About "" King Lear" I by no means go all lengths with Thackeray. He wrote to his mother after seeing the play acted, and Charles Lamb says, "Lear' is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage." Tennyson was of the same opinion. It was perfectly possible on the Jacobean stage. Monsieur Jusserand enumerates the horrors of the drama"the torturing of Gloucester, who shrieks, tied to a chain, while his eyes are plucked out in our presence (Cornwall takes one in his hand and crushes it under his heel); the mad men, semi-mad men, crazy from birth or circumstances, or by a feint, four mad men together (three, in fact), "shouting and gesticulating at once; . . . this is too much : our goodwill fails, our confidence in the guide who is leading us through the dark mazes of the human soul becomes blunted." Thus it strikes a learned and sympathetic Frenchman. Dr Johnson says that "the cruelty of the daughters of Lear is an historical fact," for Hollinshed dates Lear in the reign of Jeroboam, king of Israel. But, says the Doctor, "I am unable to apologise with equal plausibility for the extrusion of Gloucester's eyes, which seems an act too horrid to be endured That is the truth. Our Jacobean ancestors were familiar with burnings of Unitarians at the stake; our Elizabethans with the Iroquoislike torments of Cecil and Walsingham; and in the reign of Charles I., in a play of the learned Chapman, torture of a woman on the stage was a legitimate ornament of the drama. Molière introduces a lover proposing various holiday treats to his mistress-one is to go and see a prisoner tortured. Molière did not put this pleasing scene on the stage. The countrymen of M. Jusserand had seen plenty of horrors in the Bartholomew Massacre, the Tumult of Amboise, and so on; but, no more than the Greeks, did they make such things matter of dramatic entertainment. But Mr Saintsbury does not hold with M. Jusserand and Dr Johnson. He says: "With barely even the exception which has so often to be made of Titus Andronicus,' Shakespeare's horrors are never to be sought beyond a certain usual and probable round of circumstance, and are almost always tempered and humanised by touches of humour or pathos, or both." Gloucester's case seems rather out of the usual and probable round of circumstance; so are the adventures of King Lear, but all these things, and worse, were "the daily round, the common task" of the victims of Mrs Elizabeth Barnes. con bona." He has slain his brother in his mother's sight, and hears her wild heartbroken laments, and her wonderful dirge; then, at last, he says even of Marlowe in Barabbas, and the difference of Shakespeare's handling will be felt at once." Barabbas, in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta," goes far beyond the hero of Aytoun's "Firmilian" when, after many minor experiments, he "blows Shakespeare, says Dr John- up the Cathedral." The motive son, and M. Jusserand agrees, of Firmilian was to attain, for "has suffered the virtue of literary purposes, the emotion Cordelia to perish of remorse. Не was less trary to the faith of successful than Flamineo in chronicles," in which in which Lear Webster's "Vittoria Corom"triumphs over his enemies." Lear's tale, we know, like all the Greek historic legends of "Thebes, and Pelops' line," is merely a Märchen, a worldwide nursery story, set in false history. The Augustan public would not endure the tragic close. "The public has decided: Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity." Johnson was so horrified by her hanging, that he never re-read the last scenes till he edited Shakespeare. But, unlike Charles II., Shakespeare did not decree that all tragedies should end happily! In Aristotle's words, he "purged the soul by pity and terror." But, as Molière says that "everything becomes a pretty woman," tout sied aux belles, so Shakespeare cannot go wrong. It is otherwise with "the meaner people of the skies," his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, whom Mrs Barnes sent to the stake. "Contrast the character of Aaron in Titus Andronicus," " says Mr Saintsbury, "with the nightmare ghastlinesses and extravagances, not only of Tourneur and Webster, but "I have a strange thing in me, to th' which I cannot give a name, without it be ness. Firmilian knows no such weakThen to Flamineo enters the phantasm of another of his victims "Enter BRACHIANO's ghost, in his leather cassock and breeches, boots; a