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Charles Kingsley >> Plays and Puritans
And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the
degradation of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur
passages of the old sweetness and grandeur; disjecta membra poetae
such as these, which, even although addressed to James, are perfect:-
'3rd Gipsy.
Look how the winds upon the waves grow tame,
Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,
And, catching each from other, bear the same
To every angle of their sacred springs.
So will we take his praise, and hurl his name
About the globe, in thousand airy rings.'
* * * *
Let us pass on. Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?
There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here,
and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible.
The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy's expense, in 'Bartholomew
Fair,' turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women's parts acted by
boys. Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of
puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked
nevertheless. What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans
is hard to conceive. Prynne, in his 'Histriomastix,' may have pushed
a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the
Mosaic law: yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by
Moses' law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which
did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that,
therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a
similar practice would produce a similar evil. Our firm conviction
is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was
perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty
certainly to send him to the devil. Let any man of common sense
imagine to himself the effect on a young boy's mind which would be
produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not
merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in
almost every play. We appeal to common sense--would any father allow
his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of
mankind? And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be
supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons
to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while
grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving. The
Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of
the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask,
What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters
than Terence's on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes?
Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere
defilement of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but
that, from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and
that when pretty little Cupid's mother, in Jonson's Christmas masque,
tells how 'She could have had money enough for him, had she been
tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king's players,' and
how 'Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and
old Mr. Hemings too,' she had better have tied a stone round the
child's neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him
over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation
more money to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native
town, on the fruits of others' sin. Honour to old Prynne, bitter and
narrow as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the
humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor
children whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but,
while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal
regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to
be regenerate in baptism. Prynne used that argument too, and
declared these stage-plays to be among the very 'pomps and vanities
which Christians renounced at baptism.' He may or may not have been
wrong in identifying them with the old heathen pantomimes and games
of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under a mountain of
quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for Prynne's
reading seems to have been quite enormous). Those very prelates
could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught
in them which could be made to justify their own system, though
perhaps it had really even less to do therewith than the Roman
pantomimes had with the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had
retained in her Catechism the old Roman word 'pomps,' as one of the
things which were to be renounced; and as 'pomps' confessedly meant
at first those very spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre,
Prynne could not be very illogical in believing that, as it had been
retained, it was retained to testify against something, and probably
against the thing in England most like the 'pomps' of heathen Rome.
Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two was the better
Churchman--Prynne, who tried to make the baptismal covenant mean
something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as 'The Ordinary' to be
written by his especial protege, Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and
acted before him probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by christened
boys. We do not pretend to pry into the counsels of the Most High;
but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when combined with
lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history tells us that
it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we need look
no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century prelates
(whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the
monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why
it pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of
destruction.
There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century,
new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and
that is, the apotheosis of Rakes. Let the faults of the Middle Age,
or of the Tudors, have been what they may, that class of person was
in their time simply an object of disgust. The word which then
signified a Rake is, in the 'Morte d'Arthur' (temp. Ed. IV.), the
foulest term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even
up to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and
elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin. In Italy, even,
fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for the fifth
commandment seems to have lingered after all the other nine had been
forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his 'Corteggiano' (about 1520),
regretting the modest and respectful training of the generation which
had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of
education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method
which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to
Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.
But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth's reign)
fathers became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked
of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the
young gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and
Charles, with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and
roystering, beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking,
duelling, and profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of
gentle birth), set forth not merely as harmless amusements for young
gentlemen, but (as in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of 'Monsieur
Thomas') virtues without which a man is despicable. On this point,
as on many others, those who have, for ecclesiastical reasons, tried
to represent the first half of the seventeenth century as a golden
age have been altogether unfair. There is no immorality of the court
plays of Charles II.'s time which may not be found in those of
Charles I.'s. Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only
more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the
spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies,
Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who
wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master's till to pay his losses
at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly afford
to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high
patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed
lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian
Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England. Better days,
however, have dawned; 'Tom and Jerry,' instead of running three
hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as 'Monsieur
Thomas' would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now
consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while
if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they
would, instead of winning a good wife, be 'cut' by braver and finer
gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact
prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan
opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?
