In England, when the King came to his own again (29 May, 1660) and the reign of the Saints was ended, it was certain that the Theatre also would come to her own. The stage had been bad enough, in verse, taste, and manners, before the doors were closed in 1642. When the dramatic Muse returned, she brought with her, like the man in the parable, seven other devils worse than herself. The morals and tastes of the town and Court were what, after so many years of Puritan sway, they might be expected to be. They are most livelily delineated in the "Diary" of Mr. Pepys; and the drama of the Restoration was their child, and worthy of them. At first the stage was occupied by the older plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley; no new names of note appear till Dryden's "Wild Gallant" failed in 1663, and Sir George Etherege's "Love in a Tub" prospered in 1664.
No age will be content with old plays, the mould and fashion of the time must be exhibited. Pictures of the brutal mirth and the horseplay of triumphant licence, of the flirtations and intrigues of lackeys and lords and ladies, all genteel and witty à la mode of the Court and town as we know them from Pepys and Grammont, were presented.
Everything must be "new". As we hear of "the new morality," "the new theology," and so on, so, in "The Rehearsal" (1671), a burlesque by the Duke of Buckingham and other hands, on the plays of the last ten years, the word "new" is constantly reiterated. "You must know this is the new way of writing, and these hard things please forty times better than the old plain way of writing."
[Pg 359]
The butt of "The Rehearsal," Bayes, a mixture of Davenant with the mannerisms of Dryden, keeps bragging that this or that absurdity is "new". "New," certainly, and not worthy to wax old, was the extravagant "heroic" tragedy, copying the flights of the French school of bombastic romances, and written in rhyming couplets. The authors of "The Rehearsal" stitch together scraps and parodies of the new plays, in that which is being rehearsed, with plenty of farcical "business" under Mr. Bayes, who gives amusing snatches of his "Ars Poetica," while there are gibes at the new style of prologues and epilogues, which Dryden wrote so copiously. But "The Rehearsal" is less witty than Sheridan's "The Critic". As for the "new" rhyming "heroic" plays, Dryden ascribes their origin to Davenant. Forbidden to act the old sort of plays under the Reign of the Saints, he introduced examples of moral virtue, "writ in verse" (in rhyme), "and performed in recitative music". He combined the Italian opera with characters in the manner of Corneille. At the Restoration, he turned his "Siege of Rhodes" into "a just drama," but without "design and variety of characters". Dryden took the manner up, and, inspired by Ariosto, made love and valour the theme of the new heroic tragedy on a superhuman scale, and with supernatural incidents, ghosts for example. Then came rant and extravagance expressed in rhymed couplets, and even triplets, till Dryden returned to blank verse, and Lee and Otway and others followed him. But the drama remained as heroic and absurd as when Dryden wrote that masterpiece "The Conquest of Granada". In this he has a ghost, the ghost of the mother of the heroic Almanzor. Scott supposes that she was brought in to prove the courage of her son, even in face of an apparition. Really, the courtesy of Almanzor is more to be admired; the stage direction shows that he bowed to the spectre!
Many critics of the age regarded the heroic tragedy with no more respect than we are apt to do now. Dryden replied with arguments which are not quite to the point. The heroic tragedy is a perfectly legitimate form of art; the Greek tragedies deal with divine heroes and gods, and ?schylus in "The Persians" does not disdain the ghost of Darius, and in "The Eumenides"[Pg 360] introduces the Furies. Dryden pleaded for a similar licence in the heroic play, but all depends on the manner of the doing. His ghosts are not majestic, like that of Darius; they are absurd. For boldness of language he also claimed a privilege; persons engaged in superhuman struggles may talk above the pitch of ordinary men. But they must not, like the heroes of the Caroline tragedies, soar or slip into bombast; they must rise on the wings of poetry, not on bladders full of gas. "Are all the flights of heroic poetry to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness because they," the critics, "are not affected by their excellences?" asks Dryden, in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence". "No, not all," the critics might have answered, "but many of your flights of heroic poetry are bombast"; and they might, indeed they did, produce examples. For instance, in his "The State of Innocence," in which, accepting Milton's permission given in blank verse,
Ay, you may tag my verses if you will,
he rhymed "Paradise Lost" into an opera, Dryden wrote thus:—
Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge,
And wanton, in full ease, who live at large,
Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie.
The spectacle of wanton seraphs lying dissolved in hallelujahs naturally provoked laughter, but Glorious John did not see the absurdity of the situation. He took his image from Virgil, he says, where the Greeks enter Troy which "lay buried in sleep and wine". But Trojans were not seraphs, and sleep and wine are not dissolving hallelujahs. In the same way Virgil, following Homer, describes the Cyclops as a monster of mountainous height, as in fact he was. Goliath was only about ten feet high. But Dryden applauds Cowley for writing of Goliath—
The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill,
And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill.
"The passage is horrible bombast," says Scott. Not living in an early heroic age, in which exaggeration is natural and pardonable, but in the age of scepticism and the Royal Society, Dryden[Pg 361] exceeded the ancient licence, and, as when a hero takes off his hat to his mother's ghost, mingled modern manners with more than heroic audacities. Criticism should look for beauties, not faults, said Dryden, but the critics could reply that the whole scheme of the heroic drama was faulty. The result is extravagance and rant, indeed rant was then the fault of the actors on the French stage. Molière had to warn his company that a King, conversing with his Minister, "does not necessarily speak like a d?moniac".
