CHAPTER XXIX

THE DRAMATIC SELF-EXPRESSION OF THE ELIZABETHAN

AGE
I

ALL things worked together to make the Drama a full and complete expression of the Elizabethan Age. Whatever entered that Age and contributed to make it what it was, or, at least, what its report has been, entered the Drama. To be sure, that had its natural exclusions. It was not religious, and had little to say of the soul's destinies beyond the grave. It recoiled from the Puritans who would have none of it, and tried to forbid it altogether. It passed over large portions of the people, and said little of their daily tasks. Neither those who dug and sowed, nor the city mob, appealed to it, though it used them when needed to fill out its action. Nor had it much to do with trade and commerce, and crafts or the professions, save that of arms. Yet it draws from them all as the story may require; and a merchant like Antonio may be a prime figure in a play. Doctors, priests, pedagogues fill out the action; though the clown and fool are better loved for their own sake, and as apter foils to the loftier characters.

Not written for dainty reading, but to be acted on the stage, the plays had to meet the tastes of a promiscuous audience, especially of the very live London public, whose passion was the theatre. The playwright's work was tried and tried again by popular insistence. He had need to put good matter in his play, and make it carry as a dramatic story, or lively pageant of human action. If, like most of Shakespeare's plays, it contained profound thought and reflections too fine for the common understanding, that troubled no one, since the action carried the audience across such stumbling places. This auditor

public was only somewhat less quick-minded than the Athenian demos, who heard, or saw, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Their moving and, usually, wellknown legends would likewise help the stupider elements of an Athenian audience over any unfathomable comments of the chorus.

A London audience, composed of gentry as well as townsfolk, was a broader index of the age than a court society. Its demands were more apt to keep the plays broadly squared with life. It asked for, and condoned, whatever moved the time; and the plays presented such. National and patriotic "chronicle-plays " transcribed and glorified the nation's history. The enterprise, the chivalry, the heroism of the time were reflected in rugged, ancient incidents. Other plays, with subjects from the antique world, rendered the larger past, which was not England, yet had entered her throbbing veins. Still others drew tragic or romantic tales from Italy, the Orient, and Spain. Love, lust, ambition, the passions of mortal life, all were there, in English, Italian, or antique guise.

The plays embodied the current knowledge and information of the Age; and its yearning for still more knowledge. Marlowe puts a fine expression of this venturesome curiosity in Mortimer's last words in Edward the Second:

Farewell sweet queen; weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,

Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

And in Tamburlaine there is a soaring passage, which is not called for by the play or the character of the herospeaker; but is just a flash of Marlowe's yearning:

"Our souls whose faculties can comprehend the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reap the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown."

The last four lines turn the theme to Tamburlaine's own ambition. Quite fantastic or sordid twists are given to these infinite yearnings in Marlowe's Faustus. That strange soul shows no detached desire for Knowledge of the glories of the Universe; he turns his magic to human and quite foolish ends, dramatic though they be. This is as befits the Elizabethan drama, which was not interested in physical science, or the advance of knowledge, save as these intellectual yearnings were very part of man. It is the dramatic moment which is given, the effect of the impulse or the vision on the soaring soul of man.

In this, as always, the drama is consistently and gloriously human, or even humanistic. The lesser playwrights as well as Shakespeare stand upon the human plain, their presentation of life extending to the full horizon of humanity. Where they cross the pale of death, it is but to portray the effect of the imminence or contemplation of death upon the human mind engaged with mortal aims or perceiving their nullity.

The Drama appears impersonal, an impersonal, rather than individual, self-expression of the Age. The production, the authorship, of the plays was often promiscuous. Until Ben Jonson, the playwrights, whatever they felt, display no vanity of authorship. Rather than ambitious poets, they were craftsmen working upon materials at hand. It cannot be said with certainty of a single Elizabethan play that the author is giving his own views, or intentionally expressing himself in it. So we are justified in treating the Drama as a general expression of the age, and may forego investigation of the authorship of plays and the qualities of individual playwrights,— which befits a critical history of the Elizabethan drama. My purpose is merely to suggest its most expressive notes, or, better, its symphonic harmony. Its antecedents, its preparation, its debt to recent foreign literatures and fashions, need be averted to only in the most general way, to salve our sense of human unity and influence. No cursory reader can fail to mark the dramatic progress in the last decades of the century, or fail to recognize the more striking differences between Marlowe and the much

younger Webster, or between the fruits of their genius and the works of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other gifted men, which belong rather to the Jacobean than the Elizabethan time. As for Shakespeare, the more one reads the other dramatists, the more lustrous becomes his singular preeminence; which consists less strikingly in distinctive qualities, than in the vast and allinclusive power of genius and range of thought, and a loftier melodiousness in execution. He is worth all the rest; their sheer deification; in him they have become a god. He lifts the expression of other playwrights, of the whole age indeed, to Pisgah heights, whence the entire range of human consideration and mortal incident is brought within the view and made part of the self-expression of this superman and the age of which he was incidentally the exponent.

The antecedents of the Elizabethan drama, as well as its own beginnings, may be regarded as themselves forms, or schemes, or categories, of expression, which passed on into the volume of the fuller time. Archaic schemes of dramatic representation were carried by the mediaeval mystery plays, and by the miracle or saints plays as well. All these gradually admitted human and comic elements, reflected from the manners of the time. Later followed another mode of the religious drama; the "morality," in which the characters were usually personified abstractions. The "morality" was a Psychomachia; the struggle between man's good and evil faculties made the drama. Every-man, originating in the fifteenth century, is a wellknown "morality." All these "religious " religious" representations fell under the disapproval of the Puritans, and their vogue was stolen by the secular Elizabethan drama, which proved a more living expression of the time.

This had its own crude popular antecedents in the recitals of minstrels and the representations of strolling performers, or men of the town or local guilds. For these in market-place or banquet-hall could perform an "interlude," a short simple play needing little preparation or machinery. It might be accompanied by "mummings" or "disguisings," which by the time of Henry

VIII made some approach to dramatic form, and were called " masques." All these had become a part of merry-making and good cheer.

In the sixteenth century, fashions of tragedy came from Italy or from the plays of Seneca. Under the latter influence, English tragedy set a native theme upon the stage in the play of Gorboduc, called otherwise Ferrex and Porrex. Here blank verse entered upon its career in English drama. The authors were Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, the latter a statesman who became Earl of Dorset. He expressed himself naturally in a play of good counsel, such as might emanate from one who wrote the wise "Induction" to the Mirror for MagisIn the play the chorus says that Gorboduc

trates.

"A mirror shall become to princes all."

The play was acted before the still young Elizabeth in 1562, and contained passages intended for her ear. The antique idea of fate, the fate of an accursed house, seems to direct this drama of the war between Gorboduc's two sons. Porrex, the younger son, dies by his mother's hand. The people rise and slay the murderous queen and old Gorboduc. Civil war ensues, with admonishings that it is a ruler's duty to present or name the heir of the crown, and for Parliament to confirm the act.

This tragedy was the self-expression of an Elizabethan statesman with dramatic gifts. He accepted the tragic modes of Seneca, his choruses, his messengers, and the classic scheme of five acts; also a sententious style. Tragedies were to follow with plots drawn from the Italian, and like their sources, were under Seneca's influence. Or, again, the tragic interest might swing back to English stories, the Misfortunes of Arthur, The Famous Victories of Henry V, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters. In these the relatively living theme tends to break through the restraint of classic forms. But we have already reached the time of Shakespeare and his immediate known predecessors in tragedy.

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As for the comic line of early growth, one Heywood