SHAKESPEARE AS A DRAMATIC ARTIST CHAPTER I THE DRAMATIC UNITIES I "HE said that Shakespeare wanted art." This is the criticism of his great contemporary which Drummond of Hawthornden gives us as having come from Ben Jon son. There is no reason either for doubting that the man who reported the words reported them correctly, or that the words themselves correctly represented the belief of the one to whom they were attributed. In 1618 Jonson had made a journey to Scotland. While there he visited Drummond at his estate of Hawthornden. His host, who anticipated Boswell's conduct, though without Boswell's feelings of reverence, took notes of the conversation of his guest. Among the remarks of the latter were numerous comments upon his contemporaries, uttered with great freedom. The sentence quoted above expressed from one point of view his opinion of Shakespeare. It was an opinion which with more or less of modification prevailed till within a hundred years past. In accordance with it the two great dramatic writers of the Elizabethan period were long regularly differentiated. The literary criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with almost wearisome iteration depicts Jonson as the representative of art and Shakespeare as the representative of nature. This perhaps did not come to be the universally accepted estimate till after the Restoration. Still, the distinction, if not fully formulated before that time, was in process of formation. It may not be absolutely implied in the well-known reference in 'L'Allegro' to the "native woodnotes wild" of Shakespeare and the "learned sock" of Jonson. But in Milton's lines prefixed to the folio of 1632 there can be little question that, in asserting that the former writer's ease of composition was to the shame of slowendeavoring art, the great Puritan poet had also the latter writer in mind. At any rate, as time went on, this distinction cropped out more and more in the critical judgments which contrasted the two men. Thus, in the commendatory verses to Fletcher, which were prefixed to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, Sir John Denham assumes this difference between them as an accepted fact. As was proper in such a place, he gave to the poet he was celebrating the credit of having united in himself the varying merits of the two. But the characteristics which common consent had attributed to each are plainly marked in the following lines: "When Jonson, Shakespeare and thyself did sit, On Shakespeare's gentler muse, in thee full grown All through the following century this same view was expressed. Jonson's art, Shakespeare's nature, turn up almost as regularly as their names are mentioned in criticism. It was echoed and re-echoed by scores of persons who had the dimmest possible conception of what was meant by the words they were saying. How completely this method of characterizing the two men had become the merest commonplace we find indicated by Pope in his epistle To Augustus,' which came out a little less than a hundred years after the utterance of Denham that has just been given. "In all debates where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, is the somewhat contemptuous comment he makes upon the now well-worn and conventional comparison. It is evident in truth, from the remarks scattered up and down the literature of the century and more following the Restoration, that a distinction of some sort was felt to exist between nature and art in dramatic composition. In the abstract such a distinction might seem without foundation. To some, indeed, it may even then have appeared absurd. Why should art be unnatural? That art should not represent some things in nature is a position perfectly defensible. But why should art be opposed to nature? Why should nature not be in accordance with the highest art? In the concrete, however, the question was invariably answered in one way, and it was answered in a way that for generations profoundly influenced the estimate taken of Shakespeare as a dramatist. Let us, however, try first to ascertain what it was that the original users of this distinction intended to express. What in particular did Jonson mean when he declared that Shakespeare lacked art? He surely could not have intended to say that the great dramatist of all time was ignorant of the very things which were essential to success in his profession. In fact, in the glowing tribute which he subsequently paid to the memory of his friend he took care to insist upon his proficiency in the very particular which in the conversation with Drummond he is reported as having denied. He asserted that after Shakespeare the ancients tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, and witty Plautus please no longer, but lie antiquated and deserted, as if they were not of nature's family. Then he goes on to say, "Yet must 1 not give nature all. Thy art, His art doth give the fashion. For a good poet's made as well as born.` And such wert thou. Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turned and true-filed lines, In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandished at the eyes of ignorance." Jonson was not a man to use words at random or to indulge in meaningless compliments. Could any intention of the latter kind be conceived to have influenced his action, the responsibility of his position as the then acknowledged head of English men of letters would have prevented their utterance. Clearly, therefore, the art spoken of in these lines is something quite distinct from the art which he told Drummond that Shakespeare lacked. What this latter was becomes apparent when we study with care one phase of the literary history of the Elizabethan period which has rarely received the full attention it deserves. There seems to be a common belief that criticism is an art of comparatively late growth. It is frequently implied, and occasionally asserted, that the farther we go back in literature, the less we have of discussion of its principles, and that if we go back far enough we shall have no discussion of them at all. Genius, it is said, contents itself then with producing; it never stops to consider whether what it produces is in conformity with authorized canons of taste, even if it be aware that such canons exist. This happy condition of ignorance or indifference, assumed to be characteristic of early times, belongs to the realm of fiction rather than of fact. A critical age may not be creative; but a creative age is always critical. It has to be so by the very law of its being. The new experiments it is constantly making, the new forms it is introducing, the new methods of expression to which it is resorting, all these compel it to give a reason for their employment to itself, if not to others. Whatever it does will be made the subject of comment, and consequently of attack and defence. Controversy, therefore, is always going on in a creative age. That the record of it does not come down to us at all, or at best comes down scantily, is due to other causes than lack of discussion at the time, or lack - |