CHAPTER VIII

JACOBEAN DRAMA

THERE can be no question that in the first quarter of the seventeenth century the imaginative force of the English people ran so vehemently in a single channel, that all other manifestations of it are in danger of being regarded as side-streams or backwaters. As the man of fancy in the reign of Elizabeth had naturally turned to an amorous or pastoral lyric as the medium in which to express the passion which worked in him, so his successor in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. naturally produced a tragedy or a farcical tragi-comedy. The drama was the characteristic art of the age in England, and even if we omit Shakespeare from our consideration, as a figure too disturbing and overshadowing, the fact remains true that it was in the drama that Jacobean England displayed its main current of imagination.

By the end of the sixteenth century the question of the direction which English drama was to take was absolutely settled. The classical play, which had enjoyed so overwhelming a success in Italy and France, had been glanced at by our poets, gingerly touched and rejected as inappropriate and unsympathetic. Just as in France the inspiration of the dramatists had been from the first directly academic, so with us it was directly popular. The earliest modern plays in France, such as those of Jodelle and La Péruse, had been classroom entertainments, given in French in place of Latin, by actors who imitated the verses of Seneca in the vernacular instead of repeating them in the original. This was how French tragedy was formed, and on these lines it rose, smoothly and steadily, to Corneille and Racine. But we have seen that English tragedy was, from the first, a wild and popular entertainment, allied to the mediaval morality and to the medieval farce rather than to anything that Aristotle could have legislated for or Scaliger have approved. The experiments of Fulke Greville, and still more of Samuel Daniel (who, like Jodelle, but half a century later than he, wrote a Senecan Cleopatra in choruses) may give us an idea of what our drama might have become if we had taken the same turn as the French.

By 1600, however, the question was finally settled. The taste for declamation, for long moral disquisitions in rhymed soliloquy, had been faintly started by a few University pedants and had been rejected by the public in favour of a loud, loose tragedy and a violently contrasted and farcical comedy. In England something of the same national disposition to adopt for the stage extravagant and complicated plots, which had been met with a few years

before in Spain, had determined the action of our theatrical poets. The tragedies of Argensola, the predecessor of Lope de Vega, are described by Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly as "a tissue of butcheries," and this poet was an exact contemporary of our carnage-loving Chapmans and Tourneurs. We see in Spain, although the Spanish drama has little positive resemblance to the Elizabethan, parallel lines of character which are not like anything which we meet with in the dramatic Renaissance of Italy or France. But whatever adaptations of the style of stage-plays might have seemed imminent about 1595, they were all swept away at the approach of the genius of Shakespeare. When a writer of superlative force takes the development of a branch of national literature under his sway, he bends it, in its superficial forms, to his will. Jacobean drama cannot be judged apart from the fact that the most illustrious poet of the world chose to make it his instrument.

But if Shakespeare determined, beyond any power of Latinising contemporaries to divert it, the line which the vast mass of Jacobean drama should take, his own relation to his fellow playwrights is confused by the fact that he towers immeasurably above them. He would illustrate his age much better, and form a much more useful guide to its intricacies, if he were not raised over it by such a mountainous elevation. One of the penalties of altitude is isolation, and in reviewing the state of literary feeling in England in the Jacobean times, we gain the impression that a child nowadays may be more familiar with the proportion between Shakespeare and his fellows than the brightest of these latter could be; since those highest qualities of his, which we now take for granted, remained invisible to his contemporaries. To them, unquestionably, he was a stepping-stone to the superior art of Jonson, to the more fluid and obvious graces of Beaumont and Fletcher. Of those whose inestimable privilege it was to meet Shakespeare day by day, we have no evidence that even Ben Jonson perceived the absolute supremacy of his genius. The case is rather curious, for it was not that anything austere or arrogant in himself or his work repelled recognition, or that those who gazed were blinded by excess of light. On the contrary, it seemed to his own friends that they appreciated his amiable, easy talent at its proper value; he was "gentle " Shakespeare to them; and they loved the man and they were ready to borrow freely from his poetry. But that he excelled them all in every poetical artifice, soaring above them all like an elm in a coppice of hazels, this, had it been whispered at the Mermaid, would have aroused smiles of derision. The elements of Shakespeare's perfection were too completely fused to attract vulgar wonder at any one point, and those intricate refinements of style and of character which now excite in us an almost superstitious amazement did not appeal to the rough and hasty Jacobean hearer. In considering Shakespeare's position during his lifetime, moreover, it must not be forgotten that his works made no definite appeal to the reading class until after his death. The study of Shakespeare "as a book cannot date farther back than 1623.

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To us, however, our closer acquaintance with Shakespeare must prove a disastrous preparation for appreciating his contemporaries. He rises out of all