MORALITY OF THE DRAMA.

83

What is bad, is recognised as bad, and receives no extenuation. It cannot, however, be denied that there are exceptions to this healthiness of tone. Some of Fletcher's, Ford's, and Massinger's plays are founded upon subjects radically corrupt, while the touch of these latter dramatists on questions of conduct and taste is often insecure and casuistical. The student who peruses the whole of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, will hardly recommend them for family reading, and will probably be inclined to feel with Leigh Hunt that he has suffered some outrage to his own sense of right and wrong, of cleanliness and decency.

It is not needful to observe that almost every play of that epoch contains much that is coarse in sentiment and gross in language. The comedies, especially, abound in undisguised indelicacy. But, for the most part, these ribald scenes and clownish jokes are excrescences upon the piece itself; and though they are justly disagreeable to a modern taste, they convey no lessons of wantonness. If Spungius and Hircius, Rutilio and Annabella, Bellafront and Malefort, were to contend for the prize of impurity with the heroes and heroines of modern French fiction, they would assuredly have small chance of success.

The theatres of London were the resort of profligate and noisy persons, causing constant annoyance to their neighbourhoods. Therefore, as will be set forth in a separate essay of this volume, the Corporation resisted their establishment within the City bounds, and reluctantly tolerated them in the suburbs. Puritan divines denounced their teaching from the pulpit ; while a succession of books and pamphlets taxed them

with corrupting manners. But though it was manifest that playhouses encouraged loose living in the persons who frequented them, and though the social influence of plays upon the youth of London was at least questionable, neither the last Tudor nor the first Stuart attempted to suppress them on this account. Besides enjoying theatrical representations with keen relish herself, Elizabeth seems to have understood their utility as means of popular education. To institute a censorship of plays, to restrain unlicensed companies from acting, to forbid the exercise of this art upon Sundays, to make the use of blasphemous oaths in dramatic compositions penal, and to punish the publication of seditious or scandalous libels, were the utmost measures taken by successive Governments in regulating the morals of the theatre. For the rest, they trusted, not without good reason, to the wholesome instincts of the people, with whom the playwrights lived and wrote in closest sympathy. It was only when the tone of a profligate Court began to make itself felt on the public stage, that a distinct tendency to deterioration became evident.

XXI.

Whatever view may be taken about the morality of the Elizabethan Drama, one thing is certain. It formed a school of popular instruction, a rallying-point of patriotism. The praises of civil and religious liberty, the celebration of national glories, reached all ears from the theatres. Here the people learned to love their Queen and to hate slavery. They saw before

their eyes the deeds of patriots and heroes vividly enacted. They grew familiar with the history of England. The horrors of bad government and civil strife, the baneful influence of Court favourites, the corruptions of a priestly rule and the iniquities of despotism, were written plainly in large characters for all to read. Poets, orators, and scholars poured forth learning, eloquence, and imagery to express to Englishmen the greatness of their past, the splendour of their destiny. No national epic could have been so potent in the formation of a noble consciousness as those dramatic scenes which reproduced the triumphs of Crecy and Agincourt, the wars of York and Lancaster, the struggle of the Reformation, and the Defeat of the Armada. If the ballad of 'Chevy Chase' stirred Sir Philip Sidney like the blast of a trumpet, how must the dying words of Gaunt have thrilled an English audience? Rarely did one of our dramatists mention any island without some passionate praise of England. The coldest kindled at this theme: 1

Look on England,

The Empress of the European isles ;

When did she flourish so, as when she was
The mistress of the ocean, her navies

Putting a girdle round about the world?

When the Iberian quaked, her worthies named;
And the fair flower de luce grew pale, set by
The red rose and the white?

It was indeed no idle boast of Heywood's, when he contended that the pageantry of heroism and patriotism, displayed before a people on the stage, bred virtue and inflamed the soul to emulation.

'Massinger's Maid of Honour,

It cannot be doubted that the stage exercised wide-reaching influence over the development of English character at a moment when the nation was susceptible to such impressions. Reading the plays of Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, Heywood, Chapman, Dekker, Beaumont, we are fain to cry with Milton : 'Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her like an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance: while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.'

Even the Puritans may have felt grateful to the playhouse when they came to exchange their character of private sanctimoniousness for one of public resistance to tyranny. Then they found in the people a nobility of spirit and a deeply rooted zeal for freedom, which had been brought to consciousness in no small measure by the stage. These obligations remained, however, unrecognised; and perhaps it is even only now that we are beginning to acknowledge them. The Drama had done its work before the Civil Wars began. Its vigour was exhausted; every day it be

pure, more subservient to the pleasures of a luxurious Court. When it revived with Charles II. it had changed its character. The function of the theatre in England had been great and beneficial; it

INFLUENCE OVER NATIONAL CHARACTER.

87

had helped to cherish a strong sense of national honour, to popularise the new ideas and liberal culture which permeated Europe; it had evolved an original and stable type of art, developed the resources of our language, and enriched the world with inexhaustible Now it was dead, and only the faint

funds of poetry.

shadow of its former self survived.

Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit:
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;
And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,

With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude ;
And boisterous English wit with art indued.
Our age was cultivated thus at length;

But what we gained in skill, we lost in strength :
Our builders were with want of genius cursed;
The second temple was not like the first.

Thus wrote Dryden to Congreve on his 'Double Dealer,' mingling false compliment with sound criticism.

XXII.

One point, incidentally dropped in the foregoing paragraph, remains for consideration. What are the obligations of the English language to the Drama? Heywood, in the Apology to which I have already alluded, adduces, among other arguments in favour of the stage, that through its means English had been raised from the most rude and unpolished tongue' to 'a most perfect and composed language.' Each playwright, he adds, attempted to discover fresh beauties