1 
 
 
 Lia 
 
 li;.-ll».'i 1.1 n, 1'
 
 Ex Lib r is 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 CONTEMPORARIES 
 OF SHAKESPEARE
 
 Alge 
 
 The Works of 
 rnon Charles Swinburne 
 
 COLLECTED POETICAL WORKS. In 6 
 vols. 36s. net the set. 
 
 POSTHUMOUS POEMS. 6s. net. 
 
 THE GOLDEN PINE EDITION, at 3s. 6d. 
 net in cloth, and 6s. net in leather (limp 
 covers), of the following works — 
 
 1. POEMS AND BALLADS. First Series, 
 
 2. POEMS AND BALLADS. Second and 
 
 Third Series. 
 
 3. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE, including 
 
 Songs of Italy. 
 
 4. ATALANTA IN CALYDON, and 
 
 ERECTHEUS. 
 
 5. TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE. 
 
 6. A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
 
 CONTEMPORARIES OF 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 By 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 Edited by Edmund Gosse, C.B. 
 and Thomas James Wise 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN
 
 London ! William Heinemann, igi^
 
 Vh' 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ss;^6^« 
 
 PACE 
 
 INTRODUCTION: by Edmund Gosse vii 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE IN RELATION TO 
 
 GREENE. PEELE, AND LODGE i 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 13 
 
 THE EARLIER PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND 
 
 FLETCHER 143 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 167 
 
 JOHN DAY 211 
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 233 
 
 THOMAS NABBES 251 
 
 RICHARD BROME 259 
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY - . 275
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The shadow of irreparable loss lies across the essays 
 which are here for the first time collected. During 
 a period of sixty years, from his boyhood at Eton 
 to his last weeks at Putney, Swinburne brooded over 
 the history of the Elizabethan poets, chanted their 
 music, compared them one with another and cele- 
 brated their beauties in a voice that shook with 
 adoration. No one who ever lived, not Charles 
 Lamb himself, approached our great poet-critic in 
 worship of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans or in 
 textual familiarity with their writings. He had 
 read and reread them all, even the obscurest ; not 
 one " dim watchfire of some darkling hour " but he 
 had measured what faint light and heat it had to 
 give. All through his life he held before him the 
 design of a work of broad extent which should cover 
 with enthusiastic analysis the entire field, and 
 render future critical excursions in that direction 
 useless and indeed impossible. Day by day, stand- 
 ing before his bookshelves, a precious quarto quiver- 
 ing in his hands, he would start with ecstasy at some 
 
 vU
 
 viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 new discovery, and resolve more firmly than ever 
 to complete the great task of illumination. But he 
 died, overburdened perhaps by his own erudition 
 and his own enthusiasm, without having done more 
 than finish certain portions of the structure. The 
 palace of Elizabethan criticism which he dreamed of 
 building remains a fragment. 
 
 The scheme of it, I believe, is to be traced in the 
 cycle of twenty-one sonnets which he published in 
 1882. If this is correct, the completed work would 
 have consisted of a series of volumes, various in size 
 and scope, but identical in method. There would 
 have been a predominance, but not an overpowering 
 predominance, allotted to Shakespeare ; this Swin- 
 burne gave in the Study of Shakespeare of 1880, 
 and in the much less important and less valuable 
 volume of 1909. Of the other parts of the work, the 
 elaborate essay about Ford (1871) and the volume 
 about Ben Jonson (1889) represent the ambitious scale 
 on which Swinburne originally planned the work. He 
 told me that a volume, larger than that devoted to 
 Jonson, would enshrine what he had to say about 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Of this all that was ever 
 achieved is presented in the following pages, the 
 provisional essay included in Studies in Prose and 
 Poetry (1894) being scarcely worthy of mention. 
 Although Marlowe had occupied his thoughts almost 
 to excess through his whole career, he never produced
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 the finished study of that great precursor's genius 
 which he often proposed to himself and mentioned 
 to his friends. These comments indicate the points 
 at which the vast structure is most obviously 
 incomplete. 
 
 It was not, indeed, until about the close of his 
 life that Swinburne determined to unveil, as it 
 were, the messuages and minor chambers of his 
 edifice. In 1908, a few months before his death, 
 he published, without preface or comment of any 
 kind, the volume entitled The Age of Shakespeare. It 
 consisted of nine chapters, written and periodically 
 printed long before, but now first collected. There 
 was a short paper on Marlowe, an entirely per- 
 functory note on Chapman, and monographs of due 
 fullness and in fair relation to the original scheme 
 on Webster, Dekker, Marston, Middleton, William 
 Rowley, Hejrwood, and Cyril Toumeur. It was ap- 
 parent, of course, that several of the great names 
 were still unrepresented, and if what the world 
 possessed in collected form at the death of Swin- 
 burne had been all that he left behind him, the 
 hope of even hazily indicating the scope of the 
 main work which he projected would be denied 
 to us. 
 
 Happily, however, it appeared on careful exami- 
 nation that uncollected material for a second 
 series of The Age of Shakespeare was in existence.
 
 X INTRODUCTION 
 
 Various essays were unearthed from old periodicals, 
 and among the manuscripts purchased by Mr. T. J. 
 Wise from Watts-Dunton the missing chapters were 
 included. The only section of the present volume 
 which has appeared in separate book-form before is 
 the essay on George Chapman. This was originally 
 published, a thin octavo, in 1875, and has been out 
 of print for more than a quarter of a century. 
 Swinburne neglected to order its republication, 
 doubtless because he wished it eventually to take its 
 place as a part of the great Elizabethan structure. 
 In restoring it, therefore, we believe that we are 
 carrying out his wishes to the utmost of our power. 
 In a further rearrangement, the short summary 
 of Chapman's life written for the Encydopcedia 
 Britannica, like the trifling pages on Webster pub- 
 lished in 1894, will disappear from the system of 
 The Age of Shakespeare. 
 
 An examination of the ensuing pages will show 
 that the main outline of Swinburne's enterprise is 
 clearly indicated at last. Until now, we have 
 known practically nothing of his attitude to 
 Massinger and Shirley, not to mention various 
 minor figures of no extreme positive value, but each 
 necessary to fill up the general plan of criticism. It 
 will be found that the present instalment of the 
 work completes the design. The huge canvas is still, 
 and must remain, unequally finished, but every
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 portion of its surface is now covered and there are 
 no blank spaces left. Possibly, if he had chosen to 
 do so, Swinburne might have devoted one more 
 chapter to the small playwrights of the opening 
 age : he has sketched them in a few rapid lines : 
 
 Kyd, whose grim sport still gambolled over graves : 
 And Chettle, in whose fresh funereal verse 
 Weeps Marian yet on Robin's wildwood hearse : 
 
 Cooke, whose light boat of song one soft breath 
 saves, 
 Sighed from a maiden's amorous mouth averse. 
 
 He might even have spared a second to the Tribe 
 of Benjamin, the disciples of Jonson : 
 
 Prince Randolph, nighest his throne of all his 
 men, . . . 
 Cartwright, a soul pent in with narrower 
 pale, . . . 
 Marmion, whose verse keeps alway keen and fine 
 The perfume of their Apollonian wine 
 Who shared with that stout sire . , . 
 The exuberant chalice of his echoing shrine. 
 
 It is still more likely that he would have been 
 glad to expatiate further than in frequent notes and 
 passages he has elsewhere done on the Anonymous 
 Plays, " more yet, and more, and yet we mark 
 not all," among which he placed far higher than the 
 rest the mysterious and almost miraculous Arden of 
 Feversham. But these would be ornamental addi-
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 tions, extraneous appendages to the main building, 
 
 of which, as we may be proud to assert, the essential 
 
 scheme is now for the first time exhibited in its 
 
 fullness. 
 
 Edmund Gosse 
 
 October igi8
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 IN RELATION TO 
 
 GREENE, PEELE, AND LODGE 
 
 The list which comprises the names of the very 
 greatest among great poets or among men otherwise 
 great can naturally never be a long one : briefer 
 yet is the list of theirs who are only less great than 
 these, and who first began the work or gave the 
 example which none but they could follow, could 
 complete, or could excel. Above all others enrolled 
 in this latter list the name of Marlowe stands high, 
 and will stand for ever. The father of English 
 tragedy and the creator of English blank verse was 
 therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 There is no such test of critical facultj/ and 
 genuine instinct for true appreciation of poetry as 
 the estimate given or accepted of Marlowe's place 
 among poets. For his countrymen, at all events, 
 there is none as yet, and probably there never will 
 be. Most writers and most readers above the level 
 of such as would do well to abstain and should in 
 pity be prohibited from reading or from writing 
 are much of one mind about Chaucer and Spenser, 
 about Shakespeare and Milton, about Coleridge and 
 
 3
 
 4 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shelley. Those only who know and understand, as 
 Pindar and as Dante would have expressed it, can 
 hope or can be expected to appreciate the greatness 
 of the man who began his career by a double 
 and incomparable achievement : the invention of 
 English blank verse and the creation of English 
 tragedy. 
 
 It has not always been duly remarked, it is not 
 now always duly remembered, by students of the 
 age of Shakespeare that Marlowe is the one and 
 only precursor of that veritable king of kings and 
 lord of lords among all writers and all thinkers of 
 all time. The names usually associated with his by 
 painstaking and well-meaning historians of dramatic 
 poetry are hardly memorable or mentionable at all, 
 except from a chronological point of view, among 
 the names of dramatic poets. Lily, Greene, Peele, 
 Nash, and Lodge were true though not great poets, 
 who blundered into playwriting — invitissima Minerva 
 — in search of popularity or of bread. Lily, Nash, 
 and Greene were writers of prose which it would be 
 difficult to overpraise if we had here to consider the 
 finest work of Greene in romantic fiction, of Nash 
 and Lily in controversial satire. Thackeray has 
 given to the sweetest and loftiest verses of Peele 
 the immortality which they could hardly have 
 expected or attained, beautiful and noble and 
 pathetic as they are, but for the more than royal 
 dignity conferred on them by association with the 
 deathless name and memory of Colonel Newcome. 
 But their plays, though something in advance of 
 the unreadable Gorhoduc and the unspeakable 
 Locrine, have no particular claim to record among
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 5 
 
 the trophies of our incomparable drama : they 
 belong rather to the historic province of antiquarian 
 curiosity than to the aesthetic or spiritual kingdom 
 of EngHsh poetry. No man can be more grateful 
 than I for the research of the learned and laborious 
 historians whose industry has been devoted to the 
 noble task of lighting up the dark ways of study for 
 all future students of the highest, the wealthiest, the 
 most precious and golden branch of a matchless 
 literature. For all these illustrious scholars it was 
 a matter of obvious and obtrusive necessity to 
 register all surviving literary documents which 
 belong to the subject of their study. For a writer 
 whose aim is confined to the indication and illustra- 
 tion of poetic and dramatic quality, of imaginative 
 or spiritual excellence the attempt would be worse 
 than a superfluous impertinence : it would be an 
 injurious aberration or excursion from the straight 
 line of his intended labour. 
 
 Nash is always readable, even when religious : 
 and something of the " lightness and brightness " of 
 his sunny and fiery spirit gives life to his fantastic 
 little interlude of Summer's Last Will and Testament. 
 The graceful author of Rosalynde is unrecognizable 
 in Lodge's lamentable Roman tragedy The Wottnds 
 of Civil War. The Selimus and Alphonsus of Greene 
 are feeble and futile essays in hopeless and heartless 
 imitation of Tamburlaine the Great ; very bloody, 
 very wordy, very vehement, but essentially spiritless 
 and passionless. Had Shakespeare never retouched 
 his Titus Andronicus, and earned by his surely 
 slight and transient additions in Greene's own semi- 
 lyrical style the shamefully famous expression of the
 
 6 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 dying man's undjdng rancour, that strangely fated 
 play could hardly have been remembered except as 
 the third in this trinity or triunity of rhetorical and 
 rhapsodical horrors. The composition of Orlando 
 Furioso is as pitifully scandalous as the story of its 
 author's roguery in the disposal or venditation of his 
 rubbish. James the Fourth is a comparatively 
 creditable piece of work ; but its few, poor, meagre 
 merits are noticeable mainly because of its date. 
 There is something more of liveliness and coherence 
 in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay : enough to 
 exasperate the reader who can see what a far better 
 and what a really charming work of realistic and 
 fantastic invention might have been made of it — 
 by the nameless author, for instance, of The Merry 
 Devil of Edmonton. George a Greene is an honest 
 and homely expansion of a good old ballad into a 
 passable if rather formless little play. It might 
 savour of paradox to avow a preference for so tardy 
 and so singular a survival of the old moralities as 
 A Looking-Glass for London and England ; but, if 
 that preference is not perverse and capricious, no 
 more final proof of the fact that Dr. Lodge and 
 Master Greene (M.A.) ought never to have strayed 
 or staggered on to the boards could possibly be 
 exacted. For there is not only much to amuse the 
 reader of this quaint and belated sermon in scenes, 
 there is something for him to admire and enjoy. 
 And it is a pity, if not a shame, that even the 
 smallest and least precious jewel of poetry should 
 have been misframcd in so barbaric a setting. 
 
 Something of the same regret may probably or 
 must surely be felt by readers of The Arraignment
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 7 
 
 of Paris. That George Peele might and should have 
 left a more honoured name among English poets 
 than he chose or than he could manage to leave is 
 painfully or pleasurably obvious when we compare 
 the lovely lyrical and pastoral opening of this little 
 courtly interlude with the weary and wordy common- 
 place of the rhyming and rhymeless verses that 
 follow and fill out its five acts — " tedious and brief." 
 Quaint and pretty casualties or feHcities of expres- 
 sion may be found here and there to relieve the 
 general platitude of style and matter. The " ora- 
 tion " of Paris in the fourth act is noticeable, if not 
 memorable, as a decent exercise in blank verse 
 when few could achieve anything better in that line 
 than " untimely breathings, sick and short assays." 
 But it has no more claim to be classed among plays 
 or even among attempts at playwriting than any of 
 Lily's courtly allegories in dialogue ; effusions or 
 elaborations of devout and decorous ingenuity with 
 which a critic, or even a chronicler, of dramatic 
 poetry or fiction has naturally no concern. 
 
 It is lamentable that neither Shakespeare nor Mar- 
 lowe should have taken in hand so magnificent and 
 suggestive a subject for historic drama as the reign 
 of the greatest Plantagenet : it is deplorable that 
 Peele should have ventured on it. Difficult and 
 exacting as even the greatest among poets might or 
 rather must have found it, that a man of any literary 
 capacity whatsoever should have dropped upon the 
 nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its 
 spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play 
 of Edward / is a riddle beyond and also beneath 
 solution. There is hardly a passable line or couplet
 
 8 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in all the vile expanse of its twenty-five chaotic 
 scenes ; the treatment of character and the handling 
 of incident would be disgraceful to a child. The 
 community in platitude of metre, baseness of spirit, 
 and brutality of dullness, between the detestable 
 scenes which do their bestial and futile utmost to 
 pollute such names as Joan of Arc and Eleanor of 
 Castile, may not suffice as thoroughly as we may 
 wish they might suffice to establish the infamous 
 identity of the author of Edward I with the author 
 of the Fourth Scene of the Fifth Act of The First 
 Part of King Henry VI ; but at least it goes very 
 far to confirm all rational English readers in their 
 confidence that this villainy is the branding badge 
 of but one minor poet — not of two curs, but of one 
 cur. The heavy tumidity of The Battle of Alcazar 
 is relieved by the really fine scene which reminded 
 Lamb of Marlowe, and is rather honoured than 
 disgraced by the kindly raillery of Shakespeare. 
 The miserable traitor and apostate Stukeley would 
 have had no more reason to thank George Peele than 
 to thank the anonymous author of a later play 
 devoted to the commemoration of his misdeeds for 
 the feeble attempt to present them as the achieve- 
 ments or attempts of a melodramatic megalomaniac. 
 The sohloquy which closes the fourth act is match- 
 less, I should hope, for drivel of desperation and 
 platitude of bombast, in all the dramatic memorials 
 of ambitious and hopeless impotence. 
 
 The scriptural tragedy of David and Bethsabe 
 hardly deserves either the exuberant effusion of 
 Campbell's praise or the all but unqualified scorn 
 of other critics. It is a poor thing on the whole ;
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 9 
 
 yet there is the mark of a real though certainly 
 not a great poet on the earlier scenes. But Voltaire's 
 farce on the same subject, " translated " with such 
 adorable impudence " from the EngHsh of Hume," 
 is much better worth reading and far more provoca- 
 tive of reperusal. Whether Peele is or is not 
 responsible for the authorship of Sir Clyomon and 
 Sir Clamydes is a matter which may be left for 
 debate to the wise men of Gotham who question 
 the authenticity of Shakespeare's part in The Two 
 Noble Kinsmen. I should hardly suppose that even 
 this meanest among the precursors of Shakespeare 
 must be credited or discredited with the production 
 of so lamentable if not so belated an attempt to 
 reopen " King Cambyses^ vein." The only redeem- 
 ing point in all the narcotic or hypnotic rubbish is 
 the sometimes rather amusing humour of the clown 
 Subtle Shift — a not unwelcome survival of the Vice 
 who gives occasional life to the mysteries and 
 moralities which preceded the birth of tragedy or 
 comedy in England as in France. 
 
 " These three gifted men," Greene, Peele, and 
 Marlowe, have been thus bracketed by such critics 
 as in three hundred years' time may possibly chain 
 together the contemporary names of those three gifted 
 men, Charles Mackay, Haynes Bayley, and Alfred 
 Tennyson. It is shameful that it should not be (if it 
 be not) superfluous to say that Marlowe differs from 
 such little people as Peele and Greene, not in degree, 
 but in kind ; not as an eagle differs from wrens or 
 titmice, but as an eagle differs from frogs or tadpoles. 
 He first, and he alone, gave wings to English poetry ; 
 he first brought into its serene and radiant atmos-
 
 10 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 phere the new strange element of sublimity. And, 
 innovator as he was, revolutionist and creator, he 
 was no less loyal and no less competent an artist, 
 no less perfect and instinctive a workman in words, 
 than Chaucer or than Spenser was before him. He 
 had neither the boyish humour nor the childlike 
 pathos of Chaucer : he had nothing of Spenser's 
 incomparable melody and all but inexhaustible 
 fancy ; but among all English poets he was the 
 first full-grown man ; young indeed, and immature 
 if set beside such disciples and successors as Shake- 
 speare and Milton, but the first-born among us of 
 their kind. Flutes and lutes and harps and harpsi- 
 chords we had heard before the organ-music of his 
 verse astonished and entranced all ears not naturally 
 sealed against the higher strains of harmony, all 
 hearts not religiously closed against the nobler tones 
 of thought. And Shakespeare heard at once, and 
 cast off shard by shard the crust of habit which 
 fostered and sometimes fevered the jigging vein of 
 his rhyming mother-wit, sweet and exquisite as it 
 was ; and Milton long afterwards prolonged and 
 magnified by reverberation the music of " Marlowe's 
 mighty line," His place among poets is exactly as 
 questionable as Dante's. M. de Lamartine thought 
 little or nothing of Dante, and M. de Lamartine was 
 once a very great poet indeed. When such another 
 champion assails the fame of Marlowe, it will be time 
 for those who know better to undertake his defence. 
 The reviler of Shakespeare can be no other than 
 a scurrilous buffoon, " a decent priest where mon- 
 keys are the gods," and where Ibsen is the idol. 
 The anatomist of Shakespeare — the superior person
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 11 
 
 who knows all about the weaknesses of that in- 
 ferior nature, who can expound the qualities and 
 define the influences which made him the man he 
 was, and precluded him from the dubious chance 
 of showing himself a greater and a stronger man 
 than the soft, flaccid weakhngs in whom his pitiful 
 and unmanly ideal of heroic or philosophic manhood 
 is so degradingly revealed — the thinker whose 
 masculine intelligence can fathom Shakespeare's at 
 a glance and dismiss it with a smile — is worthy to 
 be classed and remembered as a representative man 
 after the order of Archquack Emerson. Collier the 
 cleric and Rymer the railer are dead and damned to 
 something less, let us hope, than everlasting fame ; 
 pity may surely be allowed to believe in a briefer 
 term of expiatory survival, a milder infliction of 
 purgatorial remembrance, for their successors in 
 the inheritance of contempt. " Zaile aussi eternel 
 qu' Homer e " — what hardest of all hearts would not 
 pity the case of Zoilus, eternally alive (or, in Brown- 
 ing's characteristically audacious phrase, " immor- 
 tally immerded ") in " the eternal cesspools " to 
 which, when a living soul, he contributed all the 
 irrepressible exuberance of effusive or explosive 
 malignity which tortured what served him for a 
 brain, and corroded what sufficed him for. a heart ? 
 No other creature, alive or dead, can be quite so 
 utterly and so hopelessly pitiable. 
 
 A much less incongruous and fissiparous trinity 
 or triunity of pre-Shakespearean playwrights would 
 be revealed in the reunion of three associated 
 names much less inharmonious than the copulation 
 of Greene's and Peele's with Marlowe's. Greene,
 
 12 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Peele, and Lodge hang very well together ; three 
 really good poets at their best, who can only have 
 been whipped and spurred into scribbling for the 
 stage by insanity of ambition or stimulation of 
 hunger. The dullness of The Wounds of Civil War 
 is so dense and malarious that it is difficult for a 
 suffering reader to remember the existence of 
 Rosalynde. Nothing more perfectly and absolutely 
 worthless, or more difficult for patient apphcation 
 to dig through, has ever been reissued in the various 
 reissues of Dodsley's Old Plays : stupendous as 
 is the stupidity or perversity which has always 
 ignored James Howard's really excellent comedy of 
 The English Monsieur, and selected for infliction on 
 modern readers a piece of noisome nonsense which 
 must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the 
 nauseated reader. 
 
 But enough or too much has before been written 
 on this pigmy trinity of dwarfish dramatists. It is 
 not with their names, it is with no such names as 
 theirs, that poets or judges of poetry will ever 
 associate the deathless name of Marlowe. To one 
 man only did Shakespeare ever pay the tribute of a 
 passing word — a word of honour, of regret, of 
 admiration, and it might almost seem of affection. 
 And to Marlowe alone it is that we can feel as 
 though such a tribute had been due. But to him 
 we may feel that it would be strange if not a word 
 of homage had been offered, not a token of regard 
 had been vouchsafed, by Shakespeare. 
 
 Note. — The foregoing essay ivas the last prose compo- 
 sition completed by Swinburne before his death.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 
 
 The fame which from his own day to ours has never 
 wholly failed to attend the memory of George 
 Chapman has yet been hitherto of a looser and 
 vaguer kind than floats about the memory of most 
 other poets. In the great revival of studious 
 enthusiasm for the works of the many famous men 
 who won themselves a name during the seventy-five 
 memorable years of his laborious life, the mass of 
 his original work has been left too long unnoticed 
 and unhonoured. Our " Homer-Lucan," as he 
 was happily termed by Daniel in that admirable / 
 
 Defence of Rhyme which remains to this day one of 
 the most perfect examples of sound and temperate 
 sense, of pure style and just judgment, to be found 
 in the literature of criticism, has received, it may be, 
 not much less than his due meed of praise for those 
 Homeric labours by which his name is still chiefly 
 known : but what the great translator could accom- 
 plish when fighting for his own hand few students 
 of English poetry have been careful to inquire or 
 competent to appreciate. 
 
 And yet there are not many among his various 
 and unequal writings which we can open without 
 some sense of great quaHties in the workman whose 
 work lies before us. There are few poets from whose 
 
 15
 
 16 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 remains a more copious and noble anthology of 
 detached beauties might be selected. He has a 
 singular force and depth of moral thought, a con- 
 stant energy and intensity of expression, an occa- 
 sional delicacy and perfection of fanciful or reflective 
 beauty, which should have ensured him a place in 
 the front rank at least of gnomic poets. It is true 
 that his " wisdom entangles itself in overniceness " ; 
 that his philosophy is apt to lose its way among 
 brakes of digression and jungles of paradox ; that 
 his subtle and sleepless ingenuity can never resist 
 the lure of any quaint or perverse illustration which 
 may start across its path from some obscure corner 
 at the unluckiest and unlikeliest time ; that the 
 rough and barren byways of incongruous allusion, of 
 unseasonable reflection or preposterous and grotesque 
 symbolism, are more tempting to his feet than the 
 highway of art, and the brushwood or the morass of 
 metaphysics seems often preferable in his eyes to 
 the pastures or the gardens of poetry. But from 
 first to last the grave and frequent blemishes of his 
 genius bear manifestly more likeness to the defor- 
 mities of a giant than to the malformations of a 
 dwarf, to the overstrained muscles of an athlete 
 than to the withered limbs of a weakling. 
 
 He was bom between Spenser and Shakespeare, 
 before the first dawn of English tragedy with the 
 morning star of Marlowe. Five years later that 
 great poet began a life more brief, more glorious and 
 more fruitful in proportion to its brevity than that 
 of any among his followers except Beaumont and 
 Shelley : each of these leaving at the close of some 
 thirty years of life a fresh crown of immortality to
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 17 
 
 the national drama founded by the first-born of the 
 three. A few months more and Shakespeare was 
 in the world ; ten years further and Ben Jonson 
 had followed. This latter poet, the loving and 
 generous panegyrist of Chapman, was therefore 
 fifteen years younger than his friend ; who was thus 
 twenty years older than Fletcher, and twenty-seven 
 years older than Beaumont. All these immortals 
 he outlived on earth, with the single exception of 
 Jonson, who died but three years after the death of 
 the elder poet. No man could ever look round 
 upon a more godlike company of his fellows ; yet 
 we have no record of his relations with any of these 
 but Jonson and Fletcher. 
 
 The date of Chapman's birth is significant, and 
 should be borne in mind when we attempt to 
 determine his rank among the poets of that golden 
 age. From the splendid and triumphant example 
 of the one great poet whose popularity his earlier 
 years must have witnessed, he may have caught a 
 contagious love of allegory and moral symbolism ; 
 he certainly caught nothing of the melodious ease 
 and delicate grace which gave Spenser his supremacy 
 in the soft empire of that moonlight-coloured world 
 where only his genius was at home. Chapman's 
 allegories are harsh, crude, and shapeless ; for the 
 sweet airs and tender outlines and floating Elysian 
 echoes of Spenser's vision he has nothing to offer in 
 exchange but the thick rank mist of a lowland 
 inhabited by monstrous hybrids and haunted by 
 jarring discords. Behind Spenser came Sidney and 
 the Euphuists ; and in their schools neither Chapman 
 nor any other was likely to learn much good. The 
 
 E
 
 18 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 natural defects and dangers of his genius were 
 precisely of the kind most likely to increase in the 
 contagion of such compan}^ He had received from 
 nature at his birth a profuse and turbid imagination, 
 a fiery energy and restless ardour of moral passion 
 and spiritual ambition, with a plentiful lack of taste 
 and judgment, and a notable excess of those precious 
 qualities of pride and self-reliance which are at once 
 needful to support and liable to misguide an artist 
 on his way of work. 
 
 The two main faults of the school of poets which 
 blossomed and faded from the brief flower of court 
 favour during the youth of Chapman were tedious 
 excess of talk and grotesque encumbrance of 
 imagery ; and Chapman had unhappily a native 
 tendency to the grotesque and tedious, which all 
 his study of the highest and purest literature in 
 the world was inadequate to suppress or to chasten. 
 For all his labours in the field of Greek transla- 
 tion, no poet was ever less of a Greek in style or 
 spirit. He enters the serene temples and handles 
 the holy vessels of Hellenic art with the stride 
 and the grasp of a high-handed and high-minded 
 barbarian. Nevertheless it is among the schools of 
 Greek poetry that we must look for a type of the 
 class to which this poet belongs. In the great age 
 of Greece he would have found a place of some 
 credit among the ranks of the gnomic poets, and 
 written much grave and lofty verse of a moral and 
 political sort in praise of a powerful conservative 
 oligarchy, and in illustration of the public virtues 
 which are fostered and the public vices which are 
 repressed under the strong sharp tutelage of such
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 19 
 
 a government. At the many-headed beast of de- 
 mocracy he would have discharged the keenest 
 arrows of his declamation, and sought shelter at 
 need from its advance behind the shield of some 
 tutelary Pittacus or Pisistratus. 
 
 What Pope said of Chapman's Homer may be 
 applied with a difference to his original poetry ; it 
 might not be inaccurate to say that he often writes, 
 not indeed as Homer, but as Theognis might have 
 written before he came to years of discretion. He 
 shows, we must admit, only in a few couplets or 
 brief paragraphs the pure and luminous charm of 
 perfect speech proper to a Greek moralist of the 
 elegiac school ; but he has more of a certain fire 
 and force of fancy than we should look for in a poet 
 of that order, where with far less of thick acrid 
 smoke there is also less real heat and flame per- 
 ceptible than struggles here through the fume and 
 fog of a Cimmerian style. The dialect of Chapman's 
 poems is undoubtedly portentous in its general 
 barbarism ; and that study of purer writers, which 
 might in another case have been trusted to correct 
 and chasten the turgid and fiery vigour of a bar- 
 barian imagination, seems too often to have encrusted 
 the mind with such arrogance and the style with 
 such pedantry as to make certain of these poems, 
 full of earnest thought, of passionate energy, of 
 tumid and fitful eloquence, the most indigestible food 
 ever served up to the guests of a man of genius by 
 the master of the feast. 
 
 Under no circumstances, probably, would Chap- 
 man have been always a pure and harmonious 
 writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form
 
 20 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the dark hard masses of his deep and ardent 
 thought, of uttering the weighty and noble things 
 he had to say in a fluent and lucid style ; but as 
 it was, he appears from first to last to have erected 
 his natural defects into an artificial system, and 
 cultivated his incapacities as other men cultivate 
 their faculties. " That Poesy should be as pervial 
 as oratory, and plainness her special ornament, were 
 the plain way to barbarism " : so he tells us at the 
 very outset of his career, in a letter of dedication 
 prefixed to the second of his published poems, and 
 containing several excellent reflections on the foUy 
 of those who expect grave and deep matter of 
 poetry to be so handled that he who runs or lounges 
 need not pause or rouse himself to read. 
 
 " That energia, or clearness of representation, 
 required in absolute poems is not the perspicuous 
 delivery of a low invention ; but high and hearty 
 invention expressed in most significant and unaf- 
 fected phrase." That is admirably said ; but when 
 we turn to the practical comment supplied by the 
 poetry which illustrates this critical profession of 
 faith, we find it hard to stomach the preacher's 
 application of his text. In this same dedication, 
 which is well worth note and regard from all students 
 of Chapman — and with all his shortcomings we may 
 reasonably hope that the number of them will 
 increase, with the first issue of his complete works, 
 among all professed students of English poetry at 
 its highest periods — ^he proceeds to a yet more 
 distinct avowal of his main principle ; and it is 
 something to know that he had any, though the 
 knowledge be but too likely to depress the interest
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 21 
 
 and dishearten the sympathy of a reader who but 
 for this assurance of design would probably have 
 supposed that great part of these poems had been 
 written in a chaotic jargon, where grammar, metre, 
 sense, sound, coherence, and relevancy are hurled 
 together on a heap of jarring and hurtHng ruins, 
 rather because the author wanted skill or care to 
 write better than because he took pains to achieve 
 so remarkable a result by the observance of fixed 
 means for the attainment of a fixed purpose. It 
 should seem to be with malice aforethought that he 
 sets himself to bring to perfection the quaHties of 
 crabbed turgidity and barbarous bombast with 
 which nature had but too richly endowed him, 
 mingling these among many better gifts with so 
 cunnipg a hand and so malignant a liberality as well- 
 nigh to stifle the good seed of which yet she had not 
 been sparing. " There is no confection made to 
 last, but is admitted more cost and skill than 
 presently-to-be-used simples ; and in my opinion 
 that which being with a little endeavour searched 
 adds a kind of majesty to poesy is better than that 
 which every cobbler may sing to his patch. Ob- 
 scurity in affection of words and indigested con- 
 ceits is pedantical and childish ; but where it 
 shroudeth itself in the heart of his subject, uttered 
 with fitness of figure and expressive epithets, with 
 that darkness will I still labour to be shadowed." 
 
 This promise, we may add, was most religiously 
 kept ; but the labour was at least superfluous. To 
 translate out of the crude and incoherent forms of 
 expression in which they now lie weltering the 
 scholastic subtleties and metaphysical symbols which
 
 22 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 beset the reader's diverted and distracted attention 
 at every step through the jungle of these poems, 
 and thus to render what he had to say into some 
 decent order and harmony, he would have found a 
 harder if a more profitable labour than to fling forth 
 his undigested thoughts and incongruous fancies in 
 a mass of rich inextricable confusion for them to 
 sift and sort who list. But this, we see, was far 
 enough from his purpose. He takes his motto from 
 Persius : 
 
 Quis leget haec ? Nemo, hercule, nemo ; 
 Vel duo vel nemo ; 
 
 and the label thus affixed to the forehead of one 
 volume might have served for almost any other of 
 his poems. His despair of a fit audience is less 
 remarkable than the bitter and violent expression 
 of his contempt for general opinion. " Such is the 
 wilful poverty of judgments, wandering like pass- 
 portless men in contempt of the divine discipline of 
 poesy, that a man may well fear to frequent their 
 walks. The profane multitude I hate, and only 
 consecrate my strange poems to those searching 
 spirits whom learning hath made noble, and nobility 
 sacred." And this is throughout his manner of 
 reference to the tastes and judgments of those 
 common readers in whose eyes he took such less 
 than little pains to make his work even passably 
 attractive that we may presume this acrid tone of 
 angry contempt, half haughty and half petulant in 
 its endless repetition, to have had in it some salt of 
 sincerity as well as some underlying sense of conscious 
 failure in the pursuit of that success on the image or
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 28 
 
 idea of which he turns and tramples with passionate 
 scorn. It is not usually till he has failed to please 
 that a man discovers how despicable and undesirable 
 a thing it would have been to succeed. 
 
 No student, however warm his goodwill and 
 admiration for the high-toned spirit and genius of 
 Chapman, v/ill be disposed to wonder that he found 
 cause to growl and rail at the neglect and distaste 
 of the multitude for his writings. Demosthenes, 
 according to report, taught himself to speak with 
 pebbles in his mouth ; but it is presumable that he 
 also learnt to dispense with their aid before he 
 stood up against ^Eschines or Hyperides on any 
 great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic 
 poet, on the other hand, before addressing such 
 audience as he may find, is careful always to fill his 
 mouth till the jaws are stretched wellnigh to bursting 
 with the largest, roughest, and most angular of 
 polygonal flintstones that can be hewn or dug out 
 of the mine of human language ; and as fast as one 
 voluminous sentence or unwieldy paragraph has 
 emptied his mouth of the first batch of barbarisms, 
 he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to 
 a fresh delivery. I sincerely think and hope that 
 no poems with a tithe of their genuine power and 
 merit were ever written on such a plan or after 
 such a fashion as the Shadow of Night or Andro- 
 meda Liherata of Chapman. It is not merely the 
 heavy and convulsive movement of the broken and 
 jarring sentences, the hurried broken- winded rhetoric 
 that seems to wheeze and pant at every painful 
 step, the incessant byplay of incongruous digressions 
 and impenetrable allusions, that make the first
 
 24 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 reading of these poems as tough and tedious a task 
 for the mind as oakum-picking or stone-breaking 
 can be for the body. Worse than all this is the 
 want of any perceptible centre towards which these 
 tangled and ravelled lines of thought may seem at 
 least to converge. We see that the author has 
 thought hard and felt deeply ; we apprehend that 
 he is charged as it were to the muzzle with some 
 ardent matter of spiritual interest, of which he would 
 fain deliver himself in explosive eloquence ; we 
 perceive that he is angry, ambitious, vehement, 
 and arrogant ; no pretender, but a genuine seer or 
 Pythian bemused and stifled by the oracular fumes 
 which choke in its very utterance the message they 
 inspire, and for ever preclude the seer from becoming 
 properly the prophet of their mysteries : 
 
 We understand a fury in his words. 
 But not the words ; 
 
 and the fury which alone we understand waxes ten- 
 fold hotter at our incompetence to comprehend 
 what the orator is incompetent to express. He 
 foams at the mouth with rage through all the flints 
 and pebbles of hard language which he spits forth, 
 so to say, in the face of " the prejudicate and 
 peremptory reader " whose ears he belabours with 
 " very bitter words," and with words not less turgid 
 than were hurled by Pistol at the head of the 
 recalcitrant and contumelious Mistress Tearsheet : 
 nor assuredly had the poet much right to expect 
 that they would be received by the profane multitude 
 with more reverence and humility than was the 
 poetic fury of " such a fustian rascal " by that
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 25 
 
 " honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman." The charge 
 of obscurity is perhaps of all charges the likeliest to 
 impair the fame or to imperil the success of a rising 
 or an established poet. It is often misapplied by 
 hasty or ignorant criticism as any other on the roll 
 of accusations ; and was never misapplied more 
 persistently and perversely than to an eminent 
 writer of our own time. The difficulty found by 
 many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from 
 a quality the very reverse of that which produces 
 obscurity properly so called. Obscurity is the 
 natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas ; 
 of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed 
 and chaotic intellect. Such a poet as Lord Brooke, 
 for example — and I take George Chapman and 
 Fulke Greville to be of all EngHsh poets the two 
 most genuinely obscure in style upon whose works 
 I have ever adventured to embark in search of 
 treasure hidden beneath the dark gulfs and crossing 
 currents of their rocky and weedy waters, at some 
 risk of my understanding being swept away by the 
 ground-swell — such a poet, overcharged with over- 
 flowing thoughts, is not sufficiently possessed by any 
 one leading idea, or attracted towards any one 
 central point, to see with decision the proper end 
 and use with resolution the proper instruments of 
 his design. 
 
 Now if there is any great quaHty more percep- 
 tible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is 
 his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his 
 sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and 
 trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with 
 obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus
 
 26 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the 
 telegraphic wire. He is something too much the 
 reverse of obscure ; he is too brilliant and subtle for 
 the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with 
 any certainty the track of an intelligence which 
 moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to 
 realize with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity 
 his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and 
 backward and forward as it lives along the animated 
 line of its labour, springs from thread to thread and 
 darts from centre to circumference of the glittering 
 and quivering web of living thought woven from the 
 inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled 
 from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He 
 never thinks but at full speed ; and the rate of his 
 thought is to that of another man's as the speed of 
 a railway to that of a wagon or the speed of a 
 telegraph to that of a railway. It is hopeless to 
 enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his 
 writings except with a mind thoroughly alert, an 
 attention awake at all points, a spirit open and 
 ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's. 
 
 To do justice to any book which deserves any 
 other sort of justice than that of the fire or the 
 waste-paper basket, it is necessary to read it in the 
 fit frame of mind ; and the proper mood in which to 
 study for the first time a book of Mr. Browning's is 
 the freshest, clearest, most active mood of the mind 
 in its brightest and keenest hours of work. Read 
 at such a time, and not " with half-shut eyes falling 
 asleep in a half-dream," it will be found (in Chap- 
 man's phrase) " pcrvial " enough to any but a 
 sluggish or a sand-blind eye ; but at no time and in
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 27 
 
 no mood will a really obscure writer be found other 
 than obscure. The difference between the two is 
 the difference between smoke and lightning ; and it 
 is far more difficult to pitch the tone of your thought 
 in harmony with that of a foggy thinker than with 
 that of one whose thought is electric in its motion. 
 To the latter we have but to come with an open and 
 pliant spirit, untired and undisturbed by the work 
 or the idleness of the day, and we cannot but receive 
 a vivid and active pleasure in following the swift 
 and fine radiations, the subtle play and keen vibra- 
 tion of its sleepless fires ; and the more steadily we 
 trace their course the more surely do we see that all 
 these forked flashes of fancy and changing lights of 
 thought move unerringly around one centre and 
 strike straight in the end to one point. Only 
 random thinking and random writing produce 
 obscurity ; and these are the radical faults of 
 Chapman's style of poetry. We find no obscurity in 
 the lightning, whether it play about the heights of 
 metaphysical speculation or the depths of character 
 and motive ; the mind derives as much of vigorous 
 enjoyment from the study by such light of the one 
 as of the other. The action of so bright and swift 
 a spirit gives insight as it were to the eyes and 
 wings to the feet of our own ; the reader's apprehen- 
 sion takes fire from the writer's, and he catches from 
 a subtler and more active mind the infection of 
 spiritual interest ; so that any candid and clear- 
 headed student finds himself able to follow for the 
 time in fancy the lead of such a thinker with equal 
 satisfaction on any course of thought or argument ; 
 when he sets himself to refute Renan through the
 
 28 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 dying lips of St. John or to try conclusions with 
 Strauss in his own person, and when he flashes at 
 once the whole force of his illumination full upon 
 the inmost thought and mind of the most infamous 
 criminal, a Guido Franceschini or a Louis Bonaparte, 
 compelling the black and obscene abyss of such a 
 spirit to yield up at last the secret of its profoundest 
 sophistries, and let forth the serpent of a soul that 
 lies coiled under all the most intricate and supple 
 reasonings of self- justified and self-conscious crime. 
 And thanks to this very quahty of vivid spiritual 
 illumination we are able to see by the light of the 
 author's mind without being compelled to see with 
 his eyes, or with the eyes of the living mask which 
 he assumes for his momentary impersonation of 
 saint or sophist, philosopher or malefactor ; without 
 accepting one conclusion, conceding one point, or 
 condoning one crime. 
 
 It is evident that to produce any such effect 
 requires above all things brightness and decision 
 as well as subtlety and pliancy of genius ; and 
 this is the supreme gift and distinctive faculty of 
 Mr. Browning's mind. If indeed there be ever 
 any likelihood of error in his exquisite analysis, 
 he will doubtless be found to err rather through 
 excess of light than through any touch of darkness ; 
 we may doubt, not without a sense that the fittest 
 mood of criticism might be that of a self-distrustful 
 confidence in the deeper intuition of his finer and 
 more perfect knowledge, whether the perception of 
 good or evil would actually be so acute in the mind 
 of the supposed reasoner ; whether, for instance, a 
 veritable household assassin, a veritable saviour of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 29 
 
 society or other incarnation of moral pestilence, 
 would in effect see so clearly and so far, with what- 
 ever perversion or distortion of view, into the 
 recesses of the pit of hell wherein he lives and moves 
 and has his being ; recognizing with quick and 
 delicate apprehension what points of vantage he 
 must strive to gain, what outposts of self-defence he 
 may hope to guard, in the explanation and vindica- 
 tion of the motive forces of his nature and the latent 
 mainspring of his deeds. This fineness of intellect 
 and dramatic sympathy which is ever on the watch 
 to anticipate and answer the unspoken imputations 
 and prepossessions of his hearer, the very movements 
 of his mind, the very action of his instincts, is 
 perhaps a quality hardly compatible with a nature 
 which we might rather suppose, judging from public 
 evidence and historic indication, to be sluggish and 
 short-sighted, " a sly slow thing with circumspective 
 eye " that can see but a little way immediately 
 around it, but neither before it nor behind, above it 
 nor beneath ; and whose introspection, if ever that 
 eye were turned inward, would probably be turbid, 
 vacillating, cloudy and uncertain as the action of a 
 spirit incapable of self-knowledge but not incapable 
 of self-distrust, timid and impenitent, abased and 
 unabashed, remorseless but not resolute, shameless 
 but not fearless. 
 
 If such be in reality the public traitor and 
 murderer of a nation, we may fairly infer that his 
 humbler but not viler counterpart in private life 
 will be unlikely to exhibit a finer quality of mind or 
 a clearer faculty of reason. But this is a question 
 of realism which in no wise affects the spiritual value
 
 .30 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and interest of such work as Mr. Browning's. "WTiat 
 is important for our present purpose is to observe 
 that this work of exposition by sohloquy and 
 apology by analysis can only be accomplished or 
 undertaken by the genius of a great special pleader, 
 able to fling himself with all his heart and all his 
 brain, with all the force of his intellect and all the 
 strength of his imagination, into the assumed part 
 of his client ; to concentrate on the cause in hand 
 his whole power of illustration and illumination, and 
 bring to bear upon one point at once all the rays of 
 his thought in one focus. Apart from his gift of 
 moral imagination, Mr. Browning has in the supreme 
 degree the qualities of a great debater or an eminent 
 leading counsel ; his finest reasoning has in its 
 expression and development something of the ardour 
 of personal energy and active interest which inflames 
 the argument of a public speaker ; we feel, without 
 the reverse regret of Pope, how many a first-rate 
 barrister or parliamentary tactician has been lost in 
 this poet. 
 
 The enjoyment that Browning's best and most 
 characteristic work affords us is doubtless far other 
 than the delight we derive from the purest and 
 highest forms of the lyric or dramatic art ; there is 
 a radical difference between the analyst and the 
 dramatist, the pleader and the prophet ; it would 
 be clearly impossible for the subtle tongue which 
 can undertake at once the apology and the anatomy 
 of such motives as may be assumed to impel or to 
 support a " Prince Hohcnstiel-Schwangau " on his 
 ways of thought and action, ever to be touched with 
 the fire which turns to a sword or to a scourge the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 31 
 
 tongue of a poet to whom it is given to utter as 
 from Patmos or from Sinai the word that fills all 
 the heaven of song with the lightnings and thunders 
 of chastisement. But in place of lyric rapture or 
 dramatic action we may profitably enjoy the unique 
 and incomparable genius of analysis which gives to 
 these special pleadings such marvellous life and 
 interest as no other workman in that kind was ever 
 or will ever again be able to give : we may pursue 
 with the same sense of strenuous delight in a new 
 exercise of intellect and interest the slender and 
 luminous threads of speculation wound up into a 
 clue with so fine a skill and such happy sleight of 
 hand in Fifine at the Fair or the sixth book of 
 Sordello, where the subtle secret of spiritual weakness 
 in a soul of too various powers and too restless 
 refinement is laid bare with such cunning strength 
 of touch, condemned and consoled with such far- 
 sighted compassion and regret. 
 
 This last-named poem has been held especially 
 liable to the charge which we have seen to be 
 especially inapplicable to the general work of its 
 author ; but although the manner of its construc- 
 tion should not seem defensible, as to me I may 
 confess that it does not, it would be an utter 
 misuse of terms to find in obscurity of thought 
 or language the cause of this perceptible defect. 
 The point of difference was accurately touched 
 by the exquisite critical genius of Coleridge when 
 he defined the style of Persius as " hard — not 
 obscure " : for this is equally true in the main of 
 the style of Sordello ; only the hard metal is of a 
 different quality and temper, as the intellect of the
 
 32 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 English thinker is far wider in its reach, far subtler 
 in its action and its aim, than that of the Roman 
 stoic. The error, if I may take on myself to indicate 
 what I conceive to be the error, of style in Sordello 
 is twofold ; it is a composite style, an amalgam of 
 irreconcilable materials that naturally refuse to 
 coalesce ; and, like a few of the author's minor 
 poems, it is written at least partially in shorthand, 
 which a casual reader is likely to mistake for cipher, 
 and to complain accordingly that the key should be 
 withheld from him, 
 
 A curious light is thrown on the method of 
 its composition by the avowal put forth in the 
 dedication of a reissue of this poem, that since 
 its first adventure on publicity the writer had 
 added and had cancelled a notable amount of 
 illustrative or explanatory matter, preferring ulti- 
 mately to leave his work such a poem as the few 
 must like, rather than such as the many might. 
 Against this decision no one has a right to appeal ; 
 and there is doubtless much in the work as it stands 
 that all imaginative thinkers and capable students 
 of poetry most assuredly must regard with much 
 more than mere liking ; but when the reader is 
 further invited to observe that the sole aim kept in 
 sight, the sole object of interest pursued by the 
 author was the inner study of an individual mind, 
 the occult psychology of a single soul, the personal 
 pathology of a special intelligence, he has a right to 
 suggest that in that case there is too much, and in 
 any other case there is not enough, of external 
 illustration and the by-play of alien actions and 
 passions which now serve only to perplex the scheme
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 33 
 
 they ought to explain. If it 'was the author's 
 purpose to give to his philosophic poem a back- 
 ground of historic action, to relieve against the 
 broad mass and movement of outer life the solitary 
 process of that inward and spiritual tragedy which 
 was the main occupation of his mind and art, to set 
 the picture of a human spirit in the frame of circum- 
 stances within which it may actually have been 
 environed and beset with offers of help, with threats 
 and temptations, doubts and prospects and chances 
 of the day it had on earth — if this were his purpose, 
 then surely there is not here enough of such relief 
 to illustrate a design which there is more than 
 enough of it to confuse. But if, as we are now 
 obliged to assume, the' author's purpose was stu- 
 diously and strenuously to restrict within the limits 
 of inner spiritual study the interest and the motive 
 of his work, to concentrate our attention with his 
 own upon the growth and the fortune, the triumph 
 and the failure, the light and the darkness of this 
 one human spirit, the soul of a man of genius fallen 
 upon evil days and . elect for great occasions and 
 begirt with strange perplexities, then surely there is 
 here far too much of external distraction and 
 diversion for the reader's mind even to apprehend 
 the issue, much less to comprehend the process, of 
 this inner tragic action. The poem, in short, is like 
 a picture in which the background runs into the 
 foreground, the figures and the landscape confound 
 each other for want of space and keeping, and there 
 is no middle distance discernible at all. It is but a 
 natural corollar^^ to this general error that the body 
 like the spirit of the poem, its form not less than its 
 
 c
 
 84 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 thought, should halt between two or three diverse 
 ways, and that the style should too often come to 
 the ground between two stools or more ; being as it 
 is neither a dramatic nor a narrative style, neither 
 personal nor impersonal, neither lyric nor historic, 
 but at once too much of all these and not enough of 
 any. The result may be to the hasty reader no less 
 repellent than the result of obscurity in thought or 
 in style ; but from identitjr of effect we are not to 
 infer an identity of cause. The best parts of this 
 poem also belong in substance always and some- 
 times in form to the class of monodramas or solilo- 
 quies of the spirit ; a form to which the analytic 
 genius of Mr. Browning leads him ever as by instinct 
 to return, and in which alone it finds play for its 
 especial faculties and security against its especial 
 liabilities to error and confusion of styles ; a security 
 for want of which his lyric and dramatic writing is apt 
 to be neither dramatic nor lyrical, simply because- 
 of the writer's natural and inevitable tendency to 
 analysis, which, by the nature of things as well as 
 by the laws of art, can only explain and express 
 itself either through the method of direct exposition 
 or in the form of elaborate mental monologue. 
 
 The whole argument of the sixth book is mono- 
 dramatic ; and its counterpart is to be sought in 
 the most dramatic and to me the most delightful 
 passage of equal length in the poem, the mag- 
 nificent soliloquy of SaHngiierra in the fourth book, 
 full of the subtle life and reality and pathos which 
 the author, to speak truth as it seems to me, 
 too generally fails to transfer from monologue into 
 dialogue, to translate into the sensible action and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 35 
 
 passion of tragedy, or adequately to express in 
 fullness and fitness of lyric form. The finest and 
 most memorable parts of his plays not less than of 
 his poems are almost always reducible in their 
 essence to what I have called monodrama ; and if 
 cast into the monodramatic form common to all his 
 later writings would have found a better if not a 
 keener expression and left a clearer if not a deeper 
 impression on the mind. For one example, the 
 communing of old King Victor with himself on his 
 return to the palace he has resigned is surely far 
 more impressive and memorable to any reader than 
 the rest of the play where his character is exhibited 
 in the mutual action and reaction of dialogue 
 among characters who seem unable to say rightly 
 what they should say except when alone or secure 
 from interruption. Even Chapman, from whom I 
 may be thought to have wandered somewhat far in 
 this inquiry as to what is or is not properly definable 
 as obscurity, has in my judgment a sounder instinct 
 of dramatic dialogue and movement than the 
 illustrious writer who has carved out for himself in 
 the second period of his career a new and better way 
 to the end appointed b}^ nature for the exercise of 
 his highest powers : and Chapman was certainly 
 not remarkable among the great men of his day for 
 the specially dramatic bent of his genius. 
 
 I have dwelt thus long on a seemingly irrelevant 
 and discursive inquiry because I could discover no 
 method so fit to explain the nature of the fault I 
 cannot but find in the poet of whom I have to speak, 
 as by contrast of his work with the work of another, 
 upon whom this fault has been wrongly charged by
 
 36 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the inaccurate verdict of hasty judges. In answer 
 to these I have shown that the very essence of Mr, 
 Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the 
 ripest fruits of his intelHgence, is such as impHes 
 above all other things the possession of a quality the 
 very opposite of obscurity — a faculty of spiritual 
 illumination rapid and intense and subtle as light- 
 ning, which brings to bear upon its central object 
 by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol 
 and everj^ detail on which its light is flashed in 
 passing. Thus in Fifine the illustration derived 
 from a visionary retrospect of Venice, and in 
 Sordello the superb and wonderful comparison of the 
 mental action of a man who puts by for a season 
 the memories in which he has indulged for a moment 
 before turning again to the day's work, with that of 
 a fugitive slave who thinks over in a pause of his 
 flight and puts aside for more practical means of 
 revenge the thought of enchantments " sovereign to 
 plague his enemies," as he buckles himself again to 
 the grim business of escape — these and other such 
 illustrative passages are not more remarkable for the 
 splendour of their imaginative quality than for the 
 aptness of their cunning application and the direct 
 light reflected from them on the immediate argu- 
 ment which is penetrated and vivified throughout 
 by the insinuation and exploration of its radiance. 
 
 Few poets, on the other hand, have been more 
 unsparing in the use of illustration than Chapman ; 
 he flings about similes by the handful, many of 
 them diffuse and elaborate in expression, most 
 of them curiously thoughtful and ingenious, not a 
 few of them eloquent and impressive ; but in
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 37 
 
 many cases they tend rather to distract the attention 
 of the reader than to elucidate the matter of his 
 study. To his first poem, short as it is, Chapman 
 appends a glossary to explain the accumulated 
 allusions of a mythological kind, with this note at 
 the foot of it : " For the rest of his own invention, 
 figures and similes, touching their aptness and 
 novelt}^ he hath not laboured to justify them, 
 because he hopes -they will be proved enough to 
 justify themselves, and prove sufficiently authentical 
 to such as understand them ; for the rest, God help 
 them " (for the poet evidently will not), " I cannot 
 do as others, make day seem a lighter woman than 
 she is, by painting her," The poem is, however, rich 
 in fine verses which struggle into sight through the 
 vaporous atmosphere of bombast and confusion ; it 
 is thoughtful, earnest, eloquent, with interludes of 
 mere violent and dissonant declamation, and rarer 
 flashes of high and subtle beauty. The licentious 
 grammar and the shapeless structure of sentences 
 that break all bounds of sense or harmony are faults 
 that cannot be overlooked and must be condoned if 
 we care to get at the kernel underlying these outer 
 and inner husks of hard language. The same 
 comment may be applied to the poems which follow ; 
 but the second Hymn, being longer and more 
 discursive than the first, is more extravagant and 
 incoherent, and its allegory more confused and 
 difficult (whenever it is possible) to follow. 
 
