JOHN WEBSTER and the ELIZABETHAN DRAMA liy RUPERT BROOKE 1 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA JOHN WEBSTER and the ELIZABETHAN DRAMA The COLLECTED POEMS of RUPERT BROOKE WITH A PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT 0/ the AUTHOR Cloth, $1.25 net Leather, $2.00 net "It is packed with the stufif of which poetry is made: vivid imagination, the phrase that leaps to life, youth, music, and the ecstasy born of their joy when genius keeps them com- pany." — The Outlook. JOHN LANE COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK JOHN WEBSTER and the ELIZABETHAN DRAMA By RUPERT BROOKE JOHN LANE COMPANY NEW YORK .-. .-. .-. MCMXVI Copyright, 1916, By John Lane Company Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A. V-; NOTE This hook was written in 1911-12, and was the ^dissertation' with which the author won his Fellow- ship at King's College, Cambridge, in 1913. The page-references are to Dyce's one-volume edition. E.M. 4 \J,*<^ C^"' *'"' PREFACE I HAVE tried to write a small book about John Webster. That is to say, I have tried to say the truth about him, as much of it as is necessary to enable anyone who reads him to understand him. I have not tried to explain him entirely to anyone who has not read him, though I hope that any person in that condition may get a rough idea of him from this book. I have tried to explain Webster for a reader, but not to explain him away. So I have endeav- oured to keep to my own province, and not to trespass on ground reserved for worthier feet — Webster's. I conceive that there is much that he can explain better than I. So I have, at least, abstained from paraphrasing. To explain Webster's writings it is first neces- sary to determine what he wrote, and also such smaller questions as when he wrote it, and how he came to write it. Such questions, the ques- tions of "scientific" literary criticism, I deal with in the Appendices. I have taken some care to get the most probable answers in each case; for there is such a lot of bad logic and fudging on vii viii PREFACE such points in modern literary science, that one always has to go over the whole ground com- pletely for oneself. When these points are settled, with as much certitude as possible, there are still other points on which it is necessary to have right opinions in order to understand Webster. One must know what a play is; one must laiow how the Eliza- bethan drama arose; and one must know what the Elizabethan drama was. I have given a chapter to each of these points; not pretending to cover the whole ground, or to do the work of a whole book; but endeavouring to correct some of the more misleading wrong ideas, and to hint at some of the more important right ones. These chapters, of course, though nominally not about Webster, should be even more important to any understanding of him than the Appendices. And I have given two long chapters to the more direct consideration of what Webster wrote, and what its more usual characteristics are. The Bibliography is, I think, fairly complete with regard to Webster. I did not think it neces- sary to make a bibliography of books on the wider subjects. It may seem, in some cases, as if I contra- dicted myself in different parts of the book; as, for instance, when I say that it is impossible to PREFACE ix understand a play wholly from the text, and later seem to believe that I do understand plays wholly from the text. I think I have not really contra- dicted myself. Part of the business of the earlier chapters is to prevent the necessity of continually repeated qualifications throughout the work. To express my exact meaning on each occasion would have meant covering the page with "in so far as it is possible's," and "I think's," and "possibly's," and "perhaps's"; which makes the style feeble and muffles the idea. I have, per- haps, gone too far in this direction already. CONTENTS Preface ....••* CHAPTEB I. The Theatre .... II. The Origins of Elizabethan Drama III. The Elizabethan Drama . »^IV. John Webster .... i V, Some Characteristics of Webster PAGE vii 15 38 62 84 123 Appendices A. The Authorship of the later Appius and Virginia l65 ^^. Miscellaneous C. Sir Thomas Wyatt D. Westward Ho and Northrvard Ho E. The Malcontent . F. The White Devil . G. The Duchess of Malfi . H. A Monumental Column I. The DeviVs Law-case . J. A Cure for a Cuckold . 1/ Bibliography .... 211 214 222 234 237 246 254 255 260 277 JOHN WEBSTER and the ELIZABETHAN DRAMA JOHN WEBSTER Chapter I THE THEATRE Anyone who has read, with any alertness, more than a little of the mass of critical and editorial comments, whether of the last three or of the last three hundred years, upon Elizabethan plays, must often have felt a helpless and bewildered irritation at the absence of any standard or uni- form grounds of judgment; both in the critics, and, on inspection, in himself. This is not the place to attempt to lay a deep aesthetic founda- tion; but, I think, it will be useful to try to fix the meanings of certain words and phrases, and to give a provisional answer to some of the more important questions. "What is Art?" is a question which most writers on subjects connected with literature, painting, plays, music, society, or life, are ready with an equal cheerfulness to ask or to answer. They may be right; but to me they seem to make 15 16 JOHN WEBSTER a gigantic, unconscious, and probably unjustifi- able assumption. It is quite doubtful, and it is nowadays continually more doubted, whether the word "Art" has properly any meaning at all. But it has so obsessed men's minds, that they start with an inevitable tendency to believe that it has a meaning. In the same way, those who believe in Art are generally inclined to believe in a single object at which all Art, that is to say all the arts, aim: Beauty. It may turn out to be true that both Art and Beauty are real and useful names; but the attitude of mind that as- sumes that they are is deplorable. The most honest