthy directness, to that outbreak of evil joy
when De Flores cries
O this act
Has put me into spirit!
and the modest murderess answers in astonishment
Why, tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
Or shelter such a cunning cruelty
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
The whole scene is written in words of white heat ; Middleton has
distilled into it the essence of his own genius and of the genius of
Rowley; in Leigh Hunt's famous and revealing words concerning
De Flores, it is ‘at once tragical, probable, and poetical' beyond
almost any single scene in the Elizabethan drama-a scene unlike


## p. 77 (#95) ##############################################

The Spanish Gipsie
77
6
anything in Shakespeare, but comparable, not as poetry but as
drama, with Shakespeare. And it is on the level of this great
scene that the play ends, in a splendid horror, and it is Rowley
who ends as he began the dreadful lives of De Flores and of
Beatrice. Rowley's underplot and some of Middleton's inter-
mediate action do what they can to deform a play which, but for
them, would be a noble and complete masterpiece. Yet the single
impression left upon our minds is scarcely affected by them. The
play is De Flores, and De Flores seems to grow greater as he passes
from one to the other of the two playwrights, as they collaborate
visibly at his creation. This great creation is the final result
and justification of Middleton and Rowley's work in common; for
it is certain that De Flores as he is would never have been
possible either to Rowley or to Middleton alone.
The Spanish Gipsie is generally put down almost as a whole
to Middleton, and even Swinburne refuses to see the hand of
Rowley in the more high-toned passages. It seems possible
that Rowley wrote a larger part of the play than Middleton,
and not by any means only the gipsy scenes, with their jollity,
dancing and crabbed ballad singing. The opening, no doubt, was
actually written by Middleton; but it has a quality unusual in his
work, and not unusual in the work of Rowley. It is as if Rowley
stood behind Middleton, controlling him. Most of the prose, both
,
when it goes creeping and tedious with Sancho and Soto, and when
it overflows into doggerel and occasionally unsavoury snatches
of song, has Rowley's manner and substance; but he is to be
traced, also, in the slow and powerful verse which ends the third
act, in lines like
This is the triumph of a soul drowned deep
In the unfathomed seas of matchless sorrow,
and in the whole attitude and speech of a father who speaks with
the very accent of Julianus in Alls Lost by Lust :
Teach me how I may now be just and cruel,
For henceforth I am childless.
Rowley is heard, also, through much of the fourth act, though
Middleton comes in unmistakably towards the end, and is the
writer of the whole fifth act. The characters are distributed
between them, and so charming a person as Constanza is decidedly
at her best when she speaks through Middleton. The whole play
is not made very probable, or meant to be so; it is a frank
romance, with stage mysteries, some of them thrilling, like the


## p. 78 (#96) ##############################################

78
Middleton and Rowley
>
wonderful opening scene, some, mere tricks of convenience; and
there is a freshness and pleasantness about it which seem to show
us Middleton in full and final acceptance of the romantic manner.
Yet it is difficult to assign to any other period the comedy
of Any Thing for a Quiet Life, printed in 1662, and so badly
printed that it is not easy to distinguish prose from verse, the
more so as the one seems to be set to run in no very different
measures from the other. It seems to be a late and only return
to the earlier manner of the farcical comedies of city life, with
shopkeeping scenes of the old random brilliance and the old
domestic fooleries. Even more matter is crammed into it, and
this even more hastily, and there is the old fierce vigour of
talk. But, in two plays, published together in 1657, we see what
seems to be almost the last mood of Middleton, after his
collaboration with Rowley was at an end, and the influence,
perhaps, not wholly evaporated. More dissemblers besides
Women, which is characteristic of Middleton in its tangle of
virtues and hypocrisies, its masquerade of serious meanings and
humorous disguises, is written in verse of a lovely and eager
quality, which bends with equal flexibility to the doings of those
dear gipsies' and to the good cardinal's concerns of conscience 'in
a creature that's so doubtful as a woman. ' It is a particoloured
thing, and has both beauty and oddity. But, in Women beware
Women, we find much of Middleton's finest and ripest work, together
with his most rancid comic relief'; a stern and pitiless criticism
''
'
of life' is interrupted by foul and foolish clowning; and a tragedy
of the finest comic savour ends in a mere heap of corpses, where
vengeance met vengeance
Like a set match, as if the plagues of sin
Had been agreed to meet here all together.
'I've lost myself in this quite,' Middleton might say with the duke,
and rarely has better material been more callously left to spoil.
There is no finer comedy of its kind in the whole of Elizabethan
drama than the scene between Livia, Bianca and the widow; and
the kind is a rare, bitter and partly tragic one. The human
casuistry is flawless; the irony is an illumination rather than a
correction of reality. And these vile people are alive, and the
vices in them work with a bewildering and convincing certainty.
The technique of such scenes as that in which husband and wife
flaunt their new finery at each other is not less than astonishing.
All the meaner passions are seen in probable action, speaking
without emphasis, in a language never too far from daily speech
a


