BOOKS.
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA.#
in we were visited by an inhabitant of another planet, and wished to prove to him convincingly the marvellous and splendid powers of the human race, should we point to the sculpture of the Greeks, or the history of Rome, or the scientific triumphs of Kepler and Newton, or should we pass by all these and simply show him the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan age ? There is in the Elizabethan drama—in its east range and immense vitality, its multitudinous beauties
• Elisobethaa Drama, 5866-1642. By Felix E. f3ebeUing, Professor in the Eniversity of Pennsylvania. 2 vols. London : A. Constable and Co. 1312. 6d. Iota
and overwhelming power—something se astounding as be be almost miraculous, something which seems to lift the authors of it and the age in which they lived. into a well-nigh superhuman place. One, asks oneself in vain what kind of men those could have been who, in the space of hardly more than two generations, gave to the world such a crowded galaxy of masterpieces, such an inexhaustible inheritance of wisdom and imagination, of loveli- ness and mirth. During the eightar years which elapsed between the accession of Elizabeth and the final closing of the theatres at least fifteen, hundred plays, according to Professor Schelling's estimate, were written and performed. But the really significant period of dramatic production falls within narrower limits. Within forty-five years of the appearanoe of Tamburlaine that of The Broken Heart, the last of the great masterpieces of the epoch, had taken place ; so that the whole of what is most memorable in the Elizabethan drama was produced in a apace of time corresponding to the active life of a single man. When we consider the accomplishment of the years, when, under the guidance of a scholar such as Professor Schelling, we am-vey once again the rich and elaborate land- scape of the drama of the Elizabethan age, it is difficult atfirat to realise in any distinct way the value of what we have been looking at. Its excellence is too varied and too great to be grasped in a single coup d'nil.
Professor Schelling has adopted the plan of dividing his subject into sections, each of which contains an account of a single species of dramatic composition. His object has been " to ascertain, as nearly as possible, the character of each play considered, and refer it to its type ; to establish its relations to what had preceded and what was to follow; and definitely to learn when a given dramatic species appeared, how long it continued, and when ib was superseded by other forme." This method of classification has the merit of com- bining critical exposition with an arrangement which is, on the whole, historical ; and the reader is enabled to follow the various developments of the drama in all its branches, from its dim beginnings in the morality and the miracle play to its last strange manifestations of "decadent romance" on the eve of the Civil Wars. Professor Schelling's scholarship is accurate and wide, and his critical judgments are always sound and sympathetic ; his book is valuable chiefly as a, magazine of well-ordered information, though it is not without originality, of which perhaps the most in- teresting instance is to be found in the dismission of the influence of Fletcher upon the. " heroic" drama of the Restoration. The enthusiastic reader will miss the glamour and the atmosphere whieh lend so much (therm to J. A. Symonds's .book on the same subject ; for Professor Sehelling's style is dry, and his whole treatment of his material is far too careful and precise to allow of any sign of excitement. There is, indeed, something almost uncanny in the calm deliberation with which the fiery spirits of that great age are docketed and labelled in Professor Schelling's pages. Immortal names lie thick upon them, but rigidly disposed, as if Marlowe and Chapman, Webster and Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, had come at last under the cold dominion of order, and shrunk into the creatures of a rule.
Nothing is more tempting than to try to find in the enormous heterogeneity of the Elizabethan drama some characteristic common to the whole which may be regarded as its supreme and essential quality. Nor can it be doubted that a central characteristic of this kind actually exists, for the dramatic style of the Elizabethans is one of the most distinctive phenomena in the whole range of literature ; the Elizabethan flavour is something unique and unmistakable, though a precise analysis of its nature is yet to seek. Professor Schelling suggests that the "ground-note in the concert of the Elizabethan drama" lies in "the realistic reproduction of con- temporary life on the stage." He observes that "the power to take to itself and make its own, whatsoever the material employed, is one of the most persistent characteristics of Elizabethan drama," and that, whatever the sources might be —"Seneca, Plautus, Italian comedy, tragedy, and novel, Chronicle, Latin, French, or English story—it mattered not what or whence—all were absorbed and all were turned out in dramas distinctively English." Doubtless there is much truth in this view; but does not Professor Schelling push it too far ? It is easy to see, for example, that the Italian setting of Shakespeare's -ca medics is in many instances little more than a conventional trick. Obviously enough, Malvolio is an inhabitant of England, and not of Illyria, while As You Like It, in spite of the " Forest of Arden," is, as Mr. Furness exclaims, " through and through an English Comedy, on English soil, in English air, beneath English oaks." Ben Jonson originally laid the scene of • Every Man in his Humour in Venice, and the action of one of his satires on contemporary writers takes place in Augustan Rome. Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard "the realistic reproduction of contemporary life" as the fundamental characteristic of Elizabethan drama, because, in spite of some instances to the contrary, the true bent of the Eliza- bethan genius was not towards realism in any form. Even Ben Jonson's comedies are too fantastic to be accurate representations of English life ; and Shakespeare's—need it be pointed out P—are too romantic. And in tragedy the Elizabethans made use of the realistic method hardly at all. The " domestic tragedy" was a genre which, as Professor Schelling observes, died out comparatively early, though it produced one work of the highest merit, —Arden of Feversham. The main current of tragedy flowed steadily in the contrary direction,—towards the depths and the heights of "Italianate " romance, which received their most consum- mate presentation in The Duchess of Malfi. In plays of this kind—and they form undoubtedly the most typical gronp of allthough it is true that they are packed with realistic details which, from one point of view, give the appearance of a contemporary and an English atmosphere, the inner spirit of the action belongs, not to the real world at all, but to a world of strange imagination and mysterious romance. In fact, the Elizabethans when they were most themselves turned their backs upon realism, and rushed towards the extraordinary, the disordered, and the sublime, so that if one wished to sum up their most essential qualities in a single word, "extravagant" would probably come nearest to the truth. Their extravagance was of course the extrava- gance of greatness; it was based on strength and knowledge, and it was controlled by the high necessities of art. An Elizabethan tragedian worked wildly, not as a madman, but as one inspired. In his reckless disregard of convention, his supreme determination to achieve his end by any means, how- ever peculiar or however absurd, he resembled the great Italian painter who, in the access of his inspiration, seized upon the broom with which his servant was sweeping his studio and finished his masterpiece with that.
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