and most hopeful course to pursue, is to say that there are certain kinds of human activity which seem to hang together in classes, such as reading books, hearing music, seeing pictures; and to examine our states of mind while we fol- low these pursuits, to see how far they are of one kind in each "art," and in all, and whether all successful works of art do seem to us to have some quality in common which can be called Beauty. The situation seems to me as if men had agreed to say "The emotions caused in human beings by pins, walking-sticks, feathers, and crowbars, acting through the tactile sense, are all of one unique kind. It is called Grumph. Pins, etc., THE THEATRE 17 are called the grumphs. Grumph is one of the holiest things in this melancholy world," and so forth. And soon they'd say, "But, philosophi- cally, what is Grumph?" Then they'd argue. They would come to some conclusion which, as you cannot tickle with a crowbar, would pre- clude tickling with feathers; and they would ex- communicate all those who used feathers for tickling with the formula, "That is not Grumph!" They would write Treatises on any one grumph, on the "Pin-grumph," say, care- fully keeping in mind all the time that what they said would have to be more or less true of the other grumphs too. Some would lay great im- portance on the fact that, as you were tickled with feathers, you were, in a way, also tickled by being beaten with a walking-stick. Others would discover the ferule of the pin, and the quill, shaft, and two vanes of barbs of the crow- bar. An Oxford don would arise to declare that all grumph continually approximated to the con- dition of pins. . . . I have put the affair, as I see it, in a figure, and with other names, in order to show its un- reason more clearly, and far more shortly, than is possible if the prejudice-clad and elusive word "Art" is used. In either case, the sensible reply to it all is, "We have sticks and pins, plays and 18 JOHN WEBSTER poems. These we know. These are, as certainly as anything is, real classes of things. Begin from them, and from the emotions they move. And see if thence you climb upwards to Grumph, to Art.'' This attitude does, directly or indirectly, shut out various bands of ideas and thinkers ; my ob- jections to each of which I could state at length. A short enumeration of these tendencies of mind in viewing questions of "Art" may hint why, psychologically at any rate, they seem to me non- starters. In the first place, I do not admit the claims of anyone who says, "There is such a thing as Beauty, because when a man says, 'This is beautiful,' he does not mean, 'This is lovely,' or, 'This provokes the cosmic emotion.' There is such a thing as Art; because the sen- tence: 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc., are Art,' is not the same as 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc., are Music, Poetry, Pictures k. t. x.' " I am not concerned with what men may mean. They fre- quently mean and have meant the most astound- ing things. It is, possibly, true that when men say, "This is beautiful," they do not mean "This is lovely." They may mean that the esthetic emotion exists. My only comments are that it does not follow that the aesthetic emotion does THE THEATRE 19 exist, and that, as a matter of fact, they are wrong. But the only way to prove them right or wrong is by introspection into our states of mind when we hear music or see pictures. It has been acutely said that, in philosophy, it is important to give the right answers, but even more important to ask the right questions. So here. Better than to ask "What is Art?" is it to ask "What do you feel before this picture?" "Before that picture?" "Is there anything com- mon between your feelings in these two cases?" "What do you feel in hearing this, and that, piece of music?" "Is there anything common?" and then, "Is there anything common between what you feel before all these pictures and what you feel in hearing all this music?" "And if so, what is it?" "Is it important?" One of the perils attending on those who ask the first question is that they tend, as all men do, to find what they are looking for: a common quality in Art. And also that they tend to exalt what they discover for this quality, above the others that are to be found in any of the arts. People who start in this way are apt to be, practically, a most in- tolerable nuisance both to critics and to artists; whether it is Art or any one art that they would tie to their rule. Art is Pattern; and a novel 20 JOHN WEBSTER that lacks "pattern" is not Art, and therefore bad. Art is the perception of the individual case; so morality plays are illegitimate. Art is the emphasising of the generality; so Hamlet, except in so far as the hero represents all neuro- paths, is a perverse and downward path from the moralities. Art must be moral; so Shake- speare's sonnets are what Hallam thought them. Art has no connection with morality ; so Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress are, artistically, worthless. A play must display a "develop- ment,'' a tragedy must involve a conflict ; music must have a tune ; a picture may not tell a story. . . . The list of these perilous and presumptu- ous a priori limitations could go on for ever. Of the wrong ways of approaching the subject of "Art," or even of any one art, this is the worst because it is the most harmful. But there are other ways in which precon- ceptions and assumptions about the thing to be looked for mislead, in the consideration of Art. Croce rather naively begins by noting that "aes- thetic" has been used both for questions of Art and, in general and in accordance with its deriva- tion, for perception. So he sets out to discover what meaning it can really have, to apply to both. He takes it for the one necessary condi- tion a true answer about "^Esthetics" must sat- THE THEATRE 21 isfy, that it shall explain how Art and Percep- tion are both included. Having found such an explanation, he is satisfied. To take a different side, most of the uphold- ers of the Einfiihlungsdsthetik seem to have founded their view on the experiences of the spec- tator of certain visual arts, especially painting or architecture. In so far, it is valuable. But when it is contorted to cover the other arts, the result is ludicrous. So those who accept the Nacherleben theory, would appear to be extend- ing what is probably true about drama to spheres where it is desperately irrelevant. It is said that the figure of Helen, whom men have so eagerly followed and sought, was a phantasm, covered by which there lurked, in fact, a knot of mercantile interests of Greece and the Hellespont and the Black Sea; even as, some claim, men who have died for the love of Eng- land, or Germany, or Italy, have, in reality, only given themselves for a few rich people. Art and Beauty have proved such delusive Helens. It is an extraordinary crowd, pouring along di- verse roads, that has followed them. The on- looker is moved to amazement and derision. Ros- setti's "View Halloo!" was less lonely than he dreamt. More than all illusory goddesses has My Lady Beauty been chased or stalked, as a 22 JOHN WEBSTER rule passionately, often irretrievably, "in what fond flight, how many ways and days!" The ingenuity of the chase has been stupendous. "They sought her with thimbles^ they sought her with care; They pursued her with forks and hope." The thimble of an a priori generalisation has not closed down on My Lady, nor the fork of Dialectic impaled her. For the quest was vain from the beginning. It is that conviction that enables me so cursorily to leave such knight-er- rants to their task — of "bounding along on the tip of their tail" or "still clutching the inviola- ble shade," according to the way you regard them. We had best cultivate our gardens of the arts. Then we may turn round one day to discover Beauty at our elbow — if she exists at all. If she doesn't, we shall at least have learnt horticulture. I can descend, then, with a clear conscience to occupy myself with the single plots of ground called Drama and Tragedy. But first I must deal with two other ways of approaching the question of the arts — for the arts, as human activities, can be classed together, even though there be no such obvious similarity discernible in the states of mind they produce, no "aesthetic emotion." There are some who would view it THE THEATRE 23 all from the point of view of the artist. "Art," they say, "is primarily a creative function of the artist; other people may profit, afterwards, if it so happens. Cricket is a game played by twen- ty-two men, under certain rules: which may or may not be watched by a crowd. This is true, even though the game would not have been played but for the crowd. Art is no more to be explained in terms of the chance result on the spectators than cricket is to be explained in terms of the feelings of the crowd. Art is an amazing creative experience of the artist: what happens to the result of his travail is neither here nor there. A good picture is one in the creating of which the artist had a good state of mind. And the utmost a spectator can hope for is to approximate, in beholding a work of art, to the state of mind the artist had in creating it." The last sentence, perhaps, expresses a view that need not logically go with the foregoing belief. For the whole position, I do not think it can, ultimately, be refuted. It becomes a question of words, or of the point of view. From where I stand, I seem to see certain activities, and I consider them according to the aspect that seems to me most important. If another man views and describes them from behind, I can only lament it. There are things to be said against 24 JOHN WEBSTER him. Certainly, if importance is to weigh in the matter, the effects on the audience are more im- portant than the state of the artist. He could, cogently, answer that corn is corn, though the most important thing about it is that it goes to make bread. A greater difficulty is the extraor- dinary variety of experience of the creative artist. Blake thought he was taking down his writings from the dictation of an angel. Some writers solemnly think their things out. Others are "inspired"; or proceed almost by automatic writing. Some are highly excited and irrespon- sible; others detached, cynical, and calculating. Many artists, it would seem, are never aware of their work of art as a whole, but build it up, patching and revising in little pieces. A play by Beaumont and Fletcher, with the scenes ap- portioned out, would be difficult to judge by this creative theory. Certainly, if you take the case of a dancer, who can never quite see herself danc- ing, it seems clear that the important whole con- nected with this activity is in the state of mind of the spectator. Another common tendency, a fatal and ridicu- lous one, is that of the historical school. Both the psychology of the artist and the history of the arts are interesting, and may be valuable, topics of investigation. But it should be clearly THE THEATRE 25 recognised that the history of the forms of the arts has no direct connection with the arts as they are. Football originated in a religious ritual; but it is not, necessarily, religious. The cooking of roast pork arose from the burning of a house ; but he would be a foolish gastronomist who, in considering cooking, laid great emphasis on the fundamental element of arson in that art. So there are some who say that the arts originated in a need to let off the superfluous energies of man, not needed to further or secure his livelihood; and therefore are essentially of the nature of play. Others declare that the sexual instinct was at the bottom of the beginnings of the arts, and that all Art is, fundamentally, sexuality. Others again would, for similar reasons, find it a religious activity. To all such we can only reply, "If your historical analysis is true, it is indeed a wonderful world in which we live; but now, in 1912, poetry and football are not sex or religion; they are poetry and football." There are theatres; places where you see things. The things you see there generally try to represent or imitate reality, and are frequently accompanied by words, in which cases they are called "plays." One of the first and most im- portant distinctions between plays, music, and poetry on the one hand, and pictures and sculp- 26 JOHN WEBSTER ture on the other, is that the element of duration enters into the first group. There is no especial point in a picture at which you begin or end look- ing at it; no fixed order of sensations. There is just the picture. But the order of sensations which a play should arouse in you is fixed be- forehand, and essential. This fact of duration gives theatrical art two features. It can arouse all the emotions that can be got through the con- secution of events; and it can employ the suc- cession of emotions in the mind. Both these are important. Take the latter first. It is obvi- ous that, though he may demand certain knowl- edge in the spectator before the beginning of the play, the artist cannot demand any definite state of mind. He can only claim to be presented with an expectant and fairly blank normal mind. After that he is responsible. And at any moment during the play, his choice of the emotions to arouse is conditioned by the emotions already aroused. Each situation must be planned, each line written, with regard to the effect of what has gone before, not only logically, but psychologic- ally, on the audience. The continuity of the play must be an emotional continuity, even more than a rational one: not necessarily, of course, the same emotion continuously, but necessarily har- monious ones, I do not mean to suggest that the THE THEATRE 27 spectator of a play experiences a number of defi- nite emotions, one at a time, each lasting three seconds, consecutive. His state of mind is com- plex; and while some perceptions or emotions flash with infinite swiftness through it, others last and colour the contents of subsequent states of mind for some time. It is these last that are most important, but the whole mental and emo- tional experience has a cumulative effect. It is as if a stream of water of various heat was trick- ling through a basin. The heat of the water in the basin at any moment would be affected by the heat of the basin, which in turn would be a result of the past heats of all the water that had gone through before. Only, heat is simple, and the succession of emotions and sensations is manifold and complex. The merit and kind of the play, in a sense the play itself, lie in the whole curve of these states of mind. That is the most important thing about plays, to which every- thing, ultimately, must be referred. I can more easily imagine a play good in which all the char- acters of the first four acts vanished, and entirely new ones came on in the fifth, with an entirely new plot, so long as the emotions aroused were harmonious, than one in which the successive states of mind clashed. What a man generally refers to when he 28 JOHN WEBSTER speaks of a play, and of the goodness and quali- ties of it, is a memory of this succession of states of mind, a kind of foreshortened view of it, an emotional precis or summary. A good critic is he who can both feel a play perfectly at the time, and sum up its particular taste and intensity perfectly, for his own reference, in this retro- spective summary. The process of summarising a play thus involves the abstraction of various, more or less common elements of the successive states of mind the play produces, and the con- cocting them into one imagined taste or state of mind, "the play." All these summaries are of something the same kind; so the habit of think- ing of plays thus leads men to think that there is some common quality in all of them — at least, in all serious ones — "beauty" and a common "ses- thetic emotion" always in the mind of all spec- tators of plays. I believe that honest introspec- tion of one's states of mind during a play, will show that there is no one quality one can call "beauty" in all successful serious plays. If there is any meaning at all in the word "beauty," my emotion at lago's temptation of Othello, or Lear's "Prithee, undo this button," is in no way a consciousness of beauty; and though there is, perhaps, something in my state of mind — the shape of it, so to speak — which is the same when THE THEATRE 29 I watch any tragedy, it is only due, I think, to the fact that all tragedies I know have a certain common quality of being partly like life; I do not find this something in my mind when I am watching pure dancing. A play is good in proportion as the states of mind during the witnessing of it are, in sum, good. The good of these states of mind is, in practice, very much dependent on the pleasur- ableness of them, and proportionate to it. Much more so than in real life, where the consciousness of virtue makes some unpleasant states good. But pleasure is not a perfect criterion of good, even in the theatre. For a performance that pro- vokes lust would move pleasant states of mind, but not good ones. If this is granted, the difficulty is: in whom is a play to move good states of mind, in order to be called good? Obviously, not only in me. A play in Russian might be very good, and yet only bore me, because I couldn't understand it. On the other hand, I do not think it fair to call a play good which can be understood by nobody but the author. Everybody is familiar, in the realm of literature, with the writer who is im- mensely pleased with his own poem because of the emotions it evokes in him. The phrase "the sun is setting" recalls to him the purple and 30 JOHN WEBSTER green glory that moved him to this inadequate expression. But it will not affect anyone else in the same way, so we rightly refuse to call the poem good. Obscurity in an author is, ulti- mately, a fault. A family of my acquaintance uses a private and peculiar synonjTn of their own childish invention for "hand," the word "nopen." ^ If one of them wrote a poem con- taining this word, it would affect him very much, because of the aura of associations around it. But the rest of the world would find it mean- ingless. It would not be a good poem. One is reduced to saying that a good play means a play that would be likely to stir good states of mind in an intelligent man of the same nation, class, and century as the author. It follows that a good Elizabethan play is a play that would have been good in Elizabethan times; and not a play that is good to us, with our different ideas. The two categories coincide to a great extent. But their differences are important. And it follows that all those literary qualities that answer to patine in works of art — quaint- ness, old-fashionedness, interest as illustrating a bygone age — are irrelevant. I had rather read an interesting book originally worthless, than a fine poem in a language I cannot understand. * Because it opens. THE THEATRE 31 But it would be misleading to call the former a better book. Whether the states of mind produced by a play were good or not, must be decided by intro- spection. The object of most critical enquiries is to discover what sort of effect different things in the theatre have on these states of mind. It is obvious if one examines one's consciousness during a play, that several different classes of object fill and move it. There is sound. Music, or the mere melody of words, impresses and pleases. There is the further literary pleasure of the language, apart from the mere sense; and sometimes there is metre. There is movement, varying from absolute dancing to mere imitation of life. There is, in most theatrical perform- ances, the story. And there is the realism of the piece ; i.e. its value as impressing us with the sense of its reality. If we exclude pure dancing, all performances in theatres have some value as connected with reality. To discover what it is, one has to con- sider one of the widest and most important psy- chological questions connected with the theatre, the question of convention. To say that one feels the reality of an ordinary play without believing it, is a fairly accurate de- scription of one's attitude. It would be better 32 JOHN WEBSTER to put it in this way: the feeling of reality, the emotion of conviction, of faith, is a purely psy- chological one. It is this that plays aim at pro- ducing. It is not the same emotion we have in real life. In real life one does not feel "He is really there, talking to me!" One takes it for granted. He is there. This is also present to some degree when one is witnessing a play, but it is the negative and less valuable side of the emotion. The former, the positive feeling of reality, does not tend to result in action. The latter does permit of various emotions resulting in action. So there has to be a permanent inhi- bition of such action ; or, to put it in another way, you accept the convention of the actors, the absent fourth wall (on the modern stage), and so on. It was in the want of this inhibition that the wrongness of that Italian's attitude lay, who, at a performance of Hamlet^ was so wrought upon that he rose from his place in the pit, and shot Claudius. Many find it difficult to under- stand the attitude of the human mind about such convention. They either say, "Absence of scen- ery destroys the illusion," or "You must know it isn't true." The accepting of a convention means that one says, "Suppose Romans talked English blank verse, then " and gives oneself to the play; or, to put it another way, one puts THE THEATRE 33 a lid on one's knowledge that Romans didn't talk English blank verse. Ignorant of that, one can believe the rest. This is one of the most natural and deep- rooted instincts in men. We do not want illu- sion; we only ask that conventions should be made and kept. But it is important that they should be kept. The artist can make any amount of conventions; but, once made, he must not break them. It is obvious in children. A grown- up can say, "Suppose you are a hen, and she is a steam-roller, and I am the King of Portugal," and they will carry the play out with entire ac- ceptance of this, absolute appreciation of the drama ensuing. But if the grown-up breaks from his regal speech and behaviour a moment to address a remark, in his own person, to some outsider or to the steam-roller in its private exist- ence, the grief and dismay of the children is prodigious and unexpected. Observation or memory will assure one that their pain is purely aesthetic. It is what we feel when a dramatist breaks or misuses one of the conventions. The artist's business, then, is to make these various conventions, and, within them, to impress the spectator as much as possible with the sense of reality. There are many ways of doing this; realism in any one one branch — in the chain of 34 JOHN WEBSTER events, in the gestures of the actors, in the style of speech, in the truth to life of the characters, or in the scenery — will do to start the feehng of reality, and it will then gather force from the general power of the play. Or there are unreal- istic ways of impressing the spectator with real- ity, through mere literary or theatrical power. It is to be noticed that in some of these things, realism means breaking a convention and setting up a more realistic one, and is consequently com- parative. With speech, for example, realism means more realistic speech than one is accus- tomed to. Robertson's Caste was realistic in this direction, in its day. When we had got used to that, Mr. Shaw's plays, with their more natural- istic speech, appeared, and seemed to us more realistic. They, in their turn, ring now old- fashioned by the side of more modern plays, the dialogue of which seems to us, for a time, start- lingly and triumphantly like real life. If one keeps in mind the fact that the ultimate classification of plays, for aesthetic purposes, must be by the general tone of the states of mind they evoke, the endeavour to distinguish Trag- edy from Comedy, and to define Tragedy, by subject-matter, appears rather misleading. Tragedy may have to have a "hero," it may in- volve death, it may require a conflict. All we THE THEATRE 35 know is that, in the two or three varieties of Tragedy we are acquainted with that have hith- erto been evolved, these things are generally present. The duty of critics is rather to decide how far it is probable that a play with a hero will evoke deeper "Tragic" feeling than a play with- out one, and such half-technical and quantita- tive questions. The emotions of a spectator are produced in various ways, and through the two channels of the eye and ear. Performances can mix their appeals through these channels in any propor- tion. Pantomime can appeal, very powerfully, through the eye alone. A blind man could get a great deal of enjoyment out of some plays. But honest introspection will convince anyone that a very large part of the appeal made by a performance of the kind of play Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi is, comes through the eye. Would one rather be bhnd or deaf at such a performance? It is a comprehensible and com- mon, but dangerous fault, to over-emphasise the importance of the printed text to the whole play. It is true that the romantic halo and additions of beauty to the general lines of the play, came, in Elizabethan plays, very little in the things you could look at; almost entirely in the words. But the story itself was told visually as well as audi- 36 JOHN WEBSTER bly. The Elizabethans were above all men of the theatre, and planned performances. It is important always to keep this in mind when read- ing their "plays," always to be trying to visualise the whole performance from the text, and to judge it so, and always to look with suspicion on those who judge the text as literature. It may be good literature, sometimes ; but it was not pri- marily that. To judge The Duchess of 3Ialfi from the book of the words which we happen to possess is a little like judging a great picture by a good photograph of it. The general plan is given you, and you see all the lines, and shapes, and shading; and you have to supply the colour by an effort of the imagination. Much genuine aesthetic pleasure can be got from this; but no one would be so rash as to assume that, after that, he knew the picture. With plays, people are more presumptuous. But an honest man will sadly have to acknowledge that, in the text, we have only the material for a rough, partial, and hesitating appreciation of The Duchess of Malfi; and that this is the truer because it is an Elizabethan play, that is to say, it is written in a language somewhat different from ours, and pronounced differently too, and it was per- formed in conditions we do not completely know and cannot at all realise. It was composed for THE THEATRE 87 an audience accustomed to the platform stage and no scenery; which we can never be. It was composed for the stage, and we judge it as liter- ature ; we are only readers. It is right enough to attempt to realise imaginatively Elizabethan plays as plays. It is right enough to admire their great literary merits and their rather acci- dental power as study-drama. But, after all, we have only the text — and that a not always trustworthy one — one factor of several in the play, a residue, fragments of the whole. We are like men who possess sweet-smelling shards of a jar which once held perfumes, and know how fragrant it must have been; but the jar is broken, and the perfumes lost. Chapter II THE ORIGINS OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA It needs the imaginative sympathy of a good anthropologist to understand the real nature of the various progenitors of the Elizabethan drama; and it needs the intuition of a good psy- chologist to interpret it. Luckily much of the outer history, names, dates, and facts, together with a good deal of understanding explanation, has been given us by such writers as Professor Creizenach, and, above all, by Mr. Chambers. Subsequent works, such as The Cambridge His- tory of English Literature, merely follow on his lines, sometimes slightly varying relative im- portances, nothing more. But as one reads the array of facts and the brilliantly powerful gen- eralisations and inductions of JNIr. Chambers, or the patient condensations of his successors, it is impossible not to feel the full sea of scepticism. Where we have records, do we really understand ? It is hard enough, four-fifths of the books now written on them witness, not to be wholly out of 38 ORIGINS OF DRAMA 39 touch with the Elizabethans themselves. But they are our brothers and fathers. These others, these white-faced savages who seem to beckon and move in the fog of the Middle Ages or the deeper night behind — what have they to do with us? A surface likeness of name and tongue will not hide their foreignness. Their hearts are dif- ferent, and distant from ours. They live in an- other universe. The unconscious worshippers of a vegetation-god, the audience of a scoj), the spectators of a miracle-play — what was really in their minds? We triumphantly know that the Feast of Fools was celebrated at Tournai on the eve of Holy Innocents, 1498, that an interlude was given at King's Lynn on Corpus Christi 1385, that the processional religious drama was acted on "pageants," and so forth. But what were the people thinking, as the waggons rolled by or the actors came out? How like was it to an Elizabethan's feeling as he watched The Tragedy of Byron? or to ours when we see The Importance of Being Earnest? It is absurd to pretend we know. Such are the misgivings with which the honest student looks back on "the origins of the drama." He can pretend he sees how the "plat- form-stage" arose, and passed into the "picture- stage"; he can cheat himself into believing he 40 JOHN WEBSTER has established the generations of an Enghsh dramatic form; but what, in our time and race, is the history of those comphcated states of mind the witnessing of Hamlet breeds in us — that he dare only wonder. If he looks beyond the Middle Ages he finds at first more familiar things. Seneca's plays fall recognisable on his modern hearing ; and if those were never on the stage, other tragedies and farces which we could, it is imaginable, under- stand, if not applaud, held the Roman ear. And the modern eye greets even more gladly finer, less recorded, performances. The best taste in Rome loved the intricate exquisite tragedies of the x^^p^^ooi, the dancers. We glibly call them, allow literary people to call them, the decadent successors of the drama. They may, we can believe now, have awoken passionate ecstasies of emotion, beyond our dreams; but they could not be handed down. These "choreo- drames" have perished. So we comfortably fall in with the assumption of those who practise literature, that drama, that queer and monstrous birth, is the God of the theatre. Literary people are very kind to each other; and all-powerful over civilisation. Through them come our his- tory, facts, ideas, and arguments; and so our valuations. We see all things through their ORIGINS OF DRAMA 41 mists. The feet of the dancers throb "No !", their heads jerk argument and dialectic to us; we do not heed. We have read of Talfourd, and he will outlive Taglioni. The other arts present them- selves naked, to be accepted as they are. Only literature continually weaves laurels, and is for ever crowning herself. But the arts had always an enemy, especially the arts of the theatre. The plays we know of and the dancing we ignore were equally threat- ened by religion, who brought with her the blind forces of asceticism and morality. Any emo- tional and absorbing view of the universe that throws the value of life over into the next world, naturally regards things of this world as means rather than ends. And so it always tends to com- bine with and use that deep instinct in human nature, the instinct to treat all things as means, which is called Puritanism. For eighteen hun- dred years, religion, when it has been strong enough, has persecuted or starved the arts. At times, when it has grown shallow, it has allowed a thin subservient art to flourish beneath it; an art that, ostensibly educating men to be in some way useful, for this life or the next, couldn't help treating them, for a stolen moment, as ends. Such, perhaps, was the pictorial art of the Mid- dle Ages in Italy. But in general the arts have 42 JOHN WEBSTER been kept pretty well under, especially the arts of the theatre, creeping slowly out when religion has slept, as in the eighteenth century, or some- times liberated by such splendid bursts of irre- ligion as produced the Elizabethan drama in England. The early fathers of the Church embodied the spirit of religion, knew the Will of God, as clearly in this as in most matters. It is amusing to see that Arius alone went so far as pleading for even a Christian theatre. Here, too, he was a lonely light. All the orthodox makers of Chris- tianity were venomous against spectacula. Like children saving up for one great treat. Chris- tians were consoled by Tertullian for the loss of theatres in this world, by the promise of the future spectacle of the exquisite and eternal suf- fering or richly comic writhing of play-actors and dramatists. The forces of evil triumphed. And the theatre was lost more swiftly and com- pletely than the rest of civilisation, when the double night of barbarism and Christianity set- tled down over Europe. The long, long rebirth of the Theatre was a process of roughly the same kind in nearly all European countries. But at present I am chiefly concerned with England. For this country the forces that led to the reappearance of theatrical ORIGINS OF DRAMA 4S art and the drama are generally divided into four groups. There were the various travelling min- strels and entertainers; the folk- festivals and folk-plays; the religious drama; and the influ- ence of the classics. The relative importance of some of the earlier fountains of the English drama has been mistaken, through false psychol- ogy. Great weight is always laid on the various popular festivals and games, and the unconscious relics of old religions. They are said to be ex- amples of the beginning of mimetic art. If peo- ple find a participant in a May-festival taking the name of "The Queen," or a member of a dance assuming a personality with the name of "Ginger-breeches," they stretch delighted fin- gers, crying, "The origins of drama!" It is an error. It is not true that "the practice which lies at the root of dramatic art and of the pleas- ure to be gained from it" is "that of pretending to be someone or something else." ^ That is merely what lies at the root of being an actor; and only one of the things even there, as anyone who has known amateur actors can testify. As such, it is but one of the human instincts which, as it happens, enable us to satisfy our love for seeing drama. It has no more to do with "the pleasure to be gained from dramatic art" than * C. H. E. L., vol. v., p. 28. 