Turning to comedy, we find it but little instructed, in refinement, creation of character, and wit, by the example of Molière.
Etherege's three plays "Love in a Tub" (1664), "She Would if She Could" (1667), and "The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter" (1676), are the work of a courtier and amateur concerning whose life and death little is known. The merriment of "Love in a Tub" is a picture of contemporary manners; compared with its prose, the rhyming ten-syllabled couplets of the graver and sentimental characters are almost a relief.
The author (1635-1691?), in the Prologue, admits that "wit" (dramatic genius in this case), "has now declined"; avers that "the older and graver sort" would decry new plays in the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson; and bids the audience "Only think upon the modern way of writing". In an Epilogue to "Sir Fopling Flutter," Dryden characterizes the hero admirably:—
True fops help Nature work, and go to school,
To file and finish God Almighty's fool.
If these' pieces have wit, they "have not wit enough to keep them sweet".
Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) was made immortal when he became the butt of Dryden's satire. His plays are useful to students of contemporary manners, and he was the Laureate of William and Mary in succession to "Glorious John".
Sir Charles Sedley and Mrs. Aphra Behn have left nothing imperishable but a few songs, the swan songs of the dying Muse of lyric.
All these playwrights had before their eyes the inimitable and immortal comedies with which Molière was endowing the literature[Pg 362] of France. But, even when they tried to follow this model, their imitations were barbarous: for compared with the literary taste and manners of the Court of Louis XIV, those of the reign of Charles II were brutal.
The least unsuccessful of those who directed themselves by the light of Molière was William Wycherley (1640?-1716?). Here we sketch his career and that of his successors, reserving for a separate section the great name of Dryden. Wycherley was of an old family in Shropshire, had a handsome person, was brought up, in boyhood, at Paris, in the literary circle of Madame de Montausier, later resided at Oxford, and, if we could believe what Pope says that Wycherley reported of himself, wrote his first play, "Love in a Wood," before he came to London, to the Middle Temple. This would make Wycherley prior to Etherege, but either his own or Pope's memory is supposed to have been incorrect. The play was not acted till 1672: it was not much in advance of Etherege in merit.
Of "The Gentleman Dancing Master" (1673), "The Country Wife" (1673), and "The Plain Dealer" (1674) the last is by far the best. In the Prologue, the line
And with faint praises one another damn,
was remembered, unconsciously, by Pope, in his "Damn with faint praise" (in the character of "Atticus," Addison).
"The Plain Dealer" is a comedy of humours, like Jon son's, the chief humorist being the benevolent railing Manly, taken from the Alceste of Molière's "Le Misanthrope". Manly "of an honest, surly, nice humour," is a gallant British sea captain, who holds all the world in contempt but his friend and his love, who, of course, betray him. He is beloved by Fidelia, who, for his sake, has abandoned her large fortune, and taken service as a seaman with Captain Manly. Many scenes of conversation, in imitation of Molière, are vigorous; one perhaps was in Sheridan's mind when he wrote "The School for Scandal". Wycherley defends his "Country Wife" from the assaults of a false prude, who, at least, shows us that, even under Charles II, "The Country Wife" was thought superfluously indecent. The Widow Blackacre,[Pg 363] a female Peter Peebles, a litigious she-lawyer, with her oaf of a son, is "in very gracious fooling". The intrigue, and the part assigned to Fidelia, are odious enough, and impossible enough, but the nobility of Fidelia is demonstrated by allowing her, occasionally, to talk in blank verse. When we remember Wycherley's French education, we may suppose that he dealt so much in matter which a French audience would not have endured, because he knew the taste of the theatre-going part of his countrymen.
Wycherley is said to have suffered much from a jealous wife of noble birth, who caused him a world of legal troubles by the bequest of her money. He married again at 75, and shortly afterwards died. The most interesting thing in his later years was his acquaintance with Pope, then a lad, and the characteristic use which Pope made of his opportunity.
Congreve.
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more
than she conferred on Congreve. So wrote Dryden: and probably half believed what he wrote. Dryden was a literary dictator; literary opinion followed his lead; and there was a period when the town recognized the equal of Shakespeare in the sprightly author of comedies no longer ravishing.
William Congreve was born (1670) near Leeds: his family was of Staffordshire. His father settling in Ireland, Congreve was educated at the grammar school of Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a very handsome man, with an air of greatness; he easily conquered both the courtly and the literary world when he came to London; he won the admiration and affection of the generous Dryden, who applauded and opened the doors of the theatre to his first comedy, "The Old Bachelor". The play is not better than a fair specimen of Wycherley's manner, but "The Double Dealer" (1693) is much more readable and interesting. The complicated passions of Lady Touchwood have a kind of greatness, the more complicated plots of Maskwell nearly lead to a sanguinary conclusion; Maskwell being as near an[Pg 364] approach to the regular villain of comedy as the conditions of comedy permitted. Lady Froth is rather more learned than Mrs. Malaprop, and as vicious under her zeal for astronomy and "mathemacular proof" as the unkindness of man will allow her to be. The haughty refusal of Lord Froth to laugh, even when he is amused, is amusing; Brisk and Careless are agreeable rattles, Sir Paul Plyant is almost to an incredible degree "an uxorious, foolish, fond old knight," and the heroine, Cynthia, is a good girl. The constant bustle, and the involutions of a plot full of surprises ought to have made the play more popular on the stage than it was at first. Leigh Hunt, who edited "The Comedies of the Restoration" (or rather of the date from the Restoration to Queen Anne), candidly says, "speaking for ourselves, we can never attend sufficiently to the plots of Congreve. They soon puzzle us and we cease to think of them."