cowl, a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't"like Keats' Pot of Basil. This rather daunts Flamineo; he reckons that the ghost is not a subjective hallucination, for it throws earth at him. So he goes out, threatening to murder his sister. Dekker, in his "Gull's Hornbook," advises young gallants to distinguish themselves at the play by laughing aloud in the crisis of the tragedy. It is no wonder if they did laugh at the ghost in his leather cassock, boots, and breeches. Here we have Webster's "nightmare ghastlinesses and extravagances"; while those of Beaumont and Fletcher, "After all," he says, "Beau Chapman, and Betty's own detested Massinger, are quite as loathsome and absurd. The unnatural, Mr Saintsbury says, is the Dutch courage of dramatists. Webster and Ford must be intoxicated with the wine of the nightmare before they can rise to the scenes and speeches by which alone they live. "The judgment of three generations," says Mr Saintsbury, "has placed 'Vittoria Corombona' and 'The Duchess of Malfi' at the very head of all their class, and they contain magnificent poetry." They do, indeed, yield "wholly magnificent poetry in phrases and short passages," but, as wholes, they are nightmares of the worst, and Webster cannot attain poetry except when he has intoxicated himself, filled himself with the Dutch courage of the unnatural. His comedy is the usual stupid ribaldry. M. Jusserand says, of all the Epigoni of Shakespeare, "they please nowadays only in parts, and are read only in extracts." The extracts made by Charles Lamb in 1808 were very cleverly selected," but Lamb, in his own words, "expunged without ceremony all that which the writers had better never have written.' The reader's pleasure is increased, but the opinion he is thus led to form of these authors is necessarily false: the more so that, in his enthusiasm as an explorer, Lamb, whose eloquence is very persuasive, goes far in his praises: 'Heywood is a sort of prose Shakespeare,' "" and so forth. Lamb had better moments. mont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakespeares and Sidneys." After extracting from Ford the love-scenes between a brother and a sister, and the murder of the sister by the brother, Lamb does not give the passage in which the brother enters with the heart of the sister on the point of his sword, and stabs her husband. Omitting these passages, Lamb gravely quotes Sir Thomas Browne's rebuke of "such authors as have chosen to relate prodigious and nameless sins.' In Nobody denies that Ford extracts poetry from prodigious and nameless sins; and he can be poetical without them, as in "The Lover's Melancholy"; though even there for his comic effects he relies much on the ravings of feigned madness: he has, in a Masque within the play, five characters who do their best to outgibber the Edgar of "King Lear." "The Duchess of Malfi," Webster contents himself with a dance and songs by eight lunatics. According to Webster, the "ignorant asses that come to that playhouse," where his "Duchess of Malfi" was first acted, did not enjoy it, and would not have relished it even had he enriched it "with the sententious Chorus and the passionate and weighty Nuntius," the Messenger of the Attic tragedy, who reports events not exhibited to the general eye. But Webster's Messenger would have been very busy if this author had done his horrors behind the scenes, and the audience preferred to see the stage made a shambles. D'os et de chair meurtris et trainés dans la fange are the materials, says M. Jusserand, of Tourneur's plays, and he gives a catalogue not convenient to be quoted.1 Mr Saintsbury finds it "almost impossible to say anything of either play" of Tourneur's, "as a whole," and does remark "the reckless, inartistic, butcherly prodigality of blood and horrors." The nature of things was as hostile as Mrs Barnes to this abominable school of drama, drama, and the Puritan reaction swept the stage till the Restoration entered with seven devils not much worse than the previous occupants. on The simple art of many dramatists was to fill a play with all abominations, from the dull and dirty ribaldry of the minor characters to the monstrous crimes of a Flamineo, or the unnatural excesses of an aged Brunhault, and then to add a pearl of preposterous virtue, a patient Grizel of sweetness and all- enduring meekness like the Ordella, Arethusa, and Bellario (Euphrasia) of Beaumont and Fletcher. This fair being is usually fortune's foe, and