confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moonlight at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. VI. Such was the society of which our theatre became the mirror. The splendour and ideal beauty of the world which it presented, in contrast with the semibarbarism from which society was then emerging, added imaginative charm to scenic pageants, and raised the fancy of the playwrights to the heavens of poetry. This contrast converted dramatic art into a vivid dream, a golden intuition, a glowing anticipation of man's highest possibilities. The poets were Prosperos. In the dark and unpaved streets of London visions came to them of Florence or Verona, bright with palaces and lucid with perpetual sunlight. The ener getic passions which they found in their own breasts. and everywhere among the men around them, attained to tragic grandeur in their imaginations. They translated the crude violence, the fanciful eccentricities, the wayward humours of the day, into animated types; and because they kept touch with human nature, their THE ROMANTIC DRAMA. 37 transcripts from the life of their own time are indestructible. The form assumed by the Drama in England was not accidental; nor was the triumph of the Romantic over the Classic type of art attained without a vigorous struggle. Scholars at the University and purists at the Court, Sidney by his precepts and Sackville by his practice, the translators of Seneca and the imitators of Italian poets, Ben Jonson's learning and Bacon's authority, were unable to force upon the genius of the people a style alien to the spirit of the times and of the race. Between the age of Pericles and the sixteenth century of our era, the stream of time had swept mightily and gathered volume, bearing down upon its tide the full development of Greek philosophy and Roman law, the rise and fall of Greek and Roman Empires, the birth and progress of Christianity and Islam, the irruption of Teutonic tribes into the community of civilised races, the growth of modern nationalities and modern tongues, the formation and decay of feudalism, the theology of Alexandria, Byzantium, and Paris, the theocratic despotism of the Papal See, the intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages, the mental ferment of the Middle Ages, the revival of scholarship, philosophy, and art in Southern Europe, and, last of all, the revolution which shook Papal Rome and freed the energies of man. How was it possible, after these vital changes in the substance, composition, and direction of the human spirit, that a Drama, representative of the new world, should be built upon the lines of Greek or Græco-Roman precedents? In Italy, under the oppressive weight of humanism, such a revival of the antique forms had been attempted-with what feeble results all students of Italian tragedy are well aware.1 The instinct of the English, who were destined to resuscitate the Drama, rejected that tame formalism. They worked at first without or rule or method. Their earliest efforts were mere gropings, tentative endeavours, studies of untaught craftsmen seeking after style. But they adhered closely to the life before their eyes; and their ill-digested scenes brought nature piecemeal on the stage. The justice of this method was triumphantly demonstrated by Shakspere; as the justice of the method of Pisano and Giotto was demonstrated by Michelangelo and Raffaello. Neither Italian painting nor English poetry can be called a silver-age revival of antique art; because in neither of these products did the modern mind start from imitation, but initiated and completed a new process of its own. The Romantic Drama is of necessity deficient in statuesque repose and classic unity of design. It obeys specific laws of vehement activity and wayward beauty; while the discords and the imperfections of the type are such as only genius of the highest order can reduce to harmony. Aiming at the manifestation of human life as a complex whole, with all its multiformity of elements impartially considered and presented, our playwrights seized on every salient motive in the sphere of man's experience. They rifled the stores of history and learning with indiscriminate rapacity. The heterogeneous booty of their raids, the ore and dross of their discovery, passed through a furnace in their brains, took form from their invention. In no 1 See my Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. chap. ii. MATERIALS USED BY THE PLAYWRIGHTS. 39 duels, in Plutarch sense can these men be arraigned for plagiarism or for imitation, although they made free use of all that had been published in the past.1 The Renaissance lent them, not its pedantic humanism, but the deep colouring, the pulse of energy, the pomp and pride and passion of its glowing youth. From Italy they drew romance and sensuous beauty-the names of Venice and Amalfi and Verona-the lust of lust, the concentrated malice of that Southern Circe. In Spain they delved a mine of murders, treasons, trigues, persecutions, and ancestral guilt. taught them deeds of citizens, heroic lives, and civic virtues. The Elegists and Ovid were for them the fountain-head of mythic fables. From sagas of the North and annals of Old England they borrowed the substance of 'King Lear,'' Bonduca,' Hamlet.' From the chronicles of recent history they quarried tragedies of Tudors and Plantagenets. The law-courts gave them motives for domestic drama. The streets and taverns, homes and houses of debauch, in London furnished them with comic scenes. Nor did these materials, in spite of their incongruous variety, confuse the minds which they enriched. Our dramatists inspired with living energy each character of myth, romance, experience, or story. Anachronisms, ignorance, crudulity, abound upon their pages. Criticism had not yet begun its reign. Legend was still mistaken for fact. The 1 As early as 1580, Stephen Gosson wrote in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions: 'I may boldly say it because I have seen it, that the Palace of Pleasure, The Golden Ass, The Ethiopian History, Amadis of France, The Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London.' (Roxburgh Library, The English Drama and Stage, p. 188.) tale of 'Cymbeline' seemed to Shakspere almost as historical as that of Henry V.' Yet, feeling the reality of life exceedingly, grasping all shapes through which they could express their knowledge of themselves and of the world around them, piercing below the surface to the heart which throbbed within each image of the fancy, they converted all they touched to essential realism. Men and women rose beneath their wand of art from dusty stores of erudition, from mists of faery land and fiction. Heywood, here as elsewhere, finely conscious of the playwright's function, unfolds a map before us of the ground they traversed, in these lines: To give content to this most curious age, The gods themselves we've brought down to the stage, Deliver up the furies, by no spell Saving the Muse's rapture. Further we Have trafficked by their help: no history We've left unrifled: our pens have been dipped, Nor scaped things intermediate, for your love. A noble boast; and not more nobly boasted than nobly executed; as they who have surveyed the English Drama from Lyly to Ford, will acknowledge. |