youth being coarsely paralleled in mad mockery by the arts of Pygmalion to bring his beloved statue to life. The risk in all such parodies is that they be taken as serious productions. This has been the fate of Shakespeare's sonnet parodies; and Marston either feared or had actually incurred a similar calamity. "Curio, know'st my sprite, Yet deem'st that in sad seriousness I write Such nasty stuff as is Pygmalion? O barbarous dropsy noll! Think'st thou that genius that attends my soul, And guides my fist to scourge magnificoes, Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows?" Marston seems to have had rather a fancy for parodying Shakespeare: he more than once has a fling at "A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" and in "The Malcontent" he has several hits at passages in Hamlet, including "Illo, ho, ho, ho, art there, old Truepenny?" and a parody on Hamlet's reflection, "What a piece of work is man!" But he also paid the great dramatist the compliment of imitating from him. In "The Malcontent," the conception of the villain Mendozo is indebted in several particulars to Richard III. And the hinge of the plot is borrowed indirectly from "Hamlet." A banished Duke of Genoa returns to court in the disguise of Malevolo, an ill-conditioned cynic, who deliberately uses his reputation for craziness as a licence to tell people of their vices in very surly terms face to face. This origin of the idea of Malevolo might not have occurred to us but for the parodies of Hamlet in the play and it has a certain value as showing Marston's notion of the feigned madness of Hamlet. Marston's plays are very remarkable and distinctive productions. They are written with amazing energy-energy audacious, defiant, shameless, yet, when viewed in the totality of its manifestations, not unworthy to be called Titanic. They make no pretence to dramatic impartiality; they are written throughout in the spirit of his satires; his puppets walk the stage as embodiments of various ramifications of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, side by side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigorous life: they are much more forcible and distinct personalities than Chapman's characters. But though Marston brings out his characters sharply and clearly, and puts them in lifelike motion, they are too manifestly objects of their creator's liking and disliking: some are caricatured, some are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. From one great fault Marston's personages are exceedingly free : they may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are seldom dull-their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. And all his serious creations have here and there put into their mouths passages of tremendous energy. Charles Lamb has gathered from Marston, for his 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' extracts of passionate declamation and powerful description hardly surpassed in all that rich collection. As we read Marston's plays, too, the conviction gains ground upon us that, after all, he was not the ill-conditioned, snarling, and biting cur that he would have us believe himself to be, but a fairly honest fellow of very powerful intellect, only rude and rugged enough to have a mad delight in the use of coarse paradox and strong language. He was not a self-satisfied snarler, girding freely at the world, but tender of his own precious personality. His plays convince us that there was a touch of sincere modesty in his prayer to Oblivion :— In the Induction to "What you Will," he makes Doricus turn round on Philomene, who is railing against the stupidity of the public in the vein of the "Scourge of Villany," and call the strain rank, odious, and leprous-" as your friend the author . . . seems so fair in his own glass . . . that he talks once of squinting critics, drunken censure, splay-footed opinion, juiceless husks, I ha' done with him, I ha' done with him.” And in the body of the same play he is hardy enough to make Quadratus fall out upon Kinsayder, his own nom de plume in his early satires : "Why, you Don Kinsayder, Thou canker-eaten, rusty cur, thou snaffle We cannot complain of ill-treatment from a cynic so unmerciful to himself, so uncompromising in his gross ebullient humour. We are inclined to concede to him that, like his own Feliche, he "hates not man, but man's lewd qualities." There are more amiable and admirable characters in his plays than in Chapman's. He has good characters to set off the bad: the treacherous, unscrupulous Mendozo is balanced by the faithful Celso; the shamelessly frail Aurelia by the constant Maria; the cruel, boastful Piero by the noble Andrugio; the impulsive, unceremonious, warm-hearted, pert, forward, inquisitive, chattering Rossaline, by the true and gentle Mellida. III.-BEN JONSON (1573-1637). Ben Jonson had a mind of immense force and pertinacious grasp; but nothing could be wider of the truth than the notion maintained with such ferocity by Gifford, that he was the father of regular comedy, the pioneer of severe and correct taste. Jonson's domineering scholarship must not be taken for more than it was worth it was a large and gratifying possession in itself, but he would probably have written better plays and more poetry without it. It is a sad application of the mathematical method to the history of our literature to argue that the most learned playwright of his time superseded the rude efforts of such untaught mother-wits as Shakespeare with compositions based on classical models. What Jