COMPLEXITY OF THE SUBJECT

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awaiting the touch of Italy upon her strings, the touch of Germany upon her keys. But poetry, the metaphysic of all arts, was ours. And poetry, using the drama for a vehicle, conveyed to English minds what Italy, great mother of renascent Europe, had with all her arts, with all her industries and sciences, made manifest. On man, as on the proper appanage of English thought, our poets, like a flight of eagles, swooped. Man was their quarry; and in the sphere of man's mixed nature there is nothing, save its baser parts, its carrion, unportrayed by them.

Reviewing this unique achievement of our literary genius, the critic is puzzled not only by its complexity, but also by its incompleteness as a work of art. The Drama in England has no Attic purity of outline, no statuesque definition of form, no unimpeachable perfection of detail. The total effect of those accumulated plays might be compared to that of a painted window or a piece of tapestry, where the colour and assembled forms convey an ineffaceable impression, but which, when we examine the whole work more closely, seems to consist of hues laid side by side without a harmonising medium. The greatness of the material presented to our study lies less in the parts than in the mass, less in particular achievements than in the spirit which sustains and animates the whole. It is the volume and variety of this dramatic literature, poured forth with almost incoherent volubility by a crowd of poets, jostling together in the storm and stress of an instinctive impulse to express one cardinal conception of their art, each striving, after his own fashion, to grapple with a problem suggested by the temper of their race and age:it is the multitude of fellow-workers, and the bulk of work produced in concert, that impress the mind; the unity not of a simple and coherent thing of beauty, but of an intricate and many-membered organism, striving after self-accomplishment, and reaching that accomplishment in Shakspere's art, which enthrals attention. Our dramatists produced very few plays which deserve the name of masterpiece. Yet, taken altogether, their works, although so different in quality and so uneven in execution, make up one vast and monumental edifice. The

right point of view, therefore, for regarding them, is that from which in music we contemplate a symphony or chorus, or in painting judge the frescoed decoration of a hall, or in philosophy observe the genesis of an idea evolved by kindred and competing thinkers, or in architecture approach some huge cathedral of the Middle Ages.

Surveyed in its totality, the Elizabethan Drama is so complex in its animating motives, so imperfect in its details, that it may well seem to defy analysis. And yet it has the internal coherence of a real, a spiritual unity. It furnishes a rare specimen of literary evolution circumscribed within welldefined limits of time and place, confined to the conditions of a single nation at a certain moment of its growth. We are furthermore fortunate in possessing copious remains of its chief monuments illustrative of each successive stage. In spite of the Great Fire, in spite of Warburton's Cook, in spite of the indifference of two succeeding centuries, our stores of plays are abundant and amply representative. Through these we trace the seed sown in the Miracles and Interludes. We watch the root struck and the plant emerging in the fertile soil of the metropolis. We analyse the several elements which it rejected as unnecessary to its growth, and those which it assimilated. We pluck the flower and fruitage of its prime. We follow it to its decay, fading, and finally cut off by frost. There is no similar instance of uninterrupted progress in the dramatic art. Through lack of documentary evidence, the origins of the Athenian Drama are obscure. From the Dithyrambic and the Thespian age no remnants have survived. Our knowledge of the playwrights who competed with Sophocles is fragmentary and vague. The successors of Euripides owe their shadowy fame to a few dim notices, a poor collection of imperfect extracts.

VI

It is not here the place to treat in detail of those intimate connections which may be traced between the many writers for our theatre. Suffice it to say that Shakspere forms a