There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage
of profligate scapegraces on the stage. They would not have been
endured on the stage had they not been very common off it; and if
there had not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking
excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that
excuse must have been. If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court
were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been
monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible. But if it was
(as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere,
decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur
Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity. Take him as he
stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and
courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers. He would
have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age as a
Hudson's Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a man-
of-war--anything where he could find a purpose and a work. Doubt it
not. How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years
ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses
and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not
only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing
homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches
at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful
fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the
crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life. And even at such
a youth's worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to deal out to
him the same measure as we do to the offences of the cool and hoary
profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false
professor. But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and
practically revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and
disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against
what sin is it revealed? It was not left for our age to discover
that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his
courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had
to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal
lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them,
sharp shot and cold steel did.
'But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.'
The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that
this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse. If it be
said that Shakspeare's is the very highest art, the answer is, that
what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the
foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother
play-writers. True, there is far less of these elements in
Shakspeare than in any of his compeers: but they are there. And
what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to expunge
before we can now represent his plays. If it be said that they ought
to have discerned and appreciated the higher elements in him, so
ought the rest of their generation. The Puritans were surely not
bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and brother poets did not
see. And it is surely a matter of fact that the deep spiritual
knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare's plays (and them
alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men
and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who
probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612,
has assigned to him.
'I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men's witty labours,
especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty
composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr.
Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right
happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
Heywood.'
While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing
in Shakspeare beyond the same 'happy and copious industry' which he
sees in Dekker and Heywood,--while Cartwright, perhaps the only young
poet of real genius in Charles the First's reign, places Fletcher's
name ''Twixt Jonson's grave and Shakspeare's lighter sound,' and
tells him that
'Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I' th' ladies' questions, and the fool's replies.
* * * * *
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.
* * * * *
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility;' {4}
while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his
soul, only remarks on Shakspeare's marvellous lyrical sweetness, 'his
native wood-notes wild'; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did
not discover the stork among the cranes?
An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which
deserves a few moments' consideration. It is said, 'the grossness of
the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was
the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they
meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none
the worse for that.' Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster's
plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a virtue. After
saying that the licentious and debauched are made 'as odious in
representation as they would be if they were actually present'--an
assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the case of
Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to forget
that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be,
keeps stoutly on the side of virtue--Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that
'perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our
morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which
we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway
of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were
careless of words, and only considerate of actions.'
To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the
fact is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence
which cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half
of the seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the
nineteenth; that the proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader:
but that these pages will not be defiled by the details of them.
Let it be said that coarseness was 'the fashion of the age.' The
simple question is, was it a good fashion or a bad? It is said--with
little or no proof--that in simple states of society much manly
virtue and much female purity have often consisted with very broad
language and very coarse manners. But what of that? Drunkards may
very often be very honest and brave men. Does that make drunkenness
no sin? Or will honesty and courage prevent a man's being the worse
for hard drinking? If so, why have we given up coarseness of
language? And why has it been the better rather than the worse part
of the nation, the educated and religious rather than the ignorant
and wicked, who have given it up? Why? Simply because this nation,
and all other nations on the Continent, in proportion to their
morality, have found out that coarseness of language is, to say the
least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong to do certain
things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of them; that
even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose their
sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of
being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them. On
the whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as
insincere. Certainly, in our day, it will not hold. If any one
wishes to hear coarse language in 'good society' he can hear it, I am
told, in Paris: but one questions whether Parisian society be now
'under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue' than our
own. The sum total of the matter seems to be, that England has found
out that on this point again the old Puritans were right. And
quaintly enough, the party in the English Church who hold the
Puritans most in abhorrence are the most scrupulous now upon this
very point; and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth,
are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than
Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and benevolent
intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a conventional
education,--a hot-house training which will render them incapable
hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the
world. They themselves republished Massinger's 'Virgin Martyr,'
because it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist--
for there is every reason to believe that Massinger was one--setting
forth how the heroine was attended all through by an angel in the
