CHAPTER XI

REALISTIC COMEDY

The last chapter in the history of the true Elizabethan drama is that which describes the acceptance into the highest theatrical favor of plays occupied primarily with the treatment of contemporary manners and vices. The sudden overwhelming popularity after 1600 of that comedy of class types and distinctively local application, which Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humor" (1598) perhaps inaugurated, is eloquent of changed conditions both on the stage and in the life of London. It indicates, on the one hand, the disappearance of the catholic largeness of view which generally universalizes and idealizes Elizabethan plays; and it bears witness to the breaking up of the national unity of the earlier simpler age into the strongly marked social and factional groups of Stuart England.

Properly considered, the stage of Elizabeth's reign was far more realistic — more adequately expressive of national life and character — than any which succeeded it; but, like all agents of legitimate realism, it reflected rather the fundamental moral and intellectual content than the material superficialities of the epoch. The growing consciousness of personal peculiarities of manner, and the tendency of the drama to devote its highest talent and most careful art to the treatment of the commonplaces of everyday existence were necessarily consequent upon a diminution in the earlier emotional and imaginative ardor. It is in literature as in life: minute interest in external details and in whimsicalities of speech or fashion seldom coexists with the intensest moral zeal or mental aspiration.

Not only is seventeenth-century drama less exalted in tone than that which we may properly call Elizabethan; it is also far less universal in its scope. One of the most potent literary influences in the age of Elizabeth was the essential unity of taste, produced by the sudden development of national feeling which, in spite of the superficial lines of cleavage, made prince and peasant really one in sentiment, character, and manner, and gave to the society of the time much of the naivete and simple directness of primitive communities. This feature of the age is everywhere reflected in the drama. The academic imitations of foreign aristocratic species never achieved real success, even with the higher classes, till they had been so modified as to appeal to the tastes of the general public.1 During the heyday of English drama, the twenty years following 1590, plays were incessantly being transported from the popular stage to the royal court, and back again; and those which most gained the applause of the rabble in the pit were nearly always the favorites also of the learned and noble connoisseurs.

Social distinctions were felt by the Elizabethans as political barriers, indispensable to good government and therefore rigidly to be maintained; but there is no evidence that the age connected differences of character in any clear way with differences of station or employment. The social democracy of the time is constantly exemplified, to a degree often perplexing to the modern reader, in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: in the motley society of the Henry IV plays and "The Merchant of Venice"; in the frank independence of the gardener in "Richard II," the grave-digger in "Hamlet," the sergeant in "Macbeth"; and in the freedom everywhere accorded to the clown. The nobleman, the shepherd, and the merchant might meet on terms of at least temporary equality, not only on the stage, but in actual life as well; and the extreme haziness of the lines which mark the various gradations in dignity between the Dean of St. Paul's, Sir Thomas Gresham the merchant prince, Hobson the haberdasher, and John Goodfellow the pedlar in Heywood's play l is no very inaccurate picture of existing conditions. For the Elizabethans, consequently, tragic and comic effect were both absolute. They resulted from the character of the individual, and had nothing to do with the rank to which he belonged or the measure in which he followed the rules of established fashion. Even the most topical dramas of this period are in no sense limited to a special class. The authors of the murder plays found equal material for tragedy in the fate of the humble shop-keeper Beech, the city merchant Sanders, and the country gentlemen Arden and Calverley.

Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, however, there began to appear a change in the structure of society which became a characteristic feature of 1 // You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II.

Jacobean life, and served to distinguish the entire Stuart drama from that of the Tudors. About 1600, as the all-absorbing excitement of the Spanish wars gave place to the general conviction of national security, and the flux of political and social adjustment consequent upon the Renaissance came to a stable equilibrium, the lines between the different ranks of the people grew hard and rigid; and the world of fashion evolved a code of manners complex and artificial to a degree previously unknown. The opposition between the court and city circles and between town and country habits was sharply, even bitterly, accentuated; and the stage, which had interpreted life in terms of universal significance, became the mirror of local prejudice and the scourge of social folly. Thus it happened that the Elizabethan drama, which in its power of expressing general communal feeling is continually reminiscent of the great national tragedy of Athens, was succeeded by a type of comedy suggestive rather of the narrow urban life portrayed by the Roman dramatists. It is therefore no accident that the first years of the seventeenth century witnessed a sudden burst of direct Plautine and Terentian imitation more striking even than that caused by the original introduction of those authors to English playwrights. The stifling atmosphere of over-ripe civilization pictured by the Latin plagiarists of the decadent Greek comedians — in which wit consists in the portrayal of clever knavery and the ridicule of the maladroit and unfashionable — was largely unintelligible to Udall. But by the time of James's accession, London manners had become far more intricate and selfconscious; and the greatest comic artists of that era, Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Middleton, often follow close in the path of Terence, producing thus a drama which is less truly a continuation of the Elizabethan method than a foreshadowing of Restoration tendencies.

In tragedy also the change in the times made itself felt: for example, in the cult of unnatural horror, in the removal of the plot from the realm of ordinary human sympathy and acquaintance, and in the growing inclination to represent the main figures as conventional dignitaries in conventional romantic cities. But in tragedy, the practice of Shakespeare maintained the old standards till after the Jacobean age was well inaugurated; whereas, in comedy, we can detect even before the death of Elizabeth the beginnings of the distinctively Stuart method.

The great exponent of the genuine Elizabethan attitude toward realistic comedy is Shakespeare, who portrays with unsurpassed truth the characters and incidents of average contemporary life, but always for the purpose of relieving and interpreting a higher ideal theme. For this poet and for the age whose spirit he voiced, the world of commonplace actuality was never dissociated from the world of lofty achievement and romantic beauty. Though, like his princely hero, he does not fail to "remember the poor creature, small beer," l life and humanity are for him invariably possessed of a nobler meaning than can be discerned by the self-deluded realist, Iago, or many soullessly objective authors of Jacobean comedy. Thus, Shakespeare's plays always infer, behind the material phenomena of existence, — the suckling of fools and chronicling of 1 * Henry IV, II, ii, 10.