CHAPTER IV BEN JONSON AND HERRICK It must always be borne in mind that Shakespeare is only the greatest in a group of great writers, whom he resembles in kind, but surpasses in degree. In a sense his greatness does them a wrong, for if the ordinary student of English literature in general has made himself familiar with thirty-seven specimens of the Elizabethan drama, he has done perhaps as much as is exigent; and it would be hard to advise that some of Shakespeare should be left unread to make room for a study of his contemporaries. Yet there were several contemporaries whose work at its best approached the Shakespearian measure. Their work has not the historic importance of Marlowe's, for they were not Shakespeare's models; nor on the whole can any of them be put quite on a level with that great forerunner. But they wrote when the dramatic art was better understood, and they were better dramatists than Marlowe. Webster in two plays, The White Devil, and The Duchess of Malfy, reached a height of tragic intensity only surpassed by Shakespeare. The latter of these dramas held the stage for long, and a single line of it is often quoted for its The marvellous suggestion of beauty and terror. Duchess, young and virtuous, has loved and married a man beneath her rank, one of her own household; and for this, her only offence, she has been done to death with horrible torments by her brother. And that brother, standing over her dead beauty and innocence, speaks only in these words his spasm of remorse : Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young. More famous in their own day than Webster, and by far more prolific, were the friends Beaumont and Fletcher, most of whose work was done in collaboration. Men of good birth, courtiers by rank and inclination, they "imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better," says Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, than their less fortunate forerunners. "I am apt to believe," he goes on, "that the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection; what words have been since taken in are rather superfluous than necessary. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." This was written in 1667; but it cannot be said that their vogue outlasted the seventeenth century; and admirable though their plays are to read, neither the Maid's Tragedy nor Philaster impresses a reader to-day as does Webster at his best. The play Two Noble Kinsmen, based on Chaucer's tale of Palamon and Arcite, was included in the folio edition of their works, but may probably owe its best passages to Shakespeare; at its first publication it was assigned to him and Fletcher jointly. Although the name Elizabethan' is loosely given to this whole group of dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher belong to the Stuart period: they began to write under James I. So did Massinger, another copious dramatist, one of whose plays outlasted any of theirs on the stage. His comedy, A New Way to pay Old Debts, was acted steadily up to the Victorian era and the dawn of modern comedy; the central figure in it, Sir Giles Overreach, giving to an actor superb chances in the presentment of this arrogant, unscrupulous, and masterful wielder of wealth. Later still than Massinger comes John Ford, whose Broken Heart, although marked with decadence, is a work of real beauty and pathos. But, by the consent of his own and all later times, the figure next to Shakespeare in this group is that of Ben Jonson, who has odd affinities with his namesake of the eighteenth century, in his rough yet attractive personality, his strong critical faculty, and his exercise of a literary dictatorship. Jonson was of plebeian origin, but got a good schooling at Westminster, though it is said he worked as a bricklayer before he went to serve in the army that fought in the Netherlands. He returned to London and took to literature for a livelihood, which meant writing plays. It is said that Shakespeare, nine years his senior, and now established in prosperity, befriended the young author, and secured the production of Jonson's first comedy by his own company. This play, Every Man in his Humour, marked a new fashion in drama. The playwright's primary object was no longer to tell a story by dialogue and action, but to exhibit peculiarities of character. Each personage has a certain humour or foible: old Knowell's is parental interference with a son, Kitely's is marital jealousy, Captain Bobadill's a cowardly braggadocio, and so on; and whatever each does : illustrates his besetting propensity. The pivot of the action is Kitely's jealousy, and it will be seen that Jonson's method differs from Shakespeare's in this that we see in Shakespeare's plays a man in whose character jealousy works, while in Jonson we see the man wholly made up of jealousy. The plot is ingeniously constructed, so that the actions prompted by the various humours lead to collisions between the characters; the swaggering captain meets the choleric old gentleman, a drubbing naturally results, and so on. But the total effect produced is that of gross improbability. It is evident that Jonson does not for a moment believe in the reality of his story; what he does believe in is the reality of the humour' displayed. His second comedy, Every Man Out of his Humour, opened with a kind of prefatory dialogue, in which the author through the mouth of one character explained his theory. First, he made it clear that what he studied was not merely a superficial eccentricity, and he resented the use of the term 'humour' as meaning merely a fad or fashion. Rather, When some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw What interested him was the abnormal; and he invited his audience to See the time's deformity Anatomised in every nerve and sinew. Here, then, we have the appearance (commonly a sign of decadence) of a self-conscious, theorising art. Jonson's appeal was to the intellect, not to the emotions; his work lay nearer to prose than that of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the rest; he neglected the love interest; he lacked their tone of romance; he repressed the lyrical vein which with them breaks out again and again in the midst of pure comedy, as for instance in Mercutio's description of Queen Mab. He attempted, moreover, to alter the conventions of the art; to impose the unity of time, confining the action after the Greek model to a period of four and twenty hours, and the unity of place, scoffing at the bold Elizabethan fashion of leaping over seas and continents. In perhaps the best of all his plays, The Alchemist, the action passes in one house and within the time needed to play it. He takes a pack of rogues - Face, the servant left by his master in charge of a house, and his two associates, Subtle, the alchemist and fortune-teller, and Mistress Dol Common- and he shows the different types of persons who come to be gulled by their quackery, from Sir Epicure Mammon, the covetous rich sensualist in quest of the philosopher's stone, to Abel Drugger, the little tobacconist, anxious for instructions how to succeed with his new shop. The first scene with Drugger may be quoted, and anyone who reflects will see why Garrick chose this small but effective part. Subtle. What is your name, say you, Abel Drugger? Drug. This, an 't please your worship; |