form of a page, and how--not to mention the really beautiful ancient
fiction about the fruits which Dorothea sends back from Paradise--
Theophilus overcomes the devil by means of a cross composed of
flowers. Massinger's account of Theophilus' conversation will, we
fear, make those who know anything of that great crisis of the human
spirit suspect that Massinger's experience thereof was but small:
but the fact which is most noteworthy is this--that the 'Virgin
Martyr' is actually one of the foulest plays known. Every pains has
been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not
written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not. If
Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we
are aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to
decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is
Dekker's, and all the poetry Massinger's. He confesses--as indeed he
is forced to do--that 'Massinger himself is not free from dialogues
of low wit and buffoonery'; and then, after calling the scenes in
question 'detestable ribaldry, 'a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of
filth and dulness,' recommends them to the reader's supreme scorn and
contempt,--with which feelings the reader will doubtless regard them:
but he will also, if he be a thinking man, draw from them the
following conclusions: that even if they be Dekker's--of which there
is no proof--Massinger was forced, in order to the success of his
play, to pander to the public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate
these villanies; that the play which, above all others of the
seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety,
devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any
extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of
the Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had
to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable to
the laws against abominable publications.
No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have
quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly
a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we
complain do not exist,--few of which they do not form an integral
part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the
morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
Look, then, at Webster's two masterpieces, 'Vittoria Corrombona' and
the 'Duchess of Malfi.' A few words spent on them will surely not be
wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best
tragedies written since Shakspeare's time.
The whole story of 'Vittoria Corrombona' is one of sin and horror.
The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest
and the basest passions. But the play is not a study of those
passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature.
There is no trace--nor is there, again, in the 'Duchess of Malfi'--of
that development of human souls for good or evil which is
Shakspeare's especial power--the power which, far more than any
accidental 'beauties,' makes his plays, to this day, the delight
alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all
but forgotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the
development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the
conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters;
and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a
certain passion, or a certain 'humour': but persons, each unlike all
others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own
peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that
destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding
his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and
that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be
able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict
his conduct under those circumstances. This is indeed 'high art':
but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest. His
characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full
grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not
characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form. Now
and then he essays to draw a character: but it is analytically, by
description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man
exhibit himself in action; and in the 'Duchess of Mall' he falls into
the great mistake of telling, by Antonio's mouth, more about the Duke
and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act. Very different
is Shakspeare's method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate
hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole
future conduct; thus 'showing the whole in each part,' and stamping
each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has
ever approached.
But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster's aim. He
has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own
way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged
power. There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria's
trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character:
but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so
handled in 'Lear,' 'Othello,' and 'Richard the Third,'--'Given a
mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,' and to solve
Webster's 'Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his
crimes.' To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria's trial
scene is not an insight into Vittoria's essential heart and brain,
but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women
when brought to bay. Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and
human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks
of Vittoria's 'innocence--resembling boldness' {5}--and 'seeming to
see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay
confidence in her,' and so forth.
Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average
of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet
amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster's
confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with
vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save
to ask, Cui bono? Was the art of which this was the highest
manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to
excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?
The 'Duchess of Malfi' is certainly in a purer and loftier strain:
but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must
take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a 'person' at
all. General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for
a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all
hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other
women: but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and
writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story;
not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and
husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio
merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in
the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene,
in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him
marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have
felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have
tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in
two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to
explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would
probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would
compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress's affection. He has
plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,--time which he wastes
on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that
Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of
being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the
scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather
than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene: though (as
there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress's declaration just
as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and
a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one
naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess's part into something
like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for
calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is Webster with
his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be
a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the
Duchess's assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a
man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day
before the wedding, is not of much importance.