The student who would enjoy Congreve must first peruse each play very carefully, and make out a summary of the plot, with diagrams illustrating the secret staircases, back doors, screens, and other places of ambush: he must also master the details of the various marriages which are arranged for the various heiresses, amiable bankrupts, and old gentlemen. When the reader has thus given his full attention to the details he may re-read the plays with more ease and pleasure.
In "Love for Love" (1695) Sir Sampson Legend has some of the diverting traits of Sir Anthony Absolute; there are unlooked-for glimpses of romance in the assumed madness of his impoverished son Valentine (the sympathetic rake of comedy—the Charles Surface of an earlier day). The sailor son, Ben Legend, is the stock simple sailor, with some gross sense under the breezy manners of the untutored mariner. Foresight, with his rich collection of superstitions, is a "character part" of interest to the folklorist; one scene between two moral sisters who simultaneously detect each other's sins is diverting: the wit of Jeremy the valet, however, does not come within sight of the wit of Molière's Mascarille; and Miss Prue is a tomboy not remarkable for innocence.
The pearl of "The Way of the World" (1700) is the high-hearted Millamant, who, when she at last rewards one of the thousands[Pg 365] that sigh for her, makes a very spirited private marriage contract with her adorer. Her song,
If there's delight in love,'tis when I see
That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me,
is famous among the lyrics of Congreve. We do not often care for Congreve's characters, nor do they try to win our affection, but Millamant conquers all hearts.
Congreve's tragedy in blank verse "The Mourning Bride," holds much the same place in his plays as "Don Garcie de Navarre" does in those of Molière.
After a long, fashionable, and applauded life, Congreve died in 1729, deeply lamented by the Duchess of Marlborough (daughter of the great Duke), and by the once beautiful and delightful actress, Mrs. Bracegirdle. He held rich sinecures under Government, as did other wits while the Tories were in office.
Vanbrugh.
He writes your comedies, draws schemes, and models,
And builds Dukes' houses upon very odd hills
is a contemporary couplet which sums up a few of the accomplishments of Sir John Vanbrugh. His family seem to have been Protestants driven from Ghent in the wars of Alva. He was born in 1666[1] "in a French bastile" he said. He was educated in France; entered the English army; produced his first play, "The Relapse," in 1696, and was the architect of Castle Howard, the Earl of Carlisle's house, in 1701. Carlisle procured for him the herald's post of Clarencieux; as a Whig he was sent to carry the Order of the Garter to the Elector of Hanover (later George I); he built the palace of Blenheim, and, like all who met her, was insulted by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He seems to have been friendly with the wits of both parties, being as jovial as versatile. He died on 26 March, 1726.
"The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger," is a kind of continuation of Colley Cibber's "Love's Last Shift"; as Fielding's "Joseph[Pg 366] Andrews" continues and burlesques Richardson's "Pamela". From the Preface we learn that, as the second title leads us to think probable, "The Relapse" was accused of obscenity and blasphemy. The Prologue, spoken by Miss Cross on the first night, would, in our delicate age, clear all the women out of the stalls and boxes. The piece opens with a long dialogue in blank verse, between Loveless, a newly married rake, rejoicing in
the happy cause of my content,
and Amanda, his bride, that Sappy cause. They are going to town, and Amanda is afraid that Loveless's Virtue will Relapse. An amusing character is Lord Foppington, a knight newly made a peer; "While I was but a knight I was a very nauseous fellow," he confesses. He holds an absurd levee with his tailor, wigmaker, and hosier, and snubs his brother, Tom Fashion, who is penniless. Through an old nauseous match-maker, Coupler, Tom learns that the peer is contracted to a rustic heiress, whom he has never seen, Miss Hoyden, daughter to Sir Tunbelly Clumsey. Tom decides to go down, personate his brother, and marry the wealthy Miss Hoyden. Yet he has a qualm of conscience and will give Foppington another chance.
Arrived in town, Loveless and Amanda drop blank verse for prose. Amanda confesses her distaste for the obscenities of, the stage. Loveless admits that he has admired a lady at the play; Amanda flutters with jealousy; her cousin, Berinthia, enters; she is the woman admired by Loveless. Enter Lord Foppington bent on the conquest of Amanda. He dislikes the quiet of a country life: "For 'tis impossible to be quiet without thinking; now thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world". His lordship is a lover of books, of their bindings, "The inside, I must confess, I am not altogether so fond of". For this he gives his exquisite reasons, and describes the glories of his everyday occupations. From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. he drinks. "Thus, ladies, you see my life is a perpetual round of delights." This peer is worth a wilderness of Sir Fopling Flutters. On Sundays, "a vile day I must confess," Foppington imitates the course of Mr. Badman. He ends by making a declaration to Amanda, who[Pg 367] replies with a box on the ear. Loveless and Foppington fight, Foppington falls, exclaiming "Ah,—quite through the body. Stap my vitals!"
Like Shakespeare, Vanbrugh "has brave notions," and like him, as Ben Jonson said, "he needs to be stopped" before swords are drawn in ladies' company. His Lordship, of course, is no more killed than was the Master of Ballantrae when the sword hilt "dirled on his breast-bone".
