'Tis in our power

(Unless we fear that apes can tutor 's) to
Be masters of our manners: what need I
Affect another's gait, which is not catching
When there is faith? or to be fond upon
Another's way of speech, when by mine own
I may be reasonably conceived, saved too,
Speaking it truly? why am I bound
By any generous bond to follow him
Follows his tailor, haply so long until
The followed make pursuit? or let me know
Why mine own barber is unblest, with him
My poor chin too, for 'tis not scissored just
To such a favourite's glass? what canon is there,
That does command my rapier from my hip
To dangle 't in my hand, or to go tip-toe
Before the street be foul? Either I am
The fore-horse in the team, or I am none
That draw i' the sequent trace.1

But in the second act, coursing in prison, the completely altered :

when the two friends are discharacter of Palamon appears

You have made me

(I thank you, cousin Arcite) almost wanton
With my captivity: what a misery

It is to live abroad, and everywhere!

'Tis like a beast methinks: I find the Court here,

I am sure, a more content and all those pleasures,

That won the wills of men to vanity,

I see through now, and am sufficient

To tell the world 'tis but a gaudy shadow,

That old Time, as he passes by, takes with him.
What had we been, old in the court of Creon,
When sin is justice, lust and ignorance
The virtues of the great ones? Cousin Arcite,
Had not the loving gods found their place for us,
We had died as they do, its old men, unwept,
And had their epitaphs, the people's curses. 2

It seems to me that we may take these variations in the character of Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen as a kind of allegory of the characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and of their respective influence on the progress of the English drama. For in the passage from the first

1 Palamon and Arcite, Act i. Sc. 2.

2 Ibia. Act ii. Sc. 1.

act we can hardly fail to recognise the deep, powerful, sarcastic, and somewhat misanthropic thought, as well as the sometimes harsh and enigmatic style, of the author of Timon, Troilus and Cressida, and the Sonnets. It is Shakespeare in his latest mood. He looks out on the society about him with the eyes of one who has suffered deeply, both in the relations of private friendship and from the criticism of the world; and the spectacle of injustice, hypocrisy, and vice which he beholds perhaps disposes him to feel the reasonabless of Arcite's advice to retire from the world and its vanity. An additional incentive to this course is the feeling that he is no longer in perfect touch with the audience in the theatre. There the taste of the Court is beginning to prevail over that of the people. The wit of the dialogue that springs out of "the ladies' questions and the fool's replies " now appears old fashioned even the profound and tragic philosophy of Hamlet and Othello is losing ground in comparison with the coups de theatre of The Maid's Tragedy; while the enthusiastic flights of eloquence characteristic of Hotspur, sometimes no doubt not far removed from the bombast of Pistol, are disparaged by the cold critics on the stage as "a huffing part." 1 Something of all this had probably pushed Shakespeare into the obscure and enigmatic manner that prevails in Coriolanus, and in parts of The Winter's Tale; and as he saw others gaining upon him in the race for the public favour, the proud consciousness of his own transcendent merits may have found utterance sometimes philosophically, as in the dialogue between Achilles and Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, and sometimes disdainfully, as in the rough satire of Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen. He supports himself against the conventional judgment of the world by the sense of greatness and superiority: "I am that I am."

The Palamon of Fletcher shows none of this rugged strength of resistance: he speaks with the feminine fervour of the poet who created him. Fletcher abandoned himself unreservedly to the current of life in his age. He reflected 1 Knight of the Burning Pestle, Induction.

the brilliancy, the wit, the vivid colour and movement which he saw on the surface of Court society, without ever pausing to "revolve the sad vicissitude of things." It was his aim to amuse the audience in the theatre, but never to lift it above itself. Whatever the majority of the moment chose to prescribe, whether as the rule of fashion or as the canon of the stage, he was ready to accept and imitate. There were times when the conscience, which was so powerful a principle in his sensitive and emotional nature, caused him to recoil from the corruption of the times, and to embody conceptions of abstract and impossible virtue. And if, as Dyce supposes, The Two Noble Kinsmen was one of his latest works, we may take the monastic sentiment, breathed into the speech of Palamon, as a genuine expression of the author's emotion. If in the foregoing pages any of my readers think that too severe a standard of judgment is applied to the work of a poet so vivacious, so versatile, so interesting, and, when all is said, so great an ornament of our literature, I would ask him to remember that, for at least two generations in the history of England, Fletcher was preferred to Shakespeare.

CHAPTER XII

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POETIC DRAMA : MASSINGER AND FORD

THE course of this history should have made it apparent that it was by no mere accident of genius that Shakespeare was the representative dramatist of the reign of Elizabeth, and Fletcher of the Court of James I. No doubt the imagination and invention of each poet was an all-important factor in the form of their dramas, but this was only because both Shakespeare and Fletcher understood that they must work within artistic limits determined by antecedent tradition and by the tendencies of the time. Between the poetry and the politics of the period there is a complete analogy. Fletcher grafted the Spanish style on the form of the romantic drama as it had come down to him through Shakespeare from Marlowe; James I. developed, according to his own pedantic theories, the practice of semi-absolute monarchy inherited from the last of the Tudors. We have now arrived at a period in which the seeds sown in the Court of James are ripening for the harvest of civil war, and in which all the old traditions of the English stage, springing out of Italian or Spanish romance, out of Morality or Melodrama, are summed up in the dramatic practice of the time immediately preceding the closing of the theatres by the Puritan Parliament. The reign of Charles I. is represented in the English poetic drama by the names of Massinger and Ford.

Philip Massinger was born (probably) at Wilton in

manners.

1584. His father, Arthur Massinger, was a member of the household of Henry, second Earl of Pembroke, and seems to have been of gentle birth, for when Philip matriculated at St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, on May 14, 1602, he was entered in the books as "Sarisburiensis, generosi filus." Anthony Wood says that he occupied himself while at Oxford mainly with the reading of romances; certain it is that he took no degree, and came to London in 1606, at a time when Shakespeare's dramatic course was drawing towards its end, when Jonson's reputation was nearly at its zenith, when Marston was purveyor to the public taste for bloody melodrama, and Middleton was beginning to pour forth a series of farces based on the sketchy imitation of contemporary We have unfortunately no materials for forming a judgment on the character of Massinger's early dramatic work. A number of his plays were, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, in the possession of John Warburton, Somerset Herald; but one of Warburton's servants found them useful for lighting her master's fires, and nothing survives of them but their titles. It is known that he co-operated with other playwrights of the time. As early as about 1614 an entry in Henslowe's account book discovers him, in company with Daborne and Nathaniel Field, asking for payment on account for a play which the three had written together. And when Beaumont and Fletcher's works were published in 1647, Sir Aston Cockayne, who knew both Massinger and Fletcher well, wrote a protest in verse to H. Moseley, the bookseller :— In the large book of plays you late did print

In Beaumont and in Fletcher's name, why in't
Did you not justice give, to each his due?
For Beaumont of those many writ but few
And Massinger in other few.

Of Massinger's surviving plays The Old Law was written in company with Middleton and Rowley, and The Virgin Martyr with the help of Dekker. These and The Unnatural Combat were certainly produced before 1623, and are the sole remains of the poet's earlier work.