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A Game at Chesse
A
79
6
for the complete illusion of reality. There is not even the inter-
ruption of a mere splendour; no one speaks greatly or utters
irrelevant poetry ; here, poetry is the very slave and confidant of
drama, heroically obedient. But the heights of The Changeling,
the nobility of even what was evil in the passions of that play, are
no longer attained. Middleton, left to himself, has returned, with
new experience and new capacity, to his own level.
With one more experiment, and this a masterpiece of a
wholly new kind, 'the only work of English poetry,' says
Swinburne, 'which may properly be called Aristophanic,' the
career of Middleton comes, so far as we know, to an end. A
Game at Chesse is a satire, taking the popular side against Spain,
and it was the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, the 'Machiavel-
politician' and Black Knight of its chess-board, who caused the
suppression of the play, and the punishment of all concerned in it.
It is the most perfect of Middleton's works, and it carries some of
his most intimate qualities to a point they had not reached before.
Banter turns into a quite serious and clear and bitter satire;
burlesque becomes a severe and elegant thing; the verse, begin-
ning formally and always kept well within bounds, is fitted with
supreme technical skill to this new, outlandish matter; there are
straight confessions of sins and symbolic feasts of vices, in which
a manner acquired by the city chronologer for numbering the
feasts and fastings of the city is adapted by him to finer use.
We learn now how
fat cathedral bodies
Have very often but lean little soul,
and the imagery, already expressive, takes on a new colour of
solemn mockery.
From this leviathan-scandal that lies rolling
Upon the crystal waters of devotion,
is sometimes the language of the Black Knight, and sometimes
In the most fortunate angle of the world
The court hath held the city by the horns
Whilst I have milked her.
Technique, in drama and verse alike, never flags ; and the play is
a satire and criticism, no longer of city manners or of personal
vices, but of the nation's policy; and that it was accepted as such,
by the public and by the government of the time, is proved by the
fifteen hundred pounds taken by the actors in nine days, and by
the arrest of Middleton for what was really a form of patriotism.


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80
Middleton and Rowley
We have no record of anything written by Middleton during
the three remaining years of his life. A Game at Chesse is the
culmination of those qualities which seem to have been most
natural and instinctive in him, in spite of the splendid work of
another kind which he did with Rowley in The Changeling. His
genius was varied and copious, and he showed his capacity to do
almost every kind of dramatic work with immense vigour. Life is
never long absent from the tangled scenes, in which a hetero-
geneous crowd hurries by, not stopping long enough to make us
familiar with most of the persons in it, but giving us an unmis-
takable human savour. Few of the plays are quite satisfactory
all through ; there is almost always some considerable flaw, in
construction, in characterisation, or in aesthetic taste; yet hardly
one of them can be neglected in our consideration of the drama-
tist's work as a whole. In single scenes of tragedy and of comedy
(romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, farce, and satire) he can
hold his own against any contemporary, and it is only in lyric verse
that he is never successful. He became a remarkable dramatic
poet; but he was not born to sing. Poetry came to him slowly,
and he had to disentangle it from more active growths of comic
energy. It came to him when he began to realise that there was
something in the world besides cheating shopkeepers and cozening
lawyers, and the bargains made between men and women for bodies,
not souls. With the heightening of emotion his style heightens,
and as his comedy refines itself his verse becomes subtler. In
Middleton's work, the cry of De Flores
Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light
Betwixt that star and me? I dread thee not:
'Twas but a mist of conscience;
is almost unique in imagination. And it is drama even more than
it is poetry. His style is the most plausible of all styles in poetry,
and it has a probable beauty, giving an easy grace of form to
whatever asks to be expressed. It rarely steps aside to pick up
a jewel, nor do jewels drop naturally out of its mouth.


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CHAPTER IV
THOMAS HEYWOOD
It is in writers of the second rank and of these, with his
abundant merit and attractive idiosyncrasy, Thomas Heywood un-
mistakably was—that we find it easiest to study the progress and
expansion of the form of art practised by them. In the brief
but often interesting addresses prefixed by Heywood to his plays,
he was fond of referring to the changes in public taste which play-
wrights had been called upon to consult in the course of his own
long experience; but he seems to care little about indicating his
own preference for either old style or new, being manifestly as
ready to fall in with the latter as he had been to put forth his best
endeavours in the former. When commending to favour a drama
depending for its effect entirely on character, situations and dia-
logue, and introducing
No Drum, nor Trumpet, nor Dambe show,
No Combate, Marriage, not so much Today
As Song, Dance, Masque, to bumbaste out our Play-
he hastens to add :
Yet these all good, and still in frequent use
With our best Poets 1.
And, as with matter, so with form : recalling the time when rime
was in fashion in plays and 'strong lines were not lookt after," he
takes occasion to observe that what is out of date now may come into
fashion again and sute well'—and, for himself, he is clearly quite
ready to stop or rime his lines with his fellows. He has no wish
to criticise or to theorise, or to set himself up as a representative
of any special class or select sort of English drama. Had he not,
at the beginning of his twoscore or more years of labours for the
stage, dramatised both history and historical romance in plays to
6
6
.