Berinthia and Amanda now discuss not "the practical part of unlawful love," "that is abominable"; "but for the speculative; that, we must all confess, is entertaining". Amanda admits an interest in a speculative inquirer, her husband's friend, Mr. Worthy, and, most unnaturally, for she is very jealous, invites Berinthia, a merry widow, to be her guest.
Lord Foppington, happily recovered, airs his original philosophy of life for his brother's edification. "Look you, Tam, of all things that belong to a woman I have an aversion to her heart. For when once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her body." This philosopher declines to give Tom a penny, and Tom returns to the raid upon Miss Hoyden and her fortune.
Loveless is now found—ah! woful change—not only talking in blank verse—indicative of a serious passion—with Berinthia, but kissing her: the discovery is made by Worthy, her old lover. "O God!" exclaims Berinthia. Worthy now knows that Berinthia adores Loveless, and Berinthia—that Worthy adores Amanda. They contrive a plot against Amanda very worthy of their ingenuous principles.
We next find Tom at Sir Tunbelly Clumsey's door, which is garrisoned like the Tower, and all to seclude that Dana?, Miss Hoyden. Both Tom and Miss Hoyden are eager to be married with no more delay than Tom Jones and Sophia, but Sir Tunbelly is more set on ceremonies than Squire Western.
The proceedings of Berinthia now justify the censures of the moralist, and "turning the other page," as Chaucer recommends, we find Tom and Miss Hoyden privately married by Chaplain Bull, when Foppington arrives with two coaches and twenty foot-men,[Pg 368] the military skill of Sir Tunbelly, convinced that the newcomer is an impostor, enables him to rout Lord Foppington's guard and arrest his person. Presently a Sir John Friendly arrives; he knows and recognizes the genuine Foppington, who has admirably preserved the calm dignity of his philosophy. The blushless Hoyden now avows to her Nurse and the Chaplain her resolve to prevent trouble by at once wedding the real Lord Foppington.
Meanwhile, by aid of virtue and blank verse, Amanda converts the passion of Mr. Worthy into profound admiration and esteem. The natural denouement follows: Miss Hoyden is recognized as Mrs. Tom Fashion, and Lord Foppington, who would have gone to the guillotine as gallantly as any gentleman, congratulates his brother: "Dear Tam, you have married a woman beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent in her conduct, constant in her inclinations, and of a nice morality. Split my windpipe!"
Vanbrugh's quality, his absence of sentiment, his large and lively handling of old comic types, may be guessed at from this brief analysis of his first play. He was thought to have surpassed it in "The Provoked Wife" (1697) and "The Confederacy" (1705). He also adapted pieces by Molière, and a French writer nearly forgotten, Boursault.
George Farquhar.
George Farquhar, born 1678, at Londonderry, was the son of a clergyman, and was a University wit of Trinity College, Dublin. He early became an actor, and early left the stage; it is said because he had done accidentally what Mr. Lenville proposed to do of set purpose to Nicholas Nickleby, severely wounded a fellow-player in a stage duel. He then obtained a commission in the army, and wrote plays, "A Trip to the Jubilee," "Sir Harry Wildair," "The Way to Win Him," "The Recruiting Officer," "The Beaux' Stratagem" (1707), and others; the characters, such as Scrub, Sergeant Kite, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Captain Plume, and others, were great favourites with Sir Walter Scott, and by him are often quoted. Farquhar died young, at about the age[Pg 369] of 30. George Farquhar with his gaiety, his gallantry, his happy military swagger, his heroes who are not lost to honour, his plots, so comprehensible, and sources of so many merry adventures, wins more sympathy and affection,—dying in the arms of Victory as he did, during the triumph of his last and best play,—than any of the other comic writers of the Restoration.
Otway.
Otway, like most dramatists of his day, cannot be fairly judged by his printed works. They want the splendid costumes and decor, the setting of the stage, and the pathos and brilliance of the beautiful actresses, for Otway was most successful in such tender and distraught heroines as Belvidera and Monimia. Born in 1652, Thomas Otway, the son of the rector of Woolbeding, in Sussex, entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1669, but soon left it, on the death of his father, for London. Here he hung about the Duke of York's Theatre, where he failed as an actor. In 1675 he produced a play, "Alcibiades," though, as he says in a preface to his "Don Carlos," "I might as well have called it 'Nebuchadnezzar,'" for Alcibiades acted in a way not consistent with his character. The caprice of the witty, miserable Earl of Rochester won the good will, if nothing more substantial, of the Duke of York for the poet, who dedicates to him the heroic play of "Don Carlos" (1676). In this, according to Otway, Dryden declared that "I know not a line I would not be author of," so the play must have been, and in fact was, a success. It is written in rhyming couplets, and even triplets; the rhymes are often surprisingly bad. The history of the death of Don Carlos, who was mad, is obscure, and Otway treats it with extreme poetic licence. Philip of Spain is here a tender, though avenging, father and husband, who repents and rants monstrously, though rant is not the common fault of Otway. There is tenderness and pathos enough to account for the popularity of the play; moreover Otway was known to be hopelessly in love with Mrs. Barry, the beautiful actress; Rochester who presently satirised Otway, being his rival. After a luckless campaign with Monmouth in Flanders, Otway, following Dryden's example, abandoned rhyme for blank verse in "The Orphan"[Pg 370] (1680), based on a stock situation in a novel of the seventeenth century. The intrigue, though the crucial situation is not acceptable now on the stage, is ingeniously contrived to bring out the characters of the rival brothers, and Monimia, a very pathetic character, must have drawn many tears. There is the usual number of deaths in the last act. The blank verse has no great distinction, and abounds in redundant feet. Otway, in fact, did not take by literary perfections, but "The Orphan" has no lines so far below the tragic level as the words of the Queen in "Don Carlos".