the authors, in Mr Stevenson's words, "wallow naked in the pathetic." Beaumont and Fletcher were both poets in the true sense of the word; indeed there were few of the playwrights that did not produce some exquisite lyrics and some lofty and noble passages of blank verse. But if we take one of the masterpieces of Beaumont and Fletcher, "Philaster," we see, among other defects, scenes for which the groundlings might be expected to throw apples and pipe-bowls at the actors. The play too well deserves its second title, "Love Lies a' Bleeding." The enamoured Philaster has given his page, Bellario (who, unknown to him, is a girl, and is in love with him), to his lady, the Princess Arethusa. The princess is accused, in the usual ribald style, of an amour with the supposed page. Philaster is now equally enraged with Arethusa and with Bellario, and, meeting both in a wood, he dismisses Bellario, and wounds Arethusa with his sword. honest peasant coming up rescues Arethusa and wounds Philaster, who flies from pursuers who come up he finds Bellario asleep, and remarking that his pursuers An "Have no mark to know me but my blood," stabs her. His hope is that the police will suppose Bellario to have wounded the princess. Thus this hero sheds the blood of one stainless lady that adores him, and, to cover his guilt, wounds another stainless lady that adores him, so that she may bear the punishment of his former crime, and probably be tortured to death. We may criticise Philaster in the words of Beaumont and Fletcher's own grocer's wife in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle":"Oh, my heart, 1 A Literary History of the English People, vol. iii. pp. 421, 422. what a varlet's this to offer manslaughter upon the harmless gentlewoman!" Another masterpiece, the tragedy of "Thierry and Theodoret," is clotted nonsense, foul, foolish, bloody, with the pearl of womankind, Ordella, to redeem it. Her husband, Thierry, by the orders of his loving mother, has been drugged to deprive him of offspring, nearly gulled into sacrificing Ordella to the gods for the abatement of that misfortune, and is finally poisoned by a pocket-handkerchief which causes incurable insomnia. The king's mother, "impatient of constraint to see Protaldy" (her paramour) "tortured," has choked herself; Thierry dies, and Ordella dies simultaneously, from mere sympathy. Beaumont and Fletcher were both gentlemen by birth and education; the father of Fletcher was a bishop, the father of Beaumont was a judge. Both authors were poets undeniable, the lyrics of Fletcher are exquisite. But would Shakespeare be admired if his Ophelia, being sane, had courted death by dressing in male attire, challenging Hamlet (who does not recognise her), kicking him, provoking him to draw, and perishing on his sword? This is the course taken by the forsaken Aspatia in Beaumont and Fletcher's play, "The Maid's Tragedy." Yet Beaumont, Mr Swinburne held, was the worthiest and the closest follower of Shakespeare, unless indeed this credit may be due to Webster,' -Webster of the nightmares. Shakespeare had no close fol lower; it is Eclipse first, and all the rest nowhere. There was something rotten in the state of England. The air, as it were, was full of genius in solution: no man can deny the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, and there were hardly two or three of the contemporary playwrights who did not, in a scene, in scattered phrases, in a speech or a lyric, give unmistakable and immortal proof of their genius. But, as Johnson says of Shakespeare, "they well knew what would please the audiences for which they wrote," and these audiences apparently preferred nightmares to all the magic of Shakespeare's comedies, and witless ribaldry to his humour. un Chapman, again, was deniably a poet. He gave to his age, which had known Homer only through medieval versions of Roman versions of Ionian perversions of the Achæan, a key to the glories of the Iliad and the enchantments of the Odyssey. His predecessors in the translation of Homer had used prose, Latin or French. Chapman says they "Had failed to reach his deep and treasurous heart; The cause was, since they wanted the fit key Of Nature, in their downright strength of art, With poesy to open poesy." But, in some of his tragedies, to Chapman "did all the horrid wood appear, Where mortal dangers more than leaves did grow: In which we could not one free step bestow, For treading on some murdered pas senger |