SHAKSPERE'S RELATION TO HIS AGE

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focus for all the rays of light which had emerged before his time, and that after him these rays were once more decomposed and scattered over a wide area. Thus at least we may regard the matter from our present point of survey. Yet during Shakspere's lifetime his predominance was by no means so obvious. To explain the defect of intelligence in Shakspere's contemporaries, to understand why they chose epithets like 'mellifluous,'' sweet,' and 'gentle,' to describe the author of 'King Lear,' 'Othello,' and 'Troilus and Cressida '; why they praised his 'right happy and copious industry' instead of dwelling on his interchange of tragic force and fanciful inventiveness; why the misconception of his now acknowledged place in literature extended even to Milton and to Dryden, will remain perhaps for ever impossible to every student of those times. But this intellectual obtuseness is itself instructive, when we regard Shakspere as the creature, not as the creator, of a widely diffused movement in the spirit of the nation, of which all his contemporaries were dimly conscious. They felt that behind him, as behind themselves, dwelt a motive force superior to all of them. Instead, then, of comparing him, as some have done, to the central orb of a solar system, from whom the planetary bodies take their light, it would be more correct to say that the fire of the age which burns in him so intensely, burned in them also, more dimly, but independently of him. He represents the English dramatic. genius in its fulness. The subordinate playwrights bring into prominence minor qualities and special aspects of that genius. Men like Webster and Heywood, Jonson and Ford, Fletcher and Shirley, have an existence in literature outside Shakspere, and are only in an indirect sense satellites and vassals. Could Shakspere's works be obliterated from man's memory, they would still sustain the honours of the English stage with decent splendour. Still it is only when Shakspere shines among them, highest, purest, brightest of that brotherhood, that the real radiance of his epoch is discernible-that the real value and meaning of their work become apparent.

The more we study Shakspere in relation to his prede

cessors, the more obliged are we to reverse Dryden's famous dictum that he 'found not, but created first the stage.' The fact is, that he found dramatic form already fixed. When he began to work among the London playwrights, the Romantic Drama in its several species-Comedy, Italian Novella, Roman History, English Chronicle, Masque, Domestic Tragedy, Melodrama-had achieved its triumph over the Classical Drama of the scholars. Rhyme had been discarded, and blank verse adopted as the proper vehicle of dramatic expression. Shakspere's greatness consisted in bringing the type established by his predecessors to artistic ripeness, not in creating a new type. It may even be doubted whether Shakspere was born to be a playwright-whether it was not rather circumstance which led him to assume his place as coryphæus to the choir of dramatists. The defects of the Romantic form were accepted by him with easy acquiescence, nor did he aim at altering that form in any essential particular. He dealt with English Drama as he dealt with the materials of his plays; following an outline traced already, but glorifying each particular of style and matter; breathing into the clay-figures of a tale his own creator's breath of life, enlarging prescribed incident and vivifying suggested thought with the art of an unrivalled poetrhetorician, raising the verse invented for him to its highest potency and beauty with inexhaustible resource and tact incomparable in the use of language.

At the same time, the more we study Shakspere in his own works, the more do we perceive that his predecessors, no less than his successors, exist for him; that without him English dramatic art would be but second rate; that he is the keystone of the arch, the justifier and interpreter of his time's striving impulses. The forms he employs are the forms he found in common usage among his fellow-craftsmen. But his method of employing them is so vastly superior, the quality of his work is so incommensurable by any standard we apply to the best of theirs, that we cannot help regarding the plays of Shakspere as not exactly different in kind, but diverse in inspiration. Without those predecessors, Shakspere.

JONSON, MILTON, DRYDEN, POPE

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would certainly not have been what he is. But having him, we might well afford to lose them. Without those successors, we should still miss much that lay implicit in the art of Shakspere. But having him, we could well dispense with them. His predecessors lead up to him, and help us to explain his method. His successors supplement his work, illustrating the breadth and length and depth and versatility of English poetry in that prolific age.

It is this twofold point of view from which Shakspere must be studied in connection with the minor dramatists, which gives them value. It appears that a whole nation laboured in those fifty years' activity to give the world one Shakspere; but it is no less manifest that Shakspere did not stand alone, without support and without lineage. He and his fellow playwrights are interdependent, mutually illustrative; and their aggregated performance is the expression of a nation's spirit.

VII

That the English genius for art has followed two directions, appears from the revolution in literature which prevailed from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. Shakspere represents the one type, which preponderated in the reigns of Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts. Ben Jonson represents the other, less popular during the golden age of the Drama, but destined to assert itself after the Civil Wars. Jonson was a learned, and aimed at being a correct, poet. He formed a conception of poetry as the proper instrument of moral education, to which he gave clear utterance in his prose essays, and which was afterwards advocated by Milton. He taught the propriety of observing rules and precedents in art. Under the dictatorships of Dryden and Pope this subordination of fancy to canons of prescribed taste and sense was accepted as a law. The principles for which Jonson waged his manful but unsuccessful warfare triumphed. The men who adopted those principles and insured their