Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

The period of time in which those whom we call the Old English Dramatists flourished runs from the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the Great Rebellion, — about sixty years. The most brilliant portion of this period was the reign of James the First. The drama commenced with Buckhurst, and died out in Shirley. In the intervening time, we have the names of Marlowe, Shakspeare, Webster, Decker, Tourneur, Heywood, Middleton, Chapman, Ben Jonson, Marston, Massinger, Ford, and Beaumont and Fletcher, a constellation of genius, which, in power and variety, in imagination, passion, fancy, wit, sense, philosophy, character, nature, is unexampled in the intellectual annals of the world. Bacon, Hooker, Hobbes, Browne, Cudworth, Barrow, Taylor, Napier, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, and, we may add, Milton, may be classed in the same generation. These sixty years were most emphatically "rammed" with intellectual life. Great men, men of originating minds in different departments of literature and science, men. eminent in action and speculation, men whose names ring now as sweet music in the ears of all who speak the English tongue, seemed to have been crowded and crammed into this era, "infinite riches in a little room." Yet the age was what we would call rude and coarse in its manners, the language had not been trained into a facile instrument of thought, few people were "educated," in our sense of the term, and civilization had but imperfectly done its work on the old barbarism; and yet, we doubt if external circumstances were ever more propitious to the development in a people of the greatest energies of intellect and passion.

The age to which we refer was one of vast intellectual and moral activity. That great movement of the Euro

pean mind at the revival of letters, whose splendid results were seen in the invention of gunpowder and printing, in the Reformation, the discovery of the American continent, the overthrow of feudalism, the new importance given to the middle class, the circulation of the classics, the creation of national literatures, the assertion of individual rights, and the general tendency to transfer the sceptre of influence from the soldier to the thinker, was most deeply felt in England during this period, and, as regards literature, it achieved there its mightiest triumphs. When we contrast the age with that which immediately preceded it, we seem almost to realize the vision of Milton, of a “mighty and puissant nation rousing itself, like a strong man after sleep, and shaking his invincible locks." Everything was in motion. Great events stimulated great passions. An old order of life, with its institutions, its manners, its superstitions, was shaken to its foundations. New ideas and images were rushing into the national life from a thousand sources. Greece, Rome, Italy, Spain, poured into the one great channel their blended streams. In the vast background of the national history, in the manners and passions of the feudal age, were exhaustless materials of heroic romance. What was passing away in actual life was transferred to the imagination, to reäppear idealized in poetry. The old times were sufficiently recent to be ideally apprehended. They lingered in knightly feelings and accomplishments, and shaped the highest minds of the age in a mould of heroism. An artificial civilization had neither tamed nor refined the energies of the heart. There were great diversities of culture, character, manners, ranging from extreme coarseness to high delicacy, and a corresponding external costume, which afforded the

poet a wide variety of subjects, from which to select striking individualities and picturesque images. The intellect of the country was prying, inquisitive, bold, disposed to innovation, and yet creative. The understanding and the imagination were both alive and active. There was a certain fulness, roundness, and harmony of mental development, in the great men of the time, which gives a character of majestic ease to their sturdiest exertions of power. None of their faculties acquired a diseased activity at the expense of the rest. It was not a time to produce Humes or Schellings in philosophy, Crabbes or Wordsworths in poetry. Taken altogether, it would be difficult to find a class of minds more comprehensive, profound, practical, and available. The philosophers were poets, and the poets philosophers. There was a strong development and happy equipoise of those powers which relate to actual life, and those which refer to the world of imagination. The literature of the period has body as well as soul. Things were grasped in the concrete, and so stated that their substance and vital spirit could not be separated. Great minds nursed Utopias in their capacious and far-darting imaginations, without being troubled with a diseased self-consciousness, and without whining about their circumstances. The noblest spirit of them all was an actor and manager of a theatre, who excelled all his contemporaries as much in prudence as in genius, and is one of the three professional authors of Great Britain who obtained a competence by literature.* The age was not troubled with "gifted spirits," "earnest minds," or "poet-souls."

The intellectual and moral activity of which we have spoken, though it was felt in nearly all departments of Shakspeare, Pope, and Scott.

philosophy, literature, and action, and produced in all magnificent results, left perhaps its most wonderful traces on the dramatic literature of the period. The originality and power of this as a mirror of life cannot be contested, however much may be said against the rudeness and inartistical shape of the majority of its products. Were a man to exhaust the literatures of all other times and nations, he could not be introduced to the English drama without being startled from the complacency of his settled tastes, and compelled to acknowledge the existence of a new province of imagination, not implied or foretold in any canons of criticism. The reading of the Old Dramatists to such a person would be like gazing at the earth's central fires through cracks in the ground made by an earthquake. He would see the nature of man revealed in its most terrible aspects of crime and suffering, all the restraints both on depravity and virtue torn violently away, and the heart in its naked reality laid open to view. All the conventional proprieties and linen decencies of language, he would find continually violated. The bad and the good, the great and the mean, wisdom and folly, mirth and grief, he would see jostling each other in seemingly inextricable confusion. He would hear not only the natural language of passion, even to the lowest tone that the heart half whispers to itself, but that language as modified by the thousand diversities of character. Oaths and vulgarities would ring through his brain, just as some exquisite strain of poetry had died away on his ear. He would stand amazed to find so much genius and impassioned action associated with so much flutter and rant, and perhaps would seek, in the phrase "irregular genius," a conven

lent passage out of astonishment into contented igno

rance.

The fine audacity that distinguishes these writers has, we believe, no parallel in literature. It led often to monstrous violations of taste and probability, but it still enabled them to reach heights and sound depths, which equal powers, wielded by a less daring will, could never have achieved. We shall see, also, that, though plain to coarseness in speech, when they undertook to represent coarse characters, they rarely, with the exception perhaps of Fletcher, tampered with moral laws. A good, wholesome, English integrity generally underlies their vulgarities. Their works would not be so likely to corrupt the mind as some of Byron's and Moore's; for, though they represent immorality, they do not inculcate it. Their robust strength of nature preserved them from sentimentality, if not from bombast and buffoonery. Their minds breathed the bracing air of their time, a time which would tolerate what would now be considered breaches of decorum, but would not tolerate the smaller vices of intellect and sentiment. Of course, in these remarks, as far as they touch upon gross faults, we do not mean to include Shakspeare among his brother dramatists. He excelled them all as much in judgment as in genius.

The first playhouse built in England was erected in Blackfriars, in the year 1569 or 1570, about twenty years before Shakspeare commenced writing for the stage. Previously to this establishment of the "regular drama," there had been three different species of theatrical representations, - miracles or mysteries, written by priests on religious subjects, and performed by them on holydays, in which, as Campbell phrases it, "Adam and Eve appeared naked, the devil displayed his horns

« AnteriorContinua »