 Whether or not there be as usual any reference to 
 Elizabeth and her court under the likeness of Cynthia 
 and her nymphs, or. any allusion to English matters 
 of contemporary interest, to perils and triumphs of
 
 38 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 policy or war, in the " sweet chase " of the trans- 
 formed nymph Euthymia under the shape of a 
 panther or a boar by the hounds of the goddess 
 which pursue her into the impenetrable thicket 
 where the souls of such as have revolted from the 
 empire of C37nthia are held in bondage and torment, 
 and whence the hunters who hew themselves a way 
 into the covert are forced to recoil in horror, it is 
 easier to conjecture than to determine : but the 
 " fruitful island " to which the panther flies and 
 eludes the hounds who track her by scent should be 
 recognizable as England, " full of all wealth, delight, 
 and empery " ; though the sequel in which the 
 panther, turned into a huger boar than that of 
 Calydon, lays waste its " noblest mansions, gardens, 
 and groves " through which the chase makes way, 
 may seem now more impenetrable to human appre- 
 hension than the covert before described. Leaving, 
 however, to others, without heed of the poet's 
 expressed contempt for our "flesh-confounded souls," 
 the task of seeking a solution for riddles to us 
 insoluble, we may note in this poem the first sign of 
 that high patriotic quality which, though common 
 to all the great of his generation, is more constantly 
 perceptible in the nobler moods of Chapman's mind 
 than in the work of many among his compeers. 
 Especially in the reference of one elaborate simile to 
 a campaign in the Netherlands, and the leadership 
 of the English forces by 
 
 War's quick artisan, 
 
 Fame-thriving Vere, that in those countries wan 
 
 More fame than guerdon, 
 
 we trace the lifelong interest taken by this poet in
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 39 
 
 the fortunes of English fighting men in foreign wars, 
 and the generous impulse which moved him twenty- 
 eight years later, at the age of sixty-three, to plead 
 in earnest and fervent verses the cause of Sir Horatio 
 Vere, then engaged " with his poor handful of 
 English " in the " first act " of the Thirty Years' 
 War* (" besieged and distressed in Mainhem," Chap- 
 man tells us), in the ears of the courtiers of James I. 
 A quainter example of this interest in the foreign 
 campaigns of his countrymen may be found in the 
 most untimely intrusion of such another simile into 
 the third sestiad of Hero and Leander. 
 
 Before 1 take in hand the examination of Chap- 
 man's works as a dramatist, I may sum up the best 
 and the worst I have to say of his earlier poems in 
 the remark that on a first plunge into their depths 
 even the reader most willing to accept and most 
 anxious to admire the firstfniits of a poet's mind 
 which he knows to have elsewhere put forth such 
 noble fruit as Chapman's will be liable to do them 
 less than justice until his own mind recovers from 
 the shock givenr to his taste by the crabbed and 
 bombastic verbiage, the tortuous and pedantic 
 obscurity, the rigidity and the laxity of a style 
 which moves as it were with a stiff shuffle, at once 
 formal and shambling ; which breaks bounds with 
 a limping gait, and plays truant from all rule 
 without any of the grace of freedom ; wanders 
 beyond law and straggles out of order at the halting 
 pace of age and gravity, and in the garb of a school- 
 master plays the pranks of a schoolboy with a 
 ponderous and lumbaginous licence of movement, at 
 
 * Carlyle's Frederick the Great, bk. iii, ch. xvi ; vol. i, p. 329.
 
 40 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 once rheumatic and erratic. With the recovery will 
 probably come a reaction from this first impression ; 
 and the student will perhaps be more than sufficiently 
 inclined to condone these shortcomings in favour of 
 the merits they obscure at first sight ; the wealth 
 of imagery, the ardour of thought and feeling, the 
 grave and vigorous harmony of the better parts, and 
 the general impression left on us of communion with 
 a strong, earnest, high-minded man of genius, set 
 adrift without helm or rudder ; of lofty instincts 
 and large aspirations that run rather to leaf than to 
 fruit for want of an eye to choose their proper aim 
 and a hand to use the means to it aright. The 
 editor of the first and by no means the worst English 
 anthology has gathered from these poems, and 
 especially from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, large 
 handfuls of fine verses, which when thus culled out 
 and bound up into separate sheaves make a better 
 show than J in the text where they lay entangled 
 among weeds and briers. There are beauties 
 enough lost in this thick and thorny jungle of 
 scholastic sensuality to furnish . forth a dozen or so 
 of pilfering poeticules with abundance of purple 
 patches to be sewn on at intervals to the common 
 texture of their style. It is with a singular sense 
 of jarring admiration and irritation that we find 
 couplets and quatrains of the most noble and 
 dehcate beauty embedded in the cumbrous ore of 
 crude pedantic jargon : but those who will may find 
 throughout the two earliest publications of Chapman 
 a profusion of good verses thickly scattered among 
 an overgrowth of bad. The first poem, however, 
 which leaves us on the whole with a general and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 41 
 
 equable impression of content, is the small "epic 
 song " or copy of verses on the second expedition to 
 Guiana. Here the poet has got clear of those erotic 
 subtleties and sensual metaphysics which were 
 served up at his " banquet " in such clumsy vessels 
 of the coarsest ware by the awkward and unwashed 
 hands of an amorous pedant, soiling with the ink 
 of the schools the hfted hem of the garment of love ; 
 he has found instead a fit argument for his genius in 
 the ambition and adventure of his boldest country- 
 men, and applied himself to cheer and celebrate 
 them " in no ignoble verse." The first brief para- 
 graph alone is crabbed and inflated in style ; from 
 thence to the end, with but slight breaks or jars, the 
 strong and weighty verse steps out with masculine 
 dignity, and delivers in clear grave accents its 
 cordial message of praise and good cheer. 
 
 At all times Chapman took occasion to approve 
 himself a true son of the greatest age of Englishmen 
 in his quick and fiery sympathy with the daring 
 and the suffering of its warriors and adventurers ; a 
 sympathy which found vent at times where none but 
 Chapman would have made room for it ; witness the 
 sudden and singular illustration, in his Epicede on 
 the death of Prince Henry, of the popular anguish 
 and dismay at that calamity by a " description of 
 the tempest that cast Sir Th. Gates on the Bermudas, 
 and the state of his ship and men, to this kingdom's 
 phght applied in the Prince's death." It has been 
 remarked by editors and biographers that between 
 the years 1574, at or about which date, according 
 to Anthony Wood, " he, being well-grounded in 
 school learning, was sent to the university," and
 
 42 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 1594, when he published his first poem, we have no 
 trace or hint to guide us in conjecturing how his hfe 
 was spent from fifteen to thirty-five. This latter 
 age is the least he can have attained by any com- 
 putation at the time when he put forth his Shadow 
 of Night, full of loud and angry complaints of 
 neglect and slight endured at the hands of an 
 unthankful and besotted generation ; it is somewhat 
 late in life for the first appearance of a poet, and the 
 poem then issued is a more crude and chaotic 
 performance than might be looked for from a writer 
 who has no longer the plea of unripe age to put 
 forward in excuse of the raw green fruits which he 
 offers to the reader. Dr. Elze, in the learned and 
 ingenious essay prefixed to his edition of Chapman's 
 Alphonsus, points out that from the internal evidence 
 of that play " we are driven to the alternative 
 either of supposing Chapman to have been in 
 Germany or of allowing him a German partner " 
 (P- 33). and a little before observes that " there is 
 ample room between his leaving the university 
 without a degree in 1576 or 1578 and his first 
 acknowledged publication in 1594 even for a length- 
 ened stay in Germany." In default of evidence we 
 might perhaps be permitted to throw out a guess 
 that the future poet had in his youth seen some 
 service and been possibly an eyewitness of some 
 part of the campaigns in the Low Countries to which 
 he refers in a manner showing his intimate acquaint- 
 ance with the details of an action on the " most 
 excellent river " Waal before " stately-sighted sconce- 
 torn Nimiguen," fought between the cavalry of " the 
 Italian Duke " and the English leader, Sir Francis
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 43 
 
 or Sir Horatio Vere, who drew the enemy's horse, 
 by a feint made with his own, into an ambuscade 
 of infantry by which they were put to rout. Both 
 the text and the note appended show a wilhngness 
 to display this knowledge of the strategy and 
 geography of the skirmish with some ostentation of 
 precision ; his parting remark at the end of the 
 note has a tone of satisfaction in the discovery of a 
 new order of illustration. " And these like similes, 
 in my opinion, drawn from the honourable deeds of 
 our noble countrymen, clad in comely habit of poesy, 
 would become a poem as well as further-fetched 
 grounds, if such as be poets nowadays would use 
 them." He was not himself, as we have seen, over- 
 careful to use them at the right moment or turn 
 them to the most natural account ; but to the 
 principle here advanced he remained staunch in his 
 later writings. 
 
 It may be thought somewhat out of keeping 
 with the general reputation of Chapman as a re- 
 tired student of a grave and sober habit of life 
 that he should be supposed to have ever taken 
 any active part in a military campaign ; but those 
 were days when scholars and men of letters were not 
 uncommonly found apt for employment in matters 
 of war and policy, and gave good proof of a right to 
 claim their place among other servants of the state 
 for the performance of high patriotic duty ; nor, 
 unless we please, need we imagine Chapman to have 
 served personally as a volunteer in the English 
 ranks ; but it is reasonable to conceive that either 
 in person or by proxy he may have had special 
 opportunities of studying the incidents of war in the
 
 44 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Netherlands, which he would evidently have been 
 mindful to make the most of and quick to put to 
 use. It is also possible that his relations with the 
 stage may have begun at an earlier date than has 
 yet been traced ; and as we know that in 1585, 
 when Chapman was twenty-six j^ears old, Leicester 
 brought over to Holland a company of actors in his 
 train when he set sail as commander of the forces 
 dispatched from England to the support of the 
 States-General, and that others followed suit on 
 their own score in succeeding years, those who are 
 unwilling to allow him a chance of service as a 
 soldier may prefer to conjecture that he was drawn 
 to the seat of war by the more probable force of 
 some poetic or theatrical connexion with either the 
 general's first troupe of players or that which followed 
 in its track five years later. That these earlier 
 adventurers were succeeded by fresh companies in 
 1604 and 1605, and again forty years later, at an 
 unpropitious date for actors in England, eleven 
 years after the death of Chapman, I further learn 
 from an article in the Athenceum (Sept. 5, 1874) 
 on Herr von Hellwald's " History of the Stage in 
 Holland " ; and eight years later than the venture 
 of the second company of players in 1590 we find 
 Chapman classed by Meres among the best of our 
 tragic writers for the stage, and repeatedly entered 
 on Hcnslowe's books as debtor to the manager for 
 some small advance of money on future dramatic 
 work to be supplied to his company. 
 
 In any case it is remarkable that his first play 
 should not have been brought on the stage till the 
 poet was thirty-six, or published till he was rising
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 45 
 
 forty ; an age at which most men, who might have 
 written such a play at sixteen, would have been 
 unwilling to expose it to the light. It is even a 
 more crude and graceless piece of work, if we con- 
 sider it as designed for the stage, than his first 
 venture of the preceding year if we regard it as 
 intended for the study. The plot is more childish, 
 though the language may be purer, than we find in 
 the rudest sketches of Greene or Peele, VN^hose day 
 was now well over ; and even for the firstfruits of 
 " a person of most reverend aspect, religious and 
 temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet," it 
 will be admitted that the moral tone of Chapman's 
 two earliest comedies is not remarkably high. The 
 first deals solely with the impossible frauds, pre- 
 posterous adulteries, and farcical murders committed 
 by a disguised hero who assumes the mask of as 
 many pseudonyms to perpetrate his crimes as ever 
 were assumed in Old or New Grub Street by a 
 prudent member of the libellous order of rascally 
 rhymesters to vent his villainies in shameful safety. 
 The story is beneath the credulity of a nursery, and 
 but for some detached passages of clear and vigorous 
 writing the whole work might plausibly have been 
 signed by any of the names under which a dunce of 
 the order above mentioned might think it wisest to 
 put forth his lyrics or his lies. In the better passages, 
 and noticeably in a description of jewels engraved 
 with figures of the gods, we catch a faint echo of 
 the " mighty line " in which Marlowe would lavish 
 on such descriptions the wealth and strength, the 
 majesty and the fancy, of his full imperial style. 
 The frank folly and reckless extravagance of
 
 46 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 incident which appear to have won for Chapman's 
 first play the favour of an audience not remarkable, 
 it should seem, for captious nicety of critical taste 
 and judgment, are less perceptible in his second 
 venture ; but this also is a crude and coarse example 
 of workmanship. The characters are a confused 
 crowd of rough sketches, whose thin outlines and 
 faint colours are huddled together on a ragged 
 canvas without order or proportion. There is some 
 promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adulteress, 
 but it comes to little or nothing ; and the comedy 
 rather collapses than concludes in a tangle of 
 incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecencies. 
 The text is seemingly more cornipt than we find in 
 Chapman's other plays, which are generally exempt 
 from such gross and multitudinous misprints as 
 deform the early editions of many Elizabethan 
 dramatists ; their chief defect is the confusion and 
 the paucity of stage directions. In the opening 
 speech of An Humorous Day's Mirth, from the 
 fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, M^e must supply 
 with some such reading as this the evident hiatus of 
 sense and metre in the fifteenth : 
 
 But pure religion being but mental stuff. 
 And sense, indeed, [being] all * [but] for itself 
 'Tis to be doubted, etc. 
 
 The text and arrangement of the scenes throughout 
 this comedy require a more careful revision than has 
 yet been given ; since if the crudest work of a man 
 
 * Perhaps an adjective has here dropped out, and we might 
 read the hemistich thus" "all covetous for itself," or "careful," 
 "curious," "gluttonous," any of which words would fit the 
 metre and suit the sense of the passage.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 47 
 
 of genius is not to be rejected from the list of his 
 writings in which it has once found place, it claims 
 at least so much of editorial care as may leave it in 
 a reasonably legible form. 
 
 It appears that in the same year which gave to 
 the press this loose and slipshod effort at a comedy, 
 the most perfect of Chapman's plays, though not 
 published till six years later, was completed for the 
 stage. The admirable comedy of All Fools is the 
 first work which bears full evidence of the vigorous 
 and masculine versatility, the force and freshness of 
 his free and natural genius. The dedication, which 
 seems to have been cancelled almost as soon as issued, 
 gives one of the most singular proofs on record of a 
 poet's proverbial inability to discern between his 
 worse and better work. The writer who ten years 
 before was so loud in his complaint of men's neglect 
 and so haughty in his claim on their attention for 
 his crudest and faultiest work now assures the friend 
 to whom he inscribes a poem of real excellence, 
 
 I am most loth to pass your sight 
 
 With any such-like mark of vanity. 
 Being marked with age for aims of greater weight 
 
 And drowned in dark death-ushering melancholy : 
 
 but for fear of piratical publishers who might print 
 " by stealth " an unauthorized and interpolated 
 edition, " without my passport, patched with others' 
 wit," he consents to " expose to every common eye " 
 what he calls 
 
 The least allowed birth of my shaken brain, 
 
 alleging as his excuse that " of two enforced ills I 
 elect the least " ; and with this most superfluous
 
 48 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 apology he ushers in one of the most faultless 
 examples of high comedy to be found in the whole 
 rich field of our Elizabethan drama. The style is 
 limpid and lurriinous as running water, the verse 
 pure, simple, smooth and strong, the dialogue always 
 bright, fluent, lively, and at times relieved with 
 delicate touches of high moral and intellectual 
 beauty ; the plot and t-he characters excellently 
 fitted to each other, with just enough intricacy and 
 fullness of incident to sustain without relaxation or 
 confusion the ready interest of readers or spectators. 
 The play and counterplay of action by which all 
 the chief persons of the comedy trick and are tricked 
 by each other in turn might easily have become per- 
 plexed or excessive in less careful and skilful hands ; 
 but the lightness and dexterity of handling which 
 the poet has here for once manifested throughout 
 the whole development of his dramatic scheme 
 suffice to keep the course of the story clear and the 
 attention of the reader alert without involution or 
 fatigue : and over all the dialogue and action there 
 plays a fresh and radiant air of mirth and light swift 
 buoyancy of life which breathes rather of joyous 
 strength and high-spirited health than of the fumes 
 of " dark death-ushering melancholy " ; and as in 
 matter of fact death was not ushered by melancholy 
 or any other evil spirit into the stout presence of the 
 old poet till full thirtj^-five years after the appearance 
 and twenty-nine years after the dedication of this 
 play, we may hopefully set down this malcontent 
 phrase to some untimely fit of spleen from which, 
 having thus given it vent, he soon shook himself 
 clear and struck his pen through the record of it. 1
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 49 
 
 find but one slight and characteristic blemish worth 
 noting in a comedy in which the proudest among 
 his great compeers might have permissibly taken 
 fresh pride ; it is that the final scene of discovery 
 which winds up the main thread and reconciles the 
 chief agents of the intrigue is somewhat hurriedly 
 dispatched, with too rapid a change of character 
 and readjustment of relations, to make room for a 
 thin-spun and wire-drawn sample of that tedious 
 burlesque declamation with which the author was 
 too prone to indulge a taste not likely to be shared 
 or relished by his readers for the minute dissection 
 of a dead jest, so dry that it crumbles into dust 
 under the scalpel of the anatomist. All the rest of 
 the comedy is so light, bright, and easy in all its 
 paces that we are the less disposed to tolerate the 
 stiffness and elaboration of this oratorical interlude. 
 But this is really the only spot or patch I can discover 
 on the jocund face of a delightful comic poem. 
 
 It is not impossible that the merit of pure and 
 lucid style which distinguishes the best comedies of 
 Chapman from the bulk of his other writings may 
 in part be owing to the slighter value set by the 
 author on the workmanship of these. By tempera- 
 ment and inclination he was rather an epic or tragic 
 than a comic poet ; and in writing verse of a tragic 
 or epic quality he evidently felt it incumbent on him 
 to assert the dignity of his office, to inflate and exalt 
 his style with all helps of metaphor and hyperbole, 
 to stiffen the march of his metre and harden the 
 structure of his language ; and hence he is but too 
 prone to rely at need on false props of adventitious 
 and barbaric dignit}^ to strut on stilts or to swim 
 
 D
 
 50 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 on bladders : whereas in writing for the comic stage 
 he was content to forget, or at least to forgo, this 
 imaginary dignity and duty ; he felt himself no 
 longer bound to talk big or to stalk stiffly, and in 
 consequence was not too high-minded to move easily 
 and speak gracefully. It is clear that he set no 
 great store by his comic talent as compared with 
 the other gifts of his genius ; of all his comedies two 
 only. All Fools and The Widow's Tears, have dedica- 
 tions prefixed to them, and in both cases the tone 
 of the dedication is almost apologetic in its slighting 
 reference to the slight worth of the work presented ; 
 a tone by no means to be ascribed in this case to a 
 general and genuine humility, since the dedications 
 prefixed to his various poems, and to two among his 
 tragedies published under his own eye, are remark- 
 able for their lofty and dignified self-assertion. The 
 fact that of these two tragedies, one. The Revenge of 
 Bussy d'Ambois, was apparently unsuccessful on the 
 stage, and the other, Ccesar and Pompey, seems never 
 to have obtained a chance of appearing on the 
 boards at all, may naturally have moved the author 
 to assert their right to respect and acceptance with 
 more studied emphasis than usual ; in the earlier 
 instance at least he is emphatic enough in his appeal 
 from the verdict of the " maligners " with whom he 
 complains that it met " in the scenical representa- 
 tion," to the " approbation of more worthy judg- 
 ments " which " even therein " it did not fail to 
 obtain ; and in the second case, though he appears 
 to apologize for the lack of " novelty and fashion " 
 in a play " written so long since " that it " had 
 not the timely ripeness of that age " (seventy-two)
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 51 
 
 " that, I thank God, I yet find no fault withal for 
 any such defects," yet he is apparently and reason- 
 ably confident that the offering of his " martial 
 history " is one honourable alike to poet and to 
 patron. Both plays are rich in rhetorical passages 
 of noble eloquence ; but in all points of workmanlike 
 construction and dramatic harmony they are incom- 
 parably inferior to the better sort of his comedies. 
 
 The year of the publication of All Fools was 
 memorable to Chapman for a more hazardous 
 misadventure on a more serious stage than the 
 failure of a comedy on the boards, for which he had 
 to thank the merited success of a play whose strange 
 fortune it was to prove as tragical in its sequence as 
 merry in itself, thus combining in a new fashion the 
 two main qualities of Bottom's immortal interlude. 
 All readers will remember the base offence taken 
 and the base revenge threatened by the son of 
 Darnley or of Rizzio for a passing jest aimed at 
 those among his countrymen who had anticipated 
 Dr. Johnson's discovery of the finest prospect ever 
 seen by a native of Scotland ; none can forget the 
 gallantry with which Ben Jonson, a Scot by descent, 
 of whom it might have been said as truly as of the 
 greatest in the generation before him that he " never 
 feared the face of man," approved himself the like- 
 minded son of a Roman-spirited mother by coming 
 forward to share the certainty of imprisonment and 
 the probability of mutilation with the two comrades 
 who without his knowledge had inserted such perilous 
 matter into their common work ; and many will 
 wish with me that he had never borne a nearer and 
 less honourable relation to a king who combined
 
 52 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 with the northern virulence and pedantry which he 
 may have derived from his tutor Buchanan a savour 
 of the worst quahties of the worst Itahans of the 
 worst period of Itahan decadence. It was worthier 
 of the great spirit and the masterful genius of 
 Jonson to be the subject of his tyranny than the 
 laureate of his court. Far more fitly, had such a 
 one then been bom, would that office have been 
 filled by any scribbling Scot of the excremcntal 
 school of letters who might have sought and found 
 in his natural prince a congenial patron with whom 
 to bathe his sympathetic spirit in the pure morality, 
 while swimming with somewhat short strokes in 
 " the deep delicious stream of the Latinit}^" of 
 Petronius Arbiter. Such a Crispinulus or Crispi- 
 naccio would have found his proper element in an 
 atmosphere whose fumes should never have been 
 inhaled by the haughty and high-souled author of 
 the Poetaster ; and from behind his master's chair, 
 with no need to seek for fear if not for shame the 
 dastardly and lying shelter of a pseudonym which 
 might at a pinch have been abjured, and the respon- 
 sibility for its use shifted from his own shoulders to 
 those of a well-meaning but invisible friend, the 
 laurelled lackey of King James might as securely 
 have launched his libels against the highest heads of 
 poets to whom in that age all eyes looked up which 
 would have looked down on him, as ever did the 
 illustrious Latinist Buchanan against the mother 
 of the worthy patron whose countenance would 
 probably have sufficed to protect the meanest and 
 obscurest creature of his common and unclean 
 favour against all recrimination on the part of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 53 
 
 Shakespeare or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of 
 Webster, of Fletcher or of Chapman, 
 
 The comedy thus celebrated for the peril it 
 brought upon the ears and noses of its authors has 
 of itself merit enough to have won for writers of less 
 previous note a sufficient share of more enviable 
 celebrity. It is one of the most spirited and brilliant 
 plays belonging to that class of which the two most 
 famous examples are the Merry Wives of Windsor 
 and Every Man in his Humour ; and for life and 
 movement, interest and gaiety, it may challenge a 
 comparison even with these. All the actors in 
 Eastward Ho, down to the very slightest, such as the 
 drawer, the butcher's man, and the keeper of the 
 prison, have some quality and character of their 
 own which gives them a place in the comic action ; 
 and in no play of the time do we get such a true 
 taste of the old city life so often turned to mere 
 ridicule and caricature by playwrights of less good 
 humour, or feel about us such a familiar air of 
 ancient London as blows through every scene ; the 
 homely household of the rich tradesman, the shop 
 with its stall in front, the usurer's lodging, the 
 waterside tavern, the Thames wharves, stand out as 
 sharply as if etched by the pen of Dickens or the 
 needle of Whistler. The London of Hogarth, as set 
 before us in that immortal series of engravings for 
 which he is said to have taken the hint from this 
 comedy, does not seem nearer or more actual than 
 this elder London of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston ; 
 and the more high-flying genius of Frank Quicksilver 
 is as real and lifelike as the humbler debauchery 
 and darker doom of Tom Idle. The parts of Mistress
 
 54 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Touchstone and Gertrude are worthy of Mohere in 
 his homeher mood ; and but for one or two momen- 
 tary indecencies dropped here and there to attest 
 the passage of Marston, the scenes in which they 
 figure would be as perfect and blameless examples 
 of pure broad comedy as any stage can show. The 
 fluttering and exuberant ambition of the would-be 
 C61imene or Millamant of the city is painted with 
 such delightful force and freshness, her imperial 
 volubility of contempt, the joyous and tremulous 
 eagerness with which she obeys the precept of the 
 Psalmist to " forget her own people and her father's 
 house," her alternate phases of gracious patronage 
 and overflowing obloquy, are so charming in the 
 buoyancy and fertility of their changes that we are 
 rejoiced when after the term of adversity so differ- 
 ently put to use by the prodigal daughter and the 
 profligate apprentice Frank and Gertrude are alike 
 restored to the favour of the excellent old citizen by 
 the kind offices of his worthy son-in-law. Not only 
 have the poets given proof of a gentler morality and 
 a juster sense of justice than the great painter who 
 followed long after in the track of their invention, 
 but they have contrived even to secure our cordial 
 regard for the kindly virtues of the respectable and 
 industrious characters whose aim it is to rise by 
 thrift and honesty ; and we salute the promotion of 
 " Master Deputy's worship " to the proud office of 
 substitute for the alderman of his ward with a 
 satisfaction which no man surely ever felt in the 
 exaltation of Hogarth's Lord Mayor to sit in judg- 
 ment on his luckless fellow. The figures of Gertnide's 
 gallant knight and his crew of Virginian adventurers,
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 35 
 
 whose expedition finally culminates in a drunken 
 shipwreck on the Thames, are as vivid and as 
 pleasant as any of these other studies ; and the 
 scenes in which the jealous usurer is induced by 
 the devices of Quicksilver and Sir Petronel to bring 
 his disguised wife into the company of her paramour 
 and reassure her supposed scruples with his pithy 
 arguments against conjugal fidelity, while he lets fly 
 at her supposed husband the well-worn jests which 
 recoil on his own head, have in them enough of wit 
 and humorous invention to furnish forth the whole 
 five acts of an ordinary comedy of intrigue. Even 
 in these sketches from the prosaic life of their day 
 the great and generous poets of that age were as 
 prodigal of the riches of their genius as in the tragic 
 and romantic work of their higher moods. The 
 style of Chapman is perceptible in some of the best 
 of these scenes in the third act as well as in the moral 
 passage of metrical philosophy put into the lips of the 
 half-drowned Quicksilver in the fourth, where only 
 the last editor has taken note of his handiwork. 
 
 Two allusions in the mouth of the usurer, one 
 to " the ship of famous Draco," and one to the 
 camel's horns of which we hear something too often 
 from this poet, are in the unmistakable manner of 
 Chapman. Other such points might perhaps be 
 discovered ; but on the whole we may probably feel 
 safe in assigning to each of the three associates as 
 equal a share in the labour and the credit as they 
 bore in the peril entailed on them by a comedy which, 
 though disclaiming all unfriendly aim at rivalry 
 with one of similar title already familiar to the 
 stage, must probably and deservedly have eclipsed
 
 56 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the success of two plays not published till two 
 years later under cognate names by Decker and 
 Webster ; though the plot of Northward Ho is not 
 wanting in humour and ingenuity, and in Westward 
 Ho there is one scene of exquisite and incongruous 
 beauty in which we recognize at once the tender and 
 reckless hand which five years earlier had inserted 
 into the yet more inappropriate framework of the 
 Satiromastix as sweet an episode of seeming martyr- 
 dom and chastity secured under the shelter of a 
 sleep like death. 
 
 In his next play Chapman reassumed the more 
 poetical style of comedy which in Eastward Ho had 
 been put off for the plainer garb of realism. The 
 Gentleman Usher is distinguishable from all his other 
 works by the serious grace and sweetness of the 
 love-scenes, and the higher tone of feminine character 
 and masculine regard which is sustained throughout 
 the graver passages. Elsewhere it should seem that 
 Chapman had scorned to attempt or failed to achieve 
 the task of rousing and retaining the chief interest 
 of his reader in the fortune of two young lovers ; but 
 in this play he has drawn such a passionate and 
 innocent couple with singular tenderness and deli- 
 cacy. The broader effects of humour are comic 
 enough, though perhaps somewhat too much pro- 
 longed and too often repeated ; but the charm of 
 the play lies in the bright and pure quality of its 
 romantic part. The scene in which the prince and 
 Margaret, debarred by tyranny and intrigue from 
 the right of public marriage, espouse each other in 
 secret by a pretty ceremony devised on the spot, in 
 a dialogue of the wounded Strozza with the wife who
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 57 
 
 has restored him to spiritual strength by " the sweet 
 food of her divine advice," are models of the simple, 
 luminous, and fervent style of poetry proper to 
 romantic comedy at its highest. A noble passage in 
 the fifth act of this play contains, as far as I know, 
 the first direct protest against the principle of 
 monarchy to be found in our poetical or dramatic 
 literature ; his last year's hazardous experience of 
 royal susceptibilities may not improbably have given 
 edge to the author's pen as it set down these ven- 
 turous lines in a time when as yet no king had been 
 taught, in the phrase of old Lord Auchinleck, that 
 he had a joint in his neck. 
 
 And what's a prince ? Had all been virtuous men. 
 
 There never had been prince upon the earth. 
 
 And so no subject : all men had been princes. 
 
 A virtuous man is subject to no prince, 
 
 But to his soul and honour ; which are laws 
 
 That carry fire and sword within themselves. 
 
 Never corrupted, never out of rule : 
 
 What is there in a prince that his least lusts 
 
 Are valued at the lives of other men. 
 
 When common faults in him should prodigies be. 
 
 And his gross dotage rather loathed than soothed ? 
 
 I should be surprised to find in any poet of 
 Chapman's age an echo of such clear and daring 
 words as these, which may suffice to show that the 
 oHgarchic habit of mind to which I have before 
 referred in him was the fruit of no sycophantic 
 temper, no pliant and prostitute spirit, the property 
 of a courtier or a courtesan, but sprung rather from 
 pure intellectual haughtiness and a contempt for the 
 mob of minds. Nevertheless it is well worth remark
 
 58 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that such a dehberate utterance of republican 
 principle should then have been endured on the 
 stage ; that so loud a blast of direct challenge to 
 the dominant superstition of the day should have 
 been blown so near the court in the ears of a popular 
 audience by a poet who, though at no time chargeable 
 with any stain of venal or parasitic servility, was 
 afterwards the habitual and grateful recipient of 
 patronage from princes and favourites, and at all 
 times, it must be confessed, in' all his other works a 
 strenuous and consistent supporter of the tradition 
 of royalty against the conception of democracy. 
 
 The opening scene of Monsieur d'Olive, the next 
 on the list of Chapman's comedies, is one of the 
 most admirable in any play. More than once indeed 
 the author has managed his overture, or what in the 
 classic dialect of the old French stage was called 
 the exposition, with a skill and animation giving 
 promise of better things to come than he has pro- 
 vided ; as though he had spent the utmost art his 
 genius could command in securing the interest of his 
 audience at the first start, and then left it for chance 
 to support, letting his work float at will on the lazy 
 waters of caprice or negligence. No more impres- 
 sive introduction to a play could have been devised 
 than the arrival of the' chief person, newly landed in 
 high hopes and spirits from a long voyage, before 
 the closed gates and curtained casements of an old 
 friend's house, within which tapers are burning at 
 noon, and before which the master walks sadly up 
 and down, and repels his proffered embrace ; and 
 the whole scene following which explains the trouble 
 of one household and the mourning of another is a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 59 
 
 model of clear, natural, dignified dialogue, in which 
 every word is harmonious, appropriate, and noble. 
 The grace and interest of this exposition are more 
 or less well sustained during the earlier part of the 
 play ; but as the underplot opens out at greater 
 length, the main interest is more and more thrust 
 aside, cramped as it were for space and squeezed out 
 of shape, till at last it is fairly hustled into a comer 
 of the action to make way for the overwrought 
 fooleries of the gull d' Olive and the courtiers who 
 play upon his vanity ; and this underplot, diverting 
 enough in a slight way for one or two scenes, is 
 stretched out on the tenterhooks of farcical rhetoric 
 and verbose dialogue till the reader finds himself 
 defrauded of the higher interest which he was led to 
 expect, and wearied of the empty substitute which 
 the waywardness or indolence of the author has 
 chosen to palm off on him in its stead. Towards 
 the end indeed there is a profuse waste of good 
 points and promising possibilities ; the humorous 
 ingenuity of the devices so well contrived to wind 
 up together and in order the double thread of the 
 main plot is stinted of room to work in and display 
 its excellent quality of invention, and the final scene, 
 which should have explained and reconciled all 
 doubts and errors at large with no less force and 
 fullness of careful dramatic capacity than was 
 employed upon their exposition, is hastily patched 
 up and slurred over to leave place for a last super- 
 fluous exhibition of such burlesque eloquence as had 
 already been admitted to encumber the close of 
 another comedy, more perfect than this in construc- 
 tion, but certainly not more interesting in concep-
 
 60 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 tion. In spite, however, of this main blemish in the 
 action, Monsieur d'Olive may properly be counted 
 among the more notable and successful plays of 
 Chapman. 
 
 Of his two remaining comedies I may as well say 
 a word here as later. Mayday, which was printed 
 five years after the two last we have examined, is 
 full of the bustle and justle of intrigue which may be 
 expected in such comedies of incident as depend 
 rather on close and crowded action than on fine or 
 forcible character for whatever they may merit of 
 success. There is no touch in it of romance or 
 poetical interest, but several of the situations and 
 dialogues may have credit for some share of vigour 
 and humour. But of these qualities Chapman gave 
 much fuller proof next year in the unchivalrous 
 comedy of The Widow's Tears. This discourteous 
 drama is as rich in comic force as it is poor in amiable 
 sentiment. There is a brutal exuberant fun through- 
 out the whole action which finds its complete 
 expression and consummation in the brawny gal- 
 lantry and muscular merriment of Tharsalio. A 
 speculative commentator might throw out some 
 conjecture to the effect that the poet at fifty-three 
 may have been bent on revenge for a slight offered 
 to some unseasonable courtship of his owa by a lady 
 less amenable to the proffer of future fame than the 
 " belle marquise " who has the credit for all time to 
 come of having lent a humble ear to the haughty 
 suit and looked with a gracious eye on the grey hairs 
 of the great Comeille. But whether this keen on- 
 slaught on the pretensions of the whole sex to 
 continence or constancy were or were not instigated
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 61 
 
 by any individual rancour, the comedy is written 
 with no little power and constructed with no little 
 ingenuity ; the metrical scenes are pure and vigorous 
 in style, and the difficulty of fitting such a story to 
 the stage is surmounted with scarcely less of dexterity 
 than of daring. The action of the last scene is again 
 hampered by the intrusion of forced and misplaced 
 humours, and while the superfluous underlings of 
 the play are breaking and bandjdng their barren 
 jests, the story is not so much wound up as huddled 
 up in whispers and by-play ; but it may certainly be 
 pleaded in excuse of the poet that the reconciliation 
 of the Ephesian matron to her husband was a some- 
 what difficult ceremony to exhibit at length and 
 support with any plausible or effectual explanation. 
 Two other titles are usually found in the catalogue 
 of Chapman's extant comedies ; but it seems to me 
 as difficult to discover any trace of Chapman in the 
 comedy of The Ball as of Shiriey in the tragedy of 
 Chahot. These two plays were issued by the same 
 printer in the same year for the same publishers, 
 both bearing the names of Chapman and Shirley 
 linked together in the bonds of a most incongruous 
 union : but I know not if there be any further 
 ground for belief in this singular association. The 
 mere difference in age would make the rumour of a 
 collaboration between the eldest of old English 
 dramatists and the latest disriple of their school so 
 improbable as to demand the corroboration of some 
 trustworthier authority than a bookseller's title- 
 page bearing date five years after the death of 
 Chapman. In the very next year a play was 
 published under the name of Fletcher, who had then
 
 62 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 been fifteen years dead ; this play was afterwards 
 reclaimed by Shirley as the work of his own hand, 
 and of his alone ; nor is there any doubt that 
 Fletcher had not a finger in it. Of the authorship 
 of Chahot there can be no question ; the subject, the 
 style, the manner, the metre, the construction, the 
 characters, all are perfectly Chapman's. The Ball, 
 on the other hand, is as thoroughly in the lightest 
 style of Shirley, and not a bad example of his airily 
 conventional manner ; it is lively and easy enough, 
 but much below the mark of his best comedies, such 
 as The Lady of Pleasure (where an allusion to this 
 earlier play is brought into the dialogue), which but 
 for a single ugly incongruity would be one of the 
 few finest examples of pure high comedy in verse 
 that our stage could show against that of Moliere. 
 A foundling of yet more dubious parentage has been 
 fathered upon Chapman by the tradition which has 
 affixed to his name the putative paternity of " a 
 comical moral censuring the follies of this age," 
 anonymously published in his sixty-first year. It 
 has been plausibly suggested that the title of this 
 wonderful medley. Two Wise Men and all the rest 
 Fools, was the first and last cause of its attribution 
 to the hand of Chapman, and that the error arose 
 from a confusion of this with the title of All Fools, 
 the best of Chapman's comedies. In any case it is 
 difficult to believe that this voluminous pamphlet in 
 the form of dialogue on social questions can have 
 been the work of any practised or professional 
 dramatist. It is externally divided into seven acts, 
 and might as reasonably have been divided into 
 twenty-one. A careful and laborious perusal of the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 63 
 
 bulky tract from prologue to epilogue, which has 
 enabled me in some measure to appreciate the 
 double scientific experiment of Mr. Browning on 
 " Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," emboldens me also 
 to affirm that it has no vestige of dramatic action, 
 no trace of a story, no phantom of a plot ; that the 
 reader who can believe the assertion of its title-page 
 that it was " divers times " or indeed ever " acted " 
 on any mortal stage by any human company before 
 any living audience will have a better claim to be 
 saved by his faith than the author by this sample 
 at least of his works ; that it contains much curious 
 and sometimes amusing detail on social matters of 
 the day, and is not wanting in broad glimpses or 
 intervals of somewhat clownish humour. In the 
 strong coarse satire on female Puritanism those who 
 will may discern touches which recall the tone if not 
 the handiwork of the author of An Humorous Day's 
 Mirth. The fact that several names occurring in the 
 course of the dialogue, though not in the long list 
 of marvellously labelled interlocutors, are anagrams 
 of the simplest kind, being merely common English 
 names spelt backwards, may be thought to indicate 
 some personal aim in this elaborate onslaught on 
 usurers, money-lenders, brokers, and other such 
 cattle ; and if so we have certainly no right to lay 
 an anonymous attack of the kind, even upon such 
 as these, to the charge of a poet who, so far as we 
 know, never published a hne in his long life that he 
 feared to subscribe with his own loyal and honour- 
 able name. Such a one is not lightly to be sus- 
 pected of the least approach in form or substance to 
 the dirty tactics of a verminous pseudonymuncule,
 
 64 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who at the risk of being ultimately shamed into 
 avowal or scared into denial of his ignominious 
 individuality may prefer for one rascally moment 
 the chance of infamy as a slanderer to the certitude 
 of obscurity as a scribbler. 
 
 Although, however, we may be inclined to allow 
 no great weight to the tradition current fifty-seven 
 years after the death of Chapman, which according 
 to Langbaine was at that date the only authority 
 that led him to believe in the general vague ascrip- 
 tion of this work to the poet under whose name it 
 has ever since found a questionable place in the 
 corners of catalogues at the tail of his authentic 
 comedies, the very fact of this early attribution 
 gives it a certain external interest of antiquarian 
 curiosity, besides that which it may fairly claim as 
 a quaint example of controversial dialectics on the 
 conservative side. The dialogues are not remarkable 
 either for Platonic skill or for Platonic urbanity ; 
 for which reason they may probably be accepted 
 with the more confidence as fairly expressive of the 
 average of opinion then afloat among honest English 
 citizens of the middle class, jealous of change, 
 suspicious of innovation, indignant at the sight of 
 rascality which they were slow to detect, much given 
 to growl and wail over the decay of good old times 
 and the collapse of good old landmarks, the degene- 
 racy of modern manners, and the general intolera- 
 bility of things in an age of hitherto unknown 
 perversity ; men of heavy-headed patience and 
 lieavy-witted humour, but by no means the kind of 
 cattle that it would be safe for any driver to goad 
 or load overmuch. The writer may be taken as an
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 65 
 
 exponent of Anglican conservatism if not of Catholic 
 reaction in matters of religious doctrine and disci- 
 pline ; he throws his whole strength as a dialectician 
 (which is not Herculean, or quite equal to his 
 evident goodwill) into the discussion of a proposal 
 to secularize the festivals and suppress the holidays 
 appointed by the Church ; and the ground of his 
 defence is not popular but clerical ; these holidays 
 are to be observed not for the labourer's but for the 
 saint's sake ; and above all because our wiser fore- 
 fathers have so willed it, for reasons which we are 
 in duty bound to take on trust as indisputably more 
 valid than any reasoning of our own. He has a 
 hearty distrust of lawyers and merchants, and a 
 cordial distaste for soldiers and courtiers ; his 
 sentiments towards a Puritan are those of Sir 
 Andrew Aguecheek, his opinion of an agitator is 
 worthy of a bishop, and his view of a demagogue 
 would do honour to a duke. 
 
 A very different work from the effusion of this 
 worthy pamphleteer bears likewise, or at least has 
 once borne, the dubious name of Chapman. This is 
 a tragic or romantic drama without a title of its 
 own, labelled it should seem for the sake of con- 
 venience by the licencer of plays as a " second 
 Maiden's Tragedy." It was first printed in 1824 
 with a brief note of introduction, from which we 
 learn that the manuscript was originally inscribed 
 with the name of William Goughe ; that Thomas 
 was then substituted for William, while a third 
 Goughe, Robert, seems to have figured as one of the 
 principal actors ; that a second correction struck out 
 either Goughe at one sweep of the pen, and sup- 
 
 E
 
 66 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 planted both names by that of George Chapman ; 
 and that last of all this also was erased to make way 
 for no less a claimant than William Shakespeare. 
 To this late and impudent attempt at imposture no 
 manner of notice need be accorded ; but the claim 
 preferred for Chapman deserves some attention from 
 all students of our dramatic poetry. In style and 
 metre this play, which bears the date of his fifty- 
 third year (1611), is noticeably different from all his 
 acknowledged tragedies, one only excepted ; but it 
 is not more different from the rest than this one, 
 which, though not published till twenty years after 
 the death of Chapman, has never yet been called in 
 question as a dubious or spurious pretender to the 
 credit of his authorship. And if, as I am unwilHng 
 to disbelieve. Chapman was actually the author of 
 Revenge for Honour, one serious obstacle is cleared 
 out of the way of our belief in the justice of the 
 claim advanced for him to this play also. 
 
 Not that the two can be said to show many or grave 
 points of likeness to each other ; but between all other 
 tragedies assigned to Chapman such points of inti- 
 mate resemblance do undoubtedly appear, while the 
 points of unhkeness between any one of these and 
 either of the plays in question are at once as many 
 and as grave. Of the posthumous tragedy I purpose 
 to say a word in its turn ; meantime we may 
 observe that it is not easy to conjecture any motive 
 of interest which might have induced a forger of 
 names to attribute an illegitimate issue of this kind 
 to Chapman rather than to another. His name was 
 probably never one of those whose popularity would 
 have sufficed to float the doubtful venture of a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 67 
 
 spurious play. To Shakespeare or to Fletcher it 
 was of course a profitable speculation for knavish 
 booksellers to assign the credit or discredit of any 
 dramatic bantling which they might think it but 
 barely possible to leave undetected at the door of 
 such a foster-father, or to pass off for a time on the 
 thickest-witted of his admirers as a sinful slip of the 
 great man's grafting in his idler hours of human 
 infirmity. But if there was in effect no plea for the 
 intrusion of such a changeling into the poetic house- 
 hold of Chapman, whose quiver was surely full 
 enough without the insertion of a stranger's shaft, 
 the gratuitous selection of this poet as sponsor for 
 this play appears to me simply unaccountable. No 
 plausible reason can as far as I see be assigned for 
 the superscription of Chapman's name in place of 
 the cancelled name of Goughe, unless the writer did 
 actually believe that the genuine work of George 
 Chapman had been wrongly ascribed to Thomas or 
 William Goughe ; whereas no reader of the play will 
 imagine it possible that the name of Shakespeare 
 can have been substituted in good faith and single- 
 ness of heart by a corrector honestly desirous of 
 repairing a supposed error. 
 
 Again, if the doubtless somewhat fragile claim of 
 Chapman be definitely rejected, we find hitherto no 
 other put forward to take its place. The author of 
 Death's Jest-hook, in that brilliant correspondence on 
 poetical questions which to me gives a higher view of 
 his fine and vigorous intelligence than any other section 
 of his literary remains, reasonably refuses to admit a 
 suggestion that the authorship of this nameless and 
 fatherless poem might be ascribed to Massinger.
 
 68 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 " The poisoning and painting is like him, but also 
 like Cyril Toiirneur ; and it is too poetical for old 
 Philip." He might have added that it is also far 
 too loose and feeble in construction for the admirable 
 artist of whom Coleridge so justly remarked that his 
 plays have the interest of novels ; but Beddoes, 
 whose noble instinct for poetry could never carry 
 him in practice beyond the production of a few lofty 
 and massive fragments of half-formed verse which 
 stand better by themselves when detached from the 
 incoherent and disorderly context, was apparently 
 as incapable of doing justice to the art of Massinger 
 as of reducing under any law of harmony to any 
 fitness of form his own chaotic and abortive concep- 
 tions of a plot ; for the most faithful admirer of that 
 genius which is discernible beyond mistake in certain 
 majestic passages of his blank verse must admit that 
 his idea of a play never passed beyond the embr^^onic 
 stage of such an organism as that upon which he 
 conferred the gift of lyric utterance in his best and 
 favourite song, and that his hapless dramatic off- 
 spring was never and could never have been more 
 than " a bodiless childful of life in the gloom, Crying 
 with frog voice, What shall I be ? " 
 
 Perhaps too for him the taint of Gifford's patronage 
 was still on Massinger, and the good ofhces of that 
 rancorous pedant may have inclined him to under- 
 value the worth of a poet announced and accompanied 
 by the proclamation of such a herald. This connexion, 
 fortunate as in one way it was for the dramatist to 
 whose works it secured for ever a good and trust- 
 worthy text admirably edited and arranged, was 
 unfortunate in its influence on the minds of men
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 69 
 
 who less unnaturally than unjustly were led to 
 regard the poet also with something of the distaste 
 so justly and generally incurred by his editor. This 
 prepossession evidently inflamed and discoloured the 
 opinions of the good Leigh Hunt, who probably 
 would under no conditions have been able adequately 
 to estimate the masculine and unfanciful genius of 
 such writers as Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Ford ; 
 and a like influence may not impossibly have dis- 
 turbed the far surer judgment and affected the far 
 finer taste of a student so immeasurably superior to 
 either Hunt or Beddoes in the higher and rarer 
 faculties of critical genius as Charles Lamb. To 
 Massinger at least, though assuredly not to Ford 
 (who had not yet been edited by Gifford when Lamb 
 put forth his priceless and incomparable book of 
 " Specimens "), the most exquisite as well as the 
 most generous of great critics was usually somewhat 
 less than liberal, if not somewhat less than just. 
 
 But what is most notable to me in the judgment 
 above cited from the correspondence of Beddoes is 
 that he should have touched on the incidental point 
 of action which this anonymous play has in common 
 with The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duke of Milan, 
 and should also have remarked on the poetical or 
 fanciful quality which does undoubtedly distinguish 
 its language from the comparatively unimaginative 
 diction of Massinger, without taking further account 
 of the general and radical dissimilarity of workman- 
 ship which leaves the style of this poem equidistant 
 from the three se^ieral styles of the sober Philip, the 
 thoughtful George, and the fiery Cyril. It is singular 
 that the name of a fourth poet, the quality of whose
 
 70 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 peculiar style is throughout perceptible, should have 
 been missed by so acute and well-read a student of 
 our dramatic poetry. The style is certainly and 
 equally unlike that of Chapman, Massinger, or 
 Tourneur ; but it is very Hke the style of Middleton. 
 The combination of the plots is as pitifully incon- 
 gruous and formless, the movement of the metre as 
 naturally sweet and fluent, the pathos of the situa- 
 tions as occasionally vivid and impressive, the play 
 of the fancy as generally dehcate and unaffected, as 
 in the best or the worst works of the fitful and 
 powerful hand which gave us The Changeling and 
 The Witch, The Spanish Gipsy and Women beware 
 Women. Were there but one grain of external 
 evidence, though light as that which now inclines 
 the scale of probabilities in favour of Chapman, I 
 should not hesitate in assigning to it the workman- 
 ship of this poem also ; but as even such a grain of 
 proof or of likelihood as this is wanting, we may 
 remark one or two points in which a resemblance 
 may be traced to the undoubted handiwork of 
 Chapman ; such as a certain grotesque abruptness 
 and violence in some of the incidents ; for example, 
 the discharge of a pistol at the father of the heroine 
 from the hand of her lover, by which that " ancient 
 sinner " is " but mocked with death " ; a semi- 
 burlesque interlude in a scene of tragic interest and 
 prelude to a speech of vivid eloquence, which may 
 recall the sudden and random introduction of deeds 
 of violence into the action in some of Chapman's 
 plays, as, for instance, the two attempts at murder 
 in The Gentleman Usher, where, though the plot is 
 neither ill devised nor ill arranged, yet some excesses
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 71 
 
 and singularities in the leading incidents are at once 
 perceptible and pardonable ; and again, the manner 
 of the ghost's reappearance at the close, where a 
 disembodied spirit takes part in the stage business 
 with all the coolness and deliberation of a living 
 actor, and is apparently received among the com- 
 pany with little more sign of disturbance or surprise 
 than if she were not confronted with her own dead 
 body, can only be paralleled in Chapman's Bussy 
 d'Amhois or the Death's Jest-hook of Beddoes, in each 
 of which a leading part is filled throughout the later 
 scenes by a ghost who takes his full share of the 
 action and the dialogue, and may be said to make 
 himself generally and creditably useful, without 
 exciting the slightest remark or perturbation among 
 his fleshly fellows of the scene. The quaint mate- 
 rialism of these realistic and too sohd spectres, who 
 show no sign and no desire of dissolution by melting 
 into air or evaporating into dew, has in it nothing 
 of the fine imagination which raises the supernatural 
 agencies employed by the author of The Witch into 
 a middle region of malign and monstrous life as far 
 above the common ground of mere prosaic phantoms 
 as below the dark aerial height at which Shakespeare 
 has clothed the forms with clouds and winged with 
 winds the feet of the weird sisters. Nevertheless, 
 both in Bussy d'Amhois and in this " second Maiden's 
 Tragedy " (as the Master of the Revels has some- 
 what inaptly labelled it), the first introduction of 
 ghostly agency is impressive : and the scene in this 
 latter where the sleep of the dead is first disturbed 
 and her tomb violated by the passion of the baffled 
 tyrant is well worthy of the praise it has received
 
 72 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 for the choice simpHcity and earnest sweetness of 
 style which j^et hardly distinguish it above many 
 other scenes and passages in this beautiful and 
 singular poem, the story of whose fate has proved 
 as strange and as fantastic as the incidents of its 
 plot. 
 
 The first of Chapman's historic tragedies was 
 published at the age of forty-eight, and stands now 
 sixth on the list of the plays in which he had the 
 help of no partner. He never wrote better and he 
 seldom wrote worse than in this only play of his 
 writing which kept any firm and durable hold on 
 the stage. The impression made on Dry den by its 
 " glaring colours " in the representation, and the 
 indignant reaction of his judgment " in the reading," 
 are probably known to more than have studied the 
 work by the light of their own taste. 
 