How hard it is his passion to confine,
I'm sure 'tis so if I may judge by mine!
The phrase of Monimia when she learns the depth of her misery, "Oh, when shall I be mad indeed!" is of other metal.
In 1682, Otway produced his "Venice Preserved," certainly his best play, which long held the stage, and was acted now and then up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The conspirators in the play may be said to rant, but moderation of language does not mark the eloquence of violent revolutionaries with the most bitter personal wrongs to avenge. Belvidera may be "stagey," but she has genuine tenderness and pathos; there is dramatic development of character in Jaffier; "the moving incident" is abundant; the absence of poetry was not marked or missed. The scenes with Antonio, a caricature of the Shaftesbury of Titus Oates's plot, with his "I'll prove there's a plot with a vengeance, a bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot," must have delighted audiences who had just escaped from Oates's reign of lies and terror. The bloody ghosts who appear in the conclusion are an unhappy reversion to the devices of Chapman. Otway wrote other things, the comedy of "The Soldier's Fortune," for example, which, even then, was "so filthy, no modest woman ought to be seen at it," as, Otway tells us, a woman of "a nice morality" declared. Certainly Otway had no real comic genius. Before he wrote "Venice Preserved" Otway was destitute, till relieved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom the play is dedicated. On the death of Charles II the Duchess ceased, it appears, to succour the poet, who died in deep distress, in April, 1685; as[Pg 371] to the manner of his death, stories vary. Probably he was not a careful liver; profits from plays were slight; and patrons were niggardly. Otway is undeniably more coherent, more capable in construction than the majority of the tragedians from Chapman to Ford; but he did not inherit that remarkable, if occasional, gift of greatness in style which was their common portion.
Nat Lee.
The reader of the plays in which Nat Lee (1653-1692) employs blank verse, finds it much more satisfactory in its cadences and in movement than the blank verse of Otway. There is something of the old ring in
For I am doz'd so weary with complaining.
That I could stand and listen to the winds,
or
For straight when the sick priest had breathed his last,
The sacred oil which for a hundred years
Supplied the sun behind the golden veil,
Went out and all the mystic lights were quenched.
Undeniably there was poetry in Lee, but to the pathos, concentration, and construction of Otway he does not attain. He was born in Hertfordshire, and educated in Westminster, and Trinity, Cambridge. He was at intervals insane, and while reading the speeches of his characters we sometimes seem to "stand and listen to the winds" of a wild night of autumn.
There is a kind of furious magnificence in the tempestuous tirades of Pharnaces with which the play of "Mithradates" opens, and throughout the terrors of that piece "The old winds cease not blowing and all the night thunders". The same vigour displays itself in his first tragedy (1675), written partly in "new" rhymed heroic couplets. The ghost of Caligula would
Burn palaces; like Thunder I would rove,
Tear the tall woods, and rend each sacred grove.
Lee is, by the way, far too prodigal of his ghosts. His age, at all events the theatre-going part of his contemporaries, was apt to jest at ghosts, following Webster and Wagstaffe, and unconvinced[Pg 372] by Henry More, Glanvill in "Sadducismus Triumphatus," and the other founders of "Psychical Research".
In 1677, Lee, with "The Rival Queens," made a success which long held the stage, and the names of Statira and Roxana, rivals for the love of Alexander the Great, live in memory. Dryden wrote the prologue of the piece, protesting that he was not "logrolling," and comparing the poet to "Titian and Angelo". Lee loved a ghost, and that of Philip of Macedon "shakes his truncheon at 'em," at the conspirators against Alexander, whom two queens adore with furious passion. Statira's first words demand
a knife, a draught of poison, flames!
but, instantly relenting, for she has heard that Alexander loves Roxana, she praises the faithless conqueror:—
Not the Spring's mouth, nor breath of jesamin,
Nor violets' infant sweets, nor opening buds,
Are half so sweet as Alexander's breast.
Though "well-matched for a pair of quiet ones," Statira, of the two, is of milder mood.
The staging of the play must have been arduous, a battle of crows and ravens fills the air, an eagle and dragon meet and fight; the eagle and birds drop dead, the dragon flies away, and "soldiers walk off, shaking their heads," and no wonder! especially as the ghost of Philip is still walking, and a "monstrous child" is weeping blood into a silver bowl and throwing the gore over the percipients. When the jealous Roxana reaches Babylon, she is as passionate as Statira, and cries to the spectators,
Away, be gone, and give a whirlwind room!
The two queens meet with gentle words, but when their blood is up their language is on the level of the situation. Roxana is the readier with her knife; the dying Statira forgives her; Alexander dies in a delirium, with a lucid interval at the close.
Dryden and Lee worked together in "The Duke of Guise" (assassinated by order of Henri III) and in "?dipus". The last is worth reading as an example of the taste of the time. The foundation is the "?dipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles, from which[Pg 373] passages are translated in blank verse. In the preface we learn that Corneille's "?dipe" "is inferior to the original". The "?dipus" of Lee and Dryden goes very far beyond,—and in that sense surpasses—the masterpiece of the Athenian. "All that one could gain out of Corneille was that an episode must lie, but not his way." For "custom has obtained that there must be an underplot of second persons," as, alas I there is, while the over-elaboration of the loves of ?dipus and Jocasta, "very curious and disgusting," would have seemed to Sophocles the work of L?strygonians or some such uncouth barbarians. Jocasta murders all her children—she hangs the girls and stabs the boys, which proves that the taste of Englishmen was infinitely more brutal than that of the prehistoric framers of the original legend. ?dipus, after putting out his eyes as in the Greek, commits suicide—by jumping out of an upper floor window! The love affair of Eurydice, and the charge against her of being the murderess of Laius, are supremely absurd, while the ghost of Laius drives about in a chariot with those of three of his retainers. Even this nonsense is capped by a song about fiends who use red-hot tongs, and boiling cauldrons, and torture "with molten lead in it".
Lee and Dryden seem to have stimulated each the other's ambition to outdo the worst excesses of the most frantic Elizabethan playwrights. They knew, of course, that ?dipus, in the Attic myth, did not kill himself, like a distraught housemaid, by jumping out of a window; they knew that he lived, and that the children of Jocasta lived and furnished the materials for two noble dramas of Sophocles. But they thought that the blood could not be spread too thick.[2]
Dryden.
Though Dryden was a dramatist of the Restoration, he was so much else, was a link so strong in the golden chain of our poetry and prose, that he must be considered apart from smaller wits.
John Dryden was born in 1631, at Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. His name is common in Teviotdale: his family was landed,[Pg 374] and had a baronetcy: in Scotland it is not a landed name. From Westminster school Dryden went to Trinity, Cambridge, where he was known to Mr. Samuel Pepys. He entered in 1650, at 19, an age later than was usual. For some reason he did not like his University.
Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age,
that is Oxford, the home of lost causes, like his own. In 1663 married Lady Elizabeth Howard; wrote plays for a livelihood (his rents were small); in 1670 became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal: acted, we may say, in both capacities in his great satires of the troubles following on the Popish Plot and other poems down to the birth of the Prince of Wales (10 June, 1688), and, after the Revolution, supported himself by play-writing, translating Virgil, by his "Fables," and other works, till his death on 1 May, 1700.
Setting aside Milton, who dwelt apart, Dryden was by far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration and the reign of our Dutch deliverer. Under Dryden, and to a great extent through his versatile and manly genius, English literature matured and clarified itself. Though not averse to far-fetched "conceits" in his early poems, Dryden shook them off; he made the heroic couplet the instrument for Pope and his successors, he gave it a nobility, a richness and depth of music which it had not possessed: it was stronger, more varied, more poetical, in his hands than in those of Pope. Prose, touched by him, became much more lucid and rapid than it had been in the long involved periods of Clarendon, if not so purely simple as the prose of Swift.
It was, in a sense, the misfortune of Dryden that he was the poet of an age immersed in its own complicated and exciting, and now, to all but careful historical students, not easily understood affairs. We have no adequate and intelligent history of the Restoration. Dry den's verses, for the most part, are "topical," deal with events of the day: there is little time for meditation on what is universal; he is an urban poet, too: nature and landscape are rarely handled by him. If our ideal of poetry is derived from study of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and other[Pg 375] recent moderns, we do not and cannot find in Dryden what they have taught us to desire and expect. His themes are of his time and of the men and the political passions of his time. His plays, many of them rhymed, are but little read; nobody strongly recommends his comedies, which are more coarse than comic; he did not, himself, think that comedy set his genius.
His lyrics, though spirited, have not the sweet spontaneity of the true English lyric from "Love has come with Lent to town" to those of the best nineteenth century makers. To read his best satires with entire enjoyment we need to be well acquainted with the obscure intrigues of an age of plots, royal, political, and religious. Yet, through all his poetic work, from his early "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Cromwell, down to "Alexander's Feast," we see the note and hear the voice of a great poet; a voice new, noble, sonorous, and his own. There is, in almost all that Dryden did, in his criticism in prose not less than in his verse, a kind of conquering supremacy, an ease, an impetus, and a consciousness of his own greatness which is not arrogance, but lends facility and a triumphant speed to his verse; while his criticism is that of zest, of delight in excellence wherever he finds it; from Homer to Virgil, from Virgil to the then little understood Chaucer, to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
His "Heroic Stanzas" (published in 1659) in quatrains, may or may not have been inspired by appreciation of Cromwell; Dryden's kinsfolk were Presbyterian and Parliamentarian; but his heart and natural inclinations as a man and a poet, were more engaged (1660) in his "Astr?a Redux," and verses to Charles II on his coronation. Dryden, like Waller, was (to our taste) more successful in praising the great usurper than the Merry Monarch. The first stanza in the poem on Cromwell strikes a ringing and a novel note, but the reader also requires a footnote on Roman imperial funereal ritual before he can understand what is meant. To say of Cromwell,
To our crown he did fresh jewels bring,
while, in fact, he sold the jewels, was to invite satire; to talk of
Stanching the blood by breathing of the vein,
[Pg 376]
was thought an odd way of alluding to regicide: though Dryden may perhaps have spoken of the wars in general.
Her safety rescued Ireland to him owes
is a strange compliment to the man of the Drogheda massacre. Dryden, at this time, wrote as a Protestant; much later he was reconciled to the ancient Church.
His "Astr?a Redux," and poem on the Coronation of Charles II show his early mastery of the heroic couplet. Scott thought that in these poems the Muse awoke, like the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale "in the same antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before". This means that the so-called "metaphysical" style of far-fetched conceits and comparisons (which Sir Walter heartily hated) still prevailed. There are, indeed, traces of the habits attributed by fable to elephants, and remote classical allusions, and abrupt changes of metaphor from anatomy to bait-fishing (of which Dryden was fond) and it is rather absurd to make a ship of war "groan beneath the weight" of a lad like the Duke of Gloucester! But the verse is excellent, and the spirit high and joyous, as became the great occasion. As much may be said of the lines addressed to Clarendon.
In the "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), concerning the naval war with Holland and the Great Fire of 1666, Dryden reverted to the quatrains made fashionable by Davenant's "Gondibert". Mr. Pepys, of the Admiralty, thought this "a very good poem," it came home to his bosom and business, and, as a poem of war, is much superior to Addison's "Campaign". There are still conceits, as when Dutch mariners killed on board a ship laden with spices and Oriental porcelain "by shattered porcelain fall," or "by aromatic splinters die". To appreciate the poem the reader needs a good chart and an intimate knowledge of naval history, but the vigour of the verses on the fire carries them on like the conflagration itself. The "Prayer of Charles II" is royal, and worthy of David, to whom Dryden had already compared him in "Astr?a Redux," as later in "Absalom and Achitophel". Indeed Charles in certain points of conduct resembled the Psalmist.
[Pg 377]
For some fifteen years Dryden was now to be occupied with play-writing, and his tragedies and comedies, as his latest editor says, supply the historian with "the most troublesome and perhaps the most thankless... part of his task". But Dryden does not live by the merits of his dramas. When we have said that Scott, with all his zeal for old plays, did not like Dryden's, it is clear that people less omnivorous in literature and less devoted to the drama, will leave them alone.
Of Dryden's first comedy, "The Wild Gallant," 1663, Mr. Pepys said it was "so poor a thing as I ever saw in my life". It was condemned, but was amended and repeated. The judgment of Mr. Pepys was well deserved. The play is in prose.
"The Rival Ladies" (published 1664) was reckoned "innocent and most pretty witty" by Pepys: it is partly in poor blank verse, partly in rhymed couplets: in the preface Dryden says that Waller "first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which, in the verse before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it". The plot is reckless of probability, but, on the whole, the thing is not coarse as well as shocking to the credulity of the reader.
In "The Indian Queen" (1664) Dryden added some scenes to a "heroic" play by Sir Robert Howard, and is credited with the part of Montezuma. The "heroic" play resembled the immense extravagant romances of the day ("Gondibert" is a versified romance of this kind); written by Mdlle. de Scudéry and her imitators. Intricate prolonged extravagance was then characteristic; and Sir George Mackenzie ("Bluidy Mackenzie"), who wrote such a romance about the civil war, reckoned these heroic tales the final and perfect type of the novel.
"The Indian Emperor," in rhyme (1665), was a contribution by Dryden to this class of drama. Cortez and Pizarro go conquering together, which is odd, "in a pleasant Indian country," within two leagues of Mexico. The High Priest's morning sacrifice has disposed of 500 human victims—love scenes with ladies of such Mexican names as Almeria and Cydaria follow; Cortez and Pizarro approach in arms, Cydaria and Cortez fall in love, in a song, and after much heroic passion, all ends happily for the[Pg 378] lovers. The merits of the versification and the rhetoric are great; Montezuma is racked on the stage; and holds a dialogue about religion, in fine distiches, with his equally tormented High Priest. The priest expires, but Cortez releases Montezuma, and throws the blame on Pizarro.
"The Conquest of Granada" (1670) was a yet more triumphant play of the heroic variety; "The Rehearsal," a satirical piece, partly by the Duke of Buckingham, partly by collaborators, derided "Bayes" (as we have seen); and as Dryden received the Laureate's bays in 1670, he is, at least, in part, the object of the mockery. He took it very unconcernedly, and went on writing heroic plays, but in 1677-1678, in "All for Love," abandoned rhyme for blank verse. "The Spanish Friar" (1681) was a "topical" play, full of the Protestantism of Oates's Popish Plot.
The sequels of the Whig and Protestant lunacy of the Popish Plot, and the political turmoil and Whig conspiracies in the interests of Monmouth, and against the succession of the Duke of York (James II.), found Dryden on the side of the King, and gave occasion for his greatest works, the political satires, "Absalom and Achitophel" (Monmouth and Shaftesbury) and "The Medal" (1681-1682), while more amusing if less monumental, is "Mac-Flecknoe," the attack on the Whig playwright and versifier, Shadwell. "The Hind and Panther" (the Roman and Anglican Churches) is not very appropriate in its allegory, but magnificent in many passages of verse. Dryden came into the religion of the Duke of York, apparently from conviction, and so threw in his lot with a doomed cause. After the Revolution of 1688, no longer Laureate, he simply worked hard at literature for his livelihood. He translated Virgil with much spirit, into rhymed ten syllabled couplets; and wrote that Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew which contains his repentance for the prostitution of the Muse throughout the revel of the Restoration.
O gracious God I how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly grace of poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love.
