The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

It is perhaps due to their habit of mixing tragedy and comedy that the Elizabethan dramatists made so much use of the double plot; for the main plot was often tragical and the underplot comical or farcical. Shakespeare, who at all points was superior to his fellows, knew how to knit his duplicate plots together and make them interdependent. But in pieces like Middleton’s “Changeling” or “The Mayor of Queensboro,” the main plot and the subplot have nothing to do with each other and simply run along in alternate scenes, side by side. This is true of countless plays of the time and is ridiculed by Sheridan in his burlesque play “The Critic.” Let it also be remembered that an Elizabethan tragedy was always a poem – always in verse. Prose was reserved for comedy, or for the comedy scenes in a tragedy. The only prose tragedy that has come down to us from those times is the singular little realistic piece entitled “The Yorkshire Tragedy,” the story of a murder. A very constant feature of the old drama was the professional fool, jester, or kept clown, with his motley coat, truncheon, and cap and bells. In most plays he was simply a stock fun maker, though Shakespeare made a profound and subtle use of him in “As You Like It” and in “Lear.” The last court jester or king’s fool was Archie Armstrong, fool of Charles I. After the Restoration he was considered as old-fashioned and disappeared from the stage along with puns and other obsolete forms of wit. Opera and pantomime were not introduced into England until late in the seventeenth century: but the Elizabethans had certain forms of quasi-dramatic entertainment such as the court masque, the pageant, and the pastoral, which have since gone out. They were responsible for some fine poetry like Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdess,” Jonson’s fragment “The Sad Shepherd” and Milton’s “Comus.” Of late years the pageant has been locally revived in England, at Oxford, at Coventry, and elsewhere.

Now since it has ceased to be performed, what is the value of the old drama, as literature, as a body of reading plays? Of the 200 known writers for the theatre, ten at least were men of creative genius, Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger. At least a dozen more were men of high and remarkable talents, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marston, Ford, Heywood, Shirley, Tourneur, Kyd, Day, Rowley, Brome. Scarcely one of them but has contributed single scenes of great excellence, or invented one or two original and interesting characters, or written passages of noble blank verse and lovely lyrics. Even the poorest of them were inheritors or partakers of a great poetic tradition, a gift of style, so that, in plays very defective, as a whole, we are constantly coming upon lines of startling beauty like Middleton’s

 
Ha! what art thou that taks’t away the light
Betwixt that star and me?
 

or Marston’s

 
Night, like a masque, has entered heaven’s high hall,
With thousand torches ushering the way.
 

or Beaumont’s

 
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
 

But when all has been said, and in spite of enthusiasts like Lamb and Hazlitt and Swinburne, I fear it must be acknowledged that, outside of Shakespeare, our old dramatists produced no plays of the absolutely first rank; no tragedies so perfect as those of Sophocles and Euripides; no comedies equal to Molière’s. Nay, I would go further, and affirm that not only has the Elizabethan drama – excluding Shakespeare – nothing to set against the first part of Goethe’s “Faust,” but that its best plays are inferior, as a whole, to the best of Aristophanes, of Calderon, of Racine, of Schiller, even perhaps of Victor Hugo, Sheridan and Beaumarchais. It is as Coleridge said: great beauties, counterbalanced by great faults. Ben Jonson is heavy-handed and laborious; Beaumont and Fletcher graceful, fluent and artistic, but superficial and often false in characterization; Webster, intense and powerful in passion, but morbid and unnatural; Middleton, frightfully uneven; Marlowe and Chapman high epic poets but with no flexibility and no real turn for drama.

Yet unsatisfactory as it is, when judged by any single play, the work of the Elizabethans, when viewed as a whole, makes an astonishing impression of fertility, of force, of range, variety, and richness, both in invention and in expression.