 All his vituperation is well deserved by such excerpts 
 as those which alone Sir Walter Scott was careful to 
 select in his editorial note on this passage by way of 
 illustration ; not even the sharpest terms in the 
 terrible and splendid arsenal of Dryden's satire can 
 be too vivid or too vigorous in their condemnation 
 of the damnable jargon in which the elder poet was 
 prone to indulge his infirmity ; whole sections of his 
 poems and whole scenes of his plays are indeed but 
 shapeless masses of bombast and bulky vacuity, with 
 nothing better in them than most villainous " incor- 
 rect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry 
 and true nonsense ; or at best a scantling of wit, 
 which lies gasping for life and groaning beneath a 
 heap of rubbish." The injustice of the criticism lies 
 only i-n the assertion or implication that there was
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 78 
 
 nothing discoverable on all Chapman's ground but 
 such cinder-heaps and windbags ; whereas the pro- 
 portion of good to bad in this very play of Bussy 
 d'Amhois is enough to outweigh even such demerits 
 as it doubtless shares with too much of its author's 
 work. There is a bright and fiery energy through- 
 out, a vigour of ambitious aspiration, which is 
 transmitted as it were by echo and reflection from 
 the spirit of the poet into the spirit of his hero. The 
 briUiant swordsman of the court of Henri III, who 
 flashes out on us as the joyous central figure of one 
 of the most joyous and vigorous in all the bright list 
 of those large historic groups to which the strong 
 swift hand of Dumas gave colour and life, has 
 undergone at the heavier hand of the old English 
 poet a singular transfiguration. He is still the 
 irresistible duellist and amorist of tradition ; but 
 instead of the grace and courtliness proper to his 
 age and rank. Chapman has bestowed on him the 
 grave qualities of an epic braggart, whose tongue is 
 at least as long as his sword, and whose gasconades 
 have in them less of the Gascon than of our " Homer- 
 Lucan " himself, who with all his notable interest in 
 the France of his time and her turbulent history had 
 assuredly nothing of the lighter and more gracious 
 characteristics of French genius. But in the broad 
 full outline of this figure, and in the robust handling 
 of the tragic action which serves for environment or 
 for background to its haughty and dilated propor- 
 tions, there is more proof of greatness than Chapman 
 had yet given. His comic or gnomic poetry may 
 be better or at least less faulty in its kind, but in 
 that kind there is less room for the growth and
 
 74 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 display of those greater qualities which not infre- 
 quently struggle through the hot and turbid atmos- 
 phere of his tragic writing, and show by a stormy 
 and cloudy illumination the higher reaches of his 
 real genius. Nor is there in these rugged outlying 
 highlands of tragedy, and in the somewhat thick 
 and troubled air of the brooding skies above them, 
 no beauty perceptible but the beauty of cloud and 
 flame, of flood and fell : they have intervals of pure 
 sunshine and soft greensward, interludes of grave 
 and tender harmony, aspects of deep and serene 
 attraction. There is a noticeable abruptness and 
 want of ease in the disposal of the incidents, as 
 though the workman were not yet well broken in to 
 his business ; and in effect Chapman never did learn 
 to run with perfect ease and grace in tragic harness. 
 Yet if his tragedies were erased from the roll of his 
 works, and only the most perfect of his comedies 
 and the better portions of his other poems were left 
 for our judgment, the sentence that we should then 
 have to pass would assuredly assign him a much 
 lower place among English poets than he now may 
 rightly claim to hold. A greater and a faultier genius 
 finds expression in these tragic poems than in the 
 more general and equable excellence of even his best 
 comic or romantic plays. 
 
 The first in order of these, especially at first sight, 
 is beyond question the most effective in point of 
 dramatic interest. With all its tumid and turbid 
 exuberance of speech, the action of this play never 
 actually halts or flags. There is no depth or 
 delicacy of character discernible in any of the leading 
 parts ; in some cases indeed it is hard at first to
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 75 
 
 determine whether the author meant to excite the 
 sympathies or the antipathies of his audience for a 
 good or for a bad character ; the virtue of the 
 heroine collapses without a touch, and friends and 
 foes change sides with no more reason shown than 
 that the figure of the dance requires it. But the 
 power of hand is gigantic which shifts and shuffles 
 these puppets about the board ; there are passages 
 of a sublime and Titanic beauty, rebellious and 
 excessive in style as in sentiment, but full of majestic 
 and massive harmony. The magnificent speech of 
 the hero, stricken to death and leaning on his sword 
 to die, has been often quoted, and as a sample of 
 fiery imagination clothed in verse of solemn and 
 sonorous music it can never be overpraised ; the 
 inevitable afterthought that the privilege of tragic 
 poetry to exceed the range of realism is here strained 
 to the utmost and beyond it will recur on reading 
 many of the most memorable passages in these plays, 
 where the epic declamation of the speaker breaks 
 the last limit of law to attain the last limit of licence 
 possible to a style which even in outward form keeps 
 up any pretence of dramatic plausibility. Any child 
 may see and object that no man ever died with 
 such a funeral oration on his lips ; but any critic 
 qualified to judge of such a poet in his strength and 
 his weakness will temper the reflection with admira- 
 tion of " that full and heightened style " which the 
 third among English tragic poets has applauded in 
 the tragedies of Chapman. The height indeed is 
 somewhat giddy, and the fullness too often tends or 
 threatens to dilate into tumidity ; sometimes the 
 foot slips and the style stumbles heavily from its
 
 76 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 height, while for its fullness we find but the empti- 
 ness of a burst bladder ; but while the writer's head 
 remains clear and his hand sure, the high air of this 
 poetry is fresh and buoyant, and its full cadences 
 have in them a large echo as of mountain winds and 
 waters. And if Webster, with the generous justice 
 proper to a great fellow-craftsman in the highest 
 guild of art, was able to condone the manifest abuse 
 in Chapman's work of rhetoric and mere poetry, 
 those may well be content to do likewise who bear 
 duly in mind the admirable absence of any such 
 defect from the vivid and intense veracity of his 
 own. 
 
 If the union of active interest with superb decla- 
 mation may suffice to explain the prolonged good 
 fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards, 
 we can discover no such pretext to account for the 
 apparent favour shown to his next venture in the 
 same field. It has no passage comparable for force 
 and vehemence of imagination to the highest moods 
 of the author of Bussy d'Ambois ; to the second 
 evocation of the spirit in a speech of which Lamb 
 said well that it was " tremendous, even to the 
 curdling of the blood ; I know nothing in poetry 
 like it " ; nor to the dying appeal of Bussy to his 
 own surviving fame, or the sweet and weighty verses 
 of invocation in which his mistress adjures " all the 
 peaceful regents of the night " to favour the first 
 meeting of the lovers. It is disfigured by no such 
 bloated bombast and animated by no such theatrical 
 changes of effect, such sudden turns and sharp 
 surprises, as fit the earlier play to catch the eyes 
 and cars of an audience more impressible than
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 77 
 
 critical. It has no such violent interlude of action 
 and emotion as the scene in which Montsurry 
 (Monsoreau) extorts by torture the confession of her 
 guilt from the bleeding hand of his wife, an incident 
 which singularly enough recalls a similar scene in 
 the earliest play of the great French improvisatore 
 who has told in such different fashion the story of 
 the ambuscade by which Bussy fell under the weight 
 of treacherous numbers ; though Dumas, in accor- 
 dance, I believe, with all tradition, assigns to the 
 Duke of Guise the brutal act of force by which his 
 wife was compelled to allure her lover into the snare 
 set by her husband ; whereas the English poet has 
 not only altered the persons of the agent and 
 patient, but has increased the means of compulsion 
 from a pinch on the arm to the application of the 
 rack to a body already mangled by such various 
 wounds that the all but unparalleled tenacity of life 
 in the victim, who reappears in the last scene not 
 perceptibly the worse for these connubial endear- 
 ments, is not the least notable in a series of wonders 
 among which we scarcely make account of the 
 singular part assigned to " the affable familiar 
 ghost " which moves so freely among the less 
 incorporeal actors. To the tough nerves and 
 vigorous appetite of the original audience this scene 
 was no doubt one of the most acceptable in a closing 
 act as remarkable for the stately passion of the style 
 as for the high poetic interest of thought and action. 
 Of these two qualities we find but one, and that the 
 less dramatic, in the next work of the poet. No 
 poem, I suppose, was ever cast in dramatic form 
 which appealed so wholly to the pure intellect. The
 
 78 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 singleness of purpose and the steadiness of resolution 
 with which the poet has pursued his point and for- 
 borne all occasions to diverge from his path to it 
 have made his work that which it is ; a sculptured 
 type and monument of his high and austere genius 
 in the fullness of its faculties and the ripeness of its 
 aims. The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke 
 of Byron, Marshal of France, a small epic in ten 
 books or acts, is the noblest memorial we have of its 
 author's original powers. Considered from the point 
 of view it requires us to assume if we would do any 
 justice to the mind which conceived and the hand 
 which completed such a design, it is a wholly great 
 and harmonious work of genius. Here for once not 
 a note is out of tune, not a touch is out of keeping ; 
 the very inflation of the style is never the inflation 
 of vacuity ; its majesty is no longer tumid, and its 
 elevation is no longer insecure. This at least has a 
 right to be counted for ever among the classic works 
 of English poetry. We close the book at last with 
 a full and satisfied sense of severe delight in the 
 deep inner music which sounds on in the mind's ear 
 after study of the thought and passion which inform 
 it. The height and the harmony of this poem are 
 equal forces in the composition of its excellence ; 
 the height of its conception and the harmony of its 
 completion were alike needed to do justice to such 
 lofty thought and such profound passion as it was 
 called upon to handle and to sound. The strength 
 and wealth of intelligence and of language from the 
 opening of the first act to the close of the tenth 
 show not a sign anyivhere of possible exhaustion or 
 inadequacy to the large demands made on them by
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 79 
 
 the poet's high design. But that such a poem 
 should ever have been " acted in two plays at the 
 Blackfriars and other public stages " must seem to 
 us one of the strangest records in theatrical history. 
 Its appearance on any boards for a single night 
 would have been remarkable enough ; but its 
 reappearance at various theatres is all but incredible. 
 The standard of culture and the level of intelligence 
 required in its auditors surpass what we can conceive 
 any theatrical audience to have attained in any 
 modern age. It is not merely that the hearer or 
 spectator of such a poem in action would have to 
 follow an unbroken line of high thought and lofty 
 language without interlude or relief worth mention- 
 ing of lower or lighter material ; he would have to 
 forgo all points of interest whatever but the satis- 
 faction of the pure intelligence. There is endless 
 repetition with absolutely no progress ; infinite 
 effusion of speech without one break of material 
 incident. Even the subtle action and reaction of 
 the mind, the ebb and flow of spiritual forces, the 
 coming and going of intellectual influences, are not 
 here given with the strength and cunning of such a 
 master's hand as might secure and sustain the 
 interest of a student in tracing their various move- 
 ments by the light of his guidance ; those movements 
 are too deep and delicate for the large epic touch of 
 Chapman to pursue with any certitude. A few 
 strong broad strokes often repeated suffice to com- 
 plete the simple and vigorous outline which is all he 
 can give us of a character. It has been observed 
 that the portrait of the traitor marshal " is overlaid 
 with so many touches that the outline is completely
 
 80 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 disguised " ; but as none of these are incongruous, 
 none mistimed or misplaced, we may reply that it is 
 of the very essence of this character to express its 
 passion with such effusion and exuberance of verbal 
 energy that the very repetition and prolongation of 
 these effects tend rather to heighten than to weaken 
 the design, to intensify than to impair the impression 
 of the weakness and the force of the mind that thus 
 pours itself out and foams itself away in large and 
 sweUing words. The quality of pathos is not among 
 the dominant notes of Chapman's genius ; but there 
 is pathos of a high and masculine order in the last 
 appeals and struggles of the ruined spirit and the 
 fallen pride which yet retain some trace and likeness 
 of the hero and the patriot that has been, though 
 these be now wellnigh erased and buried under the 
 disgrace of deeds which have left nothing in his place 
 but the ruins of a braggart and a traitor. Upon the 
 two high figures of the marshal and the king Chap- 
 man has expended his utmost power ; and they 
 confront each other on his page in gigantic outhne 
 like two studies of a great sculptor whose work is 
 never at its best but when it assumes the heroic 
 proportion of simple and colossal forms. There is 
 no growth or development in cither character ; 
 Chapman is always least happy when he tries his 
 prentice hand at analysis ; he only does well when 
 as here he brings before us a figure at once full-grown, 
 and takes no care but to enforce the first impression 
 by constant deepening of the lines first drawn, not 
 by addition of fresh light and shade, by softening 
 or heightening of minor tones and effects. The high 
 poetic austerity of this work as it now stands is all
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 81 
 
 the more striking from the absence of any female 
 element ; the queen appears in the fourth act of the 
 second part as little more than a dumb figure ; the 
 whole interest is political, and the whole character 
 is masculine, of the action and the passion on which 
 the poet has fixed our attention and concentrated 
 his own. A passage now cancelled in which the 
 queen and Mademoiselle de Verneuil were brought 
 forward, and the wife gave the mistress a box on 
 the ear, had naturally drawn down a remonstrance 
 from the French ambassador who saw the domestic 
 life of his master's court presented with such singular 
 frankness of exposition to the contemporary eyes of 
 London playgoers ; and at his instigation the play 
 was not unreasonably prohibited, by an act of 
 censorship assuredly not so absurd or so arbitrary as 
 in our own day has repeatedly exposed the direction 
 of the English stage to the contempt and compassion 
 of civilized Europe ; which has seen at once the 
 classical and the contemporary masterpieces of Italy 
 and of France, and among them the works of the 
 greatest tragic dramatist whom the world has seen 
 since the death of vShakespeare, forbidden by the 
 imperial mandate of some Lord Chamberlain or 
 other Olympian person to corrupt the insular chastity 
 of an audience too virtuous to face the contamination 
 of such writers as Hugo or Alfieri ; while the virtue 
 thus tenderly guarded from the very sight of a 
 Marion or a Mirra was by way of compensation — 
 there is a law of compensation in all things — 
 graciously permitted by leave of official examiners 
 and under favour of a chaste Chamberlain to gloat 
 upon the filthiest farces that could be raked from 
 
 F
 
 82 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the sweepings of a stage whose national masterpieces 
 were excluded from our own. But it is only proper 
 that the public virginity which averts her eyes from 
 the successors of Euripides or of Shakespeare should 
 open her bosom to the successors of Wycherley and 
 Mrs. Behn. In the time of Chapman the Master of 
 the Revels wielded with as fitful a hand as imperious 
 an authority as any court official of later date ; yet 
 then also there was so curious and scandalous an 
 alternation of laxity with rigour in the direction of 
 stage affairs that in the teeth of a direct prohibition 
 the players, " when they saw that the whole court 
 had left town, persisted in acting " the suppressed 
 play with all the offending parts revived for the 
 satisfaction of an audience of citizens whose un- 
 courtly suffrage was possibly attracted by this 
 defiance of the court ; and it may be conjectured 
 that the savour of this political scandal gave zest 
 and edge to their relish of the otherwise grave and 
 sober entertainment set before them by the poet, 
 whose somewhat weighty venture may thus have 
 been floated into favour on the artificial tide of a 
 chance which had made it the pretext of a popular 
 cry. If, however, there was any such anti-Gallican 
 or seditious element in the success of a play which 
 must certainly, one would say, have needed all the 
 outward and casual help it could get to impose itself 
 on the goodwill of the multitude, the French envoy 
 was not slack in bringing a counter-influence to bear 
 against it ; for three of the recalcitrant actors were 
 arrested at his suit ; but M. de Beaumont regretfully 
 adds that " the principal person, the author, 
 escaped." When three years later the poem was
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 83 
 
 published, his printers had probably learnt caution 
 enough from this fresh experience to ensure the 
 suppression in all published copies of every trace of 
 the forbidden part ; and indeed there should seem 
 to be two gaps in the printed text ; one at the 
 sudden end of the brief fourth act of the first part, 
 which breaks off sharply after the eloquent and 
 elaborate narrative of the speeches exchanged on the 
 occasion of Biron's embassy to England, between 
 the marshal, Queen Elizabeth, and her prime 
 minister ; one at the end of the first or opening of 
 the second act of the second part, which acts in both 
 editions of the play are run into each other without 
 any mark of division ; but the great length of the 
 fifth (or tenth) act as it now stands may suggest that 
 this seeming confusion has been caused by a mere 
 numerical derangement or misprint. 
 
 The fittest symbol I can find for this great and 
 central work of Chapman's genius would be one 
 derived from itself ; we might liken the poem to 
 that " famous mountain " which was to be carved 
 into the colossal likeness of the hero, a giant holding 
 a city in his left hand and pouring from his right an 
 endless flood into a raging sea. This device of a 
 mad and magnificent vanity gives as it were a 
 reflection of the great and singular qualities of the 
 poem ; it has an epic and Titanic enormity of 
 imagination, the huge and naked solitude of a 
 mountain rising from the sea, whose head is oare 
 before the thunders, and whose sides are fuiTowed 
 with stormy streams ; and from all its rocks and 
 torrents, crags and scaurs and gulleys, there seems 
 to look forth the likeness afar off of a single face,
 
 84 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 superhuman and inordinate in the proportion of its 
 prodigious features. The general effect is as that of ' 
 some vast caprice of landscape ; at once fantastic, 
 exaggerated, and natural. Around it we may group 
 the remaining works of its author as lower spurs 
 of the outlying range of mountains. None of these 
 lesser poems were ever befriended by such an occa- 
 sion as lifted for a season into perilous popularity 
 the mightiest of their author's dramatic brood ; that 
 the two likest in form and spirit to this giant brother 
 of their race appear to have won no popular favour 
 at all is certainly less remarkable than the record of 
 its o\vn success. The Revenge of Biissy d'Ambois is 
 a singular example of Chapman's passion for para- 
 dox. It is a work of mature power and serious 
 interest, richer in passages of moral magnificence 
 and interludes of exalted meditation than any but 
 that greatest of his poems which we have just been 
 considering ; from the large storehouse of these 
 three plays a student may select at every step 
 among their massive heaps of mental treasure fresh 
 samples of rare thought and costly style, fresh ingots 
 of weighty and glittering gold, fresh jewels of pro- 
 found and living lustre. The third of these has less 
 in common with the play of which it is the nominal 
 sequel than with the two of intervening date ; it has 
 indeed more of incident than they, but its value and 
 interest mainly depend on its gnomic or contempla- 
 tive passages. In the argument, the action, and the 
 characters of this poem one chief aim of the author 
 was apparently to reverse all expectations that 
 might be excited by its title, and bj' way of counter- 
 part to produce a figure in all points opposite to
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 85 
 
 that of his former hero. The brother and avenger 
 of Bussy appears as the favourite and faithful 
 follower of a leading accomplice in his murder ; he 
 is as sober, sententious, and slow in action as his 
 brother was boastful, impetuous, and violent ; he 
 turns every chance of fortune and every change of 
 place into an occasion for philosophic debate and 
 moral declamation ; the shelter provided by his 
 patron and the ambuscade prepared by his enemies 
 are to him equally opportune for the delivery of a 
 lecture on ethics, as close and serried in its array of 
 argument as it is grave and measured in its eloquence 
 of exposition. Hamlet himself gave less cause of 
 complaint to the " poor ghost " whose second 
 resurrection was insufficient to impel him to the 
 discharge of his office than this yet more deliberate 
 and meditative avenger of blood : and it is not 
 without cause that the tardy shade of Bussy rises 
 to rebuke the tardier hand of his brother in words 
 heavier and more bitter than any that fall from the 
 majesty of buried Denmark. The quaint contrast 
 between the tragic violence of the story and the 
 calm interest of the dialogue is not the only aspect 
 afforded by this poem of its author's taste for 
 extravagance of paradox and shocks of moral 
 surprise. His dcHght throughout these historic 
 plays is to put into the mouths of his chief speakers 
 some defence of the most preposterous and untenable 
 proposition, some apology for the most enormous 
 and unpopular crime that his ingenuity can fix 
 upon for explanation or excuse. Into the mouth of 
 Biron he had already put a panegyric on the policy 
 and the person of Phihp H ; into the mouth of
 
 86 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Clermont he puts a vindication of the massacre of 
 St. Bartholomew. This latter curious and coura- 
 geous abuse of intellectual dexterity may perhaps 
 have contributed to the ill success of a play which 
 in any case must have disappointed, and that 
 apparently by design and of malice prepense, the 
 expectations appealed to by a title seemingly devised 
 to trade upon the popularity of Bussy d'Amhois, 
 and make its profit out of the artificial capital of a 
 past success. The audience attracted by the promise 
 implied in such a title may easily have been dis- 
 inclined by such a disappointment to receive with 
 toleration these freaks of dialectic ingenuity. It is 
 not likely that a writer who must have been old 
 enough at the age of thirteen to feel and to remember 
 the shock of the first tidings of the hideous twenty- 
 fourth of August 1572 — that an English poet and 
 patriot of the stalwart type which from all that we 
 know of Chapman we might expect to find always 
 as nobly exemplified in his life and writings as in 
 those of such elder and younger contemporaries as 
 Spenser and Jonson — should have indulged any 
 more personal sentiment in these eccentric trials of 
 intellectual strength than a wayward pleasure in the 
 exercise and exhibition of his powers of argument 
 and eloquence ; but there was certainly in his 
 nature something of the sophist as well as of the 
 gnomic poet, of Thrasymachus as well as of Theognis. 
 He seems to feel a gladiator's pleasure in the sword- 
 play of a boisterous and high-handed sophistry less 
 designed to mislead or convince than to baffle or 
 bear down his opponent. We can imagine him 
 setting up almost any debatable theorem as a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 87 
 
 subject for dispute in the schools of rhetoric, and 
 maintaining his most indefensible position with as 
 much energy and cunning of argument as his native 
 force of mind could bring to the support of his 
 acquired skill of fence : we can perceive that in any 
 such case he would argue his point and reinforce his 
 reasoning with no less passion and profusion of 
 thought and speech than if his heart and conscience 
 were enlisted on the side which in fact he had taken 
 up by mere chance or defiant caprice. This, however, 
 is by no means the general character of the philo- 
 sophy set forth and the eloquence displayed in this 
 poem. The whole character of Clermont, conceived 
 as it is in a spirit of direct defiance to all rules and 
 traditions of dramatic effect, and elaborated as 
 though in disdain of possible success or the antici- 
 pated chance of popularity, shows once more the 
 masterly workmanship of a potent and resolute 
 hand. In almost every scene there are examples of 
 sound and noble thought clothed in the sober 
 colours of terse and masculine poetry ; of deep and 
 high meditation touched now and then with the 
 ardour of a fervid spirit and the light of a subtle 
 fancy. At every page some passage of severe beauty 
 reminds us with how great a spirit we are called to 
 commune, and stand in the presence of how proud 
 and profound a mind. His equal love for the depths 
 and the heights of speculation may too often impel 
 this poet to overstrain his powers of thought and 
 utterance in the strong effort to dive or to soar into 
 an atmosphere too thin or a sea too stormy to 
 admit the facile and natural play of his vigorous 
 faculties ; but when these are displayed in their full
 
 88 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 strength and clearness the study of them gives us 
 some taste of the rare and haughty pleasure that 
 their owner must have taken in their exercise. 
 Here as elsewhere I had taken note in my mind of 
 special verses and passages fit for extraction, which 
 might give some sample of the general power and 
 charm of the keen intellect and the fine imagination 
 that shape and inform the scheme and action of the 
 poem ; but to cite one or more instances of these 
 would be to wrong the profuse and liberal genius 
 which has sown them broadcast in so rich a soil. 
 The reader who seeks them for himself with a 
 judging eye and an apprehensive spirit will not be 
 unlikely to make of The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, 
 for the wealth and the weight of its treasures of 
 ethical beauty, his chosen and peculiar favourite 
 among the works of Chapman. 
 
 In the last of this stately line of tragic poems 
 dealing with the recent or immediate history of 
 France we find the same prevailing qualities of moral 
 force and poetic dignity. The tragedy of Chahot is 
 more equable and less ambitious in treatment than 
 any of its compeers ; but the model given in its 
 hero of majestic faith and august integrity may be 
 classed among the purest and most perfect studies 
 that we have from the sculptor's hand. The serene 
 and stainless figure of a wholly righteous and loyal 
 man is so thoroughly and truthfully sustained by 
 the high instinct and spiritual sense of the poet that 
 we may trace and recognize from the first a nature 
 so inflexible at once and so sensitive as to refuse all 
 shelter or compromise which might rather protect 
 than vindicate his innocence from the attacks of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 89 
 
 fraud and injustice, and when cleared of all their 
 charges and restored to all his honours to lie down 
 and die of the wound inflicted by the mere shame of 
 suspicion : a heart so stout and so tender that it 
 could resist all shocks and strokes of power or 
 treachery, and bleed to death for grief to be dis- 
 trusted where most of all it had deserved to find 
 trust. But here again the singleness and purity of 
 the interest could hardly be expected to secure 
 success on the stage ; and though we have no hint 
 as to the good or ill fortune of this high-toned poem, 
 we may conjecture that it could hardly have been 
 redeemed from popular indifference by the dramatic 
 power and pathetic impression of the scene in 
 which the wife and father-in-law of the arraigned 
 admiral prevail by the justice and dignity of 
 their appeal upon the pride and prepossession of 
 the queen. Yet this at least, and the last scene 
 in which Chabot dies at the feet of his repentant 
 master with a prayer for the pardon of his enemy 
 on the lips that kiss for the last time the hand 
 which must confer it, should have found favour 
 with an audience capable of doing justice to 
 the high desert of such austere and unseductive 
 excellence. 
 
 As we have no external ground for conjecture by 
 what original impulse or bias of mind the genius of 
 Chapman was attracted to the study and representa- 
 tion on an English stage of subjects derived from 
 the annals of contemporary France, or what freak 
 of perverse and erratic instinct may have led him 
 to bring before a Protestant audience the leading 
 criminals of the Catholic party under any but an
 
 90 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 unfavourable aspect, so we have no means of 
 guessing whether or not any conscious reason or 
 principle induced him to present in much the same 
 light three princes of such diverse characters as the 
 first Francis and the third and fourth Henries of 
 France. Indeed, but for a single reference to his 
 ransom " from Pavian thraldom " (Act ii, Scene 3), 
 we should be wholly at a loss to recognize in the 
 royal master of Chabot the radiant and exuberant 
 lover of the whole world of women, 
 
 ce roi sacre chevalier par Bayard, 
 Jeune homme auquel il faut des plaisirs de vieillard, 
 
 who in our own age has been far otherwise presented 
 
 on the theatre of a far mightier poet. There is no 
 
 hint in the play that any more prevaiHng and less 
 
 legitimate influence than a wife's was brought to 
 
 bear in favour of Chabot on a king with whom his 
 
 lawful consort might have been supposed of all 
 
 women the least likely to prevail ; and by this 
 
 suppression or disguise of the personal interest 
 
 actually exerted on behalf of his hero the dramatist 
 
 has defrauded of her due credit the real friend of the 
 
 fallen admiral ; for it was not at the instance of the 
 
 queen, but at the instance of Madame d'Etampes, a 
 
 kinswoman of Chabot, that the chancellor Poyet 
 
 was arrested and disgraced in the same year (1542) 
 
 which had seen the fall, the restoration, and the 
 
 death by heart-break of the faithful minister who 
 
 owed not to the intercession of the king's wife but 
 
 to his own alliance by blood with the king's mistress 
 
 that revenge which at the first occasion given the 
 
 duchess was not slow to exact from her lover on the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 91 
 
 triumphant enemy of her kinsman. The haughty 
 integrity which involved and upheld Chabot in 
 danger and disgrace, and the susceptible pride which 
 when restored to favour could no longer support 
 him under the sense of past degradation, are painted 
 from the life of history ; but his poet may be 
 thought to have somewhat softened the harsher 
 features of that arrogance and roughness of temper 
 which impaired the high qualities and imperilled the 
 high station of the brave and upright admiral who 
 dared his king to find a ground for his impeachment. 
 And if we miss in Chapman's portrait those chival- 
 rous and amorous features which long kept fresh in 
 popular fancy the knightly fame of Francis I, the 
 figure set before us is not wanting in a kingly grace 
 and dignity which the dramatist has chosen to 
 bestow with an equal hand on the grandson to 
 whom neither history nor tradition has assigned even 
 so much of " the king-becoming graces " as may be 
 allowed to the conqueror of Marignano. Chapman 
 indeed has in this case taken so little care to preserve 
 the historic relations of his leading characters that 
 the king by whose intervention Bussy d'Amboise 
 was betrayed to the jealousy of Monsoreau appears 
 not as the treacherous enemy but as the trusty friend 
 and patron of his brother's rebellious favourite ; 
 pardons and prefers him to the rank of his own, 
 and adopts him into that station by the surname of 
 his eagle ; while instead of the king it is here the 
 Duke of Anjou who delivers his refractory minion 
 into the murderous snare set for him by an injured 
 husband. But if I read aright the hinted imputa- 
 tion of Brantome, it would seem that some years
 
 92 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 before he put into the hands of Monsoreau the inter- 
 cepted correspondence of Bussy with his wife the 
 king had already laid an ambush of " twelve good 
 men " armed with pistols, and " mounted on 
 Spanish horses taken from the stables of a very 
 great personage who had set them on," to attempt 
 the life of his brother's indomitable champion, who 
 was preserved as well by his own presence of mind 
 and discretion as by the good fortune which befell 
 him to find the door of a neighbour's house ajar for 
 him to slip through and fasten it against pursuit. 
 Being compelled after this adventure to leave Paris 
 in consequence of his threats " to slit folk's nostrils, 
 and that he would kill everybody " in retaliation for 
 this nocturnal assault, the gallant bravo was escorted 
 out of the city by all the noble retainers of his 
 ignoble patron the Duke of Anjou, but by three 
 gentlemen only of the king's household brigade, his 
 kinsman Brantome, whom he charged at parting to 
 bear back his defiance to the whole court, M. de 
 Neuville, and the hero Crillon, who in spite of his 
 attachment to the king's party refused to forsake 
 the friendship of so stout a swordsman. Although 
 the first standard edition of Brantome's Lives was 
 not published by a descendant of his family till 
 thirty-two years after the death of Chapman, it is 
 singular that the English poet who thought fit to 
 choose as a subject for tragedy the fate of a man 
 at the time of whose murder he had himself reached 
 the age of twenty should also have thought fit so 
 seriously to alter the facts of his story for no dis- 
 cernible reason but a desire to shift the charge of 
 the principal villainy from the shoulders of a king
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 93 
 
 to those of his brother. In either play dedicated to 
 the memory of Bussy — who at the wildest pitch of 
 his windy and boisterous vanity can never have 
 anticipated that twenty-eight years after his death 
 he would figure on the page of a foreign poet as a 
 hero of the Homeric or Lucanian type — the youngest 
 son of Catharine de' Medici is drawn in colours as 
 hateful as those of truth or tradition ; whereas the 
 last king of his line is handled with such remarkable 
 forbearance that his most notorious qualities are 
 even less recognizable than those of his grandfather 
 in the delicate and dignified study of Chapman. A 
 reader indeed, if such a one were possible, who 
 should come to the perusal of these plays with no 
 previous knowledge of French history, would find 
 little difference or distinction between Henri de 
 Valois and Henri de Bourbon ; and would probably 
 carry away the somewhat inaccurate impression 
 that the slayer of the Duke of Guise and the judge 
 of the Duke of Biron were men of si^^ilar tastes and 
 manners, respectable if not venerable for their 
 private virtues, elegant and sententious in their 
 habitual choice of language, grave and decorous in 
 their habitual carriage and discourse, and equally 
 imbued with a fine and severe sense of responsibility 
 for the conscientious discharge of the highest and 
 hardest duties of their royal office. It is less 
 remarkable, as the dramatist in his dedication to 
 Sir Thomas Howard disclaims all pretension to 
 observe " the authentical truth of either person or 
 action," as a thing not to be expected " in a poem 
 whose subject is not truth, but things like truth," 
 that he should have provided to avenge the daring
 
 94 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and turbulent desperado who outbraved the gorgeous 
 minions of the king with a simple dress set off by 
 the splendour of six pages in cloth of gold, and then 
 signalized by a fresh insult under the very eyes of 
 Henri his enforced reconciliation with the luckless 
 leader of their crew, a brother of whose name I know 
 nothing but that Georges de Clermont d'Amboise, 
 not a follower of Guise but a leader of the Huguenots, 
 was slain seven years earlier than Bussy in the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew. Chapman's apology 
 for the attribution of this name to the apparently 
 imaginar}^ avenger of his brother's blood is better 
 worth remembering than such inquiries are worth 
 pursuing. " Poor envious souls they are," says the 
 poet, " that cavil at truth's want in these natural 
 fictions " ; a reasonable and memorable protest 
 against the perverse or senseless paradox which 
 confounds truth with fact and refuses to distinguish 
 veracity from reality ; and which would not be 
 worth the passing notice of a contemptuous instant 
 if men of genius would forbear to confuse the minds 
 of their feebler and more servile admirers by the 
 adoption and promulgation in the loudest tones of 
 prophecy of such blatant and vacuous babble about 
 " kinship of fiction to lying " and so forth as should 
 properly be left to the lips of the dunces who may 
 naturally believe it, being thick-witted enough to 
 accept as serious reasoning and deliberate opinion 
 the most wilful and preposterous paradoxes thun- 
 dered forth from pulpit or from tripod in the most 
 riotous and ludicrous paroxysms of wayward humour 
 or fantastic passion. 
 
 That the " Roman tragedy " of CcBsar and Pompey
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 95 
 
 was earlier in date than most though later in publica- 
 tion than any except Chahot of the French series, 
 we might have conjectured without the evidence of 
 the dedication. It is more unequal and irregular in 
 the proportion of its good parts and its bad than 
 any of Chapman's tragedies except Bussy d'Amhois ; 
 I should imagine it to be a work of nearly the same 
 period ; though, as was before intimated, it bears 
 more affinity to the sequel of that play and to the 
 great tragic poem on Biron in the main quality of 
 interest and the preponderance of speech over 
 action. To this play we might adapt a well-known 
 critical remark of Dr. Johnson's on Henry VIII, 
 much less applicable in that case than in this, and 
 say that the genius of the author comes in and goes 
 out with Cato. Not that even in this case that 
 rhetorical phrase would be wholly accurate ; there 
 are noble lines and passages discernible elsewhere ; 
 but the glory of the poem is given it by the scenes 
 in which Cato is the leading figure. I know nothing 
 in moral or contemplative poetry more admirable 
 than the speech in the first scene on fear or mistrust 
 of the gods, and the soliloquy in the last act on 
 sleep and death. The serene and sublime emotion 
 of heroic wisdom is in either passage so touched and 
 tempered with something of the personal ardour of 
 a noble passion that its tone and effect are not 
 merely abstract or didactic but thoroughly dramatic 
 and human, and the weighty words ring in the ear 
 of our remembrance long after the mind has first 
 unconsciously absorbed and retained the lofty sound 
 and sense of the memorable and magnificent verse 
 It is especially in such examples as these that we
 
 96 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 perceive the great quality of Chapman's genius, the 
 true height and purity of its power ; majestic 
 intellect lighted and enkindled by poetic imagination, 
 the high beauty of heroic thought warmed and 
 winged with the spiritual fire of a living sentiment. 
 It is true that those who read only the glorious 
 excerpts given from this poem by Charles Lamb 
 will have a nobler impression of its merit than they 
 who read the whole ; but those only who read the 
 whole will know all its merit as well as all its demerit ; 
 they will find fresh treasures of fine thought and 
 high expression embedded among dense la3^ers of 
 crabbed and confused rhetoric, wedged in between 
 rocky strata of thick and turgid verse. As there is 
 little other life or movement in the play but that of 
 declamation or discussion, we might presume that 
 if it had ever " touched at the stage " its reception 
 would in all likelihood have been something less 
 than favourable ; but we have already remarked on 
 such inexplicable variations of good and ill luck in 
 the fortunes of Chapman's plays that no conclusion 
 of the kind can be assumed as certain. That it 
 never did lose on any boards its long-preserved 
 immunity from the touch of actors or managers, we 
 may, I suppose, after the author's assurance of its 
 virginity at the date of publication, be tolerably 
 confident. 
 
 Twenty years after the death of Chapman the long 
 list of his dramatic works was completed by the 
 publication of two tragedies in which, though there 
 are but few qualities common to both, there are yet 
 fewer traces of either the chief merits or the chief 
 defects which distinguish and deform alike the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 97 
 
 poems and the tragic plays published during the life 
 of the author. There is nothing in them of bombast, 
 of barbarism, or of obscurity ; there is assuredly no 
 lack of incidents, and these, however crowded and 
 violent in themselves, are conducted with such 
 clearness and simplicity of exposition as to keep the 
 attention and interest of the reader undistracted 
 and unfatigued. The style in both is pure, lucid, 
 and vigorous ; equably sustained at an even height 
 above the lowlands of prosaic realism and beneath 
 the cloudland of winds and vapours ; more forcible 
 and direct in the first play, more florid and decora- 
 tive in the second. On the other hand, these post- 
 humous children have not the lofty stature, the 
 kingly aspect, the gigantic sinews and the shining 
 eyes which went far to redeem the halting gait and 
 the irregular features of their elders. They want 
 the breadth of brow, the weight of brain, the fullness 
 of speech, and the fire of spirit which make amends 
 for the harsh voice and stammering tongue that 
 imperfectly deliver the message entrusted to them ; 
 the tumultuous eloquence which bears down and 
 sweeps away all physical impediment of utter- 
 ance, the fervid vitality which transfigures and 
 atones for all clumsiness of gesture or deformity 
 of limb. 
 
 No thought so ripe and sweet, no emotion so exalted 
 and august is here discernible as that which uplifts 
 the contemplation and upholds the confidence of the 
 highest in spirit and the deepest in thought among 
 those earlier speakers who served as mouthpieces of 
 the special genius of their high-minded and deep- 
 souled creator. There is no trace of the ethical 
 
 G
 
 98 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 power which informs and moulds the meditation of 
 Clermont or of Cato, no relic of the imaginative 
 passion which expands and inflates the fancy of 
 Bussy or of Biron. In Alphonsus there is more 
 of Chapman's quality at first perceptible than in 
 Revenge for Honour ; there is a certain hardness in 
 the simplicity of tone, a certain rigidity in the 
 sharp masculine lineaments of style and character, 
 common to much of his work when free from the 
 taint of crabbed or bombastic obscurity. The 
 singular violation and confusion of history, which 
 may be taken to mask the probable allusions to 
 matters of more recent political interest, are ably 
 explained and illustrated by Dr. Elze in the 
 thoroughly efficient and sufficient introduction to 
 his edition of this play ; in which the student will 
 observe, with gratitude for his help and admiration 
 for his learning in all matters of social and historical 
 illustration, that the German editor has kept well 
 to such work as he was perfectly competent to 
 discharge, and has never on this occasion exchanged 
 the highest seat in the hall of scholarship for the 
 lowest form in the school of criticism. By him as 
 by others the actual merit of this most unhistoric of 
 historical dramas has perhaps been somewhat under- 
 rated. Naked as it is of ornament, violent in most 
 of its action and repulsive in several of its scenes, 
 barren of beauty in language and poor in treasure 
 of thought, it never fails in animation and interest ; 
 and the hardened student of our early stage who has 
 once entered the shambles will hardly turn away in 
 disgust or weariness from the fume and flow of 
 monotonous bloodshed till his curiosity at least has
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 99 
 
 been satisfied by the final evolution of the tangled web 
 of slaughter. In this catastrophe especially there 
 is a remarkable sense of sirong material effect, with a 
 notable capacity for vigorous theatrical manipulation 
 of incident, which is as notably deficient in the 
 earlier and loftier works of Chapman. 
 
 In the tragedy of Revenge for Honour I have 
 already noticed the curious change of style which 
 distinguishes it from all other works of Chapman : 
 a change from rigidity to relaxation, from energy to 
 fluency, from concentration to effusion of language. 
 It has something of the manner and metre of 
 Fletcher and his school, something of the softness 
 and facility which lend a half-effeminate grace to 
 the best scenes of Shirley : while in the fifth act at 
 least I observe something too much of the merely 
 conventional imagery and the overflow of easy 
 verbosity which are the besetting sins of that poet's 
 style. Only in one image can I find anything of 
 that quaint fondness for remote and eccentric 
 illustration in which the verse of Chapman resembles 
 the prose of Fuller : this is put into the mouth of 
 the villain of the piece, who repudiates conscience as 
 
 a weak and fond remembrance 
 Which men should shun, as elephants clear springs. 
 Lest thej' behold their own deformities 
 And start at their grim shadows. 
 
 Even here the fall of the verse is not that of 
 Chapman, and the tone of the verses which imme- 
 diately follow is so utterly alien from the prevailing 
 tone of his that the authenticity of the scene, as 
 indeed of the whole play, can only be vindicated by
 
 100 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 a supposition that in his last years he may for once 
 have taken the whim and had the power to change 
 his style and turn his hand to the new fashion of 
 the youngest writers then prospering on the stage. 
 Only the silliest and shallowest of pedants and of 
 sciolists can imagine that a question as to the date 
 or the authorship of any poem can be determined 
 by mere considerations of measure and mechanical 
 computation of numbers ; as though the language 
 of a poem were divisible from the thought, or (to 
 borrow a phrase from the INIiltonic theology) the 
 effluence were separable from the essence of a man's 
 genius. It should be superfluous and impertinent to 
 explain that the expression is not to be considered 
 apart from the substance ; but while men who do 
 not know this are suffered to utter as with the 
 authority of a pedagogue or a pulpiteer the verdict 
 of the gerundgrinders and metremongers on the 
 finest and most intricate questions of the subtlest 
 and most sublime of arts, it is but too evident that 
 the explanation of even so simple and radical a 
 truth can be neither impertinent nor superfluous. 
 It is not because a particular pronoun or conjunction 
 is used in this play some fifty times oftener than it 
 occurs in any other work of its author, a point on 
 which I profess myself neither competent nor careful 
 to pronounce, that I am prepared to decide on the 
 question of its authenticity or its age. That ques- 
 tion indeed I am diffident enough to regard as one 
 impossible to resolve. That it is the work of 
 Chapman I see no definite reason to disbelieve, and 
 not a little reason to suppose that it may be. The 
 selection and treatment of the subject recall the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 101 
 
 trick of his fancy and the habit of his hand ; the 
 process of the story is in parts quaint and bloody, 
 galvanic and abrupt ; but the movement on the 
 whole is certainly smoother, the evolution more 
 regular, the arrangement more dramatic than of 
 old. Accepting it as the last tragic effort of the 
 author whose first extant attempt in that line was 
 Biissy d'Amhois, we shall find perhaps in the general 
 workmanship almost as much of likeness as of 
 unlikeness. Considered apart and judged by its 
 own merits, we shall certainly find it, like Alphonsus, 
 animated and amusing, noticeable for a close and 
 clear sequence of varying incident and interest, and 
 for a quick light touch in the sketching of superficial 
 character. These being its chief qualities, we may 
 fairly pronounce that whether or not it be the work 
 of Chapman it belongs less to his school than to the 
 school of Shirley ; yet being as it is altogether too 
 robust and masculine for a work of the latter school, 
 it seems most reasonable to admit it as the child of 
 an older father, the last-born of a more vigorous 
 generation, with less of strength and sap than its 
 brothers, but with something in return of the 
 younger and lighter graces of its fellows in age. The 
 hero and his father are figures well invented and 
 well sustained ; the villains are not distorted or 
 overdrawn, and the action is full of change and 
 vivacity. 
 
 Of the poems published by Chapman after the 
 first of his plays was given to the press, we may say 
 generally that they show some signs of advance 
 and none of retrogression from the standard of his 
 earlier work. Out of many lovely lines embedded
 
 102 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in much thick and turbid matter I choose one 
 couplet from The Tears of Peace as an example of 
 their best beauties : 
 
 Free sufferance for the truth makes sorrow sing, 
 And mourning far more sweet than banqueting. 
 
 In this poem, wdth much wearisome confusion and 
 iteration of thought and imagery, reprobation 
 and complaint, there are several noble interludes 
 of gnomic and symbolic verse. The allegory is of 
 course clouded and confounded by all manner of 
 perversities and obscurities worth no man's while to 
 elucidate or to rectify ; the verse hoarse and stiff, 
 the style dense and convulsive, inaccurate and 
 violent ; yet ever and anon the sense becomes clear, 
 the style pure, the imagery luminous and tender, the 
 verse gracious and majestic ; transformed for a 
 moment and redeemed by great brief touches of 
 high and profound harmony ; of which better mood 
 let us take in proof a single instance, and that the 
 most sustained and exquisite we shall find : 
 
 Before her flew Affliction, girt in storms, 
 Gash'd all with gushing wounds, and all the forms 
 Of bane and misery frowning in her face ; 
 Whom Tyranny and Injustice had in chase ; 
 Grim Persecution, Poverty, and Shame ; 
 Detraction, Envy, foul Mishap and lame 
 Scruple of Conscience ; Fear, Deceit, Despair ; 
 Slander and Clamour, that rent all the air ; 
 Hate, War, and Massacre ; uncrowned Toil 
 And Sickness, t' all the rest the base and foil, 
 Crept after ; and his deadly weight trod dovm. 
 Wealth, Beauty, and the glory of a crown.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 103 
 
 These usher'd her far off ; as figures given 
 
 To show, these crosses borne make peace with heaven. 
 
 But now, made free from them, next her before. 
 
 Peaceful and young, Herculean silence bore 
 
 His cragg}^ club ; which up aloft he hild ; 
 
 With which and his fore-finger's charm he stHl'd 
 
 All sounds in air ; and left so free mine ears. 
 
 That I might hear the music of the spheres. 
 
 And all the angels singing out of heaven ; 
 
 Whose tunes were solemn, as to passion given ; 
 
 For now, that Justice was the happiness there 
 
 For all the wrongs to Right inflicted here. 
 
 Such was the passion that Peace now put on ; 
 
 And on all went ; when suddenly was gone 
 
 All light of heaven before us ; from a wood. 
 
 Whose sight foreseen now lost, amazed we stood, 
 
 The sun still gracing us ; when now, the air 
 
 Inflamed with meteors, we discover'd fair 
 
 The skipping goat ; the horse's flaming mane ; 
 
 Bearded and trained comets ; stars in wane 
 
 The burning sword ; the firebrand-flying snake ; 
 
 The lance ; the torch ; the licking fire ; the drake ; 
 
 And all else meteors that did ill abode 
 
 The thunder chid ; the lightning leapt abroad ; 
 
 And 5^et when Peace came in all heaven was clear ; 
 
 And then did all the horrid wood appear, 
 
 Where mortal dangers more than leaves did grow ; 
 
 In which we could not one free step bestow. 
 
 For treading on some murder'd passenger 
 
 Who thither was by witchcraft forced to err : 
 
 Whose face the bird hid that loves humans best, 
 
 That hath the bugle eyes and rosy breast. 
 
 And is the yellow autumn's nightingale. 
 
 This is Chapman at his best ; and few then can 
 better him. The language hardly holds lovelier
 
 104 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 lines, of more perfect colour and more happy 
 cadence, than some few of these which I have given 
 to show how this poet could speak when for a change 
 he was content to empty his mouth of pebbles and 
 clear his forehead of fog. The vision of Home 
 which serves as overture to this poem is not the only 
 other noble feature which relieves a landscape in too 
 great part made up of rocks and brambles, of mire 
 and morass ; and for the sake of these hidden green 
 places and sunny moments some yet may care to 
 risk an hour or so of toil along the muddy and thorny 
 lanes that run between. 
 
 From the opening verses of The Tears of Peace 
 we get one of the few glimpses allowed us into the 
 poet's personal life, his birthplace, the manner and 
 the spirit of his work, and his hopes in his " retired 
 age " for " heaven's blessing in a free and harmless 
 life " ; the passage has beauty as well as interest far 
 beyond those too frequent utterances of querulous 
 anger at the neglect and poverty to which he could 
 not resign himself without resentment. It would 
 have been w^ell for himself as for us, who cannot now 
 read such reiterated complaints without a sense of 
 weariness and irritation, if he had really laid once 
 for all to heart the noble verses in which he sup- 
 poses himself to be admonished by the " spirit 
 Elysian " of his divine patron Homer, who told 
 him, as he says, " that he was angel to me, star, 
 and fate." 
 
 Thou must not undervalue what thou hast, 
 In weighing it with tliat which more is graced ; 
 The worth that wcigheth inward should not long 
 For outward prices. This should make thee strong
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 105 
 
 In thy close value ; Nought so good can be 
 As that which lasts good between God and thee. 
 Remember thme own verse — Should Heaven turn Hell 
 For deeds well done, I would do ever well. 
 
 The dignity and serenity of spirit here inculcated are 
 not compatible with the tone of fierce remonstrance 
 and repining defiance which alternates with such 
 higher tones of meditation and self-reliance as 
 constantly exalt and dignify the praises of those 
 patrons to whom he appeals for recognition as for a 
 right not to be withheld without discredit to them 
 and danger of future loss of that glory which he had 
 to give. In all dedicatory verse known to me I find 
 nothing that resembles the high self-respect and 
 haughty gratitude of a poet who never forgets that 
 for every benefit of patronage conferred he gives 
 fully as much as he may receive. Men usually hurry 
 over the dedications of poet to patron with a keen 
 angry sense of shame and sorrow, of pity and 
 repulsion and regret ; but it may be justly claimed 
 for Chapman that his verses of dedication can give 
 no reader such pain as those of others. His first and 
 best patron in the court of James was that youth 
 on whose cofiin so many crowns of mourning verse 
 were showered, and who does by all report seem to 
 have well deserved that other than official regrets 
 should go with him to his grave. A boy dying at 
 eighteen after three years' proof of interest in the 
 higher culture of his time, three years during which 
 he had shown himself as far as we can see sincere 
 and ardent in his love of noble things only, and only 
 of noble men, of poetry and of heroes — champion of 
 Raleigh in his prison and patron of Chapman in his
 
 106 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 need — must certainly have been one worthy of notice 
 in higher places than a court ; one who, even if bom 
 in a loftier atmosphere and likelier to bring forth 
 seed of enduring honour, would assuredly have 
 earned remark and remembrance as a most excep- 
 tional figure, of truly rare and admirable promise. 
 The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince Henry 
 is one of his highest and purest examples of moral 
 verse : the august praise and grave exaltation of his 
 own great art give dignity to the words of admonition 
 as much as of appeal with which he commends it to 
 the acceptance and reverence of kings. We may 
 well believe that the prince's death gave to the high 
 heart of his old Homeric teacher and counsellor of 
 royal and heroic things a sharper pain than the mere 
 sense of a patron lost and of personal as well as of 
 national hopes cut off. Yet in his special case there 
 was good reason for special regret. The latter 
 instalments of his lofty labour on the translation of 
 Homer were inscribed to the ignoblest among the 
 minions, as the former had been inscribed to the 
 noblest among the children of the king. An austere 
 and stately moralist like Chapman could hardly have 
 sought a stranger patron than Carr ; and when we 
 find him officiating as paranjnnph at those nuptials 
 which recall the darkest and foulest history in all 
 the annals of that reign, the poisonous and adulterous 
 secrets of blood and shame in whose darkness 
 nothing is discernible but the two masked and 
 muffled figures of treachery and murder, we cannot 
 but remember and apply the parallel drawn by 
 Macaulay from the court of Nero ; nor can it be 
 with simple surprise that we listen to the sermon or
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 107 
 
 the song composed by Seneca or by Lucan for the 
 epithalamium of Sponis and Locusta. 
 
 The celebration of that monstrous marriage in 
 ethic and allegoric verse brought nothing to Chapman 
 but disquiet and discredit. Neither Andromeda 
 Lady Essex nor Perseus Earl of Somerset had reason 
 to thank or to reward the solitary singer whose 
 voice was raised to call down blessings on the bridal 
 bed which gave such a Julia to the arms of such a 
 Manlius. The enormous absurdity of Chapman's 
 ever unfortunate allegory was on this auspicious 
 occasion so much more than absurd that Carr 
 himself would seem to have taken such offence as 
 his luckless panegyrist had undoubtedly no suspicion 
 that he might give. And yet this innocence of 
 intention affords one of the oddest instances on 
 record of the marvellous want of common sense and 
 common tact which has sometimes been so notable 
 in men of genius. It is hardly credible that a grave 
 poetic moralist of fifty-five should have written 
 without afterthought this thrice unhappy poem of 
 Andromeda Liberata. Its appearance did for once 
 succeed in attracting attention ; but the comment 
 it drew down was of such a nature as at once 
 to ehcit from the author " a free and offenceless 
 justification of a lately published and most mali- 
 ciously misinterpreted poem " ; a defence almost as 
 amazing as the offence, and decidedly more amusing. 
 
 The poet could never imagine till now so far-fetched 
 a thought in mahce (" such was my simplicity," he 
 adds with some reason) as would induce any reader 
 to regard as otherwise than " harmlessly and grace- 
 fully appHcable to the occasion " — these are his
 
 108 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 actual words — the representation of "an innocent 
 and spotless virgin [sic] rescued from the polluted 
 throat of a monster, which I in this place applied to 
 the savage multitude." Such is the perversity of 
 man, that on perusing this most apt and judicious 
 allegory " the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddy multi- 
 tude " of readers actually thought fit to inquire 
 from what " barren rock " the new Perseus might 
 be said to have unbound his fettered virgin ; and in 
 answer to this not unnatural inquiry Chapman had 
 the audacious innocence to affirm — and I doubt not 
 in all truth and simplicity — that the inevitable 
 application of this happy and appropriate symbol 
 had never so much as crossed his innocent mind. 
 As if, he exclaims indignantly, the word " barren " 
 could be applied to a man ! — was it ever said a man 
 was barren ? or was the burden of bearing fruit 
 ever laid on man ? Whether this vindication was 
 likely under the circumstances to mend matters 
 much " the prejudicate and peremptory reader " will 
 judge for himself. One rumour, however, the poet 
 repudiates in passing with some violence of language ; 
 to the effect, we may gather, that he had been 
 waylaid and assaulted as was Drydcn by Rochester's 
 ruffians, but at whose instigation we can only con- 
 jecture. He will omit, he says, " as struck dumb 
 with the disdain of it, their most unmanly lie both 
 of my baffling and wounding, sajdng ' Take this for 
 your Andromeda ' ; not being so much as touched, 
 I witness God, nor one sjdlable suffering." 
 
 The rumour is singular enough, and it would be 
 curious to know if at least any such threat or attempt 
 were actually made. From Carr at all events we can
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 109 
 
 hardly believe that it would have come ; for it must 
 be set down to his credit that in the days of obscurity 
 which followed on his disgrace and retirement he 
 seems to have befriended the poet whose humbler 
 chances of court favour had presumably fallen with 
 his own. It was unlikely that any man ever so 
 slightly associated with the recollection of a matter 
 which the king was probably of all men least desirous 
 to keep in mind should again be summoned by two 
 of the Inns of Court, as Chapman had been sum- 
 moned the year before, to compose the marriage 
 masque for a royal wedding. More inauspicious by 
 far though far more innocent than those of Somerset 
 were the nuptials he had then been chosen to 
 celebrate ; the nuptials of Elizabeth, called the 
 Queen of Hearts, with Frederick, one day to be 
 sumamed the Winter-King. For that fatal marriage- 
 feast of " Goody Palsgrave " and her hapless bride- 
 groom he had been bidden to provide due decorations 
 of pageantry and verse ; and had produced at least 
 some bright graceful couplets and stanzas, among 
 others hardly so definable. But to such a task he 
 was now not likely to be called again ; the turning- 
 point of his fortunes as far as they hung upon the 
 chance of patronage at court was the wedding-day 
 of Carr. As a favourite of the dead prince to whom 
 his Homer had been inscribed in weighty and 
 worthy verses, he may have been thought fit the 
 year before to assist as the laureate of a day at the 
 marriage which had been postponed by the death cf 
 the bride's brother in the preceding autumn ; and 
 some remembrance of the favour shown him by the 
 noble youth for whom the country if not the court
 
 110 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 had good reason to mourn may have kept his name 
 for a while before the eyes of the better part of the 
 courtiers, if a better part there were : but if ever, 
 as we may conjecture, his fortune had passed 
 through its hour of rise and its day of progress, we 
 must infer that its decHne was sudden and its fall 
 irremediable. 
 
 In the same year which witnessed the unlucky 
 venture of his Andromeda Chapman put forth a 
 poem on the death of Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, a 
 patron, it should seem, of a far other kind than 
 Carr ; distinguished as a soldier in the field now 
 only memorable to us for the death of Sir Philip 
 Sidney, where if report may be trusted his romantic 
 or Homeric valour was worthy to have employed 
 the pen of a translator of the Iliad ; and yet more 
 remarkable for the comparative justice and mercy 
 displayed in his military administration of Ireland. 
 This epicede, longer and more ornate than that issued 
 two years before on Prince Henry, is neither much 
 worse nor much better in substance and in style. 
 Each may boast of some fine and vigorous verses, 
 and both are notable as examples of the poet's 
 somewhat troubled and confused elevation of 
 thought and language. In Eugenia especially the 
 same high note, of moral passion alternates with 
 the same sharp tone of contemptuous complaint 
 that we find in The Tears of Peace and in the 
 very last verses affixed by way of epilogue to his 
 translation of the Hymns and other Homeric frag- 
 ments. This bitterness of insinuation or invective 
 against meaner scholars or artists we should set 
 down rather to a genuine hatred of bad work, a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 111 
 
 genuine abhorrence of base ambition and false 
 pretence, than to any unjust or malevolent instinct 
 of mere jealousy ; which yet might perhaps be found 
 pardonable to the neglected and laborious old age 
 of a high-minded artist and hard-working scholar 
 such as Chapman. There are impressive touches of 
 a higher mood in the funeral h3/mn which completes 
 the somewhat voluminous tribute of ceremonial 
 verse offered up at the grave of Lord Russell ; but 
 the greater part of the poem is more noticeable for 
 quaintness than for any better quality, being indeed 
 eccentric in execution as in conception beyond the 
 wont even of Chapman. It carries, however, some 
 weight of thought, and contains probably the longest 
 and minutest catalogue ever given in verse of the 
 signs of an approaching storm ; a description which 
 shows at once the close and intense observation of 
 nature, the keen and forcible power of reproduction, 
 and the utter incompetence to select and arrange 
 his material, alike and at all times distinctive of 
 this poet. 
 
 Four years after the miscarriage of Andromeda 
 we find his translation of Hesiod ushered in by a 
 dignified appeal and compliment to " the truly 
 Greek inspiration and absolutely Attic elocution " of 
 no less a patron than Bacon ; " whose all-acknow- 
 ledged faculty hath banished flattery therein even 
 from the court ; much more from my country and 
 more than upland simplicity." But for his Odyssey 
 and Hymns of Homer, as well as for his plea addressed 
 to the country on behalf of the beleaguered handful 
 of troops serving with Sir Horace Vere, he sought or 
 found no patronage but that of Carr ; and that this
 
 112 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 should not have failed him gives evidence of some 
 not ignoble quality in one whom we are accustomed 
 only to regard as the unloveliest of the Ganymedes 
 whose Jupiter was James. In the dedication of the 
 Hymns he refers to the retired life of his disgraced 
 patron in a tone which might not unworthily have 
 saluted the more honourable seclusion of a better 
 man. To these as to others of Chapman's moral 
 verses Coleridge has paid a tribute of thoughtful 
 and memorable praise, deserved no less by the 
 fragments of ethical poetry printed some years 
 earlier with a metrical version, after that of Petrarca, 
 of the penitential Psalms. Among these there are 
 many grains of genuine thought, of terse and grave 
 expression, worth remark and remembrance. So 
 much indeed may be said in parting of Chapman's 
 poetry as a whole ; in all his poems of dedication 
 or mere compliment, as in the elaborate and elo- 
 quent rhapsody prefixed to Ben Jonson's Sejanus, 
 we shall find some weight of reflection and some 
 energy of utterance : in the commendatory verses to 
 Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess we shall find some- 
 thing better ; four of the loveliest lines in the 
 language, perfect for melody, purity, and simple 
 sweetness of colour. 
 
 It is better to think of Chapman as the just 
 and generous friend of other and younger men's 
 genius than to remark except in passing on his 
 quarrel in old age with Jonson, of which we 
 know nothing but by an unhappy fragment of 
 virulent and worthless verse, transcribed it should 
 seem during his last illness by some foolish and 
 officious friend or flatterer (as we may conceive) of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 113 
 
 the old man's petulances and infirmities. For these 
 there is reason to fear that we may have to make 
 more allowance than must under all circumstances 
 be claimed by age and sickness, even where adversity 
 has no share in the sufferings of the last years of a 
 laborious and noble life. After the fall of Chapman's 
 fortunes, if as I have conjectured we may suppose 
 them to have risen for a while under the patronage 
 of Prince Henry and collapsed with the favour of 
 Carr, he lived for twenty years without further 
 success on the stage to which he had given so much 
 of the best labour and the best faculty of his mind : 
 and we may doubt whether the friends or patrons of 
 his old age were numerous or generous enough to 
 secure these latter years against neglect and ob- 
 scurity. One comfort, however, must have been with 
 him to the last, whether or not we agree with Gifford 
 in accepting the apparent evidence for the poverty 
 and solitude in which he died ; the comfort of great 
 work done, the recollection of high hopes attained, 
 the evidence of daring dreams made real and fruitful 
 of fame not yet to be. Some ten years before his 
 death the poet of sixty-five could look on his com- 
 pleted version of all the Homeric poems, and say : 
 
 The work that I was born to do is done. 
 
 It was a great work, and one wrought in a great 
 spirit ; and if, as he says of Homer, not without 
 evident and immediate reference to his own lot, " like 
 a man verecundi ingenii (which he witnesseth of 
 himself), he lived unhonoured and needy till his 
 death," we may believe that he did not live dis- 
 satisfied or dejected. Unworthy indeed would the 
 
 H
 
 114 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 workman have been of his own work if from the 
 contemplation of it he had been too poor in spirit 
 or too covetous of reward to draw the consolation of 
 a high content. This strong and sovereign solace 
 against all the evils that can beset the failing age 
 and fallen fortunes of a brave man he surely deserved, 
 if ever man deserved, to have and to retain. His 
 work was done ; neither time nor trouble could 
 affect that ; neither age nor misfortune could undo 
 it. He had lived long and worked hard, and the 
 end of all the valiant labour and strenuous endurance 
 that must have gone to the perfonnance of his task 
 had not been less than triumphant. He had added 
 a monument to the temple which contains the 
 glories of his native language, the godlike images 
 and the costly relics of its past ; he had built himself 
 a massive and majestic memorial, where for all the 
 flaws and roughness of the weather-beaten work the 
 great workmen of days unborn would gather to give 
 honour to his name. He had kindled a fire which 
 the changing winds of time were not to put out, the 
 veering breath of taste and opinion was never to 
 blow upon so hard but that some would return to 
 warm themselves at its heat and to cheer themselves 
 with its light. He showed what he could of Homer 
 to the lifted eyes of Keats, and the strong and fiery 
 reflection was to the greater poet as very dawn itself, 
 the perfect splendour of Hellenic sunrise. Much of 
 precious and undying praise has been worthily 
 bestowed on it ; but while anything of English 
 poetry shall endure the sonnet of Keats will be the 
 final word of comment, the final note of verdict on 
 Chapman's Homer.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 115 
 
 This of course was the sovereign labour of his 
 life ; and to this the highest of his other works can 
 only be considered as bringing some addition of 
 honour. That there is yet in these enough to serve 
 as the foundation of a lasting fame I have made it 
 the purpose of my present task to show. But his 
 name will always first recall neither the plays nor 
 the poems which might well have sufficed for the 
 work and the witness of a briefer or less fruitful life ; 
 the great enterprise of which the firstfruits were 
 given to the world in his fortieth year and the last 
 harvest was garnered in his sixty-sixth must be the 
 first and last claim of his memory on the reverence 
 of all students who shall ever devote the best of 
 their time and of their thought to loving research 
 or to thankful labour in the full field of Enghsh 
 poetry. The indomitable force and fire of Chapman's 
 genius have given such breath and spirit to his 
 Homeric poems that whatever their faults and flaws 
 may be they are at least not those of other men's 
 versions ; they have a seed and salt of personal life 
 which divide them from the class of translated 
 works and remove them (it might wellnigh be said) 
 into the rank of original poems. By the standard 
 of original work they may be more fairly and more 
 worthily judged than by the standard of pure 
 translation : and upon their worth as tested by that 
 standard the judgment of Coleridge and of Lamb 
 has been passed once for all, without fear of appeal 
 or danger of reversal while the language in which 
 the poems were written and the judgment given 
 shall endure. To all lovers of high poetry the great 
 old version of our Homer-Lucan must be dear for
 
 116 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 its own sake and for that of the men who have 
 loved and held it in honour ; to those who can be 
 content with fire for light and force for hannony it 
 must give pleasure inconceivable by such as cannot 
 but remember and repine for the lack of that sweet 
 and equal exaltation of style which no English poet 
 of his age, and Chapman less than any, could hope 
 even faintly to reproduce or to recall. In his 
 original poems the most turgid and barbarous 
 writer of a time whose poets had almost every other 
 merit in a higher degree than those Grecian gifts of 
 perfect forni, of perfect light, and of perfect measure, 
 which are the marks of the Homeric poems no less 
 than of the Sophoclcan drama, he could not so put 
 off his native sin of forced and inflated obscurity as 
 to copy in the hot high colours of a somewhat 
 strained and tattered canvas more than the outlines 
 of the divine figures which his strong hand and 
 earnest eye were bent to bring before his readers' 
 sight. It is much that his ardour and vigour, his 
 energy and devotion, should have done the noble 
 and memorable work they have. That " uncon- 
 querable quaintness " which Lamb was the first to 
 point out as the one perpetual note of infirmity and 
 imperfection in the great work of Chapman is more 
 hopelessly alien from the quality of the original than 
 any other defect but that of absolute weakness or 
 sterility of spirit could be. Altering the verdict of 
 Bentley on Pope, we may say that instead of a very 
 pretty it is a very noble poem, but it must not be 
 called Homer. Quaintness and he, to steal a phrase 
 from Juliet, are many miles asunder. 
 The temperament of Chapman had more in it of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 117 
 
 an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's ; and had Homer 
 been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the Iliad 
 than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been 
 fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter. 
 His fiery and turbid style has in it the action rather 
 of earthquakes and volcanoes than of the oceanic 
 verse it labours to represent ; it can give us but the 
 pace of a giant for echo of the footfall of a god ; it 
 can show but the huge movements of the heaving 
 earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal and 
 violent life, for the innumerable unity and har- 
 mony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous 
 motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and 
 of power, the majestic monochord of single sound 
 underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric verse 
 the multitudinous measures of the epic sea. 
 
 The name of Chapman should always be held 
 great ; yet must it always at first recall the names 
 of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the 
 author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic 
 verse a score will at once remember him as the 
 translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe. 
 The most daring enterprise of a life which was full 
 of daring aspiration and arduous labour was this 
 of resuming and completing the " mighty line " of 
 Hero and Leander. For that poem stands out 
 alone amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of 
 its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small 
 shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour 
 of a tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly 
 express the rapture of relief with which you come 
 upon it amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once 
 more with your whole heart of that well of sweet
 
 118 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 water after the long draughts you have taken from 
 such brackish and turbid springs as gush up among 
 the sands and thickets of his verse. Faultless 
 indeed this lovely fragment is not ; it also bears 
 traces of the Elizabethan barbarism, as though the 
 great queen's ruff and farthingale had been clapped 
 about the neck and waist of the Medicean Venus ; 
 but for all the strange costume we can see that the 
 limbs are perfect still. The name of Marlowe's 
 poem has been often coupled wdth that of the " first 
 heir " of Shakespeare's " invention " ; but with all 
 reverence to the highest name in letters be it said, 
 the comparison is hardly less absurd than a com- 
 parison of Tamburlaine with Othello. With all its 
 overcrowding beauties of detail, Shakespeare's first 
 poem is on the whole a model of what a young man 
 of genius should not write on such a subject ; 
 Marlowe's is a model of what he should. Scarcely 
 the art of Titian at its highest, and surely not the 
 art of Shakespeare at its dawn, could have made 
 acceptable such an inversion of natural rule as is 
 involved in the attempted violation by a passionate 
 woman of a passionless boy ; the part of a Joseph, 
 as no less a moralist than Henri Beyle has observed 
 in his great work on Love, has always a suspicion 
 about it of something ridiculous and offensive ; but 
 only the wretchedest of artists could wholly fail to 
 give charm to the picture of such a nuptial night 
 as that of Hero and Leander. The style of Shake- 
 speare's first essay is, to speak frankly, for the most 
 part no less vicious than the matter : it is burdened 
 and bedizened with all the heavy and fantastic 
 jewellery of Gongora and Marini ; it is written
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 119 
 
 throughout in the style which an ItaHan scholar 
 knows as that of the seicentisti, and which the 
 duncery of New Grub Street in its immeasurable 
 ignorance would probably designate as " Della- 
 Cruscan " ; nay, there are yet, I believe, in that 
 quarter rhjnnesters and libellers to be found who 
 imagine such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante 
 Alighieri to have been representative members of 
 the famous and farinaceous academy. Not one of 
 the faults chargeable on Shakespeare's beautiful but 
 faultful poem can justly be charged on the only not 
 faultless poem of Marlowe, The absence of all 
 cumbrous jewels and ponderous embroideries from 
 the sweet and limpid loveliness of its style is not 
 more noticeable than the absence of such other and 
 possibly such graver flaws as deform and diminish 
 the undeniable charms of Venus and Adonis. 
 
 With leave or without leave of a much-lauded critic 
 who could see nothing in the glorified version or expan- 
 sion by Marlowe of the little poem of Musaeus but " a 
 paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most 
 licentious kind," I must avow that I want and am 
 well content to want the sense, whatever it be, 
 which would enable me to discern more offence in 
 that lovely picture of the union of two lovers in 
 body as in soul than I can discern in the parting of 
 Romeo and Juliet. And if it be always a pleasure 
 to read a page of Marlowe, to read it after a page of 
 Chapman is to the capable student of high verse 
 " a pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king." Yet 
 there is not a little to be advanced in favour of 
 Chapman's audacious and arduous undertaking. 
 The poet was not alive, among all the mighty men
 
 120 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 then living, who could worthily have completed the 
 divine fragment of Marlowe. As well might we look 
 now to find a sculptor who could worthily restore 
 for us the arms of the Venus of Melos — " Our Lady 
 of Beauty," as Heine said when l3''ing at her feet 
 stricken to death, " who has no hands, and cannot 
 help us." For of narrative poets there were none 
 in that generation of any note but Drayton and 
 Daniel ; and though these might have more of 
 Marlowe's limpid sweetness and purity of style, they 
 lacked the force and weight of Chapman. Nor is 
 the continuation by any means altogether such as 
 we might have expected it to be — a sequel by 
 Marsyas to the song of Apollo. Thanks, as we may 
 suppose, to the high ambition of the poet's aim, 
 there are more beauties and fewer deformities than 
 I have found in any of his other poems. There are 
 passages indeed which at first sight may almost seem 
 to support the otherwise unsupported tradition that 
 a brief further fragment of verse from the hand of 
 Marlowe was left for Chapman to work up into his 
 sequel. This for instance, though somewhat over- 
 fantastic, has in it a sweet and genuine note of 
 fancy : 
 
 Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her e^^es, 
 And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies 
 How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine, 
 For her love's sake, that with immortal wine 
 Sliould be embathed, and swim in more heart 's-ease 
 Than there was water in the Sestian seas. 
 
 Here again is a beautiful example of the short sweet 
 interludes which relieve the general style of Chap- 
 man's narrative or reflective verse :
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 121 
 
 For as proportion, white and crimson, meet 
 In beauty's mixture, all right clear and sweet, 
 The eye responsible, the golden hair. 
 And none is held without the other fair ; 
 All spring together, all together fade ; 
 Such intermix'd affections should invade 
 Two perfect lovers. 
 
 And this couplet has an exquisite touch of fanciful 
 colour : 
 
 As two clear tapers mix in one their light, 
 So did the Uly and the hand their white. 
 
 That at least might have been written by Marlowe 
 himself. But the poem is largely deformed by 
 excrescences and aberrations, by misplaced morals 
 and mistimed conceits ; and at the catastrophe, 
 perhaps half consciously oppressed and overcome by 
 the sense that now indeed he must put forth all his 
 power to utter something not unworthy of what the 
 " dead shepherd " himself might have spoken over 
 the two dead lovers, he puts forth all his powers for 
 evil and for error, and gives such a narrative of their 
 end as might have sufficed to raise from his grave 
 the avenging ghost of the outraged poet who has 
 been supposed — but unless it was said in some 
 riotous humour of jesting irony, the supposition seems 
 to me incredible — to have commended to Chapman, 
 in case of his death, the task thus ill discharged of 
 completing this deathless and half-accomplished 
 work of a genius " that perished in its pride." 
 
 The faults and weaknesses of strong men seem 
 usually an integral part of the character or the 
 genius we admire for its strength ; and the faults 
 ingrained in the work of Chapman were probably
 
 122 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 indivisible from the powers which gave that work its 
 worth. Those blemishes not less than those beauties 
 of which the student is at almost every other step 
 compelled perforce to take note seem inevitable by 
 a poet's mind of his peculiar bent and bias. There 
 are superfluities which we would fain see removed, 
 deformities which we would fain see straightened, in 
 all but the greatest among poets or men ; and these 
 are doubtless in effect irremovable and incurable. 
 Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear 
 the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been 
 hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own 
 day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it 
 was with the twofold load of his theories on art and 
 his pedantries of practice. And Chapman, though 
 also a brother of the giant brood, had not the 
 Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow- 
 student. That weight which could but bend the 
 back that carried the vast world of invention whose 
 twin hemispheres are Voipone and the Alchemist 
 was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength 
 of the lesser Titan. His style reels and struggles 
 under the pressure ; he snorts and heaves as 
 Typhoeus beneath Etna, sending up at each huge 
 turn and convulsion of his uneasy bulk some shower 
 of blinding sparkles or volume of stifling vapour. 
 But for all the discords and contortions of his 
 utterance the presence is always perceptible of a 
 giant, and of one issued from the lineage of the early 
 gods. 
 
 He alone, as far as I can see, among all the great 
 men of his great age, had anything in common 
 with Jonson for good or evil. It would not be
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 123 
 
 accurate to lay the heaviest faults of either poet to 
 the account of his learning. A weight of learning 
 at least equal to that which bowed and deformed 
 the genius of Jonson and of Chapman served but to 
 give new shape and splendour to the genius of 
 Milton and of Landor. To these it was but as a 
 staff to guide and a crown to glorify their labours ; 
 a lantern by whose light they might walk, a well- 
 spring from whose water they might draw draughts 
 of fresh strength and rest. But by this light the 
 two elder poets too often failed to walk straight and 
 sure, drank too often from this fountain a heady or 
 a narcotic draught. One at least, and not he who 
 had drunk deepest of the divine and dangerous 
 spring, seems at times under its influence to move 
 and speak as under some Circean transformation. 
 The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and 
 sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or 
 allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous 
 jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit 
 and style. Nevertheless, of these four illustrious 
 men whom I suppose to have been the most deeply 
 read in classical literature, with the exception 
 probably of Gray and possibly of Coleridge, among 
 all our poets of the past, the two great republicans 
 as surely were not as the two distinguished royalists 
 surely were pedants : and Chapman, being the lesser 
 scholar, was naturally the greater pedant of the 
 pair. 
 
 As a dramatic poet he has assuredly never yet 
 received his due meed of discerning praise ; but 
 assuredly no man of genius ever did so much, as 
 though by perverse and prepense design, to insure a
 
 124 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 continuance of neglect and injustice. Had he allied 
 himself with some enemy in a league against his own 
 fame — had he backed himself against success for a 
 wager, let his deserts be what they might — he could 
 have done no more than he has done to make 
 certain of the desired failure. With a fair share of 
 comic spirit and invention, remarkable at least in a 
 poet of such a grave and ambitious turn of genius, 
 he has spiced and larded his very comedies with the 
 thick insipid sauce of pedantic declamation. Their 
 savourless interludes of false and forced humour 
 may indeed be matched even in the greatest of 
 Jonson's works ; there is here hardly anything 
 heavier than the voluminous foolery of Scoto of 
 Mantua and the dolorous long-winded doggerel 
 drivelled forth by that dreary trinity of dwarf, 
 eunuch, and hermaphrodite, whom any patron of 
 less patience than Volpone, with a tithe of his wit 
 and genius, would surely have scourged out of doors 
 long before they were turned forth to play by 
 Mosca. But when on a fresh reading we skip over 
 these blocks laid as if on purpose in our way through 
 so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inven- 
 tions, the monument of a mind so mighty, the 
 palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson's, we 
 are more than content to forget such passing and 
 perishable impediments to our admiration of that 
 sovereign intellect which has transported us across 
 them into the royal presence of its ruling and inform- 
 ing power. 
 
 The " shaping spirit of imagination " proper 
 to all great men, and varying in each case from 
 all other, reforms of itself its own misshapen work,
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 125 
 
 treads down and triumphs over its own faults 
 and errors, renews its faltering forces and resumes 
 its undiminished reign. But he who in so high a 
 matter as the dramatic art can sin so heavily, and 
 so triumphantly tread under the penalty of his 
 transgression, must be great among the greatest of 
 his fellows. Such, with all his excesses and short- 
 comings in the way of dramatic work, was Jonson ; 
 such certainly was not Chapman. The tragedy, for 
 example, of Chahot, a noble and dignified poem in 
 the main, and the otherwise lively and interesting 
 comedy of Monsieur d'Olive, are seriously impaired 
 by a worse than Jonsonian excess in the analysis 
 and anatomy of "humours." The turncoat advocate 
 and the mock ambassador bestride the action of the 
 plays and oppress the attention of the reader with 
 a more "importunate and heavy load" than that 
 of Sinbad's old man of the sea. Another point of 
 resemblance to Jonson on the wrong side is the 
 absence or insignificance of feminine interest through- 
 out his works. No poet ever showed less love or 
 regard for women, less care to study or less power 
 to paint them. With the exception of a couple of 
 passages in his two best comedies, the wide field of 
 Chapman's writings will be found wellnigh barren 
 of any tender or noble trace of passion or emo- 
 tion kindled between man and woman. 
 
 These two passages stand out in beautiful and bril- 
 liant contrast to the general tone of the poet's mood ; 
 the praise of love has seldom been uttered with loftier 
 and sweeter eloquence than in the well-known verses * 
 which celebrate it as " nature's second sun," inform- 
 
 * All Fools, Act i, Scene i.
 
 126 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ing and educing the latent virtues in man " as the 
 sun doth colours " ; the structure and cadence of 
 the verse, the choice and fullness of the words, are 
 alike memorable for the perfect power and purity, 
 the strong simplicity and luminous completeness of 
 workmanship which may be (too rarely) found and 
 enjoyed in the poetry of Chapman. The passage in 
 The Gentleman Usher (Act iv, Scene 3), which sets 
 forth the excellence of perfect marriage, has less of 
 poetic illustration and imaginative colour, but is a 
 no less admirable model of clear and vigorous 
 language applied to the fit and full expression of 
 high thought and noble emotion. But as a rule we 
 find the genius of Chapman at its best when furthest 
 removed from female influence ; as in the two plays 
 of Biron and those nobler parts of the " Roman 
 tragedy " of Ccesar and Pompey in which Cato 
 discourses on life and death. The two leading 
 heroines of his tragic drama, Tamyra and Caropia, 
 are but a slippery couple of sententious harlots, who 
 deliver themselves in eloquent and sometimes in 
 exalted verse to such amorous or vindictive purpose 
 as the action of the play may suggest. Whether 
 the secret of this singular defect in a dramatic poet 
 were to be sought in coldness of personal tempera- 
 ment, in narrowness of intellectual interest, or 
 simply in the accidental circumstances which may 
 have given a casual direction to his life and thought, 
 we need not now think to conjecture. He was 
 ready enough to read lectures on love or lust, to 
 expatiate with a dry scholastic sensuality on the 
 details and influences of form and colour, to apply 
 the terms and subtleties of metaphysical definition
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 127 
 
 to the physical anatomy of beauty ; indeed, one at 
 least of his poems may be described as a study in 
 philosophic vivisection applied by a lover to his 
 mistress, in which analysis and synthesis of material 
 and spiritual qualities in action and reaction of 
 cause and effect meet and confound each other — to 
 say nothing of the reader. But of pure passion and 
 instinctive simplicity of desire or dehght there is 
 little more trace than of higher emotion or deeper 
 knowledge of such things as belong alike to mind 
 and body, and hold equally of the spirit and the 
 flesh. 
 
 Here again we find that Jonson and Chapman 
 stand far apart from their fellow men of genius. The 
 most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their 
 day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, 
 they would be content with no crown that might be 
 shared by others ; they had each his own severe 
 and haughty scheme of study and invention, and 
 sought for no excellence which lay beyond or outside 
 it ; that any could lie above, past the reach of their 
 strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their 
 keen and studious eyes, they would probably have 
 been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet 
 there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole 
 worlds of human passion and divine imagination 
 which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs 
 and trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs 
 were powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song 
 fell silent. Not greater spirits alone, such as 
 Marlowe's and Shakespeare's, but such lesser spirits 
 as Decker's had the secret of ways unknown to them 
 in the world of poetry, the key of chambers from
 
 128 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 which they were shut out. In Marlowe the passion 
 of ideal love for the ultimate idea of beauty in art 
 or nature found its perfect and supreme expression, 
 faultless and unforced. The radiant ardour of his 
 desire, the light and the flame of his aspiration, 
 diffused and shed through all the forms of his 
 thought and all the colours of his verse, gave them 
 such shapeliness and strength of life as is given to 
 the spirits of the greatest poets alone. 
 
 He, far rather than Chaucer or Spenser, whose 
 laurels were first fed by the dews and sunbeams of 
 Italy and France, whose songs were full of sweet tradi- 
 tion from oversea, of memories and notes which " came 
 mended from their tongues " — he alone was the true 
 Apollo of our dawn, the bright and morning star of 
 the full midsummer day of English poetry at its 
 highest, Chaucer, Wyatt, and Spenser had left our 
 language as melodious, as fluent, as flexible to all 
 purposes of narrative or lyrical poetry as it could be 
 made by the grace of genius ; the supreme note of 
 its possible music was reserved for another to 
 strike. Of English blank verse, one of the few 
 highest forais of verbal harmony or poetic expres- 
 sion, the genius of Marlowe was the absolute and 
 divine creator. By mere dint of original and god- 
 like instinct he discovered and called it into life ; 
 and at his untimely and unhappy death, more 
 lamentable to us all than any other on record except 
 Shelley's, he left the marvellous instrument of his 
 invention so nearly perfect that Shakespeare first 
 and afterwards Milton came to learn of him before 
 they could vary or improve on it. In the changes 
 rung by them on the keys first tuned by Marlowe
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 129 
 
 we trace a remembrance of the touches of his hand ; 
 in his own cadences we catch not a note of any- 
 other man's. This poet, a poor scholar of humblest 
 parentage, lived to perfect the exquisite metre 
 invented for narrative by Chaucer, giving it (to my 
 ear at least) more of weight and depth, of force and 
 fullness, than its founder had to give ; he invented 
 the highest and hardest form of English verse, the 
 only instrument since found possible for our tragic 
 or epic poetry ; he created the modern tragic 
 drama ; and at the age of thirty he went 
 
 Where Orpheus and where Homer are. 
 
 Surely there are not more than two or three names 
 in any literature which can be set above the poet's 
 of whom this is the least that can in simple truth 
 be said. There is no record extant of his living 
 likeness ; if his country should ever bear men worthy 
 to raise a statue or a monument to his memory, he 
 should stand before them with the head and eyes of an 
 Apollo looking homeward from earth into the sun : 
 a face and figure, in the poet's own great phrase, 
 
 Like his desire, lift upward and divine. 
 
 To all things alike we find applied in turn this 
 fervour of ideal passion ; to the beauty of women, to 
 the hunger after sway, to the thirst after knowledge, 
 to the energy of friendship or ambition, to the energy 
 of avarice or revenge. Sorrow and triumph and 
 rapture and despair find in his poetry their most 
 single and intense expression, extreme but not 
 excessive ; the pleasures and the pains of each 
 
 I
 
 130 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 passion are clothed with the splendour and harmony 
 of pure conceptions fitted with perfect words. 
 
 There is the same simple and naked power of 
 abstract outline in every stroke of every study which 
 remains to us from his hand ; in the strenuous greed 
 and fantastic hate of Barabas, in the hysteric ardours 
 and piteous agonies of Edward, in the illimitable 
 appetite of Tamburlaine for material rule and of 
 Faustus for spiritual empire, and in the highest and 
 haughtiest aspirations of either towards that ultimate 
 goal of possession where he may lay hands on power 
 unattainable and touch lips with beauty inexpres- 
 sible by man, we trace the same ideal quality of 
 passion. In the most glorious verses ever fashioned 
 by a poet to express with subtle and final truth the 
 supreme aim and the supreme limit of his art, the 
 glory and the joy of his labour, the satisfaction and 
 the insufficience of its triumph in the partial and 
 finite expression of an infinite delight and an inde- 
 finite desire, Marlowe has summed up all that can 
 be said or thought on the office and the object, the 
 means and the end of this highest form of spiritual 
 ambition, which for him was as it were shadowed 
 forth in all symbols and reflected in all shapes of 
 human energy, in all exaltations of the spirit, in all 
 aspirations of the will. Being a poet of the first 
 order, he was content to know and to accept the 
 knowledge that ideal beauty lies beyond the most 
 beautiful forms and ideal perfection beyond the 
 most perfect words that art can imbue with life or 
 inflame with colour ; an excellence that expression 
 can never realize, that possession can never destroy. 
 
 The nearer such an artist's work comes to this
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 131 
 
 abstract perfection of absolute beauty, the more 
 clearly will he see and the more gladly will he admit 
 that it never can come so near as to close with it 
 and find, as in things of meaner life, a conclusion set 
 in the act of fruition to the sense of enjoyment, a 
 goal fixed at a point attainable where the delight of 
 spiritual desire may be consummated, and consumed 
 in the moment of its consummation. A man of the 
 second order of genius is of his nature less quick to 
 apprehend the truth that 
 
 If all the pens that ever poets held 
 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
 
 and if one single and supreme poem could embody 
 in distilled expression the spirit and the sense of 
 
 every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds, and muses on admired themes, 
 
 there would remain behind all things attainable and 
 expressible in sound or form or colour something 
 that will not be expressed or attained, nor pass into 
 the likeness of any perishable life ; but though all 
 were done that all poets could do. 
 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least. 
 Which into words no virtue can digest. 
 
 No poet ever came nearer than Marlowe to the 
 expression of this inexpressible beauty, to the incar- 
 nation in actual form of ideal perfection, to the 
 embodiment in mortal music of immortal harmony ; 
 and he it is who has left on record and on evidence 
 to all time the truth that no poet can ever come 
 nearer. The lesser artist, with less liberty of action,
 
 132 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 will be the likelier of the two to show less loyalty 
 of submission to the eternal laws of thought which 
 find their full and natural expression in the eternal 
 canons of art. In him we shall find that intellectual 
 energy has taken what it can of the place and done 
 what it can of the work proper to ideal passion. 
 This substitution of an intellectual for an ideal end, 
 of energetic mental action for passionate spiritual 
 emotion as the means towards that end, is as good 
 a test as may be taken of the difference in kind 
 rather than in degree between the first and the 
 second order of imaginative artists. By the change 
 of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may 
 at once verify the change of object. In almost 
 every page of Chapman's noblest work we discern 
 the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind con- 
 vulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the 
 effort to achieve something that lies beyond the 
 proper aim and the possible scope of that form of 
 art within which it has set itself to work. The hard 
 effort of a strong will, the conscious purpose of an 
 earnest ambition, the laborious obedience to a 
 resolute design is as perceptible in Jonson and 
 Chapman as in Shakespeare and in Marlowe is the 
 instinct of spiritual harmony, the loyalty and the 
 liberty of impulse and of work. The lesser poets are 
 poets prepense ; the greater are at once poets of 
 their own making and of nature's, equidistant in 
 their line of life from the mere singing-bird and the 
 mere student. 
 
 Of the first order we may be sure that in any 
 age or country the men that compose it must have 
 been what they were, great as poets or artists,
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 133 
 
 lyric or dramatic ; of the second order we may 
 well believe that in a different time or place the 
 names which we find written in its catalogue might 
 have been distinguished by other trophies than such 
 as they now recall. And this, which may seem to 
 imply a superiority of intellectual power, does 
 actually imply the reverse. Those are not the 
 greatest among men of whom we can reasonably 
 conceive that circumstance might have made them 
 as great in some different way from that in which 
 they walked ; those are not the highest poets or 
 soldiers or statesmen whom it is possible or per- 
 missible to imagine as winning equal fame in some 
 other field than their own, by the application to 
 some other end of such energy and genius as made 
 them great in the line which they were impelled to 
 select at least as much by pressure of accident as 
 by force of instinct, by the external necessity of 
 chance as by the internal necessity of nature. 
 Accident and occasion may be strongest with men 
 of the second order ; but with minds of the first 
 rank that which we call the impulse of nature is yet 
 more strong than they. I doubt not that Jonson 
 might in another age have sought and won distinc- 
 tion from the active life of soldiership or of state- 
 craft ; I take leave to doubt whether Shakespeare, 
 had he sought it, would have won. 
 
 I am not disinclined to admit the supposition 
 that Chapman might have applied his power of 
 moral thought and his interest in historic action 
 to other ends than they ever served in literature 
 or in life. But neither for his sake nor for ours 
 am I disposed to regret that circumstance or
 
 134 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 destiny should have impelled or induced him 
 to take instead that way of work which has given 
 his memory a right to live with that of men 
 who could never have taken another way than 
 they took ; which has made it honourable and 
 venerable to all who have any reverence for English 
 poetry or regard for English fame ; which has set 
 him for ever in the highest place among the servants 
 and interpreters of Homer, and allowed us to 
 inscribe in our imagination, as on the pedestal of a 
 statue reared in thought to the father of our tragic 
 verse, the name of George Chapman not too 
 discreditably far beneath the name of Christopher 
 Marlowe. 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 The following list of passages extracted from 
 Chapman's poems by the editor of the Elizabethan 
 anthology published in 1600 under the name of 
 England's Parnassus ; or, The Choicest Flowers of our 
 Modern Poets, was drawn up from my own copy 
 of the original edition before I was aware that a 
 similar list had been compiled by Mr. J. P. Collier 
 to accompany and illustrate a private reprint of the 
 book. From this source I learn that one extract 
 given at p. 312 as from Chapman is in fact taken 
 from the Albion's England of Warner ; as 
 indeed, though acquainted only with fragmentary 
 excerpts from that poem, I had already conjectured 
 that it must be. This is preceded by another 
 extract signed with the name of Chapman, which
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 135 
 
 according to Mr, Collier is discoverable in Ovid's 
 Banquet of Sense ; but after a second and third 
 search through every turn and recess of that dense 
 and torrid jungle of bad and good verses I have 
 failed to light on this particular weed or flower. Five 
 other extracts have baffled alike my own researches 
 and the far more capable inquisition of even Mr. 
 Collier's learning ; nor have they proved traceable 
 by the energy and enthusiasm of Chapman's latest 
 editor, who has properly included them in his text 
 as authentic fragments of unknown poems by the 
 writer to whom four of them have been assigned 
 by Robert Allot, the editor of England's Par- 
 nassus. The second of these five passages he 
 ascribes to Spenser ; Spenser's it undoubtedly is 
 not ; and as it is followed by an excerpt from 
 Chapman's Hero and Leander, which is likewise 
 bestowed on Spenser by the too hasty liberality of 
 the old editor, we have some additional reason to 
 rely on the unmistakable evidence of the style, 
 which bears immediate witness to the peculiar handi- 
 work of Chapman. The last excerpt but one seems 
 familiar to me, and is rather in the manner of Greene 
 or Peele and their fellows than of Chapman or any 
 later poet ; I cannot but think that a student more 
 deeply read than I in the poems interspersed among 
 the romances of Greene and Lodge might be able to 
 trace both the two last passages of the five here 
 fathered on Chapman to the hand of one or the 
 other. They have the fluency or fluidity rather of 
 the blank verse written by the smaller scholastic 
 poets whom we may see grouped about the feet of 
 Marlowe ; the same facile profusion and effusion of
 
 136 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 classic imagery, the same equable elegance and 
 graceful tenuity of style, crossed here and there by 
 lines of really high and tender beauty. It may be 
 thought that in that case they would have been as 
 speedily and as surely tracked by Mr. Collier as were 
 the verses transferred from Warner to Chapman ; 
 but the most learned and acute among scholars 
 cannot always remember the right place for all 
 things on which his eye must have lit in the course 
 of a lifelong study ; and I find in Mr. Collier's list 
 two passages, one given at p. 22 of England's 
 Parnassus under the heading " Bliss," the other at 
 p. 108 under the heading " Gifts," marked as of 
 unknown origin, of which the first occurs in the 
 fifth sestiad of Chapman's Hero and Lcander, 
 the second in his Shadow of Night. These in the 
 list that follows are assigned to their proper places. 
 The number of the page referred to on the left is 
 that in England's Parnassus ; the number on 
 the right refers to the page in which the same 
 passage appears in the first edition of Chapman's 
 collected poems. 
 
 List of Passages extracted from Chapman's Poems in 
 " England's Parnassus ; or, The Choicest Flowers 
 of our Modern Poets." 1600. 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 3. The golden chain of Homer's high device . 6 
 
 9. Things senseless live by art, and rational die . 77 
 
 12. Sacred Beautj' is the fruit of sight . . 29 
 
 15. All excellence of shape is made for sight . 33 
 (In the next line E.P. reads : 
 
 " To be a beetle else were no defame.") 
 
 16. Rich Beauty, that each lover labours for 30, 31
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 137 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 i6. O Beauty, still thy empire swims in blood . 31 
 
 17. *Beauty enchasing love, love gaining beauty . 29 
 
 „ This Beauty fair | is an enchantment made . 29 
 
 19. Beauty (in) heaven and earth this grace doth win 76 
 
 20. O Beauty, how attractive is thy power ! . 31 
 
 21. So respected 
 
 Was Bashfulness in Athens . . . .86 
 ,, Preferment seldom graceth Bashfulness . . 83 
 
 22. Hard it is 
 
 To imitate a false and forged bliss . . 82 
 
 ,, Bliss not in height doth dwell . . .90 
 
 38. All wealth and wisdom rests in true content J 29 
 
 40. Action is fiery valour's sovereign good . . 85 
 
 47. Round-headed Custom th' apoplexy is § '74 
 
 56. In things without us no delight is sure . . 76 
 
 67. Fierce lightning from her eyes . 80 
 
 68. Begin where lightness will, in shame it ends . 80 
 108. Good gifts are often given to men past good . 13 
 no. King Amalthea was transformed by Jove . 5 
 
 * E.P. has three misprints in this extract; "gaining" for 
 "gracing," "conflict" for "constant," "time content" for 
 "true content"; but in a later extract at p. 38 it gives the 
 right reading, and cites the two first lines of the stanza follow- 
 ing, which with the third and fourth are here omitted. It 
 attempts, however, to correct two seeming errors in the fifth and 
 sixth : reading " is " f or " in " and " thrones " for " thorns " ; but 
 in the first instance the text will be found right if the punctua- 
 tion be corrected by striking out the period at the end of the 
 line preceding; and "thorns" may be taken to mean the harsh 
 doctrines of the stoics subsequently referred to. In the ninth 
 line of this unlucky stanza E.P. misprints " grave " for 
 "graven." 
 
 t So E.P, for "beauty's fair"; and in v. 5 reads "fault" for 
 "fate," and in v. 8 "god self-love" for "good self-love." 
 
 X In this extract E.P. corrects "Bend in our circle" to 
 "Bound" ; a reading which seems to me preferable. 
 
 § This is the reading in E.P. of the line 
 
 "But custom, that the apoplexy is" ; 
 
 the two following lines are transcribed exactly as they stand in 
 the third sestiad of Hero and Leander.
 
 138 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 120. Good deeds in case that they be evil placed * . ? 
 141. Many use temples to set godly faces . . ? 
 161. The] noblest born dame should industrious be 86 
 164. Inchastity is ever prostitute . . . .15 
 170. They double life that dead things' grief sustain 77 
 
 74 
 35 
 
 49 
 
 87 
 
 77 
 34 
 
 172. Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams 
 174. Love is a wanton famine, rich in food 
 178. Love laws and judges hath in fee . 
 
 180. Love paints his longings in sweet virgins' eyes 
 
 181. Trifling attempts no serious acts advance 
 183. Pure love, said she, the purest grace pursues 
 196. What doth make man without the parts of men 5 
 
 6 
 82 
 86 
 
 197. Like as rude painters that contend to show 
 
 198. Hymen that now is god of nuptial rights | 
 ,, Before them on an altar be presented 
 „ In Athens § 
 
 The custom was that every maid did wear 
 208. The mind hath in itself || a deity . 
 
 ,, That mind most is beautiful and high 
 
 221, We must in matters moral quite reject . 
 230. Too much desire to please pleasure divorces 
 260, Like ^ as a glass is an inanimate eye 
 271. None is so poor of sense and eyne 
 To whom a soldier doth not shine . 
 
 „ No elegancie ** can beautify 
 273. Every good motion that the soul awakes 
 
 86 
 
 15 
 16 
 
 32 
 28 
 
 74 
 
 45 
 44 
 
 * This extract runs thus in E.P. : 
 
 " Good deeds, in case that they be evil placed, 
 111 deeds are reckoned, and soon disgraced. 
 That is a good deed that prevents a bad." 
 
 The third line occurs in the third sestiad of Hero and Leander 
 (p. 76). 
 
 t So E.P. for "And." 
 
 X So E.P. for "rites." 
 
 § These two words are interpolated by the editor of E.P. 
 
 II So E.P. for "herself." 
 
 ^ So E.P. for "For" ; and in the next verse "outwardly" 
 for "inwardly." ** So E.P. for "elegance."
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 139 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 274. As Phoebus throws 
 
 His beams abroad though he in clouds be closed 74 
 (These two are attributed to Spenser in E.P.) 
 285. Time's golden thigh 
 
 Upholds the flowery body of the earth . . 72 
 
 292. Virtue makes honour, as the soul doth sense . 32 
 
 „ Joy graven in sense like snow in water wastes 72 
 
 295. Good vows are never broken with good deeds 76 
 
 „ We know not how to vow till love unblind us , 76 
 
 297. Use makes things nothing huge, and huge things 
 
 nothing . . . , . . . '32 
 
 303. Wisdom and the sight of heavenly things 
 
 Shines not so clear as earthly vanities 
 
 {Blind Beggar of Alexandria, vol. i, p. 2.) 
 305. Best loves are lost for wit, when men blame 
 
 fortune ....... 32 
 
 308. Words well placed move things were never 
 
 thought ... .... 32 
 
 312. Their virtues mount Hke billows to the skies . ? 
 „ Women were made for this intent, to put us 
 into pain. (Warner's Albion's England.) 
 
 Women never 
 Love beauty in their sex, but envy ever . 83 
 
 Women are most won when men merit least * 83 
 321. Nothing doth the world so full of f mischief fill 82 
 324. The gentle humorous night 
 
 Implies % her middle course, and the sharp east ? 
 
 * In the third line of this extract E.P. reads "Love's proper 
 lesson" instead of "special." 
 
 t So E.P. The right reading of this beautiful couplet is : 
 
 Ah, nothing doth the world with mischief fill. 
 But want of feeling one another's ill. 
 
 Hero and Leander, 5th sestiad. 
 (E.P. prints "will" for "ill.") 
 
 I This word alone would suffice to vindicate the authenticity 
 of the fragment. It recurs perpetually in the poems of Chap- 
 man, who always uses it in the same peculiar and licentious 
 manner. 
 
 314-
 
 140 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 355. With a brace of silver hinds . . 9 
 
 356. Nature's bright eyesight, and the world's fair 
 
 soul ....... 10 
 
 357. Amongst this gamesome crew is seen . . 48 
 366. In flowery season of the year . . -43 
 
 (With two lines prefixed at bottom of preced- 
 ing page— 
 
 The tenth of March when Aries received 
 Dan Phoebus' rays into his horned head.) 
 372. Day's king, God of undaunted verse . . 81 
 379. All suddenly a light of twenty hues . 72, 73 
 395. She lay, and seemed a flood of diamant 29, 30 
 
 (Omitting " Now Ovid's muse — to make me 
 better.") 
 399. Their soft young cheek-balls to the eye . . 47 
 
 407. To make the wondrous power of love appear , 36 
 409. *Then cast she off her robe and stood upright . 23 
 ,, Herewith she rose, like the autumnal star . 31 
 417. See where she issues in her beauty's pomp . ? 
 ,; Her hair was loose, and 'bout her shoulders hung ? 
 422. Like f as a taper burning in the dark . . 31 
 ,, Now as when heaven is muffled with the vapours 33 
 424. As when Jove at once from east to J west 33 
 
 464. As she was looking in a glass . . .32 
 
 [Her glass in the text.) 
 469. In little time these ladies found . . -47 
 
 481. (Misprinted 465). In that mead-proud-making 
 
 grass . . . . . . 41, 42 
 
 485. A soft enflowered bank embraced the fount . 23 
 488. Grim Melampus with the Ethiop's feet . 13 
 
 There arc thus in this anthology no less than 
 eighty-one extracts ascribed to Chapman, besides 
 
 * In the third line of this stanza England's Parnassus reads 
 "her night" for "the night"; in the eighth "choisefull" for 
 "charmfur'; in the ninth "varnishing" for "vanishing." 
 
 •f So E. P. for "And." J So E.P. for "and."
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 141 
 
 two of which one is known and the other suspected 
 to be the work of his hand ; these are wrongly- 
 assigned to Spenser. At the time of this pubHcation 
 Chapman was in his forty-second year ; he had 
 published but two plays and three volumes of verse, 
 the third being his continuation of Marlowe's Hero 
 and Leander. Of the eighty-three passages num- 
 bered above, thirty-two are taken from this poem, 
 twenty-five from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, ten 
 from The Shadow of Night, eight from The Con- 
 tention of Phillis and Flora, a quaint and some- 
 times a graceful version into the Elizabethan dialect 
 of a Latin or more probably a quasi-Latin poem 
 ascribed by Ritson to one of the most famous 
 among mediaeval masters ; one is taken from the 
 first scene of his first play, one is spurious, and six 
 (including the passage wrongly referred in a former 
 list to Ovid's Banquet of Sense), whether spurious 
 or genuine, have yet to be traced to their true 
 source. In his critical memoir of Marlowe {Works, 
 vol. i, p. Ivii, ed. 1850), Mr. Dyce observes that " the 
 editor of England's Parnassus appears never to 
 have resorted to manuscript sources " ; and if, as is 
 of course most probable, the supposition of that 
 great scholar and careful critic be well founded, we 
 must conclude that these passages, as well as the 
 more precious and exquisite fragment of a greater 
 poet which called forth this remark from his editor, 
 were extracted by Allot from some printed book or 
 books long lost to human sight. One small but 
 noticeable extract of two lines and a half descriptive 
 of midnight is evidently, I think, from a lost play. 
 The taste of the worthy person who compiled this
 
 142 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 first English anthology was remarkable apparently 
 for its equal relish of good verse and bad ; but we 
 may be grateful that it was by no means confined 
 to the more popular and dominant authors of his 
 age, such as Spenser and Sidney ; since his faculty 
 of miscellaneous admiration has been the means of 
 preserving many curious fragments of fine or quaint 
 verse, and occasionally a jewel of such price as the 
 fragment of Marlowe which alike for tone of verse 
 and tune of thought so vividly recalls Shelley's 
 poem, The Question, written in the same metre 
 and spirit, that one is tempted to dream that some 
 particles of the " predestined plot of dust and soul " 
 which had once gone to make up the elder must 
 have been used again in the composition of the 
 younger poet, who in fiery freedom of thought and 
 speech was like no other of our greatest men but 
 Marlowe, and in that as in his choice of tragic 
 motive was so singularly like this one.
 
 THE EARLIER PLAYS OF 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
 
 THE EARLIER PLAYS OF 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 
 
 For any man born only a little lesser than the 
 greatest, a little lower than the angels or the gods 
 of song, it is the heaviest and most enduring of all 
 conceivable misfortunes to have been rated for a 
 time among them if not above them. That a 
 Jephson or a Tate, a Gibber or an Ibsen, should for 
 a moment be compared or preferred to Shakespeare 
 by any howling dervish or laughing jackass of 
 letters is a matter of no moment : that men of 
 genius should ever have been thrust forward as 
 claimants for so ridiculous a promotion is only too 
 certain to impair or to imperil, it may be for only 
 too many generations, the recognition of their 
 genuine claims to honour. That typical Oxonicule, 
 the Rev. William Cartwright, " the most florid and 
 seraphical preacher in the university," not only 
 damned himself to everlasting fame, but did what 
 in him lay to damn the reputation of Fletcher by 
 assuring his departed spirit that " Shakespeare to 
 thee was dull," obscene, inartistic, and scurrilous : 
 dull as compared to the author of The Nice Valour, 
 obscene as compared to the author of The Custom 
 of the Country,, inartistic as compared to the author 
 of The Sea Voyage, and scurrilous as compared to the 
 
 145 K
 
 146 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 author of The Scornful Lady. The criticism is worthy 
 of Matthew Arnold : and even he could not have 
 surpassed it in perversity of cultivated impertinence 
 and audacity of self -erratic conceit. But time has 
 always done justice, when time was needed to do 
 justice, on the academic aberrations of complacent 
 incompetence and overweening culture. It is of far 
 more importance that justice should be done to the 
 victims of their admiration. To be dispraised is 
 nothing : to be mispraised may be dangerous. 
 Justice has never been done to Beaumont and 
 Fletcher since the days in which their work was set 
 up against Shakespeare's. It is time to consider so 
 rich and various a treasure as they have bequeathed 
 us without consideration or recollection of the fact 
 that their garnets were once preferred to Shake- 
 speare's rubies, their pearls to his diamonds. No 
 other dramatic treasury can boast of so magnificent 
 a display in quantity, in quality, and in variety of 
 jewels. 
 
 It must be allowed that no expert in gems would 
 have given much for the first sample of their work- 
 shop. The generous and cordial friendship of Ben 
 Jonson could hardly have applauded so crude and 
 juvenile a study in his school of comedy as The 
 Woman-Hater. It is readable, absurd, and amusing : 
 I cannot think that much more can be said for it. 
 The rather dreary and mouldy Spanish tradition of 
 jocularity on the subject of hunger and gluttony 
 revives here in a final renaissance of farcical effect 
 which may charitably be found not altogether 
 unworthy of a tolerant rather than of a sympathetic 
 smile : but the protagonist is a mere monomaniac,
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 147 
 
 and the heroine is too eccentric to pass muster 
 except as a type of the very newest and oldest of 
 new women whom we may meet in the pages of 
 Aristophanes or the columns of the Times. 
 
 In the tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret a new 
 touch is felt — a new voice is audible. There is here 
 no trace of Jonson's influence ; nor is there any 
 sign of Shakespeare's except in so far as we may 
 say that all subsequent good work in tragedy must 
 inevitably bear witness to the effect of Marlowe's 
 example and of his. For this is good work, as well 
 as new : the impetuous and continuous rush of the 
 fluent and fervent verse is only the outward and 
 visible sign of the inward and spiritual ardour, head- 
 long and heedless of reflection or restraint, which 
 impels the writer's genius along its passionate and 
 breathless course. Even if, as has been plausibly 
 suggested, the staider and less vehement hand of 
 Massinger may here and there be traced, this play 
 is on the whole about the finest and the fullest 
 evidence left us of Fletcher's magnificent but far 
 from supreme power as a tragic poet. The men are 
 nothing : at least they are but rough and rudely 
 coloured sketches. The abnormal wickedness of 
 Brunhalt, the abnormal goodness of Ordella, give 
 all the life and interest to the tragic action that 
 readers can ever find in it or that spectators ever 
 can have found. It is not quite human life : for 
 the interest excited is hardly in human nature. But, 
 such as it is, the interest is unflaggingly sustained, 
 and the style is as admirable in its impulsive 
 fashion as is the style of Marlowe and Shake- 
 speare and Webster in the nobler and more
 
 148 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 serious manner appropriate to higher and sincerer 
 inspiration. 
 
 Something more of such inspiration is perceptible 
 in Philaster : and yet, leaving Shakespeare out of 
 the question, we find here no figures comparable for 
 creative power and living truth to Faustus and 
 Edward, to Vittoria and Bracciano, the Duchess and 
 her brothers. The boyish or feminine incapacity to 
 draw even in outline, to paint even in monochrome, 
 the likeness of a man, which is here so unmistakably 
 displayed, was evidently no evidence of inferior 
 power, no reason for inferior regard, in the estimate 
 of contemporary admiration. Among all their tragic 
 or serious heroes we may look in vain for the lifelike 
 figure of a conceivable and acceptable man. A 
 gallant and roistering humorist they could paint 
 better and more delightfully, with more contagious 
 sympathy and more audacious truth, than even the 
 great Dumas himself ; but the finest type of heroic 
 manhood imaginable by either is a knight of Malta ; 
 an Origen in armour ; a hero who renounces man- 
 hood. Philaster is something worse : he is hardly 
 the shadow, the phantom, the wraith of a living 
 man. The she-page Bellario is simply the loveliest 
 and most interesting of all dramatic hermaphrodites 
 from Shakespeare's Viola down to Wycherley's 
 Fidelia : it is curious and significant that Beaumont 
 and Fletcher could never create a man or a woman 
 so attractive as this fantastic and pathetic figure, 
 whose unquestionable and inimitable charm of per- 
 fect purity and more than manly womanhood threw 
 so strange a fascination over the stage that it was 
 a less outrageously than pardonably?_extravagant
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 149 
 
 exaggeration of the truth which Lamb allowed 
 himself in the assertion that " for many years after 
 the date of Philaster's first exhibition on the stage 
 scarce a play can be found without one of these 
 women pages in it." Certainly, as he adds, " our 
 ancestors seem to have been wonderfully dehghted 
 with these transformations of sex." But after all 
 it must be admitted that the vital and enduring 
 fascination of this beautiful and famous play depends 
 less on character or on incident than on the exquisite 
 and living loveliness of the style — most attractive 
 when least realistic, most memorable when least 
 dramatic. 
 
 The authors of The Maid's Tragedy succeeded in 
 showing themselves at all points superior to the 
 authors of Philaster. Their poetic power is equal in 
 charm and more perfectly adapted or subordinated 
 to the demands of dramatic art, the laws of theatrical 
 evolution or construction. That they could not 
 draw even in outline the figure of a man — that a 
 protagonist of heroic mould, such as Marlowe's 
 Faustus or Webster's Virginius, was not only unpre- 
 sentable, but inconceivable by the purely passionate 
 and impulsive nature of their tragic genius — this 
 masterpiece would suffice to prove, even without the 
 evidence of their later tragedies. The heroes, or 
 rather the passive and the braggart figures of man- 
 hood proposed for our acceptance as the heroes of 
 the play, are not above the rather lamentable level 
 of Philaster. But the sinners are better than their 
 elders ; Pharamond and his Megra are little more 
 than the sketches of a hot-blooded and headlong 
 boy if set against the vivid, vigorous outhnes of
 
 150 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Evadne and her king. Yet, exquisite though it is 
 as a poem, this famous tragedy is the first example 
 of an EngHsh play in which all other considerations 
 are subordinate to the imperious demands, the 
 dominant exactions, of stage effect. Evadne is the 
 one thoroughly credible and thoroughly realized 
 figure in the play : a bad woman who might not 
 have made so bad a man. Of the two heroes it can 
 only be further said that Amintor is abject and 
 Melantius absurd : the king is now and then as 
 theatrical in villainy as they in virtue, and Aspatia 
 is not so much a woman as a mouthpiece and a 
 subject for poetry incomparable in its kind. Shake- 
 speare and Webster did not find it necessary and 
 did not feel impelled to make their heroines talk so 
 lyrically and evoke from other and minor figures 
 such effusion of elegiac eloquence. In the earlier 
 scenes she says now and then something that could 
 not have been bettered by Webster or even by 
 Shakespeare : but she never has enough of life and 
 truth in her to stand beside " one of Shakespeare's 
 women " — or of Webster's. 
 
 That Fletcher or any of his friends should have 
 thought it probable or possible for The Faithful 
 Shepherdess to find favour on the stage is the most 
 wonderful and unimaginable witness we could have 
 to the delight of an English audience in pure and 
 absolute poetry throughout the age of Shakespeare — 
 during the generation that reaches from the sunrise 
 of Marlowe to the sunset of Shirley. That the 
 loveliest of all pastoral plays ever set by fancy in 
 the frame of a fantastic Arcadia should have evoked 
 by its failure such noble tributes of indignant
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 151 
 
 admiration from contemporary poets is an accident 
 which may well be held worthy of rejoicing and 
 thanksgiving by all who believe that sympathy and 
 gratitude rather than defamation and envy are 
 natural to all men not utterly ignoble and all com- 
 petitors not utterly incompetent. The difference 
 between this poem and Milton's exquisitely imitative 
 Comus is the difference between a rose with a leaf 
 or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and radiant, 
 and the faultless but scentless reproduction of a 
 rose in academic wax for the admiration and imita- 
 tion of such craftsmen as must confine their ambition 
 to the laurels of a college or the plaudits of a school. 
 The figures who play their parts on the woodland 
 stage of this fairyland theatre are hardly amenable 
 to criticism as actual or possible men and women. 
 The lover whose love is curable by compliance and 
 destructible by the destruction of his idol's ideal 
 inaccessibihty would be absurdly misplaced in the 
 world of comedy or tragedy : in the world of fancy, 
 a world made up of poetic artifice and tradition, he 
 is a perfectly appropriate and coherent figure, native 
 to his fantastic element. To the same world the 
 constant Clorin and the wanton Cloe so unmistakably 
 belong that the serious application of an ethical 
 standard to their conduct or their characters is as 
 inept as a poet's objection to the unimaginative 
 realism of mathematics or a mathematician's to the 
 sterile impotence of poetry if applied to the proof 
 of a theorem or the solution of a problem. The 
 most exquisitely appreciative and the most nearly 
 infallible of critics fell surely for once into incon- 
 sistent partiality and untenable paradox when he
 
 152 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 objected to the contrast of the lascivious with the 
 virginal shepherdess on the score that " such weeds 
 by juxtaposition do not set off but kill sweet 
 flowers," and defended the outrageous obscenities of 
 The Virgin Martyr on the plea that they " have a 
 strength of contrast, a raciness and a glow in them 
 which set off the religion of the rest, somehow as 
 Caliban serves to show Miranda." Such dunghill 
 weeds as those were never planted or watered by 
 Fletcher. 
 
 It is curious from the historic or literary point of 
 view that the first burlesque ever presented on our 
 stage should still be so very much the best. The 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle is at least as superior 
 to The Rehearsal at all points as the fifth act of The 
 Chances substituted by the author of The Rehearsal 
 for Fletcher's original fifth act is superior in dramatic 
 force, character, and humour to that hasty and head- 
 long scrawl of a sketch. The seemingly incongruous 
 interfusion of serious and sometimes noble poetry 
 might have been expected to destroy the broad 
 comic effect of parody and raillery which it actually 
 heightens. The good old city poet whose Cockney 
 heroics it made no unkindly fun of, and whose 
 homely power of pathetic realism was a quality 
 altogether beyond the reach of Beaumont or of 
 Fletcher, might have smiled without wincing at so 
 good-humoured and hurtless a caricature of his 
 counter-jumping paladins. 
 
 In theatrical magnificence of incident and effect 
 A King and No King is as supreme a triumph as is 
 Othello or King Lear in poetic sublimity and spiritual 
 intensity of truth made manifest and awful in beauty
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 158 
 
 as in terror to all ages of mankind. To say that 
 there is nothing more in it would be shamefully and 
 stupidly false : there is much beautiful writing and 
 much brilliant vivacity of charm. But all serious 
 study of character, all rational or moral evolution 
 of conduct, is wantonly if not shamelessly sacrificed 
 to the immediate effect of vehement if not sometimes 
 galvanic sensation or surprise. The outrages on 
 human possibility in the parts of Gobrias and 
 Arane, the magnanimous murderess in design and 
 the virtuous promoter of a supposedly incestuous 
 passion, would have been impossible to any other 
 poet and even to any other playwright of genius in 
 any way comparable either with Beaumont or with 
 Fletcher. That any soldier king was ever such a 
 blatant braggart and swaggering swashbuckler as 
 Arbaces might surely have been questioned, as now 
 perhaps it may not be, in the days of the poets who 
 decked out his crazy and feather-headed vanity 
 with the splendid plumage of rhetorical rhapsody 
 which, as Macaulay long since observed, so singularly 
 anticipates the discoveries of modern mechanism. 
 
 The peculiar boyishness which distinguishes alike 
 the tragic and the comic genius of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, but more especially the tragic work of 
 Fletcher and the comic work of Beaumont, displays 
 itself most amusingly in the once-famous parts of 
 the three beaten braggarts which in their day were 
 classed with the incomparable figure of Bobadil. 
 The far from subtle or exquisite humour of kicking 
 and cudgelling may have been caught from the 
 example of their illustrious friend and occasional 
 model, Ben Jonson : but the lightness of touch, the
 
 154 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 buoyancy of burlesque, must be allowed to give it 
 a tone of contagious pleasantry which the heavier 
 hand of the more serious artist has not given and 
 perhaps did not care to give. The veriest horse-play 
 of farce in the broadest scenes of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher has more of good-humour and harmless or, 
 anyhow, spiteless merriment than is to be looked for 
 in the elaborate and deliberate brutality of such an 
 unsavoury masterpiece as The Silent Woman. 
 
 The eccentric tragedy of Cupid's Revenge has 
 always been a butt for the shafts of sarcasm rather 
 than criticism. It is certainly somewhat grotesque 
 and amorphous if not abnormal ; we cannot be 
 surprised that both Campbell and Dyce should have 
 dismissed it with a bitter word of scorn. But a far 
 greater than they or than any other critic of our 
 great dramatic poets has not only embalmed its 
 noblest passages in the deathless amber of a priceless 
 volume, but has selected it for the supreme honour 
 of a condensed rendering into narrative prose after 
 the fashion of his incomparable Tales from Shake- 
 speare. The rough and ready improvisation which 
 reduces to a far lower level all the huddled and head- 
 long later part of the play is as evidently due to 
 enforced haste or natural weariness of the work in 
 hand as is the inferiority of the latter part of 
 Marlowe's Jew of Malta to the magnificent beauty 
 and power of its opening scenes. To imagine in 
 either or in any such case the necessary or the 
 probable intervention or intrusion of a foreign hand 
 and a feebler touch is a facile and uncritical evasion 
 rather than explanation of a problem suggested by 
 the naturally inevitable inequality of the finished
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 155 
 
 parts with the hurried parts of even a great writer's 
 work, when casually compelled to write against 
 time for the stage or for any other pulpit or tribune 
 required for the utterance of whatever he has to 
 say. But no pantomimic absurdity in the opening 
 and no convulsive debility in the closing scenes of 
 the play can efface or should be allowed to affect 
 the impression of the two scenes between Leucippus 
 and his mistress before and after his chivalrous and 
 mendacious affirmation of her virtue has resulted, 
 during his absence at the seat of war, in her marriage 
 with his father : a situation treated with charac- 
 teristic frankness, but handled with exceptional 
 delicacy. It may be remembered that Mr. Samuel 
 Pepys, on August 17, 1668, " saw Cupid's Revenge, 
 under the new name of Love Despised, that hath 
 something very good in it, though I like not the 
 whole body of it." The somewhat eccentric judge 
 who preferred Tuke as a dramatic poet to Shake- 
 speare at his very highest was on this occasion 
 exactly and excellently right. He and Lamb 
 (" Powers eternal ! such names mingled ! ") have 
 alone been just in their expressed or implied judg- 
 ment of this otherwise unlucky play. 
 
 There are some pretty lines thrown away here and 
 there on the not very brilliant masque in celebration 
 of the ill-omened nuptials of Prince Rupert's ill- 
 starred mother ; but Beaumont would perhaps have 
 done as well to leave such work to the stronger and 
 more inventive hand of his friend Ben Jonson, whose 
 influence for good and evil, or at least for better 
 and for worse, is evident in Beaumont's part of the 
 Four Plays in One, which we must regret to remember
 
 156 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 as the only surviving example of a form of dramatic 
 entertainment to which a horrible as well as terrible 
 little work of relentless and realistic genius never 
 to be unquestioningly rejected from the Shake- 
 spearean Apocrypha must pretty certainly be 
 admitted to belong. From what context of com- 
 panion plays or playlets such an inhuman or at least 
 such a merciless masterpiece of condensed and 
 concentrated horror as A Yorkshire Tragedy can 
 have been detached by its publisher or its author, 
 no imaginable student above the lowest level of 
 brainless and frontless duncery will care or will 
 presume to conjecture. In the present unique 
 instance it would not be difficult for the youngest 
 possible reader of average intelligence to distinguish 
 and to determine the parts assignable to Beaumont 
 from the parts assignable to Fletcher. The Jonsonian 
 induction is Beaumont's : he was never worse 
 employed than in imitation of his great friend Ben : 
 exemplar vitiis imitahile if ever there was one. No 
 one but a poet born could have written The Triumph 
 of Honour, though he could only have written it 
 during a transitory eclipse or collapse of his better 
 powers ; no one but an imitator of Ben Jonson 
 when least happily inspired could have scribbled 
 the farcical part of it. The Triumph of Love should 
 have been a beautiful and pathetic play instead of a 
 beautiful and pathetic sketch : but as it is we must 
 gladly acknowledge that one lovely scene in it has 
 been overpraised neither by Charles Lamb nor by 
 Leigh Hunt. The Triumph of Death, in which 
 there certainly is no suggestion of lovehness or 
 pathos, is a superb example of Fletcher's vehement
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 157 
 
 and fervent, though neither gentle nor subhme, 
 genius for passionate and headlong tragedy. The 
 Triumph of Time is a survival of the unfittest — a 
 revival of the obsolete morality play, not improved 
 by a dash of the contemporary masque. It is by 
 no means worthless : but its author would probably 
 have been the first to admit that it was not worth 
 very much. 
 
 The noble and cordial verses in which Ben Jonson 
 expressed the fervour of his love for a younger 
 friend who had shown such religious devotion 
 towards him should be borne in mind by the reader 
 who cannot but think that the " religion " so 
 affectionately acknowledged and so generously re- 
 quited did not bring forth any very sweet or savory 
 fruit in the rather too Jonsonian comedy of The 
 Scornful Lady. In all the curious and interesting 
 history of opinion — of moral and intellectual change 
 and progress and reaction — there is nothing more 
 singular than the variations of view among intelligent 
 and honourable men as to decency and indecency, 
 morality and immorality. It must surely be now 
 incomprehensible to any student of letters or of 
 ethics that so unquestionably good and true a man 
 as Dr. Johnson should have denounced the noble 
 and natural story of Tom Jones as a " corrupt " 
 book, and agreed with the clergy of his day in 
 commending to decent readers the infamous and 
 abominable story of Pamela. If the one is 
 sometimes blunt, the other is always vile. The 
 Scornful Lady is, of course, not so ignoble and 
 impure an abortion of immorality as Richardson's 
 shamelessly shameful book ; and in a rough way it
 
 158 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 is a vigorous and memorable example of the very 
 broadest comedy : but alike in matter and in 
 manner, in language and in character, it is undeni- 
 ably the coarsest work of its authors. And yet it 
 was so long held comparatively blameless that this 
 particular discredit has generally been transferred 
 to a far less offensive work of more graceful if still 
 somewhat graceless audacity in treatment and in 
 humour. Even Wycherley, if at his worst more 
 basely and brutally immoral, was hardly more 
 impudent in theatrical invention or device of daringly 
 and undeniably comic effect. 
 
 The strange and straggling tragicomedy of The 
 Coxcomb is as unadvisedly and as singularly mis- 
 named from the idiotic protagonist of the unin- 
 terestingly extravagant underplot as is a far more 
 memorable example of dramatic poetry, the master- 
 piece at once of Middleton and of Rowley which was 
 somehow most absurdly misbaptized as The Change- 
 ling. In the gentle and devoted heroine of the 
 more serious part there is a touch of simplicity and 
 sweetness, in devotion and submission, of daring 
 and of patience, which distinguishes her as a daughter 
 of Beaumont's genius from the more vehement and 
 voluble children of Fletcher's. Another play which 
 is no less obviously a compound work, not less 
 interesting and not less insufficient to satisfy a 
 serious and grateful admirer of their sometimes 
 rather idle and irregular genius, is The Honest Man's 
 Fortune. The hero is a nobler and manlier type of 
 manhood than any of Fletcher's when left to work 
 by himself ; but the movement and ease and 
 spontaneity of the action in all but his very worst
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 159 
 
 and hastiest and most puerile plays, if not even in 
 those rather pitiful puerilities of invention and 
 execution, will hardly be found in this more serious 
 and ambitious poem. The two heroines are admi- 
 rably sketched rather than admirably painted : but 
 the simplicity and nobility of nature apparent and 
 consistent in them both would be not less hard to 
 find in the more theatrical and conventional heroines 
 of Fletcher's later plays. There are noble passages 
 and magnificent couplets in the little poem appended 
 to this play : it would be difficult if not impossible 
 to match them for moral dignity and for majesty of 
 expression in any other work of Fletcher's : but 
 few readers will probably agree with Leigh Hunt 
 that they suffice to corroborate or to justify the 
 expressed regret of Coleridge that Beaumont and 
 Fletcher had not devoted their genius and their 
 time to writing poems rather than to writing plays. 
 The ingrained and ineradicable juvenility of mind 
 which distinguishes them from all other men of true 
 and splendid genius is or should be at once apolo- 
 getically and amusingly patent if not obvious to 
 the readers of that admirably written comedy so 
 childishly misnamed The Captain : misnamed from 
 a Jonsonian figure of farce who is once happily 
 humanized by generous sympathy and pity for the 
 supposed sufferings of an elder soldier. The mon- 
 strous and abnormal criminality of the almost 
 incredible heroine is more like the impudent fancy 
 of a naughty boy than the corrupt imagination of 
 a depraved man. But so bright and lively a piece 
 of work would in common scholastic justice be set 
 down so decidedly to the youngster's credit as to be
 
 160 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 deservedly set against the discredit if not the 
 disgrace due to the juvenile audacity of his immature 
 imagination. And the first scene of cajolery in 
 which the woman's magnificent art of passionate 
 hypocrisy is brought to bear upon a half-conscious 
 and half-reluctant victim, a would-be dupe who 
 cannot dupe himself, is finer than anything I know 
 of the kind in prose or poetry before the advent of 
 Balzac's almighty and ever-living Valerie. Madame 
 Marneffe is as matchless as Madame de Merteuil : 
 but the patrician or the plebeian she-devil of 
 immortal fiction might have given a smile of 
 sympathy if not a hand of sisterhood to the hardly 
 less terrible harlot of an English poet's inven- 
 tion. 
 
 In the magnificent melodrama or tragicomedy of 
 The Little French Lawyer, it would be impossible to 
 overpraise the brilliancy of invention, the deftness 
 of composition, or the splendour of execution : but 
 the brutality of boyhood is as evident as its joyful- 
 ness. From any other hand the rufftanly insolence 
 which derides the infirmity of a veteran hero in the 
 public street would be unendurable and unpardon- 
 able ; but here the merciless infidelity of the bride 
 who has played false to her earlier and younger 
 lover makes it intelligible if inexcusable. And here 
 the incomparable and inimitable lightness of touch 
 which impairs the tragic work and glorifies the 
 comic work of Fletcher must be allowed by all 
 intelhgent or aesthetic judges to redeem the offence 
 which would else be given to the moral or ethical 
 critic of the superb result or outcome of his weakness 
 and his strength — his inevitable hmitations and his
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 161 
 
 magnificent capacities. The juvenile horse-play of 
 practical jokes which animates at once the serious 
 comedy and the rampant farce of this dazzling and 
 delightful poem, a poem in which no alloy of grave 
 or of humorous prose can anywhere be found latent 
 or apparent, contrives in some inexplicable if not 
 inexcusable but bewitching if not irresistible fashion 
 to succeed somehow in fusing them together with 
 such instinctive alchemy of inspiration as to yield 
 by way of product or result a deathless if not 
 blameless masterpiece of comic poetry. 
 
 It is impossible to imagine that the author of this 
 most brilliant and buoyant and high-spirited piece 
 of work can have had anything to do, or that his 
 even more glorious friend and compeer can have 
 had anything to do, with one of the dullest and 
 feeblest plays surviving — another survival of the 
 unfittest — from the marvellous and matchless har- 
 vest of their time. The Apocrypha of the Scripture 
 bequeathed to us by Beaumont and Fletcher may 
 be more easily and more decisively tested and 
 gauged and disposed of than the Apocrypha 
 of Shakespeare's. That the bright and pleasant 
 comedy of The Widow is Middleton's work alone 
 will hardly be questioned by any reader whose 
 time would not be better spent on even the most 
 futile of employments or diversions than in the 
 study of poetic or comic drama : and the most 
 conscientious examination will only find in The 
 Faithful Friends a passage or a verse here and 
 there which may charitably be thought not quite 
 bad enough for an old Sharpham or a new Shake- 
 speare. It is perhaps not so utterly worthless and
 
 162 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 hopeless a failure as Cupid's Whirligig or Thomas 
 Lord Cromwell. But it is sad stuff. 
 
 The riotous and outrageous farce of Wit at Several 
 Weapons is such a play as might conceivably have 
 been written in his nonage by a bastard son of Ben 
 Jonson who had inherited more of the worse than 
 of the better qualities, intellectual and moral, of his 
 illustrious father. Even Ben, whose indignant 
 humour so often concerned itself with crime, would 
 hardly have introduced at the very opening of the 
 action as a figure of pure comedy a veteran in 
 villainy who boasts to his own son of his early 
 successes as a professional pimp, and his later gains 
 by the robbery and ruin of little children confided 
 to his guardianship. This is the most seriously and 
 odiously revolting passage in all the various and 
 voluminous work of these great dramatic poets — 
 or of any that I can remember among their fellows. 
 And this comes of taking life and character too 
 lightly and too stagily. The play is throughout a 
 very slight and rather childish piece of work, with 
 some touches in it of fun rather than of humour — 
 unless there be humour in a schoolboy's pillow-fight. 
 But the intended fun of the opening could only seem 
 funny to an exceptionally ill-conditioned schoolboy. 
 It is only fair to add that some of the heroine's 
 tricks and shifts to rid herself of an idiot suitor and 
 attract a hesitating lover are really not unworthy 
 to remind the reader of Moliere in his broader and 
 rougher mood of practical pleasantry. 
 
 The genius of Beaumont and Fletcher for pure 
 comedy was at its nadir in Wit at Several Weapons : 
 in Wit Without Motiey it rises easily and visibly to
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 163 
 
 its radiant zenith. The matchless instinct of expres- 
 sion, the incomparable lightness of touch, which 
 distinguishes its best work from all other triumphs 
 of poetic comedy in the language, carries off and 
 sweeps away all too curious or serious consideration 
 of character or conduct. But, indeed, if the pro- 
 tagonist is a somewhat too extravagant figure of 
 humorous extravagance when he joyously makes 
 away with his brother's fortune as well as his own, 
 the younger brother is so noble a fellow when he 
 refuses to resent his ruin, or to forget the finer 
 qualities of his reckless and rapacious elder, that this 
 single figure should suffice to confute all charges 
 ever brought against his creator or his twin creators 
 on the score of immoral incompetence to conceive 
 or to present a morally attractive and admirable 
 young English hero. Even Shakespeare — to say 
 nothing of Jonson, who in this race is quite out of 
 the running — can show no other to be set beside 
 him.* 
 
 The curious laxity with which educated and able 
 men will fling about epithets when engaged in 
 critical comment is rather singularly exemplified in 
 the terms applied by Dyce as well as by Hallam to 
 so magnificent a work of comic and tragic genius as 
 The Custom of the Country. Dryden's previous 
 attack on it as compared with his own dirty and 
 greasy comedies and those of his brighter but not 
 
 * Why Frank should be sometimes called Francisco is as 
 insoluble a mystery as why the word "else," a word as neces- 
 sary to the sense as to the metre, should have been persistently 
 omitted by all editors in the penultimate scene of this comedy. 
 "Do not allure me," says Valentine when secure of his bride. 
 "Thou art no widow of this world (else)!" Without this 
 obvious little word the line is immetrical nonsense.
 
 164 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESFEARE 
 
 less unsavoury rivals may be dismissed with a brief 
 expression of regret that so great a writer should 
 have shown himself so small a critic — so stupidly 
 shameless in misjudgment alike from the moral or 
 ethical and from the intelligent or aesthetic point of 
 view. " The very grossest " (as Mr. Dyce unhappily 
 miscalls it) of all these plays is beyond all question 
 The Scornful Lady. The Custom of the Country is 
 certainly almost as audacious a comic poem as is 
 even the alarmingly fearless and morally rather 
 than immorally impudent Lysistrata : but coarse or 
 obscene it is not. There is not a dirty word in it : 
 not a touch, not a whiff, of Swiftian or Carlylesque 
 impurity. 
 
 When some forgotten fool observed to Byron that 
 Italian was an easy language, the supreme and 
 final and unapproachable master of serio-comic 
 poetry replied with unusual good sense and accuracy : 
 " A very easy language to know badly ; a very 
 difficult language to know well." It would be no 
 less easy to pass judgment on Fletcher as a tragic 
 poet in a sweeping and summary fashion ; it is 
 certainly no less difficult to adjust the due balance 
 of praise and blame, whether positive or compara- 
 tive, which must determine the verdict to be passed 
 on the admirable, though anything but impeccable, 
 author of such tragedies as Bonduca, Valentinian, 
 and The Double Marriage. Brilliant even to splen- 
 dour, ardent even to satiety, they most indisputably 
 are. That their somewhat hectic and feverish glory 
 cannot endure a moment's comparison with the 
 sunlight or the starlight of Shakespeare's, of Mar- 
 lowe's, and of Webster's is anything but a reproach
 
 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 165 
 
 to a poet whose fame, if eclipsed, is not and can 
 never be effaced by theirs. 
 
 The dazzHng tragedy of Bonduca is half lit up by 
 the flame of the footlights and half by the radiance 
 of a magnificent if uncertain day. That it wanes 
 and withers into the dusk of an autumnal sunset 
 before the deathless dawn of Tennyson's almost 
 ^schylean Boadicea can only be acknowledged as 
 inevitable. That more than one or two of his con- 
 temporaries might have made out of the subject 
 a far more perfect and a far sublimer poem is as 
 certain as that none of them could have turned it 
 to such triumphant account from the not ignobly 
 theatrical point of view. But the reader of Fletcher's 
 tragedies can never quite get away from the besetting 
 sense of the theatre. In this instance the incon- 
 gruous and excessive admixture or immixture of 
 broad and not always brilliant comedy deforms 
 and degrades the tragic beauty of the nobler scenes. 
 The death scene is splendid and memorable : but 
 while reading it we must not remember such another 
 and more magnificent example of poetic tribute to 
 the sacred and heroic virtue of suicide in face of 
 shame as Marston had set in the immolation of his 
 Sophonisba. The best by far of Fletcher's martial 
 heroes is Caratach : and his nephew is a much finer 
 and more natural youngster than Shakespeare's far 
 less lifelike and lovable Arthur in King John : who 
 would have made us reasonably doubt whether the 
 omnipotent hand of his creator could have created 
 a living httle boy if it had not left us at a later date 
 the incomparable and unapproachable and adorable 
 figure of Mamillius.
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 
 
 It is no less singular than certain that the fame of 
 no English poet can ever have passed through more 
 alternate variations of notice and neglect than that 
 of the most temperate, studious, and conscientious 
 of the successors of Shakespeare. In his own day 
 Massinger would seem to have received, if not such 
 honours as English lovers of dramatic poetry might 
 think due to him in such days as ours, yet un- 
 doubtedly very much more recognition than was 
 accorded to poets of far purer and more potent 
 inspiration. Ford, as a master of perverse or noble 
 passion, of stately style and severe fervour in 
 presentation or suggestion of condensed and subdued 
 tragedy, stands far above him : Tourneur stands 
 higher than Ford ; and Webster, if compared to 
 them, is as Shakespeare if compared with Webster. 
 But if Massinger cannot be classed as a poet with 
 the least of these, it is no less certain that the best 
 of them cannot be ranked as an artist, I do not say 
 equal, but comparable to Massinger. That, as 
 Coleridge said, he is " always entertaining " — that 
 " his plays have the interest of novels " — is but one 
 of the excellent qualities which make the long 
 echpse of his fame so inexplicable. After the 
 Restoration, when Jonson and Fletcher were set 
 
 169
 
 170 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 beside or above Shakespeare, Massinger was held 
 unworthy of so much as a bare mention in the 
 numerous and elaborate critical essays of the repre- 
 sentative poet and critic of his age. Yet the 
 subjects and the humours of Jonson's comedies 
 must then as now have seemed far more obsolete, 
 more stiff with old-fashioned wit and rusty with old- 
 world allusions, than the less personal and satirical 
 comedy of Massinger ; while the only qualities in 
 which Fletcher excels him beyond all question or 
 comparison are the qualities of poetry and fancy. 
 And it will hardly be contended that these can have 
 appealed with any particular force or likelihood of 
 success to the admiring contemporaries of Etherege 
 and Wycherley. On the other hand, coherence of 
 composition, dexterity of plot, and harmony of parts 
 are qualities which distinguish the best comedies of 
 the Restoration beyond most of those belonging to 
 the earlier and nobler period of English drama : and 
 in these the best work of Massinger is pre-eminent 
 above that of his more inspired and impulsive 
 rivals. And yet it was not till the opening of the 
 nineteenth century that his claims to honour or to 
 notice were adequately or generally acknowledged. 
 The two previous editions of his collected works, 
 now only known even to the special student through 
 the stripping and whipping inflicted by Gifford on 
 their editors, would seem to have attracted but 
 little general attention. There is indeed one memo- 
 rable passage in the most delightful if not the most 
 invaluable book bequeathed to us by that century, 
 which proves that one great moralist of those days 
 must have laid to heart the moral teaching of this
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 171 
 
 neglected poet. " Infidelity," observes Mr. James 
 Boswell — whose wife may possibly have agreed with 
 him ; in which case the domestic atmosphere of 
 Auchinleck must have been liable to occasional 
 disturbance — " infidelity is by no means a light 
 offence in a husband ; because it must hurt a 
 delicate attachment, in which a mutual constancy is 
 implied, with such refined sentiments as Massinger 
 has exhibited in his play of The Picture." 
 
 But when the conscientious devotion of Gifford 
 had fairly brought Massinger to the front, and 
 estabhshed his claims to notice and admiration as 
 difficult to exaggerate and impossible to ignore, the 
 reaction in his favour which set in and swept forward 
 must at first seem almost astonishing to those who 
 know anything of the greater dramatic poets with 
 whom he must be compared — I do not say, with 
 whom he challenges comparison : for the modest 
 dignity of his self-respecting reserve precludes the 
 notion of a challenge. It became a question, among 
 men to whom the names at least of Marlowe and 
 Webster should have been known if not familiar, 
 whether Massinger ought not to take precedence, as 
 a dramatic poet, of Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher 
 — and therefore of all other imaginable rivals in the 
 race for the first seat beneath Shakespeare's. The 
 typic Hallam, who thought Racine " next to Shake- 
 speare among all the moderns," gave upwards of 
 five pages to Massinger, and less than two to 
 Webster. And in our own day the process of 
 reaction or retribution has been carried so far that 
 a critic so immeasurably superior to Hallam in 
 literary inteUigence and ability as Leslie Stephen
 
 172 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 has brought to bear upon the fame of Massinger so 
 heavy and so well-directed a battery of adverse or 
 depreciatory remarks that no student of the writer 
 attacked can pretend to ignore the breaches made 
 in the outworks of his reputation by the artillery of 
 so formidable an assailant. To me, indeed, it seems 
 impossible or futile to dispute the truth of his main 
 contention. The student of dramatic poetry as it 
 existed in the age which we call the age of Shake- 
 speare will undoubtedly feel, when he comes to the 
 time of Massinger, that he has come to the turning 
 of the tide. The ebb may at first seem all but 
 imperceptible : yet he cannot but perceive, if per- 
 ception be possible at all to him, that the inevitable 
 reflux has reluctantly but steadily begun ; that 
 nothing more must be looked for which may bear 
 comparison, I do not say with the masterpieces of 
 Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Webster, but with the 
 masterpieces of Tourneur, Middleton, or Beaumont. 
 What Fletcher could do, when left alone, may 
 not yet be altogether beyond the reach of ambi- 
 tious emulation : tragedies as good as Valeniinian 
 or The Double Marriage, if no comedies as good as 
 Monsieur Thomas or The Spanish Curate, may yet 
 be hoped for — not without diffidence and misgiving ; 
 but the golden has given place to the silver age of 
 English drama. This cannot be denied ; but the 
 silver age of English drama would eclipse the golden 
 age of dramatic poetry in any other nation of 
 modern times. And when Leslie Stephen objects to 
 the admirers of Massinger that his morality is morbid, 
 and proceeds to enforce this objection by the unim- 
 peachable remark that a man who has " a vivid
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 173 
 
 perception of realities and a masculine grasp of 
 facts " " will not represent vice as so ugly that it 
 can have no charms, so foolish that it can never be 
 plausible, or so unlucky that it can never be trium- 
 phant," his reader will remember that we have only 
 to turn to the text of Massinger for evidence no less 
 unimpeachable that the poet was of the same 
 opinion as his critic. Luke and Overreach, the two 
 typical villains of Massinger's invention, are as 
 charming to those whom they seek to fascinate, 
 as plausible to those whom they seek to inveigle, 
 as triumphant in their good luck till the crash of 
 retribution falls. on them, as Goneril or Shylock, as 
 Regan or lago, as Edmund or as Richard. 
 
 On the other hand, it must be allowed that Leslie 
 Stephen has hit the weak point of Massinger's 
 proverbial morality when he strikes at the senti- 
 mental and rhetorical assumption or affectation of 
 belief in the power of sentiment and rhetoric to 
 work miracles impossible in nature. It is certain 
 that the morality which " makes villains condemn 
 themselves, because such a practice would save so 
 much trouble to judges and moralists," and " fancies 
 that a little rhetoric will change the heart as well as 
 the passing mood," is a morality which " becomes 
 necessarily effeminate." If Massinger's morality 
 were altogether or were mainly of such a kind — I 
 do not question that it sometimes is— this epithet 
 would be too lenient and too temperate to define its 
 imperfection or its default. Such an adjective as 
 Catholic or papistical would be more appropriate, 
 and would scarcely be too severe. But I cannot 
 think — when allowance is made for the necessities
 
 174 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of stage effect — that this charge can be fairly or 
 even plausibly maintained. When the element of 
 supernatural religion or thaumaturgic theology is 
 brought in to make part of the poetic structure or 
 to quicken the dramatic movement, such monstrous 
 miracles of conversion must be accepted as part of 
 the stage business by the imagination of readers or 
 spectators as frankly as they are accepted, under 
 less reputable conditions, by the greasy and gibber- 
 ing theologians of the gutter. And when this all- 
 atoning and all-satisfying element of compulsory 
 conversion is not brought in, I hardly think that the 
 revulsions of conscience or the reversions of impulse 
 to which Massinger subjects his characters are so 
 liable as Leslie Stephen represents them to the charge 
 of making those who undergo them or pass through 
 them move and speak like the typical or exemplary 
 puppets of the pulpit or the stage. In the play 
 which heads the collected works of Massinger the 
 supernatural element of miraculous or transcendent 
 emotion or influence is of course the inevitable law 
 of action and passion which impels hither and 
 thither the agents or rather the patients of the 
 story. The only persons exempt from it are tyrants 
 or slaves — brutal satraps Hke Sapritius or bestial 
 clowns like the two hideous buffoons who disfigure 
 the background of a beautiful work of art. But the 
 parts of Diocletian and his daughter, which are 
 mainly to be attributed to the temperate and 
 cautious hand of Massinger, are treated with so 
 much artistic reserve and good sense that we can 
 only " stare and gasp " when we find that in Hartley 
 Coleridge's opinion " the superhuman atrocity, obdu-
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 175 
 
 racy, and blasphemy of the persecutors, of the 
 Princess Artemia herself, one would think would 
 make an atheist shudder." The nervous system of 
 an atheist must in that case be as sensitive as the 
 cheek — I will not say, of a young person, but of the 
 most abandoned and hardened libertine : to which 
 all moralists know how proverbially easy it is to 
 bring the shamefaced blush of revolted modesty. 
 This unfortunate princess, on finding herself treacher- 
 ously betrayed and befooled, breaks out into rather 
 strong language of reproach and denunciation against 
 her false lover and her Christian rival ; but the only 
 " blasphemies " in the play, if by the word " blas- 
 phemy " we are to understand insult and outrage 
 levelled at the religion of others, are those aimed by 
 the Christian saint and her satellites at the gods of 
 their forefathers. And this form of blasphemy is of 
 course both historically and dramatically justifiable. 
 The style of Massinger — a style as unlike that of 
 any other English poet as that of Dryden or of 
 Pope ; as tempting to imitators as it is inimitable 
 by parasites, and as apparently easy as it is really 
 difficult to reproduce — is already recognizable in its 
 fullest development of rhetoric and metre throughout 
 those scenes of The Virgin Martyr in which his 
 steadfast and equable hand is easily and unques- 
 tionably to be traced. It is radically and essentially 
 unlike the style of his rivals : it is more serviceable, 
 more businesslike, more eloquently practical, and 
 more rhetorically effusive — but never effusive beyond 
 the bounds of effective rhetoric — than the style of 
 any Shakespearean or of any Jonsonian dramatist. 
 And in the second play on the list of Massinger's we
 
 176 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 find this admirably supple and fluent and impeccable 
 style — as incapable of default from its own principle 
 or ideal of expression as it is incapable of rising, like 
 Webster's or even like Dekker's, to a purer note of 
 poetry or a clearer atmosphere of passion — not less 
 complete and rounded, not less pliant and perfect, 
 than in the first act of The Virgin Martyr ; "as fine 
 an act," said Coleridge, " as I remember in any 
 play." That great poet's memory must have been 
 somewhat shaken by indulgence in the excesses of a 
 theosophist and a druggard when he could not 
 remember as fine an act or a far finer act in the 
 plays of one Shakespeare, of one Jonson, or of one 
 Beaumont : ignorant as he seems to have been of 
 what others remember at the mention of such names 
 as Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, and 
 Ford, And his opinion that " Massingcr often deals 
 in exaggerated passion " is but ill supported by the 
 instance he cites in support of it. The author of 
 Remorse — not quite so good a play as The Unnatural 
 Combat — was convinced that the protagonist of this 
 tragedy, " however he may have had the moral will 
 to be so wicked, could never have actually done all 
 that he is represented as guilty of without losing his 
 senses. He would have been, in fact, mad." He is 
 represented as guilty of the murder by poison of a 
 wife whose sufferings impel their son to seek his 
 father's life in a duel which results in the death of 
 the patricidal champion of his mother ; and after- 
 wards as overcome by an incestuous passion for a 
 daughter whom he has not seen since her childhood, 
 and whose nubile beauty excites in his savage and 
 sensual nature an emotion against which he struggles
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 177 
 
 with more resolution, and with more abhorrence of 
 a temptation so inhuman and unnatural, than 
 might have been expected from so unscrupulous a 
 ruffian. This is doubtless a tragic record enough ; 
 but to say that it is the record of a lunatic is mere 
 foolishness — a confession of presumptuous ignorance 
 as to the darker elements of human character. A 
 less defensible point is the occasional conventionality 
 of expression ; Massinger, though by no means 
 generally inchned to pedantry or to rant, is liable 
 now and then, for lack of imaginative passion, to 
 stiffen and weaken his style with the bombast and 
 the platitude of cheap classical rhetoric — the com- 
 monplace tropes and flourishes of the schoolroom or 
 the schools. " Blustering Boreas " and ^olus with 
 his stormy issue make their appearance when not 
 only is there " no need of such vanity," but when 
 their intrusion chills and deadens the tragic effect 
 and the poetic plausibility at which the writer must 
 be supposed to aim. Compare the last declamation 
 of Malefort with any one of all those put by Cyril 
 Tourneur into the mouth of Vindice. Massinger's, 
 if written in Greek or Latin, would be admired on 
 all hands as deserving of the highest honours that 
 school or college could confer on the most brilhant 
 and vigorous exercise in passionate and tragic verse 
 which could be attempted in a foreign language by 
 the most accomplished and the most able scholar : 
 Tourneur's would recall the passion and the perfec- 
 tion, the fervour and the splendour and the harmony, 
 which even we at this distance of time, and through 
 the twilight of a dead language, can recognize in the 
 dialogue or the declamation of ^schvlus himself. 
 
 M
 
 178 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 On the other hand, the grim, narrow, sardonic 
 humour of Cyril Tourneur is not comparable with 
 the excellent comedy which lightens and relieves the 
 fiery darkness and horror of this vehement and high- 
 flown tragedy. The career of the chief comic 
 personage is really worthy to be compared with that 
 of almost any one among Fletcher's comic heroes ; 
 and this is very high praise. Massinger's deficiency 
 in wit would seem to have blinded most of his 
 critics to the excellence of his humour ; which, if 
 less buoyant and spontaneous than Fletcher's in the 
 exuberance of its exultation, is at least as plausible 
 and coherent in the felicity of its invention. All 
 that Coleridge says of the fallacy implied in such 
 figures of mere burlesque as that of the buffoon 
 suitor in The Maid of Honour is no less true and 
 rational than pointed and incisive ; they are too 
 wilfully absurd to excite any emotion but that of 
 incredulity, or that of compassion for a congenital 
 infirmity or defect. But such figures as Belgarde in 
 this play, or as Borachia in a later work, are brilliant 
 and vivid creations of observant and original 
 humour. 
 
 The objection raised by Coleridge, echoed by 
 Hazlitt, and re-echoed by Leslie Stephen, that the 
 fools or the villains of Massinger's invention are 
 apt to talk of themselves as others would talk or 
 think of them is too often but too well grounded. 
 " Massinger," says Coleridge, " and all, indeed, but 
 Shakespeare " (a sweeping impeachment which 
 proves only the wide range of the critic's ignorance), 
 " take a dislike to their own characters, and spite 
 themselves upon them by making them talk like
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 179 
 
 fools or monsters." His obsequious backbiter 
 Hazlitt, our English precursor or prototype of 
 Sainte-Beuve, follows suit with the remark cited by 
 Leslie Stephen, that Massinger's villains appear like 
 drunkards or madmen. This objection is supported 
 by Leslie Stephen with far more cogency and felicity 
 of argument than either Hazlitt or Coleridge had 
 brought to bear on it. The passage in which he 
 presses and enforces his impeachment of Massinger 
 on the ground of moral and dramatic veracity is too 
 effective to be passed over or evaded by any cham- 
 pion or advocate who might think fit to undertake 
 the defence of the poet. The " rants " of Overreach, 
 he admits, " are singularly forcible, but they are 
 clearly what other people would think about him, 
 not what he would really think, still less what he 
 would say, of himself. . . . Read ' he ' for ' I,' and 
 ' his ' for ' my,' and it is an admirable bit of denun- 
 ciation of a character probably " (no : palpably and 
 notoriously) " intended as a copy from life. It is a 
 description of a wicked man from outside ; and 
 wickedness seen from outside is generally unreason- 
 able and preposterous. When it is converted, by 
 simple alteration of pronouns, into the villain's own 
 account of himself, the internal logic which serves 
 as a pretext disappears, and he becomes a mere 
 monster." 
 
 There is so much truth in this that I am not 
 disposed to inquire whether there may not be 
 something to be said in deprecation or extenuation 
 of the charge ; nor will I deny that the singular 
 character of Sforza in The Duke of Milan is liable 
 to the imputation of unnatural and inhuman incon-
 
 180 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 sistency. Massinger was only too lamentably in- 
 clined to let moral or theatrical considerations 
 prevail over the claims of dramatic or poetic har- 
 mony. The preacher or the scene-shifter supplants 
 the poet or the playwright after a fashion so palpable 
 or so primitive that we are disposed to condone, on 
 comparison, the worst offences of Fletcher against 
 the laws of aesthetic or intelligent art. For in 
 Fletcher's work the levity of treatment is in keeping 
 with the spontaneity of style ; with the brightness 
 and lightness of fancy, the headlong ease and 
 energetic idleness of irresponsible improvization. 
 But in Massinger the sense of an artist's responsibility 
 to himself and to those who are to judge of his 
 work is so singularly and so admirably evident that 
 it would be rather an injustice than an indulgence 
 to extenuate his errors on the plea of carelessness 
 or hurry or fatigue. And therefore, supposing that 
 I wished, I should find it as impossible to impugn 
 as to reinforce Leslie Stephen's impeachment of the 
 dramatist who represents his Sforza in the finest 
 scene of the play as a hero, and in all the other 
 scenes of the play as a miserable and morbid egotist. 
 But when we are told that this play " may be 
 described as a variation upon the theme of Othello," 
 we can only reply that it might more truthfully be 
 described as a variation upon the theme of The 
 Comedy of Errors, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 or The Taming of the Shrew. Each one of these has 
 some minor point in common with it ; irritability 
 on the wife's part, jealousy on the husband's, or 
 violence of temper — actual or assumed — on cither 
 part. But Othello, the most unsuspicious and the
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 181 
 
 most unselfish though the most passionate and the 
 most sensitive of men, has almost as much in 
 common with his destroyer as with the covetous and 
 murderous egotist who leaves orders for his wife to 
 be assassinated if he should happen to fall in battle. 
 
 In spite of this radical and central blemish, The 
 Duke oj Milan is a nobly written and an admirably 
 constructed play. To do justice to its excellence, 
 we should compare it, not with Othello — " which," 
 in the classic phrase of Euchd, " is absurd " — but 
 with Ford's " variation " on the same theme in his 
 abortive tragedy of Love's Sacrifice. Ford was, in 
 the main, a greater tragic poet than Massinger ; but 
 the blemish which disfigures the elder poet's work 
 would be imperceptible in the work of his junior. 
 The action of Ford's play, like the action of Mas- 
 singer's, revolves on the jarring hinges of jealousy 
 and intrigue, malevolence and revenge ; but the 
 treatment is puerile in its perversity, while the 
 characters are preposterous in their incoherence. 
 Massinger 's tragedy, whatever objection may be 
 taken to this or that point in it, is a high and 
 harmonious work of art. 
 
 But on turning to his next play we find the poet 
 on ground more thoroughly suited to his genius than 
 the ground of pure or predominant tragedy. The 
 Bondman is the first, as it is with one exception the 
 best, of Massinger's romantic plays : tragic in 
 dignity of style, but happy in consummation of 
 event. In this field of work his hand is surer and 
 steadier than Fletcher's : if it has not all Fletcher's 
 grace and ease and Hghtness of touch, its treatment 
 of subject is more serious, its grasp of character
 
 182 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 more firm, its method of execution more conscien- 
 tious and more composed. He sacrifices little where 
 Fletcher sacrifices much to sensational and theatrical 
 effect ; he is evidently and deeply in earnest where 
 Fletcher seems to be thinking mainly of rhetorical 
 or scenical displa37. Compare the famous declama- 
 tion of Pisander against slavery, in the second scene 
 of the fourth act of this play, with the noble address 
 of Caesar to the severed head of Pompey in the first 
 scene of the second act of The False One. The style 
 of Massinger is sermoni propior — nearer the level of 
 eloquent prose : but it has a deeper and a graver 
 note of masculine sincerity in the measured earnest- 
 ness of its appeal than any that we find in the 
 rushing ripples and the swirling eddies of Fletcher's 
 effusive and impetuous rhetoric. 
 
 And here rather than elsewhere we may con- 
 sider the claims of the noble tragic poem 
 which the inappreciable devotion of Mr. Bullen 
 rescued for the careful study and the grateful 
 enjoyment of all its readers. The tragedy of Sir 
 John van Olden Barnavelt, if it be indeed the work 
 of Massinger and Fletcher, now that the date so 
 plausibly assigned to it by its editor has happily 
 been confirmed by such evidence as proves it no less 
 accurate than plausible, ought henceforward to be 
 printed at the head of Massinger's works. I must 
 confess that on a first reading of this play I was 
 hardly prepared to accept so confident a conclusion 
 and so absolute an assertion as to the irrefragable 
 certainty of its authorship with a faith as unqualified 
 or a conviction so positive as Mr. Bullcn's. But it 
 seems to me now that his confidence was more
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 188 
 
 justifiable than I thought it at first sight ; that the 
 hand of Massinger is as unmistakable in the two 
 opening scenes as the hand of Fletcher in the third. 
 Massinger reappears at the opening of the second 
 act : his vigorous eloquence and his inveterate 
 mannerism, his constant abundance of reciprocal 
 argument and his occasional flaccidity of collapsing 
 verse, could hardly be better exemplified than here. 
 Such a nerveless and invertebrate line as this — " I 
 love a soldier, and all I can do," or this — " Upon his 
 favour, 'twill take from his pride," or this — " How 
 much you promise, to win the old soldiers " — is a 
 characteristic and a grievous example of Massinger's 
 besetting sin as a versifier ; a sin which charity 
 might explain but not excuse as the result of a too 
 studious effort to bring the metrical language of the 
 boards into the closest possible conformity with the 
 actual language of real life. The scene is neverthe- 
 less a fine early example of Massinger's rhetorical 
 and dialectic ability. " This tune goes manly," the 
 student will say to himself on weighing the solid 
 and vigorous verse with the eloquent and effective 
 reasoning on both sides, and the spirited altercation 
 which succeeds it. 
 
 In the next scene it becomes evident that 
 to distinguish between the blended styles of 
 Fletcher and Massinger is a far harder and more 
 delicate task than to distinguish between the con- 
 fronted styles of Shakespeare and Fletcher. In 
 the last scene, for example, of The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen, the reader stands convicted of eyeless and 
 earless incompetence who cannot see at once and 
 say for certain where Shakespeare breaks off, where
 
 184 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Fletcher strikes in, and again where Shakespeare 
 resumes and winds up the broken thread of tragic 
 harmony ; but here, if Fletcher should ever be 
 somewhat less exuberant and fervid or Massinger a 
 little less self-controlled and staid than usual, it 
 becomes a matter of some difficulty to distinguish 
 the swifter from the steadier current in this noble 
 stream of song. But on the whole I take the second 
 scene of the second act — an excellent interlude of 
 comedy — to be more probably Massinger's than 
 Fletcher's. The vein of humour, the cast of dialogue, 
 the sententious turns of phrase, the satire on feminine 
 pretension and its cackling cry for women's rights, 
 are all of such a nature as to remind us rather of 
 such comedies as The City Madam than of such 
 comedies as Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. To 
 Massinger I should also assign, on similar grounds 
 to these, the authorship of the five short scenes 
 following, full of spirit and movement, which 
 conclude this vivid and animated second act. 
 
 An ounce of proof is worth a pound of assertion ; 
 and no more typical example of Massinger's dramatic 
 style could be chosen than the speech of Barnavelt 
 (Act ii. Scene i) after the refusal of the foreign 
 mercenaries to support the enterprise of his party 
 against the authority of the Prince of Orange : 
 
 Oh, I am lost with anger ! are we fain 
 So low from what we were, that we dare hear 
 This from our servants and not punish it ? 
 Where is the terror of our name, our power 
 That Spain with fear hath felt in both his Indies ? 
 We are lost for ever, and from freemen grown 
 Slaves so contemptible as no worthy prince,
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 185 
 
 That would have men, not sluggish beasts, his servants, 
 
 Would e'er vouchsafe the owning. Now, my friends, 
 
 I call not on your furtherance to preserve 
 
 The lustre of my actions ; let me with them 
 
 Be ne'er remembered, so this government. 
 
 Your wives, your lives and liberties be safe : 
 
 And therefore, as you would be what you are, 
 
 Freemen and masters of what yet is yours, 
 
 Rise up against this t\^rant, and defend 
 
 With rigour what too gentle lenitj^ 
 
 Hath almost lost. 
 
 In the qualities of passion and pathos, of poetic 
 imagination and distinction of style, instinctive 
 choice of inspired expression and exquisite phrase, 
 Massinger has many superiors : in purity and 
 lucidity of dignified eloquence he has none. But 
 the eloquence of Fletcher, if less masculine and less 
 thoughtful, has something of a more poetic quality 
 about it — more impulse and vehemence of impetuous 
 and unpremeditated effusion. The first scene of the 
 third act is a magnificent example of his best style ; 
 indeed, if style were everything in dramatic poetry, 
 we could not but agree with Mr. Bullen that " it 
 shows us Fletcher at his highest " ; but this very 
 act, if I mistake not, shows us even higher qualities 
 in the genius of Fletcher than such as can be dis- 
 played by the splendid style of even such noble 
 declamation as this : 
 
 I never knew to flatter, to kneel basely. 
 
 And beg from him a smile owes me an honour. 
 
 Ye are wretches, poor starved wretches, fed on crumbs 
 
 That he flings to ye from your own abundance : 
 
 Wretched and slavish people ye are become.
 
 186 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 That feel the griping yoke, and yet bow to it. 
 
 What is this man, this Prince, this God ye make now. 
 
 But what our hands have moulded, wTOUght to fashion, 
 
 And by our constant labours given a life to ? 
 
 And must we fall before him now, adore him, 
 
 Blow all we can to fill his sails with greatness ? 
 
 Worship the image we set up ourselves ? 
 
 Put fate into his hand ? into his will 
 
 Our lives and fortunes ? howl and cry to our own clay, 
 
 " Be merciful, O prince " ? pitied people ! 
 
 That in the next scene Massinger again resumes the 
 place lately supplied by Fletcher I have no more 
 doubt than Mr. Bullen has. In this play, earlier in 
 date than any other extant from his hand, we find 
 that at the age of thirty-five, three years before the 
 publication of The Virgin Martyr, his style was not 
 only formed but fixed ; there is no change, no 
 modification, no development perceptible in any one 
 of his many later works. We find also an exact 
 harmony or rather identity of style between the 
 language and versification of the scenes which are 
 obviously and indisputably Fletcher's and the 
 language and versification of the scenes undoubtedly 
 written by Fletcher in the play already mentioned, 
 which the all but irrefragable judgment of Mr. Dyce 
 assigned to the joint authorship of Massinger and 
 Fletcher, and which must probably have appeared 
 about the same time as the yet nobler work which 
 we are now engaged in examining. The False One 
 is full of brilliant and pow^erful wTiting ; but, like 
 the tragedy of Barnaveli, it is admirable rather on 
 that score than for constructive or impressive merit 
 as a dramatic poem ; the persons represented are
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 187 
 
 rather mouthpieces for fine verse than characters 
 of living men or women ; the development of the 
 story is somewhat lamely and loosely conducted or 
 evolved, and the upshot is consequently less effective 
 than it should and than it would have been if the 
 play had been built up or pieced together after a 
 more dramatic and a more workmanlike fashion. 
 Beaumont, we cannot doubt, would have looked to 
 this more carefully than did the brother in art 
 whom he had left to lament the loss of the younger 
 and greater partner in their poetic firm just three 
 years before the certain date of Barnavelt and the 
 probable date of The False One. And we should 
 not have had to observe and to lament a radical 
 defect in these noble scenes, full as they are of 
 magnificent eloquence and mastery in dramatic 
 debate : we should not have been left in doubt, we 
 should not have had to ask ourselves, in perplexity 
 if not with irritation, whether we, the intended 
 spectators or the actual readers of this play, were 
 expected by the authors to S3mipathize with the 
 calm and patriotic moderation of the Prince or with 
 the fiery and intemperate enthusiasm of the Advo- 
 cate. 
 
 To hold the balance equally and fairly between 
 the extreme or excessive assertions or preten- 
 sions of principle or opinion on either side of a 
 political or historical question may be the noblest 
 aim and the highest honour of a constitutional 
 historian : it cannot be the sole or the final object 
 of a dramatic poet. Shakespeare, fromx the demo- 
 cratic or ochlocratic point of view, may have been 
 as wrong as Hazlitt and Hallam thought him — as
 
 188 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 unjust to the plebeians and the tribunes of historical 
 or legendary Rome : but the tragedy of Coriolanus, 
 in consequence and not in spite of that hypothetical 
 iniquity, is a superb and perfect work of art. But 
 here, where we Hsten alternately to two equally 
 eloquent pleaders of whom we know nothing but 
 that they are equal in eloquence, we feel that the 
 demand made on our imagination, our interest, and 
 our faith is somewhat unreasonable in its exactions. 
 We cannot listen with equal confidence to the 
 orators on either side ; and beyond the effect of 
 their eloquence we are shown no reason, we are 
 given no hint, why our sympathies should be enlisted 
 on this side or on that. And this is so serious and 
 so deep a defect in the conception as well as in the 
 composition of a dramatic poem that we might too 
 justly apply to this otherwise most admirable 
 masterpiece the words in which Barnavelt (Act i, 
 Scene 3) replies to the Prince's threatening sugges- 
 tion of a cure for his errors which would make him 
 shrink, and shake, too — shake off his head. " You 
 are too weak i' the hams, sir," retorts the Advocate : 
 and this noble poem, considered either as a work of 
 art or as a study of character, is somewhat " too 
 weak i' the hams " — too uncertain in its bearings 
 and too equivocal in its effects. Fletcher never 
 thoroughly outgrew this ingrained infirmity of his 
 genius : we find him to the very last only too liable, 
 through mere weakness of handling or uncertainty 
 of design, to such error or such perversity as impairs 
 or effaces the effect intended : his heroes swagger 
 like cravens, his constancy is unstable as water, and 
 his chastity is more immodest than wantonness itself.
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 189 
 
 But of Massinger we may confidently and thank- 
 fully affirm that no such accusation can reason- 
 ably be brought against any of his later and unas- 
 sisted plays. And to him we must assign the credit 
 of introducing the most beautiful and pathetic 
 figure in all this populous tragedy of Barnavelt : 
 though it is to Fletcher that we must pay homage 
 and give thanks for the lovely later scene in which 
 this little figure reappears. In the second scene of 
 the third act the rhetoric is as characteristic of 
 Massinger as the metrical construction and fusion 
 of the verses. The style of the scenes immediately 
 following is all but unmistakable as Fletcher's. The 
 very fine one in which Leidenberch confesses to 
 Barnavelt his previous revelation of their secrets is 
 written exactly in the same running hand, so to 
 speak — with the same impetuous fluency and 
 vehemence of verse, which we find in such typical 
 plays of Fletcher's as The Loyal Subject and The 
 Humorous Lieutenant. Not only by the headlong 
 rush and exuberance of the metre, the headlong 
 violence and fervour of the dialogue, but by the 
 sensational sophistry and the passionate paradox of 
 the reasoning by which Barnavelt impels into 
 suicide the penitent betrayer of his trust, we recog- 
 nize beyond all possibility of mistake the hand of 
 the English Euripides. The short scene which 
 follows is as evidently an interlude inserted by 
 Massinger between two scenes of Fletcher's : his 
 curious and vexatious addiction to the use of the 
 ablative absolute — a Latinizing habit peculiar to 
 him, and suggestive of a recurrent stutter or 
 twitch or accent — is no less obvious than objec-
 
 190 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 tionable.* But the next scene — the sixth of the third 
 act — is in my opinion the most beautiful ever written 
 by Fletcher. Mr. Bullen assigns to Massinger the 
 " solemn and pathetic soliloquy " of the intending 
 suicide : and there are touches in it which recall 
 the manner of a poet somewhat overmuch given to 
 indulgence in classical allusion of a cheap and facile 
 kind ; f but it is to me absolutely inconceivable that 
 Massinger could have written what I am about to 
 transcribe : for the pathos is suggestive and the 
 writing is worthy of Webster ; I had wellnigh 
 written, of Shakespeare : 
 
 Boy. Shall I help you to bed, sir ? 
 
 Leidenherch. No, my boy, not yet. 
 
 Boy. 'Tis late, and I grow sleepy. 
 
 Leid. Go to bed then. 
 
 For I must write, my child. 
 
 Boy. I had rather watch, sir. 
 
 If you sit up, for I know you will wake me. 
 
 * Mr. Bullen's note on a passage in this scene, explaining the 
 word " fry " as here equivalent to " buzz, hiss," is surely an 
 oversight. Were this the sense, I do not see how the passage 
 could be either parsed or construed. Grotius threatens, if the 
 prince lays hands on Barnavelt, to set on fire the hall of justice 
 or house of parliament : 
 
 " His court, our gift, and where the general States, 
 Our equals, sit, I'll fry about their ears. 
 And quench it in their blood." 
 Any but the ordinary sense of a word not then so meanly familiar 
 in its sound as now would reduce the whole passage to incoherent 
 nonsense. 
 
 f I may observe that, while the metre is generally unmis- 
 takable as Fletcher's, there is one line in this scene — 
 
 " If you sit up, for I know you will wake me " — 
 
 as " weak i' the hams " as the weakest of Massingcr's ; but a 
 single metrical slip is a matter of little, or rather of no significance 
 if set against the whole weight of evidence inclining the other 
 way, and impelling us to asign it to the author of Bonduca.
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 191 
 
 Leid. Indeed I will not : go, I have much to do ; 
 Prithee, to bed ; I will not waken thee. 
 
 Boy. Pray, sir, leave writing till to-morrow. 
 
 Leid. Why, boy ? 
 
 Boy. You slept but ill last night, and talked in your 
 sleep, too ; 
 Tumbled, and took no rest. 
 
 Leid. 1 ever do so. 
 
 Good boy, to bed ; my business is of weight 
 And must not be deferred : good-night, sweet boy. 
 
 Boy. My father was not wont to be so kind, 
 To hug me and to kiss me so. 
 
 Leid. Why dost thou weep ? 
 
 Boy. I cannot tell ; but sure a tenderness. 
 Whether it be with your kind words unto me, 
 Or what it is, has crept about my heart, sir. 
 And such a sudden heaviness withal, too — 
 
 Leid. {aside) Thou bring'st fit mourners for my 
 funeral. 
 
 Boy. But why do you weep, father ? 
 
 Leid. O, my boy, 
 
 Thy tears are dewdrops, sweet as those on roses, 
 But mine the faint and iron sweat of sorrow. 
 Prithee, sweet child, to bed ; good rest dwell with 
 
 thee, 
 And heaven return a blessing : that's my good boy. 
 
 [Exit Boy 
 How nature rises now and turns me woman 
 When I should most be man ! Sweet heart, farewell. 
 Farewell for ever. When we get us children. 
 We then do give our freedoms up to fortune 
 And lose that native courage we are born to. 
 To die were nothing, — simply to leave the light ; 
 No more than going to our beds and sleeping ; 
 But to leave all these dearnesses behind us. 
 These figures of ourselves that we call blessings.
 
 192 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Is that which troubles. Can man beget a thing 
 That shall be dearer than himself unto him ? 
 
 If the English world of letters owed nothing to 
 Mr. Bullen but the discovery and recovery of such 
 a jewel of dramatic poetry as this — a pearl richer 
 than all our tribe — the debt would be not merely 
 beyond all repayment but beyond all acknowledg- 
 ment. The famous death-scene of Hengo in Bondnca 
 is not more pathetic, nor more delightful as evidence 
 of Fletcher's almost Shakespearean tenderness for 
 children. 
 
 The first three scenes of the following act are 
 composed and written in the same poet's liveliest 
 and most spirited style ; but, full as they are of 
 active interest and animation, the most important 
 part of this fourth act bears the evident sign-manual 
 of Massinger. In the impeachment and defence of 
 Barnavelt the poet who was above all things a 
 pleader — who could never miss an opportunity of 
 displaying his talents as an advocate — found his 
 first occasion for such display, and made use of it 
 mth such dexterous ability and such vigorous 
 temperance of style as to give promise of even finer 
 future work on the same lines ; of such noble 
 instances of dramatic ratiocination as the pleading 
 of Malefort before the council of war, of Sforza 
 before the Emperor, of Donusa before the Viceroy, 
 of Cleremond and Leonora before the Parliament of 
 Love, of Paris before the senate, of Camiola before 
 her rival and the King, of Antiochus and Flaminius 
 before the senators of Carthage, of Charalois before 
 the court of justice (twice in the same play) and 
 we might perhaps add that of Luke with Sir John
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 193 
 
 Frugal on behalf of his debtors. If Massinger, like 
 Heywood, had written a play on the legend of 
 Lucretia, we may be sure that the heroine, on being 
 awakened by Sextus, would have overwhelmed him 
 with oratorical demonstration and illustration of the 
 theorem that such a purpose as his in any man 
 
 Were most inhospitable ; this being granted, 
 
 (As you cannot deny it) 'tis in you 
 
 A more than barbarous cruelty ; kings being tyrants. 
 
 When they prefer their appetites (their conscience, 
 
 As a most dejected slave, cast down and trod on) 
 
 Before their nobler reason. Philomela — 
 
 And so forth, and so forth : it would be only too 
 easy to continue. But if the irrepressible barrister 
 too often intrudes or intrenches on the ground of 
 the dramatic poet, it must be allowed that his 
 pleading, if sometimes prosaic in expression and 
 conventional in rhetoric, is seldom or never ineffec- 
 tive either through flatulence of style or through 
 tenuity of matter. In the defence of Barnavelt 
 there is, however, one sign of comparative imma- 
 turity in the art of composition which would suffice 
 to distinguish it as the earliest of its author's sur- 
 viving attempts in this line. It is strange to find 
 Massinger writing as badly as Byron ; but Matthew 
 Arnold's denunciation of a " famous passage " in 
 the Giaour, " with those traihng relatives, that 
 crying grammatical solecism, that inextricable ana- 
 colouthon," is but too well deserved by the otherwise 
 effective and forcible speech of that Barnavelt 
 
 Who, when there was combustion in the state, 
 
 must be supposed to have said or done something ; 
 
 N
 
 194 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 but what, we can only guess : for this unhappy 
 relative is left hanging in the void, without a verb 
 to support it, over a howUng wilderness of ablatives 
 absolute and parenthetical propositions. 
 
 The first scene of the fifth act must apparently 
 be divided — " like a bribe-buck," as Sir John (not 
 Barnavelt) would express it — between the two 
 illustrious partners in this admirable play. The 
 change of style and rhythm from Massinger's to 
 Fletcher's, after the departure of the French ambas- 
 sadors, must be perceptible to the dullest ear and 
 eye, if not absolutely inattentive or unobservant. 
 The ghastly jocularity of the scene succeeding, in 
 which the three executioners play at dice for the 
 office of headsman to the great Advocate, is more 
 like Fletcher than Massinger : it may be compared 
 with the farcical hanging scene in the tragedy of 
 Rollo Duke of Normandy ; though the humour of 
 this later interlude is very inferior to that of a scene 
 which may remind a modern reader of " the song 
 that Jack the headsman sings," as quoted by his 
 friend the friar in the third scene of the third act 
 of the second part of Sir Henry Taylor's masterwork. 
 But the final scene which follows is, I should say, 
 beyond all question Fletcher's ; and a magnificent 
 example of his literary and dramatic power. The 
 tragically humorous realism of the part immediately 
 preceding the appearance of the condemned man is 
 as fine in its way and as effective as the stately and 
 fervent eloquence of his last appeals and protesta- 
 tions ; the pathos, if not profound, is genuine, and 
 the grasp of character more firm and serious than 
 usual.
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 195 
 
 In energetic fertility of invention and fervid 
 fluency of rhetoric The Renegado is a fairly repre- 
 sentative example of Massinger's most characteristic 
 work : it can hardly be placed in the first class of 
 his plays, but must be allowed to stand high in the 
 second rank. Hartley Coleridge's critical summary 
 of this play is about the best thing in his essay on 
 Massinger and Ford. The Parliament of Love, for all 
 the miserable mutilation of its text, is still recogniz- 
 able as one of its author's most brilliant and animated 
 comedies ; no less graceful and interesting in its 
 graver parts than amusing and edifying in its lighter 
 interludes. In the tragedy of The Roman Actor, if 
 the interest is less keen and the emotion less vivid 
 than that excited by the previous tragic poems of 
 Massinger, the equable purity of style and the 
 conscientious symmetry of composition will seem all 
 the more praiseworthy if compared with the head- 
 long and slipshod vehemence of many among his 
 competitors ; but in the hands (for instance) of 
 Fletcher ; the all-important figure of Domitia, 
 though it might have been more theatrical and 
 exaggerative, would have been more animated and 
 interesting than it is. The Great Duke of Florence, 
 if remarkable even among Massinger's works for 
 elegance and grace of execution, does not aim high 
 enough or strike deep enough to give more than the 
 moderate pleasure of a temperate satisfaction.* 
 
 * The generous praise given to this play by a greater tragic 
 poet than Massinger does no less honour to Ford than to the 
 object of these well-turned lines : 
 
 " Action gives many poems right to live ; 
 This piece gave life to action ; and will give, 
 For state and language, in each change of age. 
 To time delight, and honour to the stage."
 
 196 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The Maid of Honour leaves a deeper impression of 
 the very noble and original character which gives 
 its title to the play. The others, with the possible 
 exception of the loyal and single-hearted Adomi, 
 are somewhat conventional in comparison. It is 
 impossible to take any sympathetic interest in the 
 vacillations and infidelities of such half-hearted 
 lovers and loyalists as figure too frequently on the 
 stage of Massinger ; who must have found them so 
 serviceable in the development of a story, and for 
 the presentation of a nobler nature in fuller relief 
 against their ignoble or pitiable figures, that he 
 could scarcely appreciate or foresee the inevitable 
 effect or impression of such characters — a compro- 
 mise between indifference and contempt. And it is 
 a serious if not a ruinous defect in the structure of 
 a poem or a play that this should be the impression 
 left by any of its indispensable and leading characters. 
 In The Picture, an admirably written and admi- 
 rably constructed play, the typically constant and 
 devoted husband and wife are no sooner induced to 
 doubt or to disbelieve in each other's constancy 
 and fidelity than they begin to entertain, however 
 uncertainly and faintly, the notion of revenge or 
 retaliation in kind ; and this without the slightest 
 sense of attraction on the wife's part towards her 
 tempters or on the husband's towards his temptress. 
 One of Musset's brightest and gracefuUest little 
 comedies covers part of the same ground as this 
 much more ambitious and elaborate play of Mas- 
 singer's ; but the subject is touched with a far 
 lighter hand, and the figures are sketched in fainter 
 but more attractive colours.
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 197 
 
 In his two next plays, The Emperor of the East 
 and Believe as you list, Massinger has given a 
 colouring of romance to historical characters — or at 
 least to historical names — which in either case makes 
 the drama something of a hybrid, but a hybrid of 
 no unattractive or unlawful kind. The merit of 
 either play is rather literary than dramatic ; not 
 that there is any lack of interest and action, but 
 that, if set beside any play or any poem of strong 
 human interest, the comparative tenuity of com- 
 position, the comparative tepidity of emotion excited 
 or expressed, becomes manifest beyond all question. 
 Massinger's Pulcheria may be compared with Cor- 
 neille's by those who take pleasure in studying the 
 secondary works of celebrated poets : they have in 
 common at least the gift of sober and dignified 
 eloquence or declamation. But Corneille's penulti- 
 mate play, in spite of some better among many bad 
 verses, is on the whole very dull and rather absurd 
 in style and in design : Massinger's is at any rate 
 vigorous and lively, well written and well composed. 
 
 In the very act of reading the Frenchman's dreary 
 tragicomedy, it is difficult even to remember or 
 to distinguish, among all its wordy and s]3.adowy 
 figures, who is supposed to be in lukewarm love with 
 whom : in reading the Englishman's, if our interest 
 is rather the interest of literary curiosity than of 
 imaginative sympathy, we are at least amused and 
 gratified by the freedom and the fluency of invention 
 and of style. But neither Massinger, Corneille, nor 
 even Sir Walter Scott — though Count Robert of 
 Paris is worth far more than the common cry of 
 critics has ever admitted — could succeed in giving
 
 198 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 life and interest to any subject or to any hero 
 selected from Byzantine history. One only poet has 
 ever done that : and it is not the least among Sir 
 Henry Taylor's many claims to a place of high 
 honour among English poets and dramatists that 
 such a success should have been reserved for him to 
 attain at the very outset of his literary career. 
 
 It is a coincidence something more than singular 
 that in his next play. Believe as you list, Massinger 
 should again have so nearly anticipated Comeille in 
 choice of subject, place, and time that two of the 
 most important figures in either tragicomedy are 
 identical, and might indeed be recognizable even 
 without the identity of name. And the comparison 
 is here of far more value than before : for Corneille 
 in Pulcherie was at his weakest, and Massinger in 
 The Emperor of the East was not a little beneath 
 himself at his best. But in the tragic story of 
 Antiochus Massinger has displayed his gift of noble 
 writing and its quality of manly pathos as fully and 
 as impressively as in any of his more famous works : 
 and Corneille, in his corresponding play, has well 
 deserved the triple honour of denunciation from 
 Voltaire, of depreciation from Schlcgel, and of 
 acclamation from Victor Hugo. " Le Nicomede si 
 moque du dernier si^cle pour sa fi^re et naive 
 couleur " is in its own way as noble and original a 
 work as Massinger's ; and if the final upshot of 
 neither play is satisfactory to the sympathies or 
 adequate to the expectations of the reader, this is 
 but another point of curious interest in the com- 
 parison of two poems equally admirable in vigour of 
 handling and singular in selection of subject. But
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 199 
 
 the parallel runs far closer than this : the Prusias 
 of Massinger is essentially identical with the yet 
 more abject Prusias of Corneille, the Flaminius of 
 Corneille with the yet more arrogant and insolent 
 Flaminius of Massinger. And the patient heroism 
 of Antiochus under his sufferings is matched by the 
 haughtier heroism of Nicomedes in the face of con- 
 spiracy and danger. Ford's admirable Warbeck is 
 not a nobler or more interesting figure than either. 
 A certain deficiency in constructive power, a certain 
 monotony in dramatic arrangement and effect, may 
 perhaps be found alike in the English and in the 
 French play : there is something of pettiness, if not 
 something of discrepancy or confusion, in the motive 
 and the conduct of the intrigue which winds and 
 unwinds itself around or beneath the central 
 character of Comeille's ; while in Massinger's the 
 varied and protracted martyrdom of an innocent 
 and heroic victim becomes even before we reach the 
 fifth act too positively painful and oppressive for 
 the reader to find relief in any lighter interlude, were 
 it even far more exhilarating than the defiant 
 buffoonery of the indomitable fat Flamen. The 
 unmistakable reference in Massinger's prologue to 
 " a late and sad example " of royal misfortune " too 
 near " the subject-matter of his play — the crushing 
 defeat and the wandering exile of Charles I's luckless 
 brother-in-law, the Prince Palatine — is a noticeable 
 instance of his unflagging interest in contemporary 
 history as well as in social and political questions 
 more particular to England. 
 
 His next surviving play. The Fatal Dowry, is on 
 the whole the finest example of tragedy he has left
 
 200 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 us : the most perfect in build, the most pathetic in 
 effect, and the most interesting in development, 
 harmony, and variety of character. The attention 
 and admiration of the reader are seized and kindled 
 at the very opening, and are kept alive and ahght 
 to the last moment of the action. And on this 
 occasion we may feel confident in attributing to 
 Massinger all but all that is of value in a work 
 which we owe in part to another hand than his. 
 Nathaniel Field, his colleague in its composition, is 
 a dramatist of genuine and original quality ; but it 
 is impossible to suppose that the better and greater 
 part of this play can be either his work or any 
 man's work but Massinger's. Gifford, with com- 
 mendable candour and good taste, assigns to Field 
 the fine scene (as he justly calls it) in which the last 
 honours are paid to the father of the hero who has 
 sacrificed his own liberty to the claims of filial 
 respect : but except for this one scene we must 
 agree with him in regretting that Massinger did not 
 take upon himself the execution of the whole. His 
 calm command of earnest and impressive eloquence 
 was never put to nobler service : his austere sym- 
 pathy with self-denying courage or self-renouncing 
 resolution was never more worthily expressed than 
 in the devotion of Charalois to his father and of 
 Romont to his friend. But it is undeniable that the 
 best character in this play — the best in each sense 
 of the word, at once most effective from the dramatic 
 point of view, and most attractive if considered as 
 a separate figure — is a subordinate though neither 
 superfluous nor insignificant person. Romont is one 
 of the noblest of Massinger's men ; and Shakespeare
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 201 
 
 has hardly drawn nobler men more nobly than 
 Massinger. Fletcher's handling of such characters 
 is absolutely schoolboyish in its perverse conven- 
 tionality. Massinger's heroes have always some 
 touch of manly reason and loyal good sense which 
 preserves them from the ideal absurdity of Fletcher's 
 alternately blatant and abject martialists. 
 
 The figure of the heroine, on the other hand, is too 
 thinly and feebly drawn to attract even the conven- 
 tional and theatrical sympathy which Fletcher 
 might have excited for a frail and penitent heroine : 
 and the almost farcical insignificance and baseness 
 of her paramour would suffice to degrade his not 
 involuntary victim beneath the level of any serious 
 interest or pity. Rowe, in the play which he 
 founded on Massinger's, has very skilfully removed 
 this blemish. The victim of a Lothario we may 
 pity, excuse, and understand ; the victim of a 
 Novall is fit for enlistment in the sisterhood of the 
 streets. Rowe's place is rather low and Massinger's 
 place is rather high among dramatic poets ; but in 
 this instance the smaller man's poetic or dramatic 
 instinct was juster and worthier than the greater 
 man's. That his play is on the whole immeasurably 
 inferior in composition and execution to the original 
 from which it was rather treacherously conveyed or 
 derived is as certain as that the Phedre of Racine is 
 poetically inferior to the Hippolytus of Euripides ; 
 but Rowe's Calista is as much more pardonable 
 than Massinger's Beaumelle as the passionate peni- 
 tence of the French playwright's heroine is more 
 credible and more interesting than the unimaginable 
 atrocity — the murderous mendacity in suicide — of
 
 202 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the Greek's. Nevertheless it is curious to observe 
 the influence of a tradition rather Spanish than 
 French or English in the deliberate immolation of 
 the wretched girl by her husband's hand before her 
 father's face ; and to compare it with Heywood's 
 treatment of a similar subject in a far less ambitious 
 and a far more pathetic tragedy than any of Mas- 
 singer's. The English gentleman dismisses his adul- 
 terous wife from his house, to live and die in seclu- 
 sion : the French or rather the Spanish hero butchers 
 his poor traitress in cold blood, after killing her 
 paramour before her eyes and bringing her to trial 
 and sentence from the lips of her father and his 
 benefactor. The situation is theatrically superb ; 
 but the morality — even from the theatrical point of 
 view — belongs rather to the southern than the 
 northern side of the Pyrenees. 
 
 In tragedy Massinger was excelled by other 
 dramatic poets of his time : in the line of severe 
 and serious tragicomedy he certainly has never been 
 and probably never will be equalled. The hideous 
 hero of A New Way to pay Old Debts may perhaps 
 be now and then too strongly and even coarsely 
 coloured : the epilepsy of rage and remorse which 
 overtakes him in the last scene may be too obviously 
 the device of a preacher or a moralist who thinks 
 rather of impressing his audience with dread of a 
 special providence or a judicial visitation than of 
 working out the subject of a dramatic poem in a 
 natural and logical manner : but for all that, and 
 in spite of his theatrical and incredible expositions 
 of his own wickedness and baseness to men whom 
 he wishes to conciliate or attach. Sir Giles Overreach
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 203 
 
 will always and deservedly retain his place among 
 the great original figures or types created by the 
 genius and embodied in the art of our chief dramatic 
 poets. The spirit, eloquence, and animation of the 
 whole play are not more admirable than the perfect 
 harmony and proportion of all the figures displayed 
 in stronger or slighter relief by the natural progress 
 of the well-constructed plot. Much of the same 
 praise may be given to the first four acts of The 
 City Madam ; and the figure of Luke Frugal, if less 
 imposing and impressive than that of Overreach, is 
 drawn with far subtler skill and finer insight into 
 the mystery of ingrained and incurable wickedness. 
 The self-deceit of the suffering hypocrite, his genuine 
 penitence and humility while under a cloud of 
 destitution and contempt, may probably be accepted 
 as the deepest and truest touch of nature, as it is 
 certainly the most daring and original, to be found 
 in the works of Massinger. Up to the fifth act the 
 conduct of the whole scheme of the play is almost 
 beyond praise : it is lighter and easier, more simple 
 and more clear, than the evolution of Jonson's best 
 comedies : the variety of living character is as 
 striking as the excellence of artistic composition. 
 But all the energetic advocacy of Gifford, earnest 
 and plausible as it is, cannot suffice to vindicate the 
 taste or justify the judgment of a comic poet who 
 has chosen to deface the closing scenes of a comedy 
 with such monstrous and unnatural horror as 
 deforms the fifth act of this play. We know, he 
 pleads, that the inhabitants of Virginia in his days 
 did not offer human sacrifice to god or devil (in 
 other words, that they were neither Catholics nor
 
 204 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Calvinists). But Massinger and his contemporaries 
 did not know this, and must be excused for beheving 
 that they did. And therefore we must accept as a 
 natural and agreeable incident in a comic poem the 
 projected transportation and immolation of Lady 
 Frugal and her daughters "as an oblation unto 
 Hecate (!) and wanton Lust, her favourite." Ad- 
 mitting that so subtle and splendid a scoundrel as 
 Luke could be fool enough to swallow such a bait 
 and monster enough to entertain such a proposal, 
 we may surely crave leave to object that such a 
 conception is as monstrous, from an aesthetic point 
 of view, in a comedy, as it would be, from an ethical 
 point of view, in real life ; that it jars and unhinges 
 and disjoints the whole structure of the play. Luke, 
 under the impression of supernatural agency — 
 duped by his former dupes, and befooled by his 
 former victims — is no longer the same man : the 
 supple, pliable, quick-witted, humble', and resentful 
 rascal whom his creator had made as visible and 
 credible to us as Tartuffe himself subsides into a 
 devil and a fool, whom the simplest device can 
 delude and the insanest atrocity cannot revolt. 
 
 In these two noble and memorable plays Massinger 
 is no less a patriot than a poet ; his wise and 
 thoughtful interest in matters affecting the social 
 interests of the commonweal is as evident as his 
 mature and masterly power of construction and of 
 style. He was, it is evident, as all loyal Englishmen 
 must be, at once truly conservative and thoroughly 
 liberal in his views and in his aims ; all the more 
 bitter and unsparing in his hatred of corruption and 
 his abhorrence of abuses that he foresaw, as did no
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 205 
 
 other writer for the theatres, the inevitable result of 
 lawless extortion and transgression on the part of 
 the rulers of England. He was the Falkland as 
 Fletcher was the Rupert of the stage ; and a wiser 
 counsellor than ever won the ear of the king who 
 found his dramatic satire " too insolent " in its 
 exposure of the royal claims on " benevolences " 
 and the royal defiance of the law to be endured 
 without modification or excision. Coleridge's re- 
 marks on Massinger as a politician are equally 
 inaccurate and perverse ; nor are his strictures on 
 the dramatist and the moralist much more valid or 
 profound. It is true that some of his objections to 
 Massinger's treatment of character are not without 
 force ; and to the examples which he selects as 
 typically blameable he might well have added that 
 of the judicial frenzy which falls at last as a retri- 
 bution for his crimes on the head of Sir Giles 
 Overreach. 
 
 It has sometimes struck me as possible if not 
 probable that the first actor of this famous part 
 may have suggested or insisted on this tragic exag- 
 geration of its climax. We all remember how a similar 
 addition to the catastrophe of Dr. Johnson's Irene 
 was urged upon the author of that tragedy by the 
 fruitless importunity of Garrick : " The fellow wants 
 me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have 
 an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his 
 heels." The dumb despair in which Luke finally 
 leaves the scene is as much more impressive as it is 
 more lifelike than the raging desperation of Sir 
 Giles. But there is critical truth as well as friendly 
 cordiality in the pleasant commendatory verses of
 
 206 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Sir Thomas Jay, whom Massinger, with characteristic 
 modesty and unselfishness, had rebuked for classing 
 him as " equal with those glorious men, Beaumont 
 and Fletcher." The good knight does no more than 
 justice to his friend in applauding 
 
 The crafty mazes of the cunning plot. 
 The polished phrase, the sweet expressions, got 
 Neither by theft nor violence ; the conceit 
 Fresh and unsullied. 
 
 The steady and conscientious independence of his 
 genius and his principles had fully and nobly 
 asserted itself in Massinger's studies from contem- 
 porary life in England : in his three remaining plays 
 he has given a freer if not a looser rein to his fancy, 
 with less of the ethical and more of the sentimental 
 in its action. The Guardian is much more like a 
 play of Fletcher's — such a play, for example, as 
 Women Pleased or The Pilgrim — than any other of 
 Massinger's unassisted works : I need hardly add 
 that its plot is unusually multifarious, improbable, 
 and amusing. It is always excellently and some- 
 times exquisitely written : there is no very severe 
 or serious grasp of character, though all the figures 
 are as lively and easy as some of the incidents are 
 violent and absurd. The Bashful Lover, his next 
 play but one, is little less well written and well 
 arranged, but very inferior in interest, and more 
 markedly conventional in character than any other 
 play of Massinger's ; nevertheless it is an able and 
 in some degree an admirable piece of work. 
 
 One play alone remains for us to notice : for there 
 is neither any internal nor any external evidence of
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 207 
 
 the slightest value or the faintest plausibiUty for 
 Massinger's alleged association with Middleton and 
 Rowley in their comedy of The Old Law. But this 
 one remaining play is the flower of all his flock ; so 
 lovely and attractive in its serious romance, so ripe 
 and rich in its broader strokes of humour, so full of a 
 peculiarly sweet and fascinating interest, as to justify 
 more than ever the compliment of a comparison 
 which its author's diffidence had reprovingly depre- 
 cated on the lips of Sir Thomas Jay. As I have so 
 lately had to protest against Coleridge's occasional if 
 not general misjudgment of Massinger, I am bound 
 as well as glad to quote his atoning tribute to the 
 merit and the charm of A Very Woman — " one of the 
 most perfect plays we have. There is some good 
 fun in the first scene between Don John Antonio " 
 disguised as a slave " and Cuculo, his master " — and 
 more, the greater poet might have added, in the 
 later scenes between each of them and the bibulous 
 wife of Cuculo ; " and can anything exceed the skill 
 and sweetness of the scene between him and his 
 mistress, in which he relates his story ? " The 
 exquisite temperance and justice and delicacy of 
 touch in that almost unrivalled example of narrative 
 by dialogue are hardly to be equalled or approached 
 in any similar or comparable scene of Fletcher's ; 
 but the loveliest passage in it — the loveliest both for 
 natural grace of feeling and for melodious purity 
 of expression — has perhaps somewhat more of the 
 peculiar cadence of Fletcher's very finest versifica- 
 tion than of Massinger's. Mr. Dyce, in his admirable 
 introduction to the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 suggests that this play may be a recast of an earlier
 
 208 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 play by those poets — A Right Woman, which was 
 " certainly never given to the press," and in which 
 " Massinger might have been originally concerned." 
 Possibilities are almost infinite in such cases ; but I 
 cannot believe in the probability of any theory 
 which would tend to deprive Massinger of any part 
 of the honour and the gratitude which we owe to 
 the writer of this most beautiful and deUghtful play. 
 The great argument against the likelihood, if not 
 against the possibility, that Fletcher can have had 
 any hand or any finger in the text as it now stands 
 is the utter absence of his besetting faults. Violent 
 as are the passions and violent as are the revolutions 
 of passion represented in the course of the story, the 
 poet's aim is evidently to make them appear, if not 
 always reasonable, yet always natural and inevit- 
 able ; Fletcher, in his usual mood at least, would 
 have rioted in exaggeration of their contrasts, 
 improbabilities, and inconsistencies. His hunger 
 and thirst after sensation at any price could never 
 have allowed him to be content with so moderate, 
 so gradual, and so rational an evolution of the 
 story. 
 
 That Massinger was both greater and more trust- 
 worthy as a dramatic artist than as a dramatic poet 
 has already been admitted and avowed : but this 
 crowning work of his noble and accomplished genius, 
 at once so delicate and so masculine in its workman- 
 ship, would suffice to ensure him a place of honour 
 among the poets as well as among the dramatists 
 of his incomparable time. Upon the whole, how- 
 ever, I venture to think that his highest and most 
 distinctive claims to honour are rather moral and
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER 209 
 
 intellectual (or, if Greek adjectives be preferred to 
 Latin as more fashionable and sonorous, we will 
 say rather ethical and aesthetic) than imaginative 
 and creative. Be this as it may, there can be no 
 question that the fame of PhiHp Massinger is secure 
 against all chance of oblivion or eclipse as long as 
 his countrymen retain any sense of sympathetic 
 admiration and respect for the work and the memory 
 of a most admirable and conscientious writer, who 
 was also a most rational and thoughtful patriot. 
 
 #
 
 JOHN DAY
 
 JOHN DAY 
 
 One of the very greatest poets that ever glorified 
 the world has left on record his wish that Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher had written poems instead of 
 plays ; and his wish has been echoed by one of the 
 finest and surest critics of poetry, himself an admi- 
 rable and memorable poet, unequalled in his own 
 line of terse and pathetic narrative or allegory. I am 
 reluctant if not ashamed, and sorry if not afraid, to 
 differ from Coleridge and Leigh Hunt ; yet I cannot 
 but think that it would have been a pity, a mistake, 
 and a grievous loss to poetic or creative literature if 
 the great twin brethren of our drama had not given 
 their whole soul and their whole strength to the 
 stage. I cannot imagine that any poetry they might 
 have left us, had they gone astray after Spenser 
 with the kinsmen of the elder of the two, could have 
 been worth Philaster or The Spanish Curate, The 
 Maid's Tragedy or The Knight of Malta. But I do 
 sincerely regret that a far humbler labourer in the 
 same Elysian field should have wasted the treasure 
 of a sweet bright fancy and the charm of a true 
 lyrical gift on work too hard and high for him. 
 John Day should never have written for the stage 
 of Shakespeare. The pretty allegory of his Peregri- 
 natio Scholastica, a really charming example of that 
 
 213
 
 214 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 singular branch of mediaeval literature which had 
 yet to find its last consummate utterance in the 
 Pilgrim's Progress of a half-inspired but wholly 
 demented and demoralized Christomaniac, is perhaps 
 better reading than his comedies ; and it is not the 
 least of our many debts to the industrious devotion 
 of Mr. Bullen that we owe to him the publication 
 of this long buried and forgotten little w^ork of 
 kindly and manly and rather pathetic fancy. There 
 is nothing in it of such reptile rancour as hisses and 
 spits and pants with all the recreant malignity of a 
 fangless viper, through the stagnant and fetid 
 fenlands of The Return from Parnassus. We are 
 touched and interested by the modest plea — it is 
 rather a plea than a plaint — of the poor simple 
 scholar ; but perhaps we only realize how hard and 
 heavy must have been the pressure of necessity or 
 mischance on his gentle and fanciful genius when 
 we begin to read the first extant play in which he 
 took a fitful and indistinguishable part. And yet 
 there is good matter in The Blind Beggar of Bednal 
 Green, however hasty and headlong be the manage- 
 ment or conduct of the huddled and muddled 
 combination or confusion of plots. The scene in 
 which poor Bess, driven toward suicide by the 
 villainy of her guardian and the infidelity of her 
 betrothed, first comes across her disguised and 
 unrecognized father, and turns all her own sorrow 
 into pity for him and devotion to the needs of a 
 suffering stranger, is a good example of that exquisite 
 simplicity in expression of pathetic fancy which was 
 common to all the dramatic poets of the divine 
 Shakespearean generation, and peculiar to them.
 
 JOHN DAY 215 
 
 Art thou blind, say est thou ? Let me see thy face : 
 O, let me kiss it too, and with my tears 
 Wash off those blemishes which cruel time 
 Hath furrowed in thy cheeks I 0, couldst thou see, 
 I'd show thine eyes whom thou dost represent. 
 1 called thee father — ay, thou shalt be my father ; 
 Nor scorn my proffer : were my father here 
 He'd tell thee that his daughter held him dear ; 
 But in his absence, father, thou art he. 
 
 It would seem that the very existence and presence 
 of Shakespeare on English earth must have infected 
 with a celestial contagion of incomparable style the 
 very lowliest of his followers in art and his fellows 
 in aspiration. It would also seem that the instinct 
 of such emotion, the capacity of such expression, 
 had died out for ever with the afterglow of his 
 sunset. Even the grateful and joyful appreciation 
 of the legacies bequeathed to us by the poets of that 
 transcendent age is now no natural and general 
 property of all Englishmen who can read, but the 
 exceptional and eccentric quality of a few surviving 
 students who prefer old English silver and gold to 
 new foreign brass and copper. 
 
 Shakespeare and Marlowe to the vile seem vile : 
 Filths savour but themselves. 
 
 Themselves, that is, and their Ibsens. " Like lips, 
 like lettuce." 
 
 There is some good simple fun too in this homely 
 and humble old play : the Norfolk yeomen are not 
 all unworthy compatriots of Tennyson's immortal 
 Northern Farmers ; there is something in young 
 Tom's reflection, " Well, I see I might ha' kept
 
 216 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 company with honest men all the days o' my life 
 ere I should ha' learned half this knavery." Worse 
 jests than this have found wider echoes of laughter ; 
 and Tom approves himself a good fellow, and a 
 living creature of a real creator, when he risks his 
 hfe for the bhnd old beggar : "I'll take up my 
 lodging on God's dear ground ere thou shalt take 
 any harm." It is a pity we have lost the double 
 sequel to this play ; I for one, at all events, should 
 rejoice to read " the second part of Strowd " and 
 " the third part of Tom Strowd." His evident 
 popularity does credit to the honest and wholesome 
 taste of his audience. It is a curious sign of the 
 times that Day and his comrade Chettle should have 
 ventured and found it profitable to venture a 
 trespass on ground preoccupied already by Marlowe, 
 if not by Shakespeare ; and we can only wonder 
 whether Duke Humphrey and Cardinal Beaufort 
 reappeared and renewed their tragic wrangling on 
 the stage of the second or the third part of a story 
 transported from the traditional date of Henry the 
 Third to the theatrically popular date of Henry the 
 Sixth. It is perhaps needless to remind any reader 
 that the bhnd beggar who played his part on the 
 Bethnal Green of our old ballad-mongers was sup- 
 posed to be the surviving son of the great Earl 
 Simon, blinded and left for dead on the battlefield 
 of Evesham. 
 
 A quaint and primitive little play. The Maid's 
 Metamorphosis, printed in the year which Henslowe 
 gives as the date of the production of The Bliiid 
 Beggar, who was not to see the light of print till 
 fifty-nine years later, has been conjecturally and
 
 JOHN DAY 217 
 
 plausibly assigned by Mr. Gosse to the hand of Day. 
 The fluent simplicity of rhyming verse is sometimes 
 sweet as well as smooth. In the first scene of the 
 second act there is so singular an instance of the 
 crude and childish licence which allowed an actor in 
 the play to address the audience, that I should have 
 expected to find it a famihar quotation in the notes 
 or commentaries of editors who were scholars, and 
 not such impudently ignorant impostors as have 
 sometimes undertaken a work of which they did not 
 understand the simplest and most elementary condi- 
 tions. " {He speaks to the people.) Well, I pray you 
 look to my master, for here I leave him amongst 
 you." There are touches of pleasant fancy and 
 joyous music in this evidently juvenile poem which 
 may recall to a modern reader the lighter moods of 
 Keats. Its author, like the author of Doctor 
 Dodipoll, must have had Shakespeare on the brain ; 
 no reader of either play can miss or can mistake 
 the gracious influence of A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Comedy of 
 Errors. The pun on the words Pan and pot antici- 
 pates a jest unconsciously borrowed and worked to 
 death by the typically Caledonian humour of Carlyle. 
 Any form of tribute to the memory of Sir Philip 
 Sidney, any kind of witness to the popularity of the 
 Arcadia, does honour to his lovers in the past and 
 gives pleasure to its lovers in the present ; but one 
 at least of these latter must express a wish that 
 the playwrights would have left that last and 
 loveliest of chivalrous and pastoral romances reveren- 
 tially and lovingly alone. The prologue to The 
 Isle of G^dls is a bright and amusing little sample of
 
 218 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 dramatic satire ; its three types of critic, the lover 
 of Hbel, the lover of ribaldry, and the lover of 
 fustian, are outHnes of figures not unworthy of Ben 
 Jonson. But there is httle or rather nothing in 
 the five acts thus ingeniously introduced of the 
 peculiar charm which pervades the whole atmosphere 
 of the Arcadia : Day's young princes are mere 
 puppets, with no trace of likeness to the noble 
 original figures of Pyrocles and Musidorus ; not for 
 a moment can his light and loose-tongued heroines, 
 whatever grace of expression and of verse may be 
 wasted on the wanton and fantastic exposure of 
 their trivial inclinations, recall the two glorious 
 sister figures of Sidney's divine invention. There is 
 only one " person of the play " who has any 
 life or likeness of life in him : the rascally adven- 
 turer Manasses, morahst and satirist, informer and 
 swindler and preacher ; a very model and proto- 
 type of the so-called new journahst. The scene in 
 which he explains his professional aptitudes and 
 relates his varied experience is the only vigorous 
 piece of writing in the ragged and slipshod little 
 play ; his Puritan - sermon anticipates with quite 
 curious precision the peculiar eloquence of Mr. 
 Chadband. There is some rough and ready fun in 
 the part of Miso ; but the whole concern is on the 
 whole but " an indigcst deformed lump." The 
 soliloquy which opens the fifth act has real sweetness 
 as well as smoothness of metre as well as fancy. A 
 few lines may serve to give the reader a taste of 
 Day's simple and gentle genius or gift of style : 
 
 Farewell, bright sun, thou lightener of all eyes ; 
 Thou fall'st to give a brighter beam to rise :
 
 JOHN DAY 219 
 
 Each tree and shrub wear trammels of thy hair, 
 But these are wires for none but kings to wear. 
 
 For these we should probably read hers. The play 
 is as carelessly printed as it was carelessly composed. 
 
 The gentle minutes, crowned with crystal flowers. 
 Losing their youths, are grown up perfect hours 
 To hasten my delight : the bashful moon. 
 That since her dalliance with Endjnnion 
 Durst never walk by day, is under sail. 
 
 What follows is pretty and musical, but these are 
 the best lines, 
 
 Shakespeare and Heywood have both touched 
 smilingly on the " infinite variety " in style and 
 subject of their contemporary playwrights : neither 
 has included in his list of the sundry sorts and 
 kinds of play then aiming at popularity or bidding 
 for success one curious and interesting class, generally 
 perhaps interesting on historical rather than literary 
 grounds : the biographical drama. There are better 
 and there are worse examples of this kind than 
 The Travels of Three English Brothers ; the anony- 
 mous play of Sir Thomas More, which has scenes 
 and passages in it of a quiet beauty and grave 
 charm peculiar to the unknown and unconjecturable 
 writer, is very much better, and probably the finest 
 existing poem of its class ; Thomas Lord Cromwell, 
 by the new or German Shakespeare, must alike in 
 reason and in charity be hopefully accepted as the 
 worst. The curious and amorphous play in which 
 three men of genius — no competent reader of their 
 remaining works will deny the claim to that distinc- 
 tion of Rowley, of Wilkins, or of Day — took it by
 
 220 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 turns to dash off a sketch of incidents suppHed by 
 report, and to compile a supplement of inventions 
 huddled up at random, is almost equally interesting 
 and disappointing to a student of heroic biography 
 or a lover of the drama which depends on adventure 
 and event. Hey wood was the man who should 
 have undertaken this subject : he would have made 
 out of it a simple and a noble work of artless and 
 unconscious art. The three adventurous brothers, 
 whose doings and sufferings, wise or unwise and 
 deserved or undeserved, can hardly be remembered 
 without sympathy by any not unworthy country- 
 man of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Burton, 
 do not seem to have made any complaint of the 
 liberties taken by their three volunteer laureates 
 with their persons or their names, their characters 
 or their experiences. And yet the representation of 
 a Christian hero, who might conceivably and quite 
 possibly have been sitting among the audience, 
 fastened in the stocks and distended on the rack 
 before the eyes of " the great Turk," must make a 
 modern Englishman feel that the honest and admir- 
 ing enthusiasm of a dramatic poet no greater than 
 Rowley or Wilkins or Day might be almost more 
 terrible as an infliction than the pitiless and 
 unscrupulous animosity of Aristophanes or Shake- 
 speare or Moliere. Cleon or Lucy or Cotin may 
 have held up his head and smiled upon the foolish 
 and vulgar spectator who could imagine him acces- 
 sible or vulnerable by the satire of The Knights, or 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Les Femmes 
 Savantes : an English gentleman must have been a 
 very Stoic if he could so far sacrifice his natural
 
 JOHN DAY 221 
 
 instinct of personal reserve and noble shyness as to 
 abstain from wincing at his exhibition or exposure 
 as a hero and a martyr, on the chance that the 
 groundlings might be kindled and stimulated by his 
 example to a keener sense of religious or patriotic 
 duty. 
 
 The quaint and original prologue to this singular 
 play is perceptibly and demonstrably the work of 
 Rowley : who, though assuredly no dunce, would 
 seem to have anticipated the brilliant and convenient 
 theory of certain modern dunces that good metre 
 and musical verse must needs imply tenuity of 
 meaning and deficiency of thought — as in the 
 notorious and lamentable instances of Coleridge and 
 Shelley, whose melodious emptiness and vacuous 
 efflorescence of mere colour and mere sound were so 
 justly and so loudly derided and deplored by con- 
 temporary criticism. The singular point in Rowley's 
 case is that he really could write excellent good 
 verse if he chose, but usually preferred to hobble 
 and stagger rather than walk steady or run straight. 
 Lamb, who liked him so well, and took such pleasure 
 in culinary humour, must surely have missed this 
 curious illustration of the process by which fact 
 has to be trimmed up with fiction for the purposes 
 of the historic stage : 
 
 Who gives a fowl unto his cook to dress 
 Likewise expects to have a fowl again ; 
 Though in the cook's laborious workmanship 
 Much may be diminisht, somewhat added, 
 (The loss of feathers and the gain of sauce), 
 Yet in the back surrender of this dish 
 It is, and may be truly called, the same.
 
 222 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Such are our acts : should our tedious Muse 
 Pace the particulars of our travellers, 
 Five days would break the limits of our scenes 
 But to express the shadows : therefore we 
 (Leaving the feathers and some needless stuff) 
 Present you with the fairest of our feast.. 
 Clothing our truth within an argument 
 Fitting the stage and your attention, 
 Yet not so hid but that she may appear 
 To be herself, even truth. 
 
 Eccentric in expression as this apology may seem, 
 I know not where to look for an apter or happier 
 explanation and vindication of the method by which 
 the nudity and aridity of mere casual fact must 
 needs be clothed and vivified by poetry or fiction 
 with the likeness and the spirit of enduring and 
 essential truth. The symbol or emblem is less 
 refined and ingenious than that of The Ring and the 
 Book, but hardly less exact in its aptitude of 
 application. 
 
 A curious use of a word which conveys to modern 
 English ears none but a very different meaning may 
 be noted in the dedication, where the authors 
 express a modest wish to have " a safe harbour and 
 umbrage for our well- willing yet weak labours." 
 One or two necessary corrections or completions of 
 an obviously defective text may be worth transcrip- 
 tion : 
 
 Refrain therefore, and [know,] whate'er you are (p. 38). 
 I thank thee : less [or more] I cannot give thee (p. 45). 
 
 An over-austere or impatient critic might set 
 down his opinion that the opening scene of Law
 
 JOHN DAY 223 
 
 Tricks was less like the professional writing of a 
 sane adult than the furtive scribbling of a clever 
 child ; that a few pretty verses sprinkled here and 
 there throughout the infantile five acts of this 
 innocent little play could hardly carry weight 
 enough with even the most uncritical reader to 
 make him doubt whether a schoolboy with a touch 
 of ambition to give something like shape to his 
 rudest fancy and something of colour to his crudest 
 emotion might not have written it against time 
 between school hours — and hesitated to submit it 
 to the judicial and jocose opinion of any but his 
 most intimate and most closely coeval friend ; that 
 the two pages are the only satisfactory figures in it 
 — their elders, virtuous or murderous, being comically 
 rather than lamentably like the creatures of such a 
 boy's brain. The mention of " Justice Slender " in 
 the first scene is noticeable as an early and blunder- 
 ing reference to the text of a play which, though 
 published four years before, can hardly have been 
 known to Day except on the stage ; the hastiest 
 reader of Shakespeare's first rough draft could 
 hardly have confused the two immortal cousins as 
 the memory of a playgoer who had but once seen it 
 acted may apparently if not evidently have done. 
 The dialogue is sometimes bright and pleasant ; it 
 shoots and sparkles through the rhyming retort of 
 fencing epigrams as lightly and gracefully as Shake- 
 speare's in any of his earliest and idlest wit-combats 
 or encounters of fancy. There are not a few notable 
 words and phrases in the text worth registering for 
 an English dictionary that should be worthy to 
 stand beside Littre's ; and there are touches of
 
 ^24 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 humour illustrative of manners which might repay 
 the notice of a social historian. This passage, 
 for instance, anticipates the aristocratic satire of 
 Etherege : " Still in the bogs of melancholy ! 'tis 
 staler than tobacco : not so much but the singing 
 cobbler is grown melancholy, and corrects shoes in 
 humour ; fie on't ! " * That modern American 
 slang has its roots in old or obsolete English is a 
 truth once more attested by this curious passage : 
 " Why, she is of my near affinity ! Should I see my 
 near affinity go in tatters ? " (Act ii. Scene i). It 
 may possibly be just worth notice that the same 
 speaker in a later scene echoes the famous and 
 defiant query of Ancient Pistol, " Have we not 
 Hiren here ? " and it seems to me certainly worth 
 while to note a singularly modern or modem- 
 sounding use of a commonplace^ adjective just 
 afterwards : " We will be odd in all things." I do 
 not know whether camp-ball and football be the 
 same game, but I should guess so from Tom Strowd's 
 offer [The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, v. i) to 
 " play gole at camp-ball." Football was then held 
 
 * For "doubt" (Act ii, Scene i) we must obviously read 
 " doubted " — certainly not " do't," which is hardly sense, as 
 tobacco is not exactly an aphrodisiac. Profligate the prince is, 
 says the jesting speaker ; " and that which makes him doubted 
 most, he is in love with the Indian punk Tobacco." In the 
 ninth line of p. 23 " induce " is, of course, a misprint for 
 " endure." In the second line of p. 42 a stage direction has 
 crept into the text ; the words " discover Lurdo behind the 
 arras " can only mean " Lurdo is discovered " ; as part of the 
 speech into which the printer has jumbled them they are mere 
 nonsense. In the sixth line of the pretty rhyming scene which 
 follows, the word " away " is a palpable mistake for " awry." 
 The right reading is pathetic and consistent ; the wrong reading 
 stultifies a very graceful passage. On p. 78 there are two 
 consecutive and curious errors : " ungive " for " ungyve " 
 (= unfetter), and ' Heate " for " Hecate."
 
 JOHN DAY 225 
 
 a plebeian game — witness Shakespeare, to say 
 nothing of Beaumont and Fletcher. Anyhow, the 
 word is a rare one. 
 
 There is about as much substance in Humour out 
 of Breath as in a broken thread of gossamer ; but 
 even in the slightest and lightest of dramatic play- 
 things misconstructed by the very clumsiest crafts- 
 men who opened their toyshop on the stage of 
 Shakespeare there is a touch, a hint, an indication 
 of something more graceful and fanciful and child- 
 like in its pretty silly idleness or waywardness or 
 incompetence than can be found among the wares 
 of earlier or later " factors for the scene." Mr. 
 Bullen's generous commendation of such merit as 
 may be discovered in action or in character by a 
 kindly or friendly reader will be accepted rather 
 than controverted by a reasonably good-humoured 
 critic ; who nevertheless may be expected to regret 
 that a little more than the less than little which has 
 been was not made of the faintly pencilled outlines 
 and suggestions which promise now and then some- 
 thing better than we find realized in this unsteady 
 and headlong little play. The divine and universal 
 influence of Shakespeare lends it something of life 
 and light and charm ; we feel once more that the 
 very humblest and hastiest of his faithful and loyal 
 followers has something to give us which no later 
 stage poet of more vigorous and serious ability, no 
 Dryden or Otway or Southerne or Rowe, can give. 
 There is more merit in the least of these four play- 
 wrights, whichever he may be, than it is now the 
 fashion to allow him ; but in all those later days of 
 luminous decadence there was but one of their kind 
 
 p
 
 226 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who could write a verse or two after the manner of 
 the Shakespearean age in its earhest and simplest 
 expression of dramatic rapture by alternate or 
 elegiac rhyme. No competent judge of poetic style 
 would assign the following verses to a poet or a 
 dramatist of the Restoration : 
 
 Why was I destined to be born above, 
 By midwife Honour to the light conveyed, 
 Fame's darling, the bright infant of high love, 
 Crov,Tied, and in Empire's golden cradle laid ; 
 Rocked by the hand of empresses, that yield 
 Their sceptres formed to rattles for my hand, 
 Born to the i&ealth of the green floating field, 
 And the rich dust of all the yellow land ? 
 
 Any one who knows anything of the subject, if 
 asked to name at a venture the author of these last 
 two lovely lines, would assuredly name Tennyson. 
 They belong to Nathaniel Lee, and occur in the first 
 scene of the most hopelessly and obviously delirious 
 or lunatic performance that surely can ever have 
 got itself acted. I wish I could find anything in 
 Day so wholly and so delightfully worthy of the 
 hand which wrote the lovely scene of 13^^00 and 
 romantic courtship between Antipholus of Syracuse 
 and Luciana : but there is some light faint breath 
 of the luminous April air which stirs and shines 
 through every scene of Shakespeare's earliest plays 
 in the opening of this fantastic little comedy. And 
 there is something of a higher note in the utterance 
 of the banished Duke's irreconcilable son, when he 
 refuses to acquiesce with his father and sisters in 
 submission to adversity without hope of retribution
 
 JOHN DAY 227 
 
 or restoration, but repudiates all treacherous means 
 of revenge on their supplanter : 
 
 I will not play the coward, kill him first 
 And send my challenge after. 
 
 This almost tragic figure, which might have been 
 borrowed from Marston and tempered or toned 
 down in the borrowing, seems to bring luck to the 
 lesser and gentler poet ; the character of his mistress 
 takes something of life and charm on it when he 
 leaves her, rejected and contemptuous, and the 
 page to whom she has .confessed that she " cannot 
 live without him " replies, " O that he knew it, 
 lady ! " The rejoinder is worthy of a greater and 
 more famous dramatist. " He does : he would 
 never have left me else. He does." And the 
 wrangling and love-making dialogue that follows is 
 worthy either of Marston or of Jonson. But on the 
 whole this play might not unjustly be described as 
 Marston and water. Antonio, though he has some 
 very pretty and fanciful verses to say, is a very thin 
 " moonshine shadow " of Andrugio. But in lighter 
 things the lighter touch of Day is graceful and 
 pleasant enough ; the scene of blind man's buff in 
 which the prisoner escapes by the help of his princess 
 and her page, and leaves his gaoler in gaol, is as 
 pretty an interlude of farce as even Moliere could 
 have devised by way of relief to the graver interest 
 of romantic comedy.* 
 
 * In the third line of the second speech of this play there is 
 an obviously ridiculous misprint : the " steeds still armed " 
 could only have been " banded with steel," not " branded " — 
 or fired.
 
 228 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 In the moral and satirical allegory of the scholar's 
 pilgrimage, for the survival or revival of which Day 
 and we owe sincere thanks to Mr. Bullen, the 
 opening attack on the tricks of tradesmen is notice- 
 able for a realistic force of humour not unworthy of 
 Dekker. The wealth of curious terms and phrases 
 would amply repay the research of a social historian 
 or an intelligent lexicographer.* There are such 
 vivid and picturesque touches in the description of 
 " Poneria, or Sin," as would be famous if they had 
 but had the luck to be laid on by the hand of no 
 better a poet than Bunyan. For example : " Her 
 hair, that hung in loose tramniels about her shoulders, 
 like find threads of gold, seemed like a curled flame 
 that hums downwards." The entire allegory is alive 
 with ingenious and imaginative invention of incident 
 and sjnnbol. There are touches of genuine if not 
 very subtle or recondite humour in the seventeenth 
 tractate : the description of " a kind of justice in 
 law " and his household is hardly unworthy of 
 Fielding or of Dickens ; and " the new vicar, made 
 out of an old friar that had been twice turned at a 
 religion-dresser's," is a clergyman fit to stand beside 
 the reverend and immortal figure of Parson Trulliber, 
 In the nineteenth tractate it is curious to come once 
 more upon the old mediaeval fable or allegory of 
 human life as a tree growing in the side of a gulf or 
 pit, with God as a raging lion and the devil as a 
 
 * In his description of Envy, Day uses the word " hag " as 
 a masculine substantive, and Anger he defines as " a right 
 low country boot-haler." The rare word " swelted " which 
 occurs in the sixth tractate — " the beauteous flowers were 
 nothing else but swelted weeds " — is apparently another form 
 of "wilted."
 
 JOHN DAY 229 
 
 fiery serpent above it and beneath, and the white 
 mouse Day and the black mouse Night ever nibbHng 
 at the root of it.* 
 
 The best known or rather the least unknown of 
 Day's works belongs to the same category of alle- 
 gorical satire. Leigh Hunt, who spoke of it with 
 his usual and unfaihng charm of sympathetic and 
 sensitive appreciation in that dehghtful book which 
 will always be especially cherished by all to whom 
 his genius and Richard Doyle's are dear, was as 
 right as might have been expected in his objection 
 that the characters who play their parts in The 
 Parliament of Bees were too unlike the makers of 
 honey to represent them fairly in sight of the 
 laziest and most indulgent fancy. He knew this 
 quaint and queer and beautiful poem only by the 
 extracts given in Lamb's priceless " Specimens," and 
 consequently could not guess that it was mainly 
 intended as a direct and obvious presentation, 
 satirical or panegyrical, of contemporary and charac- 
 teristic types of men and women under the merely 
 nominal and transparent form of bees. It is a real 
 pity that the happy and happy-making author of 
 A Jar of Honey from Mount Hyhla should never 
 have read even the title of the original version 
 unearthed by the deservedly fortunate and thank- 
 worthy research of Mr. Bullen : " An old Manuscript 
 containing the Parliament of Bees, found in a 
 hollow tree in a garden at Hybla, in a strange 
 language, and now faithfully translated into easy 
 EngHsh verse by John Day, Cantabrig." — who ven- 
 
 * In the seventh tractate there is a curious phrase which is 
 new to me : "he is his own as sure as a club."
 
 230 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAIO^SPEARE 
 
 tures to append the motto chosen by Shakespeare 
 for the first book which ever bore on its title-page 
 the most illustrious of all mortal or immortal names. 
 Balzac, if not Hugo, might have been interested to 
 learn from the dedication " how Lewis the eleventh 
 (of that name) King of France took notice, and 
 bountifully rewarded a decayed gardener, who 
 presented him with a bunch of carrots." 
 
 The partnership of Dekker in this work, detected 
 and verified by Mr. Bullen, is confirmed beyond all 
 question by comparison of the good metre in the 
 charming sixth scene with the scandalously slipshod 
 verse which here and there disfigures those which 
 precede and follow it : a perverse and villainous 
 defect peculiar to Dekker alone among all his 
 fellows ; a sin out of which even the merciless lash 
 of Ben Jonson failed to whip him into repentance 
 and reformation. The changes from the manuscript 
 in the printed text are sometimes at least such 
 improvements as transfigure rather poor verse into 
 really good poetry ; and sometimes of a much more 
 dubious kind. A passage which does not reappear 
 in the printed Parliament of Bees, but recurs in 
 Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom, seems to me better 
 expressed in its original manuscript form : 
 
 He that will read my acts of charity 
 
 Shall find them WTit in ashes, which the wind 
 
 Shall scatter ere he spells them. 
 
 In the text of Dekker's play we find this surely 
 inferior version : 
 
 He that will read the wasting of my gold 
 Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind 
 WUl scatter ere he spends it.
 
 JOHN DAY 231 
 
 But if Wordsworth, Landor, and even Tennyson, 
 did not al-ways-change for the better, we can hardly 
 expect a more infallible felicity in revision from 
 Dekker or from Day, 
 
 That the third " Character " belongs to Dekker 
 seems to me evident from the cancelled couplet 
 which announces without introducing an important 
 figure in The Wonder of a Kingdom, the disowned 
 and impoverished brother of the profligate and 
 ruffianly braggart. As that gallant and ill-requited 
 soldier is the next " Character," this scene must 
 also, I presume, be Dekker's, But it is Day, I 
 think, who touches the loathsome lips of the typical 
 and eternal poetaster — sycophant and slanderer, 
 coward and liar — with indirect and involuntary 
 praise of Persius. I doubt whether Dekker could 
 have construed a dozen consecutive lines of the 
 noble young Roman stoic. 
 
 How Day could have had the heart to cancel 
 some of the sweetest lines he ever wrote I cannot 
 conjecture ; but the strange fact is that these pretty 
 verses were struck away from the sixth and grace- 
 fullest scene of the most delightful little poem he 
 has left us : 
 
 A pair of suns move in his spherelike eyes ; 
 Were I love's pirate, he should be my prize. 
 Only his person lightens all the room, 
 For where his beauty shines night dares not come. 
 His frown would school a tyrant to be meek ; 
 Love's chronicle is painted on his cheek, 
 Where lilies and fresh roses spread so high 
 As death himself to see them fade would die. 
 
 This passage can hardly have been cancelled
 
 232 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 because the characteristics of fascinating youth 
 described in it were rather human than apiarian : 
 the whole poem, on that score, would at once 
 deserve the castigation of fire. 
 
 The seventh interlude, brightly and lightly written 
 after the ready fashion of Dekker, has just the 
 straightforward simplicity of his satire in its carica- 
 tures of parsimony and prodigaHty, with something 
 of his roughness and laxity in metre. In the ninth 
 and tenth we find him again, and recognize in each 
 the first shape or sketch of yet another scene in the 
 tragicomedy to which so much was transferred from 
 this as yet unpublished poem. The eighth, a sequel 
 or counterpart to the sixth, is no less evidently the 
 work of Day : as smooth and musical in metre, as 
 extravagant and fantastic in conceit. The two 
 sweet and graceful scenes which wind up the pretty 
 and fanciful weft of this lyric and satiric poem are 
 perhaps the best evidence left us of Day's especial 
 and delightful gift ; fresh, bright, and delicate as 
 the spirit and the genius of the poet and critic who 
 discovered him, and gave his modest and gentle 
 name the imperishable and most enviable honour of 
 association with the name of Lamb.
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 
 
 The posthumous fortune of Robert Davenport is 
 unique in the record of EngHsh poets. A moderate 
 amount of modest recognition would seem to have 
 fallen to his lot in life ; and then, after a century 
 and a half of all but absolute obUvion, he was dis- 
 covered and held up to honour by a critic from 
 America. For once it is not to Charles Lamb that 
 we owe the resurrection of a true and fine dramatic 
 poet whose work belongs to the age of Shakespeare 
 — to the half-century which closed on the outbreak 
 of the civil war. Lamb did not discover Davenport 
 till 1827 — nineteen years after the memorable issue of 
 his first " Specimens." Washington Irving had long 
 before introduced him to the readers of Bracebridge 
 Hall with a most cordial and generous commenda- 
 tion of a poet who had chosen for his heroine a 
 martyr or confessor to the religion of matrimony. 
 
 This was hardly so new or so exceptional a choice 
 as the kindly critic seems to have thought it — for- 
 getting apparently that the creator of Juliet was 
 also the creator of Imogen ; and that Imogen, 
 Hermione, and Desdemona are somewhat more 
 typical and memorable examples of Shakespeare's 
 women than Juliet, Ophelia, or Anne Page. But we 
 should not consider too curiously — we should not 
 
 885
 
 236 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 be over-exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain 
 criticism, when it is animated by genuine goodwill 
 and instinct with a cordial sincerity. It is so much 
 to his honour that Washington Irving should have 
 been the first to introduce Davenport to his country- 
 men, that we may well overlook any seeming 
 inaccuracy or impropriety in the terms of introduc- 
 tion. He is by no means exceptional among his 
 fellows as an admiring student and a fervent painter 
 of virtue and devotion on the part of an injured 
 and long-suffering wife ; nor yet, on the other hand, 
 as an admiring preacher and a fervent advocate of 
 that abject and grovelhng servility which was 
 exacted from the ideal wife in ages whose ideal was 
 the prone and preposterous patience of Griselda. 
 
 Nor is he, it must in fairness be added, exceptional 
 among the followers of Shakespeare or of Fletcher 
 as a lover and honourer of a far nobler type of 
 womanhood. The heroine of his first extant play 
 is a figure not unworthy to be set beside Ordella 
 and Juliana : nay, a partial though not a disin- 
 genuous advocate might be permitted to plead that 
 she is a more real and credible angel, less excessive 
 and " exaggerative " in her devotion, than is either 
 of these. Nor can I agree with Mr. Collier's verdict 
 that " Davenport's production is inferior in most 
 respects to the earlier work of Chettle and Munday " 
 on the same subject. No doubt it " goes precisely 
 over the same ground, and " (we must admit) " with 
 many decided marks of imitation, especially in the 
 conduct of the story " ; but what is best and most 
 characteristic in Davenport's work is not only not 
 derived from Chettle's, but is apparently inspired by
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 237 
 
 a wish to do better and a resolution to do otherwise 
 than his predecessor. The two plays, valuable in 
 themselves to all lovers and students of dramatic 
 poetry, are invaluable as types of the sunrise and 
 the sunset of the Shakespearean half-century. The 
 earlier playwright's touch is lighter and swifter, but 
 his method is thinner and shallower : Davenport 
 has followed very closely on his track — as closely as 
 Shakespeare on the track left open by the author of 
 The Taming of a Shrew : but, like Shakespeare, he 
 has deepened the lines and heightened the colours 
 of the original poem. Chettle's Fitzwater is an 
 admirable sketch, admirably completed by Daven- 
 port : Davenport's King John is perhaps less real 
 and credible — he is certainly more effusive and 
 poetic in his penitence — than Chettle's. 
 
 It is amusing to find in Mr. Bullen's reprint of the 
 first edition that among the actors of King John and 
 Matilda the representative of the venerable hero 
 Fitzwater was one " whose action gave grace to the 
 play," and that the murderer Brand was represented 
 by an actor " who performed excellently well." 
 These two were evidently recognized by the audience 
 as the most effective and important figures in the 
 composition of the play ; though the eponymous 
 persons are presented in a careful and workmanlike 
 manner. There is true and keen pathos in the 
 horrible scenes which represent the agony of a 
 mother and her child slowly starved to death under 
 the eye of their jeering gaoler : but few if any 
 readers will differ from Mr. Bullen's objection that 
 even tragedy has no right to deal with such harrow- 
 ing elaborations_^of physical horror. Nevertheless it
 
 238 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 must be allowed that the picture of a noble child's 
 affectionate courage and devotion is as beautiful as. 
 the situation is hideous ; and that Davenport has 
 at least spared us one dreadful detail on which his 
 predecessor had expatiated — the fruitless attempt of 
 the mother to feed her dying child with her own 
 flesh and blood. Still on the whole he is the crueller 
 of the two in his expansion and prolongation of the 
 intolerable scene : though we may admit that he 
 has nowhere else shown anything like such intensity 
 of tragic and pathetic power. It is little less than 
 bewildering to compare the remorseless and fearful 
 realism of these revoltingly admirable scenes with 
 the vile fantastic jargon of John's parting address to 
 Matilda in the first scene of the play. Davenport 
 has here successfully emulated the demerit of the 
 worst passage in Chettle's tragedy — that in which 
 young Bruce gives vent to what he too truly calls 
 his " execrable execrations." Lamb has done no 
 more than justice to the " passion and poetry " of 
 the last scene : quaint and exuberant as the rhetoric 
 may seem to a modern reader, it is singularly 
 beautiful and musical as a close to so dark a tragedy. 
 The excess of stale second-hand euphuism in the 
 poetical or sentimental parts of The City Nightcap is 
 evidently due, as Mr. Bullen has shown, to the 
 servile and belated fidelity with which the author 
 has followed an already obsolete model in the 
 artificial and overloaded style of Robert Greene. In 
 the very first scene there are no less than six direct 
 plagiarisms from the text of the romance by that 
 poet on which the play is mainly founded : and 
 there is not one of these passages which would not
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 239 
 
 be better away. Was it modesty, sheer laziness, or 
 inveterate admiration for an early favourite, which 
 so woefully misguided a poet who could write 
 when it pleased him with such masculine purity 
 and simplicity ? The barren and cumbersome 
 profusion of these faded artificial flowers, colour- 
 less now and scentless always, is not the only 
 fault of a play in which there is so much of 
 interest, pathos, passionate and poetic beauty. 
 The virtuous hero is a most vile rascal — a 
 bloody and cowardly cur ; while the irrational 
 brutality and the infernal rascality of a Leontes 
 who is also an lago — of a jealous husband whose 
 jealousy induces him to hire false witnesses against 
 the honour of his wife — are too plainly the qualities 
 of an incurably criminal lunatic to make it possible 
 or leave it credible that such a demoniac should be 
 capable of repentance and reform. This fault is 
 common to Greene's story and Davenport's play ; 
 but one of the finest passages in the latter is very 
 closely modelled upon the fervent and eloquent 
 prose of the older poet. Noble as are the parting 
 speeches with which the innocent victims of perjury 
 take leave of their betrayer in the trial scene of the 
 play, it is to Robert Greene, and not to Robert 
 Davenport, that the main honour is due for their 
 piercing and pathetic eloquence. Indeed, the pro- 
 test of Philomela is much finer, more dignified, and 
 more proper than the more piteous appeal of 
 Abstemia. 
 
 But the admirable if audacious broad comedy of 
 the underplot is unsuggested by anything in Greene's 
 novelette. Davenport is always more original and
 
 240 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 usually more powerful as a comic than as a tragic 
 writer. A curious if also an undesirable or indeed 
 regrettable result of the poverty in stage properties 
 which otherwise so happily distinguished the Shake- 
 spearean theatre was the possibility of such a bedroom 
 scene as that which opens the second act being 
 represented by any actors and tolerated by any 
 spectators. The nakedness of the stage must have 
 served, as it were, as a screen or a veil for the naked- 
 ness' of the situation : which would otherwise have 
 defied even the impudence of a Wycherley to 
 venture on it, and might have made the chaste 
 muse of Aphra Behn (first inventress though not 
 sole patentee of the heroic negro) blush like a black 
 dog — of the fairer sex. 
 
 In 1639 two little poems by Davenport, as well 
 as his dramatic masterpiece, were given to the press. 
 A Crown for a Conqueror is suggestive rather of a 
 fool's cap for the poet : I am confident that Quarles 
 has left behind him no worse trash. The " Dialogue 
 supposed between a Lover and the Day " is a very 
 different piece of work : it is even exquisitely pretty 
 here and there, and written, as the author says in 
 his dedication, " rather with a native familiarity 
 than an impertinent elegancy " : which latter phrase 
 would be only too appropriate a designation, too 
 accurate a description, of his own too frequent style. 
 A Survey of the Sciences, now first printed, is equally 
 quaint, ingenious, and humorous — sometimes inten- 
 tionally but oftener unintentionally provocative of 
 a smile. 
 
 By far the best of Davenport's three surviving 
 plays is that one which had never been reissued
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 241 
 
 until 1890. A New Trick to cheat the Devil is a master- 
 piece in its way, though it may be but " a stumbling- 
 block " to readers who cannot imagine themselves 
 more credulous or otherwise credulous than they 
 are, and " foolishness " to such as will not understand 
 that tha superstitions of their forefathers were no 
 whit more irrational and idiotic, unmanly and 
 unworthy, than those which lead fools by the nose — 
 by the nose of a palpably insensitive intelligence 
 — on the track of the male and female Sludges who 
 reap so rich a harvest from the typical idiocies and 
 the representative lunacies of our own sagacious 
 and contemptuous age. The construction of this 
 externally eccentric play is so ingenious that the 
 final solution, though admirably sufficient when we 
 come to it, hangs far beyond conjecture, swings high 
 out of apprehension, till the very close and consum- 
 mation of it all ; the supernatural machinery is so 
 deftly handled, and so naturally adapted to the 
 situations of the subjects on whom it is set to work, 
 that on a first reading it may probably and plausibly 
 seem as real and serious as in other plays of the 
 same age — A Mad World, my Masters, or Grim, the 
 Collier of Croydon ; and yet, when the unexpected 
 explanation is sprung upon us, and the terror is 
 resolved into laughter, and divine admonition 
 relaxes into human reprobation, the upshot is as 
 satisfactory, and if the date of the play be considered 
 is even as plausible, as that of any more famous and 
 elaborate comedy applauded by the admirers of 
 Congreve or of Sheridan. The style is far better 
 and purer than that of Davenport's other two plays : 
 the iiowery verbosity which decorates and disfigures
 
 242 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 them is happily absent here. Nor do even the quasi- 
 miraculous incidents of the story tax our faith or 
 outrage our patience so severely as those of Fletcher's 
 Night-Walker — by no means one of its illustrious 
 author's worst plays. The more serious parts of 
 Davenport's tragicomedy may well sustain a com- 
 parison with Beaumont's work as well as Fletcher's ; 
 for the vigorous and masterly metre, infinitely 
 superior to that of his two other plays, is but the 
 natural and fitting raiment for the fresh and virile 
 humour oi dialogue and situation. 
 
 The exposition of the play is bright, brief, and 
 straightforward, though the rhapsody in which 
 Slightall plights his faith to Anne Changeable is 
 about the worst piece of sheer nonsense to be found 
 in the whole blatant record of euphuism. It does 
 not prevent her father from giving his consent and 
 blessing ; but Mrs. Changeable opposes the match 
 on behalf of the young Lord Skales, who has sent 
 a proxy to propose in his name for her daughter's 
 hand. Anne, forgetful of the fascinating and seduc- 
 tive eloquence which has just paid homage to " those 
 intrammelled rays, those starry eyes Endymion 
 blushes on " (whatever that may mean), " those 
 ruby lips, where a red sea of kisses is divided by 
 rocks of pearl," is easily persuaded to accept the 
 nobleman and forsake the commoner ; who there- 
 upon, like any modern French hero, abjures " affec- 
 tion and all loyal love," and resolves to seek comfort 
 in the career of a professional seducer and rioter, 
 A usurer is found ready to make his profit of this 
 rational resolution, on the assurance of the scrivener 
 with whom he deals that the youngster is " well
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 248 
 
 possessed," having " three fair lordships, besides 
 sheep-walks, parks, and other large demesnes," and 
 that under the influence of a man of his who soothes 
 him up in all his riots, and leads him to gamble and 
 guzzle in places^ of bad fame, he may be led to sell 
 his landed property on terms convenient to the 
 conspirators. His honest and loyal servant Roger 
 is unable to counteract the influence of this pimp 
 and swindler Geoffrey ; but the eloquent simplicity 
 of his remonstrance may remind us of that admirable 
 song on which Leigh Hunt wrote so admirable a 
 commentary, The Old and Young Courtier. 
 
 The opening of the second act is as vivid and 
 animated as was the opening of the first. Changeable 
 begins by maintaining a better fight than Major 
 Ponto or poor Frank Berry could have attempted 
 against an imperious wife and an ambitious daughter: 
 but Thackeray himself could hardly have bettered 
 the sardonica.ly comic effect of the scene when the 
 noble suitor arrives, and disgusts the young woman 
 who but a moment before was revelling in the 
 reflection that his lordship was coming to see her 
 ladyship. Mrs. Changeable's prostrate exultation 
 could hardly have been bettered by any dramatic 
 satirist — hardly even by Congreve or Moliere. " I 
 feel state come upon me," says her daughter ; 
 
 Speak, good mother. 
 How shall I bear myself ? 
 
 The worthy Mistress Changeable is at no loss for 
 an answer : 
 
 Why, such at first 
 As you must be hereafter ; like a lady,
 
 244 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Proud, but not too perverse ; coy, not disdainful ; 
 Strange, but yet not too strait ; like one that would, 
 Were she well wooed, but yet not to be won 
 Without some formal courtship : had it been 
 My case, my wench, when I was young like thee, 
 I could have borne it bravely. See, he's come ; 
 Husband, your duty ; girl, your modest blush, 
 Mixt with a kind of strange hut loving welcome. 
 
 This last touch seems to me worthy of Shakespeare 
 rather than of Jonson. Anne, however, is even 
 more disgusted than disappointed at sight of his 
 luckless lordship ; and the satire aimed at the 
 superstition or tradition of titular nobility is as 
 remarkable as Chapman's attack on the institution 
 of monarchy in a play which had been printed 
 thirty-six years earlier. The spirit, humour, and 
 vigour of the dialogue, till it rises to the culmination 
 of contempt in Anne's inquiry whether her new 
 suitor could not lend his lordship to a friend whom, 
 had he but that slight addition, she gladly would 
 embrace, may bear comparison with the work of 
 any comic poet but Shakespeare. The squabble 
 between the usurer and scrivener over the leavings 
 of their victim is excellent ; there is hardly in all 
 Ben Jonson's work a better or neater little bit of 
 satiric realism : but the next scene has merit of a 
 higher kirld. Slightall, now thoroughly ruined, 
 takes leave of his good and his evil counsellor like 
 a generous and good-humoured gentleman : the 
 honest Roger begs his master to keep the money 
 bestowed on him at parting, and refuses to take it 
 except as " a steward to your use, and always ready 
 to furnish your least wants " ; but the unlucky
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 245 
 
 fellow is now so case-hardened against all coming 
 troubles or comforts that even the appearance of 
 Anne, in a penitent and pathetic state of mind, 
 cannot move him to give over his fancy of applying 
 to the devil for redemption from present wretched- 
 ness. Mad with misery and indignation, he rejects 
 her offers and repels her apologies ; breaks from 
 her, and leaves her in a rage of repentance, for the 
 treason of which she will not hold herself guilty — 
 the true culprits being " her mother and that lord." 
 The third act, by way of relief, changes both 
 scene and tone, style and subject, after a fashion 
 somewhat astonishing to modern readers ; but the 
 episode contained in it is a consummate and a 
 blameless example at once of the broadest and the 
 highest comedy. Old Friar Bernard and young 
 Friar John, belated after nightfall on their return 
 from visiting the sick, take shelter under the roof 
 of a hostess who in her husband's absence has only 
 a cock-loft at her disposal ; in which she has no 
 sooner locked up her reverend casuals than her 
 lover the constable knocks at the door, bringing a 
 couple of manchets and a bottle of wine. She lets 
 him in, and produces for his entertainment a roast 
 chicken piping hot, warning him not to speak loud 
 enough to wake the two abbey lubbers whom she 
 has locked up fast, being unable to get rid of them, 
 with neither light nor bed nor any other comfort. 
 Friar John, however, finding these conditions not 
 overconducive to a good night's rest, peeps down 
 from the cock-loft, and is watching with hungry 
 envy the festive preparations below, when they are 
 cut short by a fresh knock at the door and a call
 
 246 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 from the hostess's husband outside for admittance. 
 The constable is in an agony. 
 
 Dost thou not think he'll spare an officer, 
 But fall on the king's image ? 
 
 He creeps under the bed : the supper is whisked 
 into a cupboard, the fire put out, and the host at 
 length admitted. He has travelled hard, and is 
 very hungry ; be the time of night what it may, 
 something he must and will have : his wife is obliged 
 to rekindle the fire. The worthy host, now in high 
 spirits, expresses a wish for company : " I had not 
 such an appetite to be merry for an hour this seven 
 year ; that I could tell where to call up some good 
 fellow that I knew ! we would not part these two 
 hours." The vigilant Friar John takes this as his 
 cue, and forthwith makes such a noise in the garret 
 that the hostess is compelled to confess what guests 
 she has locked up in the straw-loft. He beshrews 
 her for giving no better welcome to the very men 
 he would have wished to meet with, and sends her 
 up to release and bring them do'WTi. Unluckily, 
 there is nothing for supper ; " not so much as a 
 cantlc of cheese or crust of bread that can this night 
 be come by," protests the inwardly furious hostess. 
 But Friar John, to the horror and amazement of 
 his superior, offers to procure supper by art magic, 
 and conjures the demon Asteroth to provide a 
 couple of loaves baked in Madrid, the best wheat 
 being in Spain ; bids mine host put but his hand 
 into the corner, pull them forth, and place them 
 behind the salt. Next, he calls for " a cup of divine 
 claret ; no, a bottle of some two quarts " ; and the
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 247 
 
 host finds it in the place indicated. Asteroth must 
 be but once more employed as purveyor, and 
 provide a pullet piping hot : he, John, smells it 
 smoking, and sauce to it. Ay, but where ? 
 
 John. Somewhere about this room : who hath the key 
 Of that same cupboard ? 
 
 Host. Marry, Nan, my wife. 
 
 John. Call for it, good mine host. 
 You see I come near nothing, use fair play, 
 Saw neither fire nor candle to provide this. 
 Touched neither lock nor key within your house. 
 But was asleep i' the straw ; unlock, mine host. 
 See what the cupboard yields. 
 
 The men fall to and sup heartily. " Good Dame," 
 says the attentive John, " methinks you do not 
 eat." " I could eat thee," mutters the hostess to 
 herself. The host now naturally wishes for a sight 
 of so obliging a devil as Asteroth ; but John assures 
 him that it must be under some other likeness than 
 his own, or the sight of him in his terrors would 
 drive the spectator mad. 
 
 Have you no neighbour whom you best affect. 
 Whose shape he might assume to appear less terrible ? 
 
 Host. Yes, twenty I could name. 
 
 John. Soft, let me pause; 
 
 It must be some that still wake at these hours. 
 We have no power o'er sleepers : say I bring him 
 In person of some watchman ? 
 
 Host. No shape better. 
 
 John. Or in the habit of your constable ? 
 
 Host. Why, he's my honest gossip. 
 
 John. Why, then, his. 
 
 But, mine host, resolve me one thing : should great
 
 248 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Asteroth appear to you in your gossip's shape, 
 How would you deal with him ? 
 
 Host. Why, as my friend. 
 
 My neighbour and my gossip. 
 
 John. No such thing : 
 
 You must imagine him what he appears, 
 An evU spirit, to kick him and defy him 
 As you would do the devil : otherwise. 
 When you are late abroad, and we gone hence, 
 He'll haunt your house hereafter. 
 
 Is it necessary to add that after a thunder-peal of 
 resonant invocations Asteroth appears as required 
 " from underneath the bed, in shape of Master 
 Constable," to be forthwith kicked out of the room ? 
 and that the hostess follows to let him out of doors, 
 " lest he should bear down part of the house " ? 
 
 John. We'll take our leaves ; make much of our good 
 dame, 
 And think no worse of your good officer. 
 Your gossip and your neighbour, in whose form 
 Asteroth so late appeared. 
 
 * 4: ■K * « 
 
 Only commend us to my dame, your wife, 
 And thank her for our lodging. 
 
 The jest, of course, is old enough ; but I cannot 
 imagine that it can ever have been presented with 
 such fullness of comic effect, such ripe and rich 
 humour, or such excellent spontaneity and simplicity 
 of natural and artistic style. 
 
 The next scene brings us back into an atmosphere 
 of more serious emotion. The faithful Roger refuses 
 the proffered patronage of Lord Skales, and tells
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT 249 
 
 him he has driven a better man than himself to 
 ruin — one whom his old servant will follow " to 
 his grave, or to his better fortunes." Anne denounces 
 his lordship to his face as a noble thief who has 
 stolen a contracted wife from her husband ; her 
 father as a gentle fool, her mother as a scold, and 
 the subordinates according to their respective deserts. 
 Her noble suitor, however, is rather attracted than 
 repelled by the ingenuous expression of her high 
 spirit. 
 
 To modem unbelievers in demonology the inci- 
 «dents of the two remaining acts, though excellently 
 constructed and arranged, may probably appear too 
 extravagant to evoke any more serious interest than 
 that of perplexed curiosity. But the solution is so 
 ingenious, and the stage effect of it so striking, 
 that the play cannot fairly be said to fall off in merit 
 towards the close ; and enough has now been shown 
 of it to justify the claim of its author to honourable 
 remembrance, and to enhance the claim of his editor 
 to our deepest and most cordial gratitude.
 
 THOMAS NABBES
 
 THOMAS NABBES 
 
 In the second issue of Lamb's Selections from the 
 Dramatic Poetry of the Shakespearean Age, we find 
 for the first time the name of Nabbes admitted to 
 the company of names honoured by the notice of the 
 greatest and surest critic that ever wrote or ever will 
 write on a subject of unsurpassable interest to any 
 historic student of English letters and of English 
 character. This name was hardly v/orthy of inclu- 
 sion in the priceless volume which first revived and 
 revealed to modern readers the now deathless 
 glories of Marlowe and of Webster, of Dekker and of 
 Ford ; but to all true lovers of the incomparable and 
 unapproachable work bequeathed us by our greatest 
 school of writers it will seem worthy of honourable 
 mention. Nabbes is to Shirley what Shirley is to 
 Massinger ; but the inspiration then afloat and alive 
 in the air of English poetry was so strong and keen 
 and true that even the subordinates of the subor- 
 dinates of Shakespeare are still and will always be 
 memorable men. Any other nation but theirs 
 would have long since registered their names among 
 those which ought not to be forgotten. 
 
 Covent Garden, his earliest extant play, may be 
 remembered as a late and slight example of a 
 class which contains such admirable masterpieces 
 
 253
 
 254 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 as Eastward Ho ! and Every Man in his Humour ; 
 the realistic comedy of old-world London. It is 
 " pleasant " — as its title-page not too arrogantly 
 affirms — for students of the time who can be content 
 with a modest allowance of comic or farcical humour 
 interwoven with serious action and emotion. The 
 more ambitious and eloquent rhetoric of the graver 
 scenes has now and then some savour of the great 
 style then gradually dying out ; but the best 
 character is the really humorous and original figure 
 of the " complimenting vintner " — a new and 
 amusing specimen of the old English host.* 
 
 In the dedication of this comedy Nabbes compares 
 Suckling to Pindar and himself to Bacchylides — 
 Apollo alone knows why. He should have been 
 sentenced to translate into Pindaric verse the immor- 
 tal Ballad on a Wedding. His next attempt found no 
 such distinguished patron, and suggested no such 
 inexplicable comparisons. The " pleasant " comedy 
 of Tottenham Court is only less unpleasantly un- 
 satisfactory than Suckling's own abortive and 
 illegitimate plays to the lover of comedy or melo- 
 drama. There are glimpses in it of a poet, and 
 there are traces of a dramatist ; but the incidents 
 and the intrigues, instead of being fused or welded 
 into harmony by the strong hand of a poet or the 
 technical skill of a playwright, are not so much as 
 pasted or stitched together with any decent preten- 
 sion to plausible coherence. It is as far from success 
 on the lines of Etherege and Wycherley as on the 
 
 * A word rather overfamiliar as the synonym of the French 
 chauvin occurs — to me unintelligibly— in the fifth scene 
 of the third act: "pity from an Executioner, or bashfulness 
 from a Jingo." Ths editor suggests no explanation.
 
 THOMAS NABBES 255 
 
 lines of Jonson or Fletcher. There is matter enough 
 in this failure for one romantic comedy of an earlier 
 date and for more than one realistic comedy of a 
 later ; but there is a plentiful lack of construction, 
 composition, dramatic tact and inventive instinct. 
 These awkward and abortive efforts of a decadent 
 school may be found serviceable if not valuable as 
 foils to the finished and admirable work of the great 
 comic dramatists who arose at once after the Restora- 
 tion. There is here some little savour lingering of 
 poetry, of sentiment, of honest love and cordial 
 simplicity ; but it is unmistakably flat and stale. 
 Manners and morals are not very far above the later 
 level : in wit and humour, strength of hand and 
 excellence of workmanship, there can be no possible 
 comparison. How far this anaemic and crestfallen 
 generation of pithless poets and nerveless dramatists 
 had sunk below the level of their fathers' days may 
 be measured by the fact that a typical gallant of 
 their pitiful time can find no stronger evidence to 
 offer of his devotion to women than this : that he 
 would not only " spin, or thread their needles," 
 but even " read Spenser and the Arcadia, for their 
 company." 
 
 Euripides himself could not have written a 
 tragedy more spiritless and shapeless, more imbe- 
 cile and insipid, than Hannibal and Scipio. The 
 yawning reader will be reminded, and will yawn 
 again over the recollection, of Lodge's Marius and 
 Sylla. There are touches of rhetoric less merely 
 vacuous than usual here and there ; the style and 
 the metre are not so piteously prosaic as those of the 
 dramatic date when James Thomson and Samuel
 
 256 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Johnson were taken for dramatic poets ; but the two 
 distinguishing quahties of the verbosity which per- 
 vades and dilates it are flatulence and platitude. 
 
 When Lee makes temperate Scipio fret and rave. 
 And Hannibal a whining amorous slave, 
 
 he is less unbearably unreadable than Nabb2s. 
 
 The Bride is a play which would have done no 
 discredit to Shirley : it stands well above his worst 
 or hastiest comic work, if far beneath his thought- 
 fullest and his best. We may think that " the 
 picture would have been better if the artist had taken 
 more pains " ; and again we may doubt. There is 
 something flaccid and relaxed in the constitution or 
 composition of this comedy : it has enough of real 
 and vital merit to surprise and disappoint the reader 
 who finds it on the whole so strangely wanting in 
 the vigorous and coherent sufficiency of a really 
 good play. The broad comic effect of one character, 
 " an owner of rarities and antiquities," is exactly 
 such as we find in the personal caricatures which 
 still amuse the too infrequent reader in Foote's 
 comedies or farces : and the humour of the arrogant 
 and amorous French cook anticipates the more 
 finished and maturer dignity of Thackeray's immor- 
 tal Mirobolant. The simple justice and his imperious 
 wife are really good studies in the school of Jonson. 
 It is something for a writer of the Shakespearean 
 decadence to have shown himself at once a not 
 unworthy follower and a not unworthy precursor 
 of men so far greater than himself as the authors 
 of Pendennis and The Silent Woman. 
 
 The tragedy of intrigue is a subordinate form of
 
 THOMAS NABBES 257 
 
 drama which cannot flourish, but in a period of 
 decadence, and cannot but flourish then. There 
 are much worse examples of it extant in our own 
 Uterature than a luckless play which was " denied 
 the credit which it might have gained from the 
 stage " on which the author's previous attempt at 
 tragedy had found acceptance or toleration. It is 
 not easy to imagine the reader who would not rather 
 read or the audience who would not rather sit out 
 the five acts of The Unfortunate Mother than the 
 five acts of Hannibal and Scipio. And if the eye of 
 Charles Lamb had happened to rest or to alight on 
 the following lines, they would, if I mistake not, 
 have had a fair chance of being embalmed for 
 immortality — 
 
 If greatness 
 Were not a relative to all that's good 
 And glorious in the general speculation 
 Of things that do affect us, not in sense, 
 But the bright part of reason, emulous man 
 Would not through danger manage actions 
 So full of wonder, nor employ his faculties 
 In high designs : but like a heavy lump 
 That only by its weight moves to its centre. 
 And there sleeps, so should we : leave not so much 
 As the record of any memorable 
 And brave achievement, for a monument 
 That once such men had being. ) 
 
 This passage is worthy of Massinger or Ford. 
 
 Microcosmus is an ingenious and graceful masque, 
 with enough in it of humour and poetry to keep the 
 fancy and invention which they serve and inform 
 alive and agreeable to the taste of modern readers 
 
 R
 
 258 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 not overintolerant of facile moral allegory. The 
 lesser masque of The Spring s Glory is noticeable 
 only for the quaint and amusing passage at arms 
 between Christmas, Shrovetide, and Lent. There 
 is no great matter to be looked for in the minor 
 poems of a minor poet; but a tolerant curiosity 
 may be amused now and then by some of those 
 appended to this masquelet. The modest and 
 good-humoured author may never find many 
 readers ; but none will regret the time spent on 
 reading him, or question his claim to a place among 
 English poets above the station of many whose 
 names, if not their works, are more famihar to 
 the docile and conventional student of English 
 poetry.
 
 RICHARD BROME
 
 RICHARD BROME 
 
 If the futile and venerable custom of academic 
 disputations on a given theme of debate were ever 
 to revive in the world of scholarship and of letters, 
 an amusing if not a profitable theme for discussion 
 might be the question whether a minor artist of real 
 and original merit is likelier to gain or to lose by the 
 association of his name with that of a master in his 
 art. And no better example could be taken than 
 that afforded by the relation of Dick Brome to Ben 
 Jonson. The well-known first line of the commen- 
 datory verses with which his master and patron 
 condescended to play the part of sponsor to his first 
 comedy must probably be familiar to many who 
 care to know no more than that Ben had '"' Dick " 
 for a servant once, and testified that he " performed 
 a servant's faithful parts " ; and further, that when 
 Dick took to play-writing Ben encouraged him with 
 sublime condescension and approval of the success 
 attained by his disciple through dutiful observation 
 of those laws of comedy " which I, your master, 
 first did teach the stage." From this Olympian 
 nod of supercilious approbation it might be in- 
 ferred, and indeed has very probably been inferred 
 by the run of readers, that Brome, as dramatist and 
 humorist, was little or nothing more than a shadow 
 
 261
 
 262 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 or an echo, more or less definite or distinct, of his 
 master's figure and his master's voice. And un- 
 questionably he must have learnt much and gained 
 much by such intercourse and such discipleship. 
 His first play, The Northern Lass, appearing and 
 succeeding as it did under the kindly if haughty 
 patronage of his master, and deserving as it certainly 
 was of that patronage and success, might perhaps 
 have been better and might perhaps have been 
 worse if the author's agile and active talent had been 
 uninfluenced and unmodified by the rigid example 
 and the imperious authority of Ben Jonson. The 
 stage is so crowded and the action is so crossed by 
 the coming and going of so many ludicrous and 
 serious figures, that the attention if not the patience 
 of the reader is overstrained by the demand made on 
 it ; and the movements of the figures through the 
 mazes of a complex dramatic dance are not so happily 
 regulated as to avoid or to avert an irritating sense 
 of confusion and fatigue. But there are scenes and 
 touches of character in it worthy of very high 
 praise : the gentle heroine, tender and true (if some- 
 what soft and simple) as a " northern lass " should 
 appear in compliance with tradition, is a figure very 
 gracefully outlined, if not quite adequately finished 
 or relieved : there is something more of sentimental 
 interest or romantic suggestion in the ingenious if 
 incomposite plot than might have been expected 
 from a disciple of Jonson's : and the direct imitation 
 of his Bobadil and Master Mathew is too lively and 
 happy to be liable to the charge of servile or sterile 
 discipleship. And there are few scenes in all the 
 range of serio-comic drama more effective and
 
 RICHARD BROME 263 
 
 impressive on even a second or third reading than 
 that in which the friend of an intending bridegroom 
 attempts to break off his match with a woman whom 
 he beheves unworthy by denunciation of his friend's 
 imaginary vices, and is fascinated himself by the 
 discovery of her unshaken and unselfish devotion. 
 
 The modern reader of this play, the earhest at- 
 tempt of its author and an excellent example of his 
 talent, will probably be struck by the evidence it 
 affords that Brome in our own day would have won 
 higher distinction as a novelist than he did in his 
 own as a playwright. Were he now alive, he would 
 be a brilliant and an able competitor in their own 
 field of work and study with such admirable writers 
 as Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris. His powers of 
 observation and invention were not, if I mistake not, 
 inferior to theirs ; and the bent of his mind was not 
 more technically dramatic. In fact, his characters 
 are cramped and his plots are distorted by com- 
 pression into dramatic shape : they would gain both 
 in execution and in effect by expansion, dilation, 
 or dilution into the form of direct and gradual 
 narrative. 
 
 The opening scene of The Sparagus Garden is as 
 happily humorous and as vividly natural as that 
 of any more famous comedy. Tim Hoyden is a 
 figure not unworthy of comparison with Sir Man- 
 nerly Shallow in Crowne's excellent broad comedy of 
 The Country Wit — as that rural knight may be held 
 worthy to rank as a precursor, a herald from afar, a 
 daystar announcing the sunrise, of Congreve's 
 matchless and inimitable Sir Wilfrid Wit would. 
 But in Congreve's time, and even in Crowne's, the
 
 264 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 construction of a play — its carpentry, to use a 
 French term beloved of the great Dumas — was too 
 well understood for it to have been possible that a 
 writer of brilliant ability and conscientious energy 
 should have offered to the public a play so roughly 
 put together — so loose on its hinges and so shaky in 
 its joints. "It is no common play," says a friend 
 of the author in a remarkably well-written copy of 
 commendatory verses ; 
 
 Nor is thy labyrinth [? so] confused but we 
 In that disorder may proportion see. 
 
 That is, I should be inclined to add, on a second 
 reading. The actual audience of that ideal time for 
 dramatists and poets must have been as quick to 
 seize the clue and follow the evolution of the most 
 complicated plot or combination of plot with under- 
 plot or counterplot as to catch and relish the finer 
 graces of poetry, the rarer beauties of style, the 
 subtler excellences of expression. The influence of 
 Jonson is here still patent and palpable enough ; but 
 the incomposite composition of so vigorous and 
 humorous a piece of work will recall to the mind of a 
 critical reader, not the faultless evolution of such a 
 flawless masterpiece as The Alchemist, but the dis- 
 jointed and dislocated elaboration of so magnificent 
 a failure — if failure we may diffidently venture to 
 call it — as The Devil is an Ass. It is surely a very 
 bad fault for either a dramatist or a novelist to 
 cram into the scheme of a story or to crowd into the 
 structure of a play, too much bewildering ingenuity 
 of incident or too much confusing presentation of
 
 RICHARD BROME 265 
 
 character : but such a fault is possible only to a 
 writer of real if not high ability. 
 
 A Mad Couple well Matched is very clever, very 
 coarse, and rather worse than dubious in the bias of 
 its morality ; but there is no fault to be found with 
 the writing or the movement of the play ; both 
 style and action are vivid and effective throughout. 
 That " a new language and quite a new turn of 
 comic interest came in with the Restoration " will 
 hardly be allowed by the readers of such plays as 
 this. That well-known and plausible observation 
 is typical of a stage in his studies when Lamb was 
 apparently if not evidently unversed in such reading 
 as may be said to cast over the gap between Etherege 
 and Fletcher a bridge on which Shirley may shake 
 hands with Shadwell, and Wycherley with Brome. 
 A more brutal blackguard, a more shameless ruffian, 
 than the leading young gentleman of this comedy 
 will hardly be found on the stage of the next thea- 
 trical generation. Variety of satirical observation 
 and fertility of comic invention, with such vigorous 
 dialogue and such strong sound English as might be 
 expected from a disciple of his master's, give to this 
 as to others of Brome's comedies a quality which may 
 fairly and without flattery be called Jonsonian ; 
 and one of the minor characters is less a reminiscence 
 of Juliet's nurse than an anticipation of Miss Hoy- 
 den's. No higher praise could be given, as no 
 higher could be deserved. 
 
 The prologue to The Novella is really worthy of 
 Dryden : its Jonsonian self-confidence and defiance 
 are tempered by a certain grace and dexterity of 
 expression which recalls the style and the manner
 
 26S CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of the later rather than the earlier laureate. In 
 this brilliant and audacious comedy the influence of 
 Ben Jonson's genius and example is exceptionally 
 perceptible and exceptionally happy ; for here it is 
 the author of Volpone, not the author of Bartholo- 
 mew Fair, who has inspired and guided the emulous 
 ability of his servant. The metre and style are 
 models of comic language and versification ; the 
 action, if a little complicated and more than a little 
 improbable, is as lively as in any of Fletcher's rather 
 than of Jonson's comedies. The plot is as usual a 
 little too exacting in its demands on the attention of 
 reader or spectator ; there is not quite sufficient 
 distinctness of outline in the various figures of 
 seniors and juniors, pantaloons and harlequins, 
 Gerontes and Leandres, to make it at first sight as 
 amusingly easy as it should be to follow their various 
 fortunes through so many rather diverting than edi- 
 fying evolutions and complications ; but, daring 
 even to the verge of impudence as is the central 
 conception of the subject, the tone or atmosphere 
 of this Venetian comedy is less greasy than that of 
 the author's London studies in vicious or dubious 
 lines of life ; a fresh point in common, I need hardly 
 observe, between the disciple and his master. 
 
 In The Court Beggar and The City Wit, twin 
 comedies of coarse-grained humour and complicated 
 intrigue, we breathe again the grimier air of Cockney 
 trickery and Cockney debauchery ; but the satire 
 on " projectors " or speculators in monopoly is 
 even now as amusing as it is creditable to the author 
 to have seconded in his humbler fashion the noble 
 satirical enterprise of Massinger and Ben Jonson
 
 RICHARD BROME 267 
 
 against the most pernicious abuses of their iime. 
 The three wits of the court, the country, and the 
 city are good strong sketches in caricature ; and 
 there are passages of such admirable eloquence in 
 such excellent verse of the higher or graver comic 
 style as would not have misbeseemed the hand of 
 Jonson himself. The opening scene, for instance, 
 in which the heroine remonstrates with her father 
 for exchanging the happy and honoured life of a 
 hospitable and charitable country gentleman for the 
 mean and improvident existence of an intriguing 
 parasite, is as fine an example of earnest or serious 
 comedy as may be found in Shirley at his best : and 
 the scene in the second act between the grave and 
 eloquent dotard Sir Raphael and the unmercifully 
 ingenious Lady Strangelove is even a better because 
 a more humorous piece of high comic work ; so good, 
 indeed, that in its kind it could hardly be bettered. 
 But The City Wit is the finer and shapelier comedy of 
 the two ; well conceived, well constructed, and well 
 sustained. The conception, if somewhat farcically 
 extravagant in outline, is most happily and in- 
 geniously worked out ; and the process or progress 
 of the comic action is less broken, less intermittent, 
 more workmanlike and easier to follow, than in most 
 if not in all of the author's preceding plays. Even 
 where the comic types are far enough from original, 
 there is something original and happy in the treat- 
 ment and combination of their active or passive 
 humours. 
 
 The Damoiselle, a spirited and well-written comedy, 
 is so inferior in tone and composition as to suggest a 
 reversion on the author's part to the cruder and
 
 268 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 coarser effects or attempts of his dramatic nonage. 
 Justice Bumpsey is one of Brome's very best and 
 most original creations — so fresh, and so genuine a 
 sample of comic or farcical invention that Jonson 
 might have applauded it with less extravagance or 
 perversion of generosity than his cordial kindliness of 
 nature led him sometimes to indulge in. There are 
 passages and scenes of genuine eloquence and of 
 pathetic sincerity in this rough and wayward piece 
 of dramatic composition or incomposition ; but 
 the presentation of the plot or plots is as clumsy and 
 confusing as their evolution is awkward and con- 
 fused ; and the noisome villainy of a character at 
 first presented as a possible object of sympathy, and 
 finally as a repentant and redeemed transgressor, 
 might have made Wycherley himself — or any one 
 but Wycherley — recoil. But there is no sign of 
 decadence in literary ability or inventive humour ; 
 indeed, if I mistake not, two or three better comedies 
 than this might have been carved out of the material 
 here compressed and contorted into the mould of 
 one. In the first scene of the second act a dramatic 
 and effective touch of satire will remind the reader of 
 Mr. Pickwick's horror and Mr. Perker's protest against 
 his horror at the existence — in his day as in Brome's 
 — of witnesses whose oaths were as readily on hire 
 as the principles of a disunionist politician — or, if 
 the phrase be preferred, of a separatist statesman. 
 The Queen's Exchange is one of the last examples 
 of its kind ; a survival from the old school of plays 
 founded on episodes of imaginary history and built 
 up with incidents of adventurous romance ; active 
 in invention and agile in movement, unambitious
 
 RICHARD BROME 269 
 
 in style, and not unamusing in result. The clowneries 
 and the villainies, the confusions and the conver- 
 sions of character and fortune, seem curiously 
 archaic or old-fashioned for the date of this belated 
 tragicomedy ; but to lovers of the better sort of 
 drama it will be none the less acceptable or tolerable 
 on that account. 
 
 One of the most fanciful and delightful farces in 
 the world is The Antipodes. In this charming and 
 fantastic play a touch of poetic humour, a savour 
 of poetic style, transfigures and exalts wild farce to 
 the level of high comedy. The prologue to this, 
 one of his latest comedies, is as remarkable for its 
 exceptional quality of style as is the admirable 
 dedication of his earliest, The Northern Lass. After 
 a satirical apology for his inability to compete with 
 the fashionable writers of plays 
 
 that carry state 
 In scene magnificent and language high 
 And clothes worth all the rest, except the action, 
 
 he reminds his audience that 
 
 Low and home-bred subjects have their use 
 As well as those fetched from on high or far ; 
 And 'tis as hard a labour for the Muse 
 To move the earth, as to dislodge a star. 
 
 Had these two last lines been Dryden's, they would 
 have been famous. And had the play thus intro- 
 duced been Jonson's, it must have taken high rank 
 in the second if not in the first class of his works as 
 a successful comedy of humours. Joylesse and his 
 wife, with the " fantastic " Lord Letoy, are faithful 
 but not servile studies after the manner of the master,
 
 270 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who had been dead but a year when it came out, and 
 as we learn from the author's postscript was generally 
 applauded. The small part of the curate or chap- 
 lain Quailpipe might have been of service to Macau- 
 lay in a famous chapter of his history as an example 
 of the humble if not contemptible position occupied 
 in great households by men of his cloth or calling. 
 If Shirley may be described as a bridge between 
 Fletcher and Etherege, Brome may be defined as a 
 link between Jonson and Wycherley But if some 
 of his stage effects are crude enough in their audacity 
 of presentation and suggestion to anticipate the tone 
 and manner of the theatre under Charles II, the 
 upshot of such a play as this pays at least a con- 
 ventional deference to the proprieties and moralities. 
 Virtue — of a kind — presides over the solution of a 
 tangled and crowded intrigue, which might perhaps 
 have gained rather than lost in clearness or vivacity 
 if impression and effect by a little more reserve in 
 the exercise or reticence in the display of ingenuity 
 and invention. Perplexity and surprise ought hardly 
 to be the mainsprings of comic art as displayed 
 either in the evolution of intrigue or in the develop- 
 ment of character. But no such fault, and indeed no 
 fault of any kind, can be found with the play within 
 this play. Even on a third or fourth reading it is 
 impossible for even a solitary reader to reopen it 
 at almost any part without an irresistible impulse 
 to laugh — not to smile approval or appreciation, 
 but to laugh out aloud and uncontrollably. The 
 logic of the burlesque, its topsy-turvy coherence, its 
 preposterous harmony, its incongruous congruity of 
 contradictions, is as perfect as its exuberance of
 
 RICHARD BROME 271 
 
 spontaneous and varipus fertility in fancy and in 
 fun is inexhaustible and superb. The delicious 
 inversion of all social t)r natural relations between 
 husband and wife, mistress and servant, father and 
 son, poet and puritan, lawyer and client, courtiers 
 and clowns, might satisfy the most exacting 
 socialist ; and the projects for the relief, encourage- 
 ment, and support of criminals and scoundrels in 
 general at the expense of the State could hardly 
 be held unworthy of consideration by the latest 
 and loudest apostles of professional philanthropy. 
 Something of Jonson's influence is still perceptible 
 in the conception and construction of this play ; but 
 in joyous ease and spontaneity of comic imagination 
 and expression the disciple has excelled his master. 
 The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage, is an 
 ingenious and audacious comedy of ill-contrived and 
 ill-combined intrigue, at once amusing and confus- 
 ing, which might have been better than it is if both 
 characters and incidents had been fewer, but more 
 neatly and lucidly developed and arranged ; rich in 
 good suggestions and good possibilities, but imper- 
 fect in evolution and insufficient in impression 
 through overmuch crowding and cramping of the 
 various figures and the complicated action. The 
 Love-sick Court is such an example of unromantic 
 romance and unimaginative invention as too often 
 wearies and disappoints the student of English 
 drama in its first period of decadence ; yet even in 
 the decadence of the greatest and most various 
 school of tragic and of comic poetry that ever this 
 country or this world has witnessed there are signs 
 of Hfe and survivals of style which give to all but its
 
 272 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 very meanest examples a touch of comparative 
 interest and a tone of comparative distinction. 
 
