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ADVANCE IN TRAGIC STYLE.

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universe in which all live and move and have their being.

The Misfortunes of Arthur' shows a marked advance on Gorboduc.' The characters are far more fully modelled-those of Arthur and Mordred standing forth in bold relief. The language is less studiedly sententious. The verse flows more harmoniously. The descriptive passages are marked by greater vividness; and the dialogue evolves itself more spontaneously from the situation. Many vigorous single lines anticipate the style of Marston; who, without Shakspere's work before his eyes, could certainly have not produced a better tragedy. Some of these lines are due to Seneca:

Yea, worse than war itself is fear of war

Small griefs can speak, the great astonished stand.

Seneca had written:

Pejor est bello timor ipse belli. . .

Curæ leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.

Shakspere wrote:

The grief that does not speak,

Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

To neglect this instance of the Shaksperian alchemy, though unseasonable, was beyond my fortitude.

What the Greeks called Stichomuthia is common in this tragedy. Gawin, for example, urges on Mordred the imprudence of resisting Arthur in the field.

G. And fear you not so strange and uncouth war?

M. No, were they wars that grew from out the ground!

G. Nor yet your sire so huge, yourself so small?

M. The smallest axe may fell the hugest oak.

R

G. Nor that in felling him yourself may fall?

M. He falleth well that falling fells his foe.

G. Nor common chance, whereto each man is thrall?
M. Small manhood were to turn my back to chance.

This dialogue by a stroke of tragic irony prefigures the catastrophe, which is thus described by the Messenger:

So saying, forth he flings,

And desperate runs on point of Arthur's sword-
A sword, alas! prepared for no such use !
Whereon engored, he glides till, near approached,
With dying hand he hews his father's head.
So through his own annoy he 'noys his liege,
And gains by death access to daunt his sire.

From the point of view of tragic passion, the finest scene in the play, and the highest in expression, is when Arthur greets the dead body of his

son.

[The breathless body of MORDRED in armour, as he fell, is brought upon the stage.

A. A causeless foe! When wars did call me hence,

He was in years but young, in wit too old.
As virtue shineth most in comeliest wights,

When inward gifts are decked with outward grace,
So did his wit and feature feed that hope,
Which falsely trained me to this woeful hap.

[He turns to the corpse.

His mind transformèd thus, I cannot choose
But long to see what change his face sustains.
My blood and kindred, doubled in his birth,
Inspires a mixed and twice-descending love,
Which drives my dying veins to wish his view.
Unhelm his luckless head, set bare his face,

That face which erst pleased me and mine too much!
Ch. See, worthiest king, the hope of all your realm,

Had not his lust to rule prevented all.

A. I see, alas! I see--Hide, hide again!
Oh, spare mine eyes !- a witness of my crimes,

ARTHUR AND MORDRED.

A fearful vision of my former guilt,

A dreadful horror of a future doom,

A present gall of mind! O happy they,
Whose spotless lives attain a dreadless death!
And thou, O hapless boy! O spite of fates!
What might I term thee-nephew, son, or both?
Alas! how happy should we both have been,
If no ambitious thought had vexed thy head,
Nor thou thus strived to reave thy father's rule,
But stayed thy time, and not forestalled us both!

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Cador, an attendant noble, compares Mordred in his fate to the 'hot-spurred' and aspiring Phaethon. Arthur resumes his lamentation:

What ruth, ah, rent the woeful father's heart,

That saw himself thus made a sonless sire!

Well, since both heavens and hell conspired in one

To make our ends a mirror to the world,

Both of incestuous life and wicked birth,
Would God the fates that linked our faults alike
Had also framed our minds of friendlier mould,
That as our lineage had approached too near,
So our affections had not swerved so far!

Something magnanimous in Arthur's attitude toward his dead son, something noble in his meditation on their common crime, the playing with antitheses, the covert allusion to Guenevora's guilty love, the natural and dignified movement of the dying hero's apostrophes to fate-all these points of style seem to me to indicate a study of the Greek at first hand. The 'Misfortunes of Arthur,' superior in all respects to 'Gorboduc,' has this particular superiority, that it breathes in parts the air of an Euripidean tragedy.

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VII.

The tragedies of what I have called the pseudoclassic school differ in very essential points from the type of the true English drama. Their authors, men of birth, culture, and position, were unable to stem the tide of popular inclination. They could not persuade play-goers to prefer the measured rhetoric of Seneca to the stirring melodrama and varied scenes of the romantic poets. It remains, however, to be asked what these workers in an unsuccessful style, permanently achieved for our dramatic literature. The answer is not far to seek. Their efforts, arguing a purer taste and a loftier ideal than that of the uncultivated English, forced principles of careful composition, gravity of diction, and harmonious construction, on the attention of contemporary playwrights. They compelled men of Marlowe's mental calibre to consider whether mature reflection might not be presented in the form of dramatic action. The earlier romantic playwrights regarded the dramatisation of a tale as all-important. The classical playwrights contended for grave sentences and weighty matter. To the triumph of the romantic style the classics added this element of studied thought. Mere copies of Latin tragedy were doomed to deserved unpopularity with the vulgar. Yet these plays had received the approbation of the Court and critics; and the approbation of the higher social circles is rarely without influence. Thus, though themselves of little literary value and of no permanent importance, they taught certain lessons of regularity and sobriety in

VALUE OF THE PSEUDO-CLASSICS.

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tragic art, by which the poets of the romantic drama. did not fail to profit. We have cause to be thankful that no Richelieu, with a learned Academy at his back, was at hand in England to stereotype this pseudo-classic style; and that the Queen who patronised our theatre in its beginnings, was very far from being a purist in dramatic matters. Else Marlowe, like Corneille, might have been forced to walk in the fetters which Sidney and Sackville sought to forge, and the Shaksperian drama might never have been England's proudest boast in literature. But, while recording our gratitude for these mercies, we should not refuse their due meed to the School of Seneca. It is no slight thing moreover to have given blank verse to the English stage; and dramatic blank verse was certainly the discovery of Norton, Sackville, Hughes, and Gascoigne. These followers of Seneca and the Italians familiarised the reading public with this metre in their 'Gorboduc' (1561), 'Jocasta' (1566), and Misfortunes of Arthur' (1587). The first of these works was printed at least twenty years before the production of Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine.' The last of them was printed three years before Marlowe sent that play to press.

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