44 JOHN WEBSTER the desire for fame which made Keats write, or the desire for expression which made Wagner compose, have to do with poetry or music. They are conditions; at the most, indispensable condi- tions. The point of an art is in the state of mind of the recipient. "The poet sings because he must; We read because we will." Certain pleasant and valuable states of our minds when we see it, are what distinguishes dramatic art. Only such causes as produced them, or earlier forms of them, are directly relevant to a history of the drama or the theatre. Folk-games and festivals, and even folk-drama, have, there- fore, it seems to me, nearly no relevance to the history of the English drama. What is much more important is, of course, the religious drama. Religion, incessantly and half-consciously hostile to the arts, has inces- santly and half-consciously fostered them. Every activity of the mind of man is both end and means; and it is as impossible for religion to confine art to be useful, as it is for the pure "hedonist" to make it merely an end. When the first moralist discovered that by putting his ad- vice into a rhymed couplet he interested and im- pressed the people more, he opened the flood- ORIGINS OF DRAMA 45 gates. There soon came along somebody who thought more of the jingle than of the morality. The moralist was powerless to prevent him. Thence follow Martial, Villon, English folk- songs, the Earl of Rochester's play, Baudelaire, and all the abominations of the holy. As the earliest Christian artist sought, in illustrating some incident from Christ's life, to enrich Truth with Beauty, the ghostly, unborn fingers of the Breughels and Felicien Rops guided his brush. So while Christianity was busily disinfecting ""7 the front hall, the most dreadful smells were j starting again in the scullery. As early as the i fourth century, before she was yet able to tri- umph completely in the defeat of the pagan theatre, the Church had begun to show forth part of the greatest drama in her universe, by repre- sentation, and with all the pomp and wonder of the highest dramatic art. Those who admit the existence of other varieties of theatrical art be- sides the entirely realistic, must recognise that the state of mind of the spectator of the INIass is strongly aesthetic. Other elements enter, but they combine, not clash, wdth this. The fact the spec- tator thinks that what is being represented is true does not make the whole thing undramatic. It becomes a variety of drama, as portrait-paint- ing is a variety of pictorial art, but with less dis- 46 JOHN WEBSTER cordant ends than the portraitist must try to serve. That the importance of the Mass is quite other than aesthetic is irrelevant. Considered in the hght of the states of mind of the spectators of that time, the Mass must have been great drama as surely as Giotto's pictures of the life of Christ were great pictorial art. Other services and ceremonies of the Church followed in admitting more or less of drama. The history of them, the Quem quceritis trope and the rest, had been worked out and often related. The progress from few to many occasions for gratifying the theatrical instinct in men was in- evitable. More elaborate as well as more numer- ous, as the centuries went on, grew the liturgical dramas. They soon began to be transported out- side the churches; finally to be played by lay- men. More and more scenes from the Bible and from legend were dramatised and performed. They became definitely amusing and interesting for the people, quite apart from the lessons they might teach. Rather too much stress has been laid, naturally, on the great cycles, of Ches- ter, York, Coventry, and elsewhere, that have survived. The accident of their existence must not make us forget that, in church and out, espe- cially l out, there were innumerable miracle and mystery plays continually being played through ORIGINS OF DRAMA 47 England in the two or three hundred years be- fore Elizabeth. Every little town and village seems to have had them. They were the ordinary food of the theatrical instincts of the people. We cannot understand them now — what there is left. They are far from our ideas of drama, and by our standards they fail. We can see that some of the episodes were funny, that others had pathetic or tragic value, or a queer vitality of characterisation. But the whole seems incoher- ent, disjointed, and "inartistic." Careful writers go through them, picking out bits of "realistic humour" in one place, and "true literary feeling" in another. It is meaningless; a prattling rela- tion of which parts of these plays appeal to a twentieth century professor. What did those curious mediasvals feel when they were watching them? We cannot tell. They may have had as profound and passionate emotions as a play of Ibsen's stirs in us. But as we do not know we cannot affirm that this mediaeval drama was good or bad; any more than we can for the Greek drama. Which of the two, for instance, was the greater? It is like a deaf mute having to judge whether Strauss or Mozart is the greater opera- maker. Judging from the librettos, and from watching conductors, he might guess that Strauss was more interesting, Mozart more melodious. 48 JOHN WEBSTER . . . He could play with inferences. ... So (whatever may be claimed by Greek scholars) must we confess almost complete ignorance about the medieval drama. Some things can be said. It was certainly narrow; and it cannot have had those qualities of concentration and "dramatic unity," that are necessary for great dramatic art as we are used to know it. But I think there may have been, to the contemporary, more con- nection and significance in many of these series of plays than the modern will allow. Or rather, the modern sometimes will admit it intellectually, but he does not realise it emotionally. I can conceive the mediaeval mind (the exceptional mediaeval mind, I admit, for the ordinary childish one must have viewed scene after scene with that transient delight, on a background of reverence, with which schoolboys read Henry the Fourth — they find bits very interesting, and they know it's all for their education) tasting in each episode both the episode itself and the whole, in such a way that, finally, that whole loomed out pecu- liarly solid, majestic, and impressive. The mind would, from its ordinary bent of religious and moral thought, be prepared to receive the play (or cycle) in just this way; and the whole thing would fall into these predestined mental channels with immense accumulating force and power. ORIGINS OF DRAMA 49 Just as the Agamemnon was meant for, had its significance for, a mind naturally thinking in terms of v(3pL