 In The Covent Garden Weeded the studious though 
 not servile imitation of Ben Jonson is obvious 
 enough to explain though not to justify the sneer of 
 Randolph at the taste of the audiences who were 
 more contented with what Brome swept from his 
 master than with the worst leavings and the flattest 
 dregs of that master's exhausted genius and decrepit 
 industry. This clever and ingenious comedy is 
 evidently built more or less on the lines of Jonson's 
 most realistic and gigantic farce : and the obliga- 
 tion is no less directly than honourably acknowledged 
 by Brome at the very opening of the very first scene, 
 where Justice Cockbrain, " the Weeder of the Garden," 
 cites with all due accuracy, as well as all due respect, 
 the authority of his reverend ancestor Justice Adam 
 Overdo. It cannot, of course, bear comparison with 
 that huge and unlovely though wonderful and memor- 
 able masterpiece ; but it is easier in movement and 
 lighter in handling of humours and events. 
 
 The New Academy, or The New Exchange, is a 
 tangled and huddled comedy of unattractive and 
 improbable intrigue, nor unrelieved by glimpses of 
 interest and touches of humour ; worth reading 
 once as a study of manners and language,* but 
 hardly worth tracing out and unravelling through 
 all the incoherent complications and tedious convo- 
 lutions of its misshapen and misconstructed plot. 
 The romantic tragicomedy of The Queen and Con- 
 cubine is a rather palhd study in the school of 
 
 * I have not met elsewhere with the quaint verb " to snook " 
 (" over my wife at home," says " an uxorious citizen ").
 
 RICHARD BROME 273 
 
 Fletcher, with touches of Jonsonian farce and more 
 than Jonsonian iteration of cheap humours and 
 catchpenny catchwords : but it is not unamusing in 
 its vehement exaggeration of wickedness and good- 
 ness, of improbable impulse and impossible reaction ; 
 and there is still a certain lingering fragrance — the 
 French word relent would perhaps express it better 
 — of faint and fading poetry in the tone of style and 
 turn of phrase, which no later playwright could 
 regain or reproduce. 
 
 The best of all Brome's plays is curiously enough 
 the only one that has attained any posthumous 
 popularity or any durable celebrity. It has nothing 
 of such brilliant, spontaneous, and creative humour 
 as flashes and vibrates through every scene of The 
 Antipodes ; nothing of such eccentric, romantic, 
 and audacious originality as modesty must blush 
 to recognize and weep to acknowledge in The 
 Novella ; but for sustained interest and coherent 
 composition of quaint, extravagant, and consistent 
 characters with fresh, humorous, and plausible 
 results, for harmony of dramatic evolution and 
 vivacity of theatrical event, I doubt whether it 
 could be matched, and I am certain that it could not 
 be excelled, outside the range of Shakespeare's 
 comedies and farces. The infusion of romantic 
 interest and serious poetry in Beggar's Bush may 
 give to Fletcher's admirable tragicomedy a higher 
 literary place on the roll of the English drama ; but 
 the superiority of the minor poet as a dramatic 
 artist, and not merely as a theatrical craftsman, is 
 patent and palpable beyond discussion or dispute.* 
 
 * The text of Brom«'s plays, which, though reprinted with 
 
 S
 
 274 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 In the dramatic literature of any country but ours 
 the name of Richard Brome would be eminent and 
 famous : being but an Englishman, he is naturally 
 regarded by critics and historians after the order of 
 Hallam as too ineffably inferior for mention or 
 comparison with such celebrities as Regnard or 
 Goldoni. That such a character as Justice Clack is 
 worthy of Moliere in his broader and happier moods 
 of humour could hardly seem questionable even to 
 the dullest of such dullards if his creator had but 
 " taken the trouble to be born " in France, in Italy, 
 or in any country but their own. As it is, I cannot 
 suppose it possible that English readers will ever 
 give him a place beside the least of those inferior 
 humorists who had the good fortune or the good 
 sense to be born outside the borders of England. 
 
 all their imperfections on their heads, have never yet been 
 edited, might supply the English dictionary with several rare 
 and noticeable words. In The City Wit a short dramatic enter- 
 tainment or interlude is announced as a " ballet." In A Jovial 
 Crew we find the word " gentile " (once used, and afterwards 
 cancelled, by Ben Jonson) : " Provided your deportment be 
 gentile " (a verse but too suggestive of Mr. Turveydrop and the 
 Prince Regent) ; " gentily " or " gentilely " : " They live very 
 civilly and gentily among us " — Act i, Scene i ; " remore " 
 as a verb : " Should that remore us " — same scene ; " rake- 
 shame," a curious variant or synonym of " rakehell " : " It 
 had been good to have apprehended the Rakeshame " — Act iii, 
 Scene i. " Skise," apparently a variant of the Shakespearean 
 word " skirr " : " Skise out this away, and skise out that away " 
 — Act iv. Scene i ; " yawdes " for jades : " Your yawdes may 
 take cold, and never be good after it " — same scene. In the 
 first scene of the second act there is a curious mention of Bath, 
 and of Captain Dover's games on the glorious Cotswold Hills : 
 " We are not for London." " What think you of the Bath 
 then ? " " Worse than t'other way. I love not to carry my 
 Health where others drop their Diseases. There's no sport i' 
 that." " Will you up to the hill-top of sports, then, and Merri- 
 ments, Dover's Olimpicks or the Cotswold Games ? " " No, that 
 will be too publique for our Recreation."
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 
 
 If ever the time-honoured French fashion of repub- 
 Hshing the select works of an author in place of a 
 complete edition might reasonably find favour in 
 the eyes of an English student, it certainly might in 
 the case of Shirley. A considerable section or 
 division of the six goodly volumes which contain the 
 first collection ever made of his multitudinous works 
 is taken up by such vapid and colourless sketches, 
 such mere shadows or phantoms of invertebrate 
 and bloodless fancy, as leave no trace behind on the 
 memory but a sense of tedious vanity and unprofit- 
 able promptitude of apparently copious but actually 
 sterile invention. Very possibly he never wrote any- 
 thing quite so bad, so insolently faulty, and so 
 impudently preposterous, as the very worst im- 
 provisations of his master Fletcher ; but even such 
 otherwise unqualified rubbish as The Sea Voyage or 
 The Nice Valour has the one qualifying merit, the 
 one extenuating circumstance, of being readable — 
 not without irritation, indignation, and astonish- 
 ment, but at all events without stupefying fatigue 
 and insuperable somnolence. 
 
 Too many of Shirley's plays may be read or 
 skimmed without exciting any more active or 
 stimulating emotions than these. Royal Masters, 
 
 277
 
 278 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Duke's Mistresses, Constant Maids, Young Admirals, 
 Balls, Coronations, and Humorous Courtiers pass 
 before the reader's half-closed eyes in a long 
 thin stream of indistinguishable figures and im- 
 memorable events. They never, as far as he can 
 observe or can remember, sink below a certain 
 modest level of passable craftsmanship and humble 
 merit ; but they never rise into palpable distinction 
 or cohere into substantial form. The worst that 
 can be said of them is not that they are wanting in 
 merits or abounding in faults, but that they do not 
 exist ; they have absolutely no principle of life, no 
 reason for being, no germ of vitality whatever. It 
 would be something if even they were bad ; it would 
 be something if even they were dull ; but they are 
 not bad, they are nothing ; they are not dull, they 
 are null. You read them, and feel next day as if you 
 had read nothing. The leading articles of last week's 
 journals have left as much mark on your memory, 
 as much impression on your mind. Perhaps you 
 can hardly tell — they may be rather good of their 
 kind than bad ; but their kind has no right to 
 propagate, no reason to produce. Once or twice the 
 writer may remind you of Jonson — with all the sap 
 squeezed out of him, or of Fletcher — with all his 
 grace evaporated ; but as a rule they are simply 
 wearisome and conventional, anaemic and inverte- 
 brate. Even those who loathe the Puritans with a 
 loathing equal to that of Butler may admit, as one 
 at least of their number is ready to do, that if the 
 advent of those brainless and brutish devil-wor- 
 shippers had cut off nothing better worth keeping 
 than the average of Shirley's supply for the London
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 279 
 
 stage, literature and art and poetry would have had 
 no very heavy charge to bring against their deadliest 
 and most desperate enemies. 
 
 On the other hand, it would be unjust to under- 
 value the iTierit of the work which seventy years 
 since found its first articulate admirer in Campbell, 
 and has lately found a no less cordial than capable 
 advocate in Mr. Gosse. Nor will any one deny the 
 claim of Shirley to the neutral credit of such negative 
 commendation as may be due to a writer alike 
 incapable of the faults and of the excellences which 
 distinguish or disfigure the work of greater men. In 
 Defoe's phrase, " he can't commit their crimes ; 
 it would task a stronger genius than his to do so. 
 But then the question with regard to a poet's claims 
 is not a question of abstinence, but of achievement ; 
 he must be judged by consideration of what he has 
 accomplished, not of what he has avoided. Virtue 
 which depends on incompetence to sin can hardly be 
 commended for withstanding temptation. " J'ad- 
 mire Scipion, soit," says Victor Hugo; " j 'admire 
 moins Origene." 
 
 Abstinence, however, is not Shirley's only virtue ; 
 if it were, he would now be sleeping with Tate and 
 Home, Cumberland and Jephson, Talfourd and 
 Sheridan Knowles. There are very remarkable 
 and admirable exceptions to the general mediocrity 
 of his level, conventional, unambitious, and languid 
 work. The terrible sarcasm which lashed him into 
 oblivion for a century and a half may possibly, if 
 not justifiably, have been provoked by the revival 
 of his first play, a year after the author's death : a 
 resurrection which may not unnaturally have been
 
 280 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 regarded by Drj/den — it must assuredly be regarded 
 by modern students — as an example of the survival 
 of the unfittest. That Love Tricks, or the School of 
 Complement (in modern English, of accomplishments), 
 should have been reissued on the stage forty-two 
 years after its first appearance is so unaccountable a 
 fact that it may be allowed to account for the 
 contempt with which the Laureate of the Restora- 
 tion referred to the memory of Shirley fifteen years 
 later. 
 
 This first attempt of its author is a feebly pre- 
 posterous and impotently imitative abortion, and 
 the product of second-hand humour and second-rate 
 sentiment : but though always absurd it is not 
 always dull ; there are one or two redeeming touches 
 which indicate or suggest a latent or dormant 
 capacity for better things. There is a pleasant 
 anticipation of modern progress on the social lines 
 of French democracy in the first scene, when an 
 amorous elder on the eve of marriage reflects and 
 resolves thus manfully : "I will get but one child, 
 and that shall be a boy, lest having too many 
 children I undo my heir, and my goods be divided." 
 That a royalist playwright of retrogressive and re- 
 actionary England should thus early have foreseen 
 and forecast the future of " the great nation," under 
 the practical and exemplary influence of the most 
 advanced and enlightened children of its unspeak- 
 ably sublime revolution, may perhaps be no less 
 edifying than amusing to readers not inoculated 
 with incurable Gallomania. 
 
 The absurd fancy of representing an old man under 
 the delusion that his youth had been restored to him
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 281 
 
 can only be excelled in preposterous and irritating 
 inanity of impotent invention by the ineffable 
 notion of introducing a young libertine, in the heyday 
 of impudent vigour and rampant recklessness, whom 
 a virtuous young woman, assisted by acquaintances 
 of such virtue as will ignore blows and kicks ad- 
 ministered by the subject of the experiment, succeeds 
 in persuading that he is dead. How such impudent 
 and insufferable nonsense can ever have crawled on 
 to the stage or crept into print it is difficult to under- 
 stand. The Witty, Fair One is woefully witless 
 stuff — inane, incoherent, incomposite, impossible, 
 and dull. A pretty piece of smooth and smirking 
 verse, which might have passed unobserved among 
 far nobler passages in almost any play of Dekker's or 
 Middleton's or Marston's, attracted the attention of a 
 critic who did not think overmuch of Shakespeare 
 to a somewhat vapid and flaccid play of Shirley's. 
 I doubt if the reader whom this quotation may induce 
 or impel to peruse The Brothers will bless the memory 
 of the critic who suggested such an enterprise. 
 " They did not think," says one of the actors in the 
 last scene, " to find this pale society of ghosts " ; 
 which shows that he had not had time to keep 
 company with his fellow phantoms, the other and 
 latter ghosts of their romantic or sentimental inven- 
 tion. A paler or more featureless " society " it 
 would be difficult to find. 
 
 But when Shirley was not astray on the track of 
 his adored Fletcher, limping and wheezing and hob- 
 bling behind that splendid if not always reliable 
 racer, he could run better than might have been 
 expected by a spectator of his performances in a field
 
 282 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 reserved for steeds of finer blood and higher mettle. 
 I can by no means agree with Mr. Dyce that the 
 happiest efforts of his genius will perhaps be found in 
 the tragic portions of these variegated dramas, his 
 romantic or tragicomic studies in the school of 
 Fletcher rather than Beaumont. Such a tragedy as 
 The Traitor, such a comedy as The Example, may 
 defy comparison with the best of these hybrid and 
 imitative creatures of overworked invention and 
 fatigued or enfeebled fancy. Even The Maid's 
 Revenge, for which his very editors have hardly a 
 good word, is a failure which makes us feel that it 
 ought to have been a success ; crude, rude, coarse, 
 and rough as it is, there is more suggestion if not more 
 presentation of natural passion and dramatic life in 
 it than in a later play, so much better polished and 
 composed, so much more equable and elaborate, 
 as The Cardinal. But the fiendish atrocity of 
 Catalina is a flight beyond the gentle capacity of 
 Shirley : his pinion flags in the attempt, and his 
 voice cracks in the effort to express such murderous 
 and perfidious passions. A very fine tragedy might 
 have been made out of the story : but when we 
 think what Middleton and Rowley would have given 
 us, had they happily chanced to undertake it, we 
 cannot be thankful enough that the story of Beatrice 
 and De Fleres fell into the right hands, and was 
 treated by artists who could make at once the most 
 and the best of it, as they would have made, and 
 Shirley could not make, of the story of Antonio and 
 Berinthia. 
 
 In The Brothers, his next play, Shirley now and then 
 touches a note of feeling and expression more natural
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 288 
 
 and more graceful, more proper and peculiar to his 
 talent. The subject, in stronger hands, might have 
 been the groundwork of a very noble play ; in 
 Shirley's it is but faintly attempted and inadequately 
 carried out, with nothing like the vigour and vitality 
 of Mr. Norris's admirable story. Major and Minor. 
 One scene, however, is worthy of Fletcher : that 
 master of tender fancy and romantic emotion 
 might well have approved and enjoyed so charming a 
 study in his school of art as the interview between 
 the disinherited lover and the girl who would share 
 his fallen fortunes, but finds him unwilling — too 
 loyal and unselfish, or too diffident and half-hearted 
 — to prove unkind, and marry her. That the 
 woman's part is finer than the man's is typical of the 
 author's somewhat feminine if not effeminate genius. 
 He looks on vice and virtue, prosperity and adver- 
 sity, action and passion, in the spirit of an amiable 
 woman whose instincts are innocent and domestic, 
 but whose hterary ambition is apt to tempt her into 
 unseemly affectation of a man's unconscious tone, 
 and indecorous imitation of his natural manner. 
 He tries now and then to play Tom Jones, but his 
 heart is with Sir Charles Grandison. His passion, 
 at its highest and keenest, is never anything more 
 than intensified sentiment. Even in The Witty 
 Fair One, gross and monstrous in its coarseness and 
 absurdity as is the more original and rememberable 
 portion of the plot, there are touches of liveliness and 
 ingenuity ; such as the amusing if rather easy and 
 trivial device of the letter returned by a mistake 
 which brings about one or two fairly effective scenes : 
 but even this better part is not vigorously or tho-
 
 284 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 roughly conceived and carried out. The best thing 
 in the play, the ingenious device by which Violetta 
 discovers her regard and gains herself a lover, is 
 borrowed — and certainly not heightened or bettered 
 in the borrowing — from Marston's Dulcimel in The 
 Fawn. One excellent touch of humour and good 
 sense in this abortive comedy bears evidence to the 
 unchanged and unchangeable absurdity of affecta- 
 tion which will probably always distinguish a fool 
 whelped in England from a fool whelped in any other 
 country. " What say you to England ? " asks a 
 simple 3^oung fellow who has just been desired to 
 name what kingdom or province he has most mind 
 to travel in. " By no means," replies the tutor 
 who has undertaken to imbue him with the prin- 
 ciples of culture ; "it is not in fashion with gentle- 
 men to study their own nation ; you will discover a 
 dull easiness if you admire not, and with admiration 
 prefer not, the weeds of other regions before the 
 most pleasant flowers of 3^our own garden." The 
 most " cultured " Oxonicule of the present day 
 could have said no better and no more. 
 
 The fifth of Shirley's plays is his first really good 
 one : and The Wedding is a tragicomedy which 
 would have done no discredit to an older and more 
 famous poet. Fletcher, who had been dead four 
 years when it first appeared in print, has left us much 
 worse as well as much better work than this. The 
 first and central incident of the action may or may 
 not have been borrowed from an earlier play that 
 Field had published, a comedy, twenty-seven years 
 before, in which the bridal of an innocent girl was 
 broken off by the intervention of a slanderer and the
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 285 
 
 defamation of her chastity. The effect is less 
 striking from a theatrical point of view in Shirley's 
 play than in Field's ; but the incident is at once more 
 credible and more explicable. The slanderer in 
 Field's play is a rather theatrical villain — an im- 
 probable compound of Pistol and lachimo : the 
 motive which impels the unconscious calumniator 
 in Shirley's is honest and friendly. And in com- 
 position and execution this play is so far ahead of 
 any previous work from the same hand that the first 
 audience or the first reader might well have been 
 inclined to question the authenticity of its ascription 
 to the author of Shirley's previous plays. The 
 farcical underplot is not very refined or very subtle, 
 but not less amusing than Massinger's or Fletcher's 
 rougher work on the same or a similar line : and the 
 construction would be almost blameless if the con- 
 duct of the disguised girl on whose perfidy the whole 
 plot hinges had been more rational and less thea- 
 trical. The eternal " she-page " who pesters and 
 infests the plays of the period is a more positive 
 nuisance in Shirley's than even in Massinger's. The 
 Viola-Cesario of Shakespeare's invention, the Bel- 
 lario-Euphrasia of Beaumont's or Fletcher's, must 
 regretfully be held responsible for numberless idiocies 
 of imitation. In the hands of Ford or Dekker this 
 common type of deformed devotion becomes too 
 tragic and pathetic to fall under the same reprobation 
 as the tricks and shifts of these more conventional 
 playwrights. Poor Winnifrede in The Witch of 
 Edmonton is a more touching and life-like figure 
 than the jaded invention of such imitative dealers in 
 sentiment or sensation could evoke.
 
 286 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 It is amusing to find in the next work of so fervent 
 a royalist as Shirley so sharp a stroke of satire aimed 
 at his fellows of the court as might have been dealt 
 by a writer of the opposite party at the conspirators 
 against the constitution who were soon to succeed 
 in plunging their country into civil war and bring- 
 ing their leader to the scaffold. " I shall quickly 
 learn to forget myself," says " a foolish ambitious 
 steward " in the tragicomedy of The Grateful Servant, 
 " when I am great in office ; I will oppress the sub- 
 ject, flatter the prince, take bribes on both sides, do 
 right to neither, serve heaven as far as my profit will 
 give me leave, and tremble only at the summo7is of a 
 parliament." Charles I had been six months on the 
 throne when this comedy was licensed. Like the 
 great majority of Sliirley's plays, it is " too bad for a 
 blessing, too good for a curse " : and the reader will 
 not improbably " wish from his soul it were better or 
 worse." There is no lack of pretty flowery writing 
 in it, which seems to have taken the fancy of Camp- 
 bell more than the more serious merit of its author's 
 better plays ; but there is not much else. Conven- 
 tional motives and fantastic impulses take the place 
 of noble passions and natural emotions ; the curious 
 mixture or alternation of shameless and unnatural 
 brutality in the villainous libertine of the play with 
 the most refined and rose-coloured devotion in its 
 sentimental heroine is not only significant but 
 typical of the decadence from the age of Shakespeare 
 and Webster which found its fittest and its fairest 
 representatives in Davenport and Shirley. That 
 the inevitable " she-page " was not yet unacceptable 
 to an overtolerant audience is no less evident than
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 287 
 
 inexplicable. The fantastic unreason of Spanish 
 chivalry and the fantastic perversity of English 
 sentimentalism have seldom been exemplified in a 
 more ludicrously serious manner than by a lover's 
 offer to cede his mistress to his sovereign out of 
 regard for her (" I love her still, and in that study 
 her advancement ! ") and by the author's evident 
 belief that this monstrous prostitution of sentimental 
 servility is (in his own words) a " miracle of honour, 
 and of love." It is enough to make one think that 
 the court whose fashionable sentiment found its 
 prophet or exponent in Shirley — the court of Hen- 
 rietta Maria — might have been the court of Blanche 
 Amory, the immortal 5^oung lady who had always 
 on hand a whole stock of sham or second-hand 
 emotions. 
 
 Two years after the appearance of this pretty but 
 uninteresting sample of sentimental and ineffectual 
 invention, the one play which gives its author a 
 place among the tragic poets of Shakespeare's age 
 and country was licensed for the stage, and found its 
 way into print four years afterwards. The gravest 
 error or defect of Shirley's work as a dramatist is 
 usually perceptible in the management of his under- 
 plots ; his hand was neither strong enough to weld 
 nor skilful enough to weave them into unity or 
 harmony with the main action ; and the concurrent 
 or alternate interests, through lack of coherence and 
 fusion, become a source of mere worry and weariness 
 to the distracted attention and the jaded memory. 
 But the main plot of The Traitor, founded on the 
 assassination or immolation of Alessandro de' Medici 
 by his kinsman Lorenzino (whom Shirley — and for
 
 288 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that matter Musset and Dumas — probably did not 
 know to have been a brother dramatist), is very 
 neatly and happily interwoven with a story which at 
 first sight recalls that of the fatal marriage and 
 breach of promise through which the name of Buon- 
 delmonti had attained a significance so tragical for 
 Florence three hundred and twenty-two years 
 earlier. This underplot, however, is more probably 
 a device of the author's or an adaptation from some 
 serviceable " novel " or romance than a distorted 
 reflection of so remote an actual tragedy. 
 
 The unreal unselfishness of unnatural devotion and 
 the sentimental vehemence of moral paradox, which 
 mark the decline of English tragedy from the level 
 of Shakespeare's more immediate followers, are 
 flagrant in the folly of such a conception as this of a 
 lover who insists on resigning his mistress against 
 her will to a friend already betrothed or pledged in 
 honour to another woman. Chivalry has destroj^ed 
 itself — plucked out its o^^^l eyes, and cut its own 
 throat — when it descends to such heartless and sense- 
 less depths of sentimental superstition. But it must 
 be allowed that this perverse and preposterous im- 
 probability is skilfully and delicately adapted to 
 bring into fuller relief the most beautiful figure on 
 all the overcrowded stage of Shirley's invention. 
 His place among our poets would be very much 
 higher than it is if he could have left us but one or 
 two others as thoroughly realized and as attractively 
 presented as the noble and pathetic conception of 
 Amidca. There is something in the part which 
 reminds us of Beaumont's Aspatia ; but even 
 though the forsaken heroine of the elder poet has
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 289 
 
 yet more exquisite poetry to utter than any that 
 Shirley could produce, her character is less noble 
 and attractive, the manner of her death is less 
 natural and far less touching. The lover iij either 
 case is equally contemptible ; but the heroic part 
 of Sciarrha is as superior in truthfulness as it was 
 inferior in popularity to the famous but histrionic 
 part of the boastful martialist Melantius. The King 
 in The Maid's Tragedy is certainly not better drawn 
 than his equally licentious but less tyrannous 
 counterpart in The Traitor ; and the very effective 
 scene in which Calianax denounces Melantius to the 
 King, only to be stormed down and put to silence 
 by the denial of his accomplice and the laughing 
 incredulity of the victim, is surpassed by the ad- 
 mirable device in which the chief conspirator's 
 superb and subtle audacity of resource confounds the 
 loyalty of Sciarrha and confirms the confidence of 
 Alessandro. A more ingenious, natural, and strik- 
 ing situation — admirable in itself, and more admir- 
 able in its introduction and its assistance to the 
 progress or evolution of the plot — it would be difficult 
 to find in any play. The swiftness and sharpness of 
 suspicious intuition, the promptitude and impudence 
 of intelligent hypocrisy, v/hich distinguish the 
 conduct of Shirley's ideal conspirator, are far above 
 the level of his usual studies or sketches of the same 
 or a similar kind. Nor is there, if I mistake not, so 
 much of really beautiful writing, of pure and vigorous 
 style, of powerful and pathetic simplicity, in any 
 earlier or later work of its author. Of Shakespeare 
 or of Marlowe or of Webster we can hardly hope to be 
 reminded while reading Shirley : but we are reminded 
 
 T
 
 290 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of Fletcher at his best by the cry of S5mipathy with 
 which Amidea receives the assurance that the rival 
 who has unwittingly and reluctantly supplanted her 
 is also the victim of her lover's infidelity and in- 
 gratitude. 
 
 Alas, poor maid ! 
 We two keep sorrow alive then. 
 
 This indeed, if I may venture to say so, seems to me a 
 touch not unworthy of Webster himself — the nearest 
 of all our poets to Shakespeare in command of 
 spontaneous and concentrated expression for tragic 
 and pathetic emotion. 
 
 It is somewhat singular that Shirley's next play, 
 a severely moral if audaciously realistic tragedy of 
 illicit passion, should have found favour on the stage 
 of the Restoration, Its tone is certainly so unlike 
 that of The Kind Keeper or The Country Wife that 
 its toleration by the patrons of Wycherley and of 
 Dryden is hard to explain — except perhaps by the 
 sisterly sympathy which may have been awakened 
 in the various foundresses of ducal houses for the 
 doings and sufferings of so impudent a strumpet as 
 its heroine. The advance in experience or intelli- 
 gence of such characters which distinguishes Love's 
 Cruelty from The Maid's Revenge must be unmis- 
 takable by the most innocent reader ; the perfidious 
 and poisonous Catalina is a violent and boyish 
 caricature, the lascivious and murderous Clariana 
 is a real and unmerciful portrait. The development 
 of her character from mere wayward and capricious 
 curiosity of coquettish irritation into lecherous and 
 irreclaimable ferocity of jealous egotism is at least
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 291 
 
 as well conceived and executed as any other study 
 from the same hand. Her soft-hearted but high- 
 minded husband, her penitent young lover and his 
 profligate old father, are more solid and vivid figures 
 than their easy-going creator could usually present : 
 and it is singular that Macaulay should so completely 
 have overlooked or forgotten the point of the 
 catastrophe as to cite this play as an instance in 
 which " the outraged honour of families is repaired 
 by a bloody revenge." No two catastrophes could 
 well be more widely dissimilar than this one and 
 that of The Fatal Dowry : the only point they have 
 in common is that in each case an adulteress dies 
 by a violent death. In the one case, a penitent 
 woman is executed by the unrelenting justice of an 
 inflexible husband : in the other, an impenitent 
 woman assassinates her paramour, and is slaughtered 
 by him in return ; a comfortable consummation 
 which surely carries with it no particular reference to 
 outraged honour. 
 
 The comedy which bears the pretty title of Changes, 
 or Love in a Maze, has some pretty passages and 
 scenes, but it is far too " high fantastical " for any 
 serious interest in the action or the agents to be 
 possible : and there is unpleasant evidence in one 
 place that no amount of noble or royal patronage 
 could make a gentleman at heart of the playwright 
 who was capable of representing as other than the 
 vilest of all villains and the meanest of all hounds a 
 wretch who by way of excuse for his own rascality 
 would support or encourage a suggestion against the 
 character and honour of a lady whom he has deserted 
 for a wealthier object of courtship. On the other
 
 292 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 hand, the noble unselfishness of the hopeless lover 
 who is ready to serve her at the cost of his own 
 happiness is painted with so fine and warm a sym- 
 pathy as almost to renew our better opinion of the 
 poet. But except for the ingenuity of intrigue, 
 which from a theatrical point of view is really 
 creditable, and really amusing in the upshot, it is 
 too slight a thing to deserve any very serious praise, 
 as it is altogether too slight a thing to deserve any 
 serious blame. The Bird in a Cage is a play of much 
 the same weight : not ill done, if not particularly 
 worth doing ; with farcical passages which may be 
 found fairly diverting by idle or indulgent readers, 
 and a pretty touch of humanity in advance of an 
 age little inclined to such tenderness for animals as 
 moves the imprisoned princess to set free her captive 
 birds. 
 
 The bright light comedy of Hyde Park is the second 
 really good play of its kind on the long list of Shirley's 
 works. In vigour of style and force of interest it is 
 notably inferior to The Wedding : its tone is alto- 
 gether more modem, more remote from tragicomedy, 
 less serious and less ambitious ; but it belongs un- 
 mistakably to a period of transition. It is a quasi- 
 poetic or semi-poetic piece of work, and so far belongs 
 or aims at belonging to the same class as The Spanish 
 Curate or The Guardian — not to say as Twelfth 
 Night or Much Ado about Nothing. It aims also at a 
 transient sort of realism, a photographic represen- 
 tation of the fancies or the follies of the hour, its 
 passing affectations or extravagances of the drawing- 
 room or the race-course, which anticipates in some 
 degree the enterprise, if not the superb and perfect
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 293 
 
 mastery in that line, of such artists as Congreve and 
 Vanbrugh. The versatility and flexibility of talent 
 required and displayed in such an attempt, admitting 
 it to be fairly and moderately successful, may 
 reasonably challenge our praise ; but Mistress 
 Carol, though bright and pleasant enough, is as far 
 beneath the level of Millamant as beneath the level 
 of Viola. 
 
 Between the sunset of Fletcher and the sunrise 
 of Etherege the moonlight of Shirley's more modest 
 and subdued genius serves well enough to display 
 him as a successor of the poetic or romantic 
 dramatist whose fancy walks hand in hand with 
 humour, and a precursor of the prosaic or realistic 
 playwright whose C3mical humour has swallowed up 
 sentiment and fancy as a stork might swallow a 
 frog ; but this moonlit or starlit period of transition 
 is noticeable rather for its refraction of the past than 
 its anticipation of the coming day. The characters 
 in such comedies as this of Shirley's seem to be play- 
 ing at reality as shadows might play at being sub- 
 stantial, as ghosts might play at being alive, as 
 children do play at being " grown-up ; " and this at 
 least is a charge which can no more be brought 
 against the ruffians and strumpets of Wycherley's 
 or Shadwell's invention than against the noble men 
 or women of Shakespeare's or of Webster's. The 
 return of the shipwrecked husband to his supposed 
 widow is borrowed from Marston's What you Will ; 
 and though Shirley's comedy is far more neatly 
 and reasonably constructed, far more satisfactory 
 to an aesthetic or intelligent judge of composition, 
 it has nothing of such intellectual force or such
 
 294 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 literary merit as must be recognized here and 
 there in the rougher and more vigorous work of 
 the elder and greater though ruder and faultier 
 poet. Marston, with all his shortcomings, is one 
 of Jonson's if not of Shakespeare's men-at-arms ; 
 Shirley, with all his merits, is but one of Fletcher's 
 body-guard. 
 
 There is some honest fun, though there is no great 
 matter, in the little satirical comedy of The Ball : 
 the sham traveller is a more original and amusing 
 j6gure than a copy of Ben Jonson's rather ponderous 
 Puntarvolo could have been ; and even after all his 
 precursors the braggart and beaten coward contrives 
 to have some amusing and original touches of base- 
 ness and comicality about him, which may make us 
 tolerate the reappearance of an almost worn-out 
 and wearisome type of farce. The ladies and their 
 lovers are so lamentably shadowy and shapeless that 
 a modem reader has no difficulty in understanding 
 the curious admission of the poet in a later and 
 better and less reticent play that he had been 
 " bribed to a modest admission of their antic gam- 
 bols." Had he rejected the bribe, supposing it to 
 have ever been offered, a less decorous and a less 
 vacuous comedy might have been better worth our 
 reading : but possibly, if not probably, the assertion 
 or imputation may be merely part of the character 
 to whom it is assigned. Shirley, however, must have 
 all due credit for this fresh stripe of satire applied to 
 the same idiotic affectation which he had lashed with 
 as wholesome and cordial a stroke of contempt just 
 four years earlier, in a passage already quoted. 
 " You must encourage strangers, while you live ;
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 295 
 
 it is the character of our nation, we are famous for 
 dejecting our own countr3mien." 
 
 Shirley's next play, The Young Admiral, is amusing 
 enough for a lazy and consequently a tolerant reader 
 to take up and put down with as much satisfaction as 
 he might hope to derive from a novel obviously and 
 exclusively intended for railway reading ; it is not at 
 all discreditable, and now and then promises — and 
 breaks its promise — to be seriously interesting as well 
 as tolerably entertaining ; the hero and heroine are 
 a very creditable couple of ultimately triumphant 
 victims, the kings and knaves, bullies and fools, 
 play their parts very decently and endurably. On 
 the whole, we may say of this and indeed most of 
 Shirley's plays that it admirably anticipates and 
 agreeably realizes Mrs. John Knightley's immortal 
 receipt for " nice smooth gruel — thin, but not too 
 thin." 
 
 The one thing memorable about this anaemic and 
 invertebrate play is the fact that it had the dis- 
 honour to be commended for its decency and pro- 
 priety by the mean puritan who then dishonoured 
 even the discreditable post of dramatic censor. A 
 censor of a far different kind has made of Shirley's 
 next play the central point of his impeachment, the 
 crowning witness in favour of his plea for puritans 
 against playwrights, for William Prynne against 
 William Shakespeare. A better point could not 
 have been made ; a better witness could not have 
 been cited. It would be worse than useless for a 
 lover of poetry and a hater of puritanism to under- 
 take the defence of the admirably constructed and 
 excellently written tragicomedy which Charles I set
 
 296 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shirley to write on a subject supplied by the royal 
 and kindly patron. The subject is excellent in its 
 way, and suggestive of even better and stronger 
 dramatic effects than Shirley has made out of it ; 
 but the utter vileness, the abject and atrocious 
 treachery of the two mean tricksters and traffickers 
 in women who play the leading parts in this comedy, 
 cannot reasonably be condoned on consideration of 
 the brilliant and striking situations which are brought 
 about by the villainy of these gilded and varnished 
 rascals. Fletcher was not a severe moralist ; he is 
 usually considered by modem critics to have some- 
 times broken the bounds of good taste and artistic 
 tact in his pictures of headlong youth and light- 
 hearted passion : but not one of his Rubilios, 
 Valentines, or Pinieros, can be imagined capable of 
 such baseness as would disgrace a professional 
 pander. The Gamester is a very clever, very power- 
 ful, and very amusing play : but Wycherley's Plain 
 Dealer, though doubtless more impudent in its inde- 
 cency, is certainly less immoral in its consummation. 
 Fletcher in his own way, like Congreve in his, has 
 always at least the graceless grace of high-bred 
 wantonness ; Shirley is nothing if not moral ; or 
 rather he is ruffianly and repulsive. 
 
 A Contention for Honour and Riches is a bright and 
 ingenims little interlude in which the author shows 
 himself as faithful and as able an imitator of Jonson 
 as in the costly Triumph of Peace which soon after- 
 wards eclipsed all previous pageants of the kind for 
 gorgeous extravagance of elaborate profusion. In 
 the dramatic or literary part of this glorified puppet- 
 show there is some very pretty, humorous, and
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 297 
 
 ingenious writing ; the final interlude of burlesque 
 is so especially well conceived and invented that it 
 may provoke even a modern and private reader to a 
 quiet and approving smile. Four or five months 
 later the best of Shirley's comedies was licensed for 
 the stage. To have written such a tragedy as The 
 Traitor, such a comedy as The Example, should be 
 sufficient to secure for their author a doubly dis- 
 tinguished place among the poets of his country. A 
 judgment unblinded by perversity, prepossession, or 
 malevolence must allow that the noble tone of this 
 poem is at least as typical of its author's tone of 
 mind as the baser tone of a preceding play : a candid 
 and clear-headed critic would have admitted that 
 the moral credit due to the author of The Example 
 was enough to counterbalance, if not to efface and 
 obliterate, the moral discredit due to the author 
 of The Gamester. 
 
 The noble, high-spirited, simple-hearted and single- 
 minded heroine would suffice to sweeten and redeem 
 an otherwise condemnable or questionable piece of 
 work ; her husband is a figure not unworthy to be set 
 beside her ; and the passionate young tempter whose 
 chivalrous nature is so gracefully displayed in the 
 headstrong, punctilious, perverse, and generous course 
 of conduct which follows on the fact of his conversion 
 would be as thoroughly successful and complete a 
 study as either, if it were not for the luckless touch of 
 incongruous melodrama which throws the lady of 
 his love into a swoon at the sight of his preposterous 
 poniard and the sound of his theatrical threats. But 
 all that can be done to redeem this conventional 
 and sensational error is admirably well done in the
 
 298 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 sequel of this noble and high-toned play ; a model 
 of simple construction and harmonious evolution, 
 in which the broad comedy of the underplot is rather 
 a relief than an encumbrance to the progress of the 
 more serious action. 
 
 The Opportunity is a lighter and slighter piece of 
 work, but as lively, ingenious, and amusing in its 
 complications and solutions, its intrigue and its 
 results, as any comedy of accidents and errors not 
 glorified by the sign-manual of Plautus, Shakespeare, 
 or Moliere. The night-scene under the balcony is as 
 dexterously contrived as the night-scene in George 
 Dandin, and more plausible as well as more decorous 
 in its arrangement and its upshot. The Coronation 
 is a too characteristic example of that uninteresting 
 ingenuity in constniction and that unprofitable 
 fertility of invention which must be allowed to dis- 
 tinguish the duller and emptier plays of Shirley. It 
 opens with some promise of interest, but the promise 
 is almost immediately falsified : the passage in the 
 first scene which, in Gifford's opinion, " cannot be 
 exceeded for truth and humour," is the only passage 
 in the play which deserves the attributes of " liveli- 
 ness " and " pretty perversity " : the laboured com- 
 plications and revolutions of character and event are 
 perverse enough in their mechanical intricacy, but 
 their liveliness and prettiness are less easy to dis- 
 cover. The publisher's attribution of this play to 
 Fletcher is only exceeded in idiotic monstrosity of 
 speculative impudence by the publisher's attribution 
 of The London Prodigal to Shakespeare. And the 
 title-page which brackets Shirley's name with 
 Chapman's as joint author of the pathetic and
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 299 
 
 stately tragedy of Chabot makes almost as exorbitant 
 a demand upon our credulity. 
 
 But the comedy which was licensed six months 
 afterwards is the most brilliant though by no means 
 the most blameless of Shirley's plays. His gift of 
 graceful and humorous writing was never more happily 
 exercised and displayed than in the glittering and 
 shifting scenes of The Lady of Pleasure. In style and 
 in versification it is equally superior to most of his 
 other comedies : the rivalry of the two heroines in 
 fashionable extravagance and display could hardly 
 have been more lifelike and amusing if painted or 
 photographed by Etherege or Congreve. But it is 
 impossible to reconcile the morality of Love for Love 
 with the morality of A Woman killed with Kindness : 
 the endeavour to do so must needs result in a more 
 revolting and unnatural violation or adulteration of 
 morality than even the brutal and impudent genius 
 of a Wycherley could have attempted or conceived. 
 Charles Lamb was as absolutely and unanswerably 
 right as usual in his contention on behalf of the great 
 comic dramatists who flourished after the Restora- 
 tion that the characters of their plays are outside the 
 pale of moral criticism : and Macaulay, in his ener- 
 getic attempt at a refutation of this plea, gave 
 evidence of a more than Caledonian incapacity to 
 appreciate the finer shades of critical reasoning 
 and the subtler touches of humorous logic. Now 
 Shirley, in this splendid and sparkling comedy of 
 high life, has fallen into the very pit which Congreve 
 so skilfully and Vanbrugh so nearly avoided. 
 
 A Kttle more, or a little less, and we might say of 
 his characters what Lamb says of Congreve's, that
 
 300 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 they do not offend our moral sense ; " in fact they do 
 not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their 
 proper element. They break through no laws, or 
 conscientious restraints. They know of none. They 
 have got out of Christendom into the land — what 
 shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry, the Utopia of gallantry, 
 where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect 
 freedom." In that land the escapades of such 
 characters as Aretina, Kickshaw, and Decoy would 
 be simply amusing and becoming : but in this half- 
 way house on the border which divides the genera- 
 tion of Massinger from the generation of Etherege 
 they are partly diverting and partly shocking. The 
 infusion of a little morality makes the whole affair 
 immoral : the intrusion of a somewhat equivocal 
 and utterly incongruous penitence reduces a comic 
 intrigue to the level of a serious crime. " II est 
 vrai," says the great Dumas, in an admirable 
 chapter of his delightful memoirs, " que du temps de 
 Moliere cela s'appclait le cocuage, et qu'on en riait ; 
 que de nos jours cela s'appelle I'adultere, et qu'on 
 en pleure." It is so obviously impossible to recon- 
 cile or to harmonize these two points of view that 
 the very attempt must needs be no less offensive to 
 the intelligence of good taste than repulsive to the 
 instinct of good feeling. With this very serious 
 reserve, it would be difficult to overpraise a play in 
 which the genius and the art of Shirley are seen 
 together at their brightest and their best. 
 
 The Royal Master is a fair example of Shirley's 
 ingenious and fertile talent ; there is a somewhat 
 faded and conventional grace in the style of it which 
 seems not unsuitable to a rather slight and artificial
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 301 
 
 but neither ill-conceived nor ill-conducted plot. 
 The Duke's Mistress has a little more Hfe and spirit 
 with interest enough of story to make it a better 
 specimen of the same class. The Doubtful Heir is 
 perhaps the best ; with the usual faults or conven- 
 tions of romantic tragicomedy and the particular 
 weaknesses of the author's style and manner it 
 combines some peculiar merits of genuine grace and 
 tenderness. There are touches in it of something 
 more like spontaneous pathos and serious interest 
 than we find in most of Shirley's plays. As much 
 may be said, though it may seem strange to say it, 
 for his remarkable attempt at a miracle-play, revived 
 under new conditions and adapted to maturer 
 tastes. In the very first scene of 5^. Patrick for 
 Ireland there is a note of truer and purer poetry than 
 usual : the style is a little fresher, the movement 
 more lively, and the action more amusing ; and in 
 the parts of Conallus and Emeria there are situations 
 of real interest and touches of real pathos. 
 
 The Constant Maid is a comedy of some spirit and 
 originality ; but a mother's attempt to win or to 
 test the affections of her daughter's lover is a revolt- 
 ing if not a ridiculous mainspring for the action 
 of a play. A farcical character which may remind 
 the reader of Bob Acres will only increase his appre- 
 ciation of Sheridan's superior art and intelligence ; 
 though there is some crude and rough-hewn humour 
 in Shirley's caricature of a loutish lover. But the 
 two plots are so badly mixed that any reader or 
 spectator would have supposed it the first attempt 
 of an awkward and ambitious novice in comedy. 
 The farce of The Humorous Courtier is not unhappily
 
 302 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 nor unamusingly conceived, but the execution is too 
 extravagant and the infusion of serious villainy too 
 incongruous to pass muster with the idlest or most 
 tolerant of readers. The so-called pastoral in which 
 Sidney's voluminous romance is condensed into 
 dramatic form is so perfunctory in style and so 
 halting in metre as to be worthier of a Davenant or a 
 Killegrew than of even a second-rate or third-rate 
 dramatic poet ; but the reader who spends an hour 
 or so on perusal of The Arcadia must admit that the 
 playwright's work was neatly done — and not worth 
 doing. How and why such a play could have been 
 either required of any writer or performed by any 
 actors is a problem insoluble by the modern reader ; 
 who will find the complicated action as flat as the in- 
 vertebrate versification, and will not find any shadow 
 of serious interest or any plausible pretence to evoke 
 it from the limbo of an obsolete popularity. Any 
 tribute to the memory of the noble poet and hero 
 whose literary monument is the noble poem of 
 Astrophel and Stella does credit to the man who offers 
 it ; but a more singular sort of tribute than this was 
 never paid by the most injudicious and ineffectual 
 perversity or debility of devotion. 
 
 In The Gentleman of Venice the bright and lively 
 talent of Shirley rises again after the eclipse through 
 which it would seem to have passed. The two plots 
 are more neatly interwoven into a more amusing and 
 coherent story than usual : though the one may be 
 somewhat too threadbare in its antiquity, the other 
 somewhat too unseemly in its extravagance. But 
 the writing throughout is graceful, easy, and pleasant 
 to read ; and the characters, if rather theatrical
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 303 
 
 and rather thin, are at all events alive enough to 
 amuse and amusing enough to satisfy a not exacting 
 or intolerant reader. The Politician, if not one of 
 Shirley's best plays, is one of his liveliest and most 
 effective ; the pathos of the scene immortalized by 
 insertion in Lamb's immortal volume of "Specimens" 
 is so simple and so pure as to remind us rather of 
 He3AVOod than of Shirley ; and if the attempt at a 
 similar effect in the part of an injured and misused 
 wife is not equally happy or impressive, it is not for 
 lack of graceful and facile writing. The worst of 
 Shirley's tragedies is certain to be better, and very 
 much better, than the worst of Shirley's comedies. 
 Among these latter The Imposture is one of the many 
 that will be found tolerable by the tolerant reader, 
 though possibly by him alone ; its complications of 
 incident and intrigue, if (as usual) rather ingenious 
 than interesting, relieved as they are by scenes of 
 farcical horse-play, may serve to keep his idle atten- 
 tion idly awake. 
 
 If the treatment of character and passion had been 
 equal to the development of interest and the manage- 
 ment of the story, the vigorous and well-built 
 tragedy of The Cardinal might have been what its 
 author avowedly thought it, the flower of his flock ; 
 it is indeed a model of composition, simple and lucid 
 and thoroughly well sustained in its progress towards 
 a catastrophe remarkable for tragic originality and 
 power of invention ; with no confusion or encum- 
 brance of episodes, no change or fluctuation of 
 interest, no breach or defect of symmetry. But the 
 story is more interesting than the actors ; and the 
 points of resemblance between this play and The
 
 304 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Duchess of Malfy are consequently as noticeable as 
 the points of ^resemblance between Macedon and 
 Monmouth, There is a wicked cardinal in each, and 
 the principal victim of his crimes is an innocent 
 duchess. 
 
 The very spirited and amusing comedy of The 
 Sisters is only not one of Shirley's very best ; The 
 Country Captain, discovered and reissued by Mr. 
 Bullen, is indisputably one of them. The tradi- 
 tional attribution of this brilliant play to the Duke 
 of Newcastle will hardly persuade any competent 
 reader that it is not mainly if not altogether the work 
 of Shirley ; though the burlesque picture of the 
 trained bands may possibl}^ be assigned to the pro- 
 fessional hand of the martial and equestrian duke. 
 The parody of Donne's most elaborately eccentric 
 style in the verses ascribed to a fashionable poetaster 
 seems curiously out of date in a generation of writers 
 equally incapable of emulating the peculiar merits 
 and of copying the peculiar mannerisms of the great 
 poet who is to the Cowleys and Clevelands of Shirley's 
 day as a giant to pigmies who cannot even mimic 
 his gait ; for the strong uneven stride of his verse is 
 no more like the mincing amble of Cowley's than 
 Wordsworth is like Moore. The attack on mono- 
 polists does credit to the independence and courage 
 of the assailant ; but it is unfortunate that a figure 
 of mere farce should so much as recall what it does 
 not pretend to compete with, the most famous 
 character on the stage of Massinger. The humour 
 is throughout as much stronger as it is coarser than 
 usual with Shirley : the more high-flown parts are 
 more than fair examples of his fluent and flowery
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 305 
 
 style of rhetoric — not glaringly artificial, but sug- 
 gestive rather of perfumery than of natural perfume. 
 Some parts of the action, like some parts of the dia- 
 logue, are exceptionally daring in the licence if not 
 the licentiousness of their freedom ; but the upshot 
 is more satisfactory to the moral and intellectual 
 taste or judgment of a critical reader than is that 
 of The Lady of Pleasure — the only other play of 
 Shirley's which can be compared with it for sheer 
 brilliance and vivacity of movement and of style. 
 
 The Court Secret, of apparently later date, is a thin 
 dry cobweb of a play, with a few tender and graceful 
 touches here and there which hardly serve to lighten 
 or relieve the empty complications and confusions 
 of its tedious and conventional story. But there are 
 signs even here that the writer's invention, though 
 now a spur-galled and broken- winded jade, was once 
 a racer of some mettle. It is agreeable to reflect that 
 the condensed satire of the following brief descrip- 
 tion is inapplicable to any politician of our own day. 
 
 Why, there's 
 A statesman that can side with every faction ; 
 And yet most subtly can untwist himself 
 When he hath wrought the business up to danger ! 
 He lives within a labyrinth. 
 
 There are some " pretty little tiny kickshaws " 
 among Shirley's poems. His Good Night is a curious 
 anticipation of Shelley's, though less graceful and 
 serious in expression ; but it would be flattery to 
 honour his elegies with the qualification of medio- 
 crity ; and his Narcissus must surely be the very 
 feeblest and faintest copy among all the innumerable 
 
 u
 
 306 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 imitations of Shakespeare's too popular first poem. 
 The Triumph of Beauty is poor meagre stuff ; the 
 interlude of Cupid and Death is livelier and not un- 
 graceful, though much beneath what it might have 
 been. The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses is a very 
 fair piece of work, more solid in versification than 
 usual, though wanting alike in the stately grace of 
 Ovid and the sprightly facility of Heywood ; but 
 memorable only as containing the one universally 
 popular and famous poem of so fertile a writer as 
 Shirley. This celebrated dirge or monody is no 
 doubt a noble poem, but it has also been a very 
 lucky one. There is many a yet finer lyric of the 
 same age and kind which has had but two or three 
 readers where Shirley's lament has had a thousand. 
 His last work, the allegorical comedy of Honoria 
 and Mammon, is not merely a recast or expansion 
 of a twenty-six years older work, but a great im- 
 provement on that clever and bright little interlude. 
 Shirley's wit, style, and humour are all at their best 
 in the curious and ingenious drama with which he 
 took a final farewell of the stage. It is amusing to 
 find in his last as in his first play a touch of satire 
 which would have been even more timely and appro- 
 priate in a satirist of our own generation. " I'll 
 — build a bridge," says one of Lady Mammon's 
 suitors, " from Dover cliff to Calais." " A draw- 
 bridge ? " asks a countryman ; and another ob- 
 serves, with due reticence, 
 
 This may be done ; but I am of opinion 
 We shall not live to see it. 
 
 Amen to that : but the loyal and sensible old poet is
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 307 
 
 surely deserving of serious praise and credit for his 
 contemptuously imaginative anticipation of the most 
 monstrous project ever hatched — except perhaps its 
 fellow-folly, a submarine instead of an aerial con- 
 spiracy against the beneficence of nature. 
 
 The works of Shirley fall naturally into three 
 categories or classes ; those in the first class are very 
 good, those in the second class are very fair, those 
 in the third class are very poor. The Traitor, The 
 Example, The Lady of Pleasure, and The Country 
 Captain belong beyond all question to the first 
 class : The Wedding, Hyde Park, The Gamester, 
 and The Cardinal stand high in the second. If 
 these, with perhaps two or three more, were all we 
 had of Shirley, it would be simply impossible to see 
 the point or understand the meaning of Dryden's 
 bitter sneer at his " tautology." But to the patient 
 reader of all his plays the truth of the imputation will 
 be as evident as the cruelty of the insult. The 
 general charge of repetition, monotony, wearisome 
 reiteration of similar types and similar effects, can 
 hardly be disputed or denied. Of Heywood, whom 
 Dryden in his headlong ignorance and his headstrong 
 arrogance chose or chanced to bracket with Shirley 
 as a subject for indiscriminate satire, this cannot 
 either truthfully or plausibly be affirmed. He has 
 always something to say, even though it be said in 
 the homeliest of bald and prosy styles : Shirley at his 
 worst has'really nothing to say whatever. But the de- 
 merits of his duller and unhappier hours would hardly 
 be remembered by the admirers of his better work if 
 he had never been overpraised by such critics as 
 depreciate or ignore his betters.
 
 308 CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The "poet-critic" who ignores the existence of 
 Tourneur and dismisses Webster with a sneer 
 expatiates with exuberance of unction on the at- 
 tractions and fascinations of Shirley : and this 
 enthusiasm on the part of Campbell inclines us 
 to remember — if ever it were possible we should 
 forget — that a breath of Cyril Tourneur's fiery 
 passion would suffice to blast the fairest fruits of 
 Shirley's garden into dust and ashes, and a glance 
 from the eye of John Webster to strike its chirping 
 and twittering birds into breathless and cowering 
 silence. When we turn to such poets as these we can 
 hardly see or hear or remember Shirley as a singer 
 or a creator at all ; but it is as unjust and ungracious 
 to insist on the inferiority in kind which is estab- 
 lished by such a comparison, as it would be pre- 
 posterous and absurd to question it. The place of 
 James Shirley among English poets is naturally 
 unpretentious and modest : it is indisputably 
 authentic and secure. 
 
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