[Pg 379]
Dryden's old age, as the dictator to the wits at Will's Coffee House, was tranquil and happy: he had sown his literary wild oats, his life was one of peaceful and honoured industry, without failure of mental force. He died in May, 1700, and was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, with strangely maimed rites, according to Farquhar, the author of "The Beaux' Stratagem," who was present.
Dryden's prose, chiefly critical, was addressed to that part of the literary world, the Court and the Town, and the Templars, which was mainly interested in the theatre. He could thus write with freedom, alertness, and gaiety, to appreciative readers concerned with the problems of the drama. It had almost expired by a kind of natural decay, moral and literary, before the theatres were closed by the Puritans. Now writers of plays looked back on the glories of the "former temple," to Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, and also looked abroad to the French stage then flourishing under Corneille and Molière. Which was the better way? Was the rhyme of French tragedy, and of many French comedies, to be imitated? It was imitated, and in his rhymed tragedies Dryden acquired his mastery of the couplet. What was to be said for and against the English practice of an upper and an under plot? What were the famous "unities" of time, place, and action? Should deaths be merely reported or presented on the stage? Dryden observes that the audiences used to laugh at dying scenes in tragedies: "it is the most comic part of the whole play".
Having such topics to discuss, Dryden adopted the prose style so justly appreciated, though it was the reverse of his own manner, by Dr. Johnson. Dryden's prefaces to his plays "have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled: every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is little is gay; what is great is splendid."
The most famous essays are those of "Dramatic Poesy," and "The Preface to the Fables," adaptations or "translations" of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The former essay is, in form, a[Pg 380] dialogue, held in a boat on the Thames, while the thunder of the guns, in a great naval battle against the Dutch (3 June, 1665) dies away from the English shores, with promise of an English victory. The speakers are Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, the poet himself, and Sir Charles Sedley, the gayest of the four, though his knowledge of Aristotle's "Poetics" is far from adequate. The speeches are rather long; there is no rapid interchange of opinions. In Dryden's lips are placed the words, "Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul". Yet "he is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast". Dryden, here, and in "The Preface to the Fables," was much more keen to praise Shakespeare than to blame him: in the second place the zest with which he applauds Shakespeare and Chaucer (whose scansion, unluckily, he did not understand), is worthy of himself and of them. He translated Virgil, but, when he did some Homeric passages into English, we see how entirely the Greek, to his taste, overcomes the Mantuan poet. "I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet."
Dryden himself, at the meeting of the ways of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belonged by genius more to the past than the immediate future. His criticisms are like the conversation of a great artist, speaking of his art, and also (Dr. Johnson thought him too copious on this subject) of himself. But here Johnson resembles Dryden when he rebukes Andromache, at her last leave-taking with Hector, for speaking of her utter bereavement of father and brothers by the spear of Achilles. "The devil was in Hector," says Dryden, "if he knew not all this matter, as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together"—an error in fact, and an example of Dryden's occasional frivolity.
The work of Thomas Southerne has for long been neglected, though Garrick, by making excisions and modifications, restored part of it to the stage. Southerne was born before the Restoration (1660), and lived to see the last effort of the Stuart cause crushed in 1746. Born in Dublin, he went[Pg 381] to Oxford, neglected the law, gave his first play in 1682, paid court to the Duke of York, got a commission in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and wrote, in 1687, a play, not acted till 1721, in which he satirized Mary, the daughter of James II. Dryden doubled, in Southerne's case, the price of a prologue, raising it from ￡5 to ￡10, but Southerne raised the gains of authors, getting ￡700 for a single piece, while Dryden never received more than ￡100. Southerne's new comedies were popular after the Revolution of 1688. The plot of his "Innocent Adultery" (dear to Lydia Languish) was taken from a novel, by Mrs. Aphra Behn—the play, in 1758, was revived by Garrick;—from Mrs. Behn also Southerne dramatized "Oroonoko, or the Loyal Slave". This piece, with the licentious comic scenes removed, was revived in 1759, and a new age saw how Southerne
"Touch'd their fathers' hearts with gen'rous woe,
And taught their mothers' youthful eyes to flow,"
though
"With ribald mirth he stained his sacred page".
In 1725, the poetic fire of Southerne died out in "Money the Mistress". The author was liked by everybody, even by Pope, known to all as "honest Tom," and addressed by the Earl of Orrery in a letter as "My Dear Old Man". Southerne did not affect the development of the stage, and the better part of his "Oroonoko" is due to Mrs. Behn: people who laughed at the sub-plot were easily amused.
Of Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) space suffices only for the statement that he was made Poet Laureate under George I., edited Shakespeare, and wrote "Jane Shore," "in imitation of Shakespeare's style". Here is a sample of the imitation:—
"If poor, weak woman swerve from Virtue's rule,
If strongly charmed she leave the thorny way,
And in the softer paths of pleasure stray,
Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame,
And one false step entirely damns her fame."
The blank verse too is remote from the Shakespearean.
The stage (like the world after the death of Donne's Miss Drury) continued to exist after the death of Steele. Young and Johnson, Thomson and John Home wrote tragedies, and acting comedies abounded, but we do not find comedies that live and give pleasure in the reading till we come to Goldsmith and Sheridan.
[1] In 1664 in the Parish of St. Nicholas Aeons (see "Diet, of Nat. Biog." referring to the list of Baptisms in that Church).
[2] In the Ach?an myth, first mentioned in the "Iliad," we read that "?dipus fell," the Greek word is that used for falling in battle.