is introduced into a brothel, merely that the life of the place may be represented, and that his wife may be obliged to fetch him out. In The Phoenix one of the characters draws up a formal deed for the sale of his wife to a courtier: The Mayor of Quinborough exhibits in detail the manners of London under Elizabeth in the days of Hengist and Horsa. These are but a few characteristic examples of the improbabilities abounding in the structure of Middleton's plays; the high-water mark of his invention may be inferred from the plot of what is perhaps his best constructed comedy, A Trick to Catch the Old One. Witgood, a spendthrift, has wasted his estate in riotous living. In order to recover himself he arranges with a mistress, of whom he is tired, that the latter shall pass herself off as a rich widow about to marry him. By these means he hopes to regain the favour and assistance of his usurious uncle, Lucre, to whom he has mortgaged his estate, and who is at deadly feud with another usurer, Hoard. When the tidings of Witgood's approaching marriage are brought to Lucre he is as much delighted as his nephew expects; but Hoard, hearing of the affair at the same time, resolves, out of spite to Lucre, to supplant Witgood by marrying the supposed widow himself. This suits the plans of the conspirators exceedingly well. The courtesan, after a well-dissembled hesitation, is married to Hoard, but not before Witgood has made use of the situation to recover from Lucre the mortgage on his estate, by representing that thus alone can he frustrate the designs of his uncle's rival. After the marriage Witgood obtains further relief from his creditors through Hoard, who promises to pay the spendthrift's debts, on receiving from him an undertaking that he will abstain from pressing against him any claims he may have by virtue of his pre-contract to the late widow. Rascal and impostor as he is, Witgood then gains the hand of Hoard's virtuous niece; Lucre's indignation against him, when the trick is discovered, is mitigated by the delight which the usurer feels at the discomfiture of Hoard; the latter is obliged to make the best of a bad situation; and his new wife promises to abandon her old habits. The ingenuity of this plot is not unworthy of Plautus; but I venture to say there is no play of the Roman dramatist so absolutely devoid of ethical feeling as A Trick to Catch the Old One. With this completely cynical view of human nature, Middleton's characters, as is natural, are suited to his ideas of dramatic action. To expect from him the exquisite refinement of Shakespeare's creations would, of course, be absurd, but we do not find in his comedies any persons imagined with the ideal distinctness of Jonson's Bobadil, Dekker's Simon Eyre, Hippolito, Bellafront, Matheo, Friscobaldo, or even Heywood's Bess Bridges. His contempt for the taste and understanding of his audience may be inferred from the names and descriptions of the leading personages in Your Five Gallants, viz., “Frippery, the broker-gallant; Primero, the bawd-gallant; Goldstone, the cheating-gallant; Pursenet, the pocket-gallant; Tailby, the whore-gallant." Two motives, as a rule, sway the characters he represents,-lust and greed. Within the sphere to which his imagination is restricted he can conceive character with vigour and intensity, and Charles Lamb, who gives an extract from his tragedy Women Beware of Women, representing a female bawd cozening an unsophisticated old woman, says justly that the particular scene gives an impression of being studied from real life.1 Yet even on his own ground Middleton fails to make his characters seem consistently natural throughout the play their behaviour is fitful and unconnected; they speak and act as the dramatist chooses, rather than as nature and the situation require. There is in fact in his plays the same abstract mode of thought that has been already noticed in Dekker's. Bianca, the heroine of the play I have just mentioned, appears in one scene as a matron inspired with the virtue of a Lucretia; almost immediately after she is an experienced prostitute; Leantio, her 1 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, p. 155. betrayed husband, after singing the joys of domestic love, sinks contentedly into a paid minister to the pleasures of the female bawd. In A Mad World my Masters the spirit of the Morality flashes out vividly for a moment in the character of Penitent Brothel, who, having actually employed a courtesan to corrupt the mind of a married woman, and having made an assignation with the latter in the disguise of a doctor, is suddenly converted by conscience, and parts from her with a sermon which, being overheard by her husband, has the further effect of curing the latter of his jealousy. Moving in such a sphere of action and character, it is not to be expected that Middleton in his plays should attempt to elevate the imagination by poetical sentiment or diction. With the exception of the pious Cleanthes and Hippolita in The Old Law (characters whom I imagine to have been the creation of Massinger rather than Middleton) I cannot recall one of his female personages who speaks the language of virtue, or even of modesty, and only one man who understands the sentiment of honour. To the latter is assigned the appropriate name of Phoenix; and his view of the world may be charitably accepted as expressing the experience of the dramatist himself: So much have the complaints and suits of men, seven, nay, seventeen years neglected, still interposed by coin and great enemies, prevailed with my pity, that I cannot otherwise think but there are infectious dealings in most offices, and foul mysteries throughout all professions: and therefore I nothing doubt but to find travel enough within myself, and experience I fear too much: nor will I be curious to fit my body to the humblest form and bearing, so the labour may be fruitful; for how can abuses that keep low come to the right view of a prince, unless his looks lie level with them, which else shall be longest hid from him?—he shall be the last man sees 'em.1 Almost the only elevated thoughts in Middleton's plays are put into the mouth of this prince, and one of such passages (a soliloquy after he has witnessed the sale of a wife by her husband) may be cited because it appears to have struck the imagination of Milton :— 1 The Phanix, Act i. Sc. 1. Of all deeds yet this strikes the deepest wound Reverend and honourable Matrimony, Mother of lawful sweets, unshamed mornings, All the whole world were soiled bastardy. That put'st a difference between our desires, And the disordered appetites of beasts, Making their mates those that stand next their lusts.1 Even here the materialism, which lies at the base of all Middleton's ideas, discloses itself, and the value of his praises of marriage, as well as the standard of refinement in his diction, may be measured by the language of Maria in The Family of Love, a character whom he evidently means the reader to admire, for her lover says : My love's chaste smile to all the world doth speak This Maria reproves some loose talk of her aunt about love as follows: 3 was made, Disgrace not that for which our sect Suck forth each other's souls, the earth, the air, 1 The Phanix, Act ii. Sc. 2. Compare Paradise Lost, iv. 750-762. 2 Family of Love, Act i. Sc. 2. 3 I.e. sex. 4 Family of Love, Act ii. Sc. 4. CHAPTER IX THE DRAMATIC TASTE OF THE CITY: ROMANCE AND ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM, CHAPMAN, MELODRAMA MARSTON, TOURNEUR, AND WEBSTER I USE melodrama in its secondary and acquired sense, meaning a play in which tragic situations, characters, sentiments, and diction are pushed so far beyond the limits imposed by art and nature as to produce in the mind a sense of exaggeration and improbability. Like the tragic poet, the melodramatist aims at arousing the feelings of pity and terror, but he writes, as a rule, with such a complete want of moral restraint that he deprives the soul of the purgation" which Aristotle says ought in tragedy to be applied to those passions.1 Melodrama abolishes all gradations of light and shade: virtue and vice are in it opposed to each other with the crudest contrasts. The actions represented generally involve murder, revenge, or some kind of unlawful love: the motives by which the actors are prompted are as simple as their passions are violent the interest depends rather upon a succession of strong physical sensations, than upon complex entanglements, brought about by the moral and intellectual opposition between good and evil. Accordingly there are few melodramas that will stand the test of reading: their poetic life expires when it loses the illusion lent to it by the unreal lights, the simulated emotions, and the mechanical appliances of the stage. The typical melodramatist of the classic stage was Seneca, and the relation of melodrama to tragedy cannot 1 Aristotle's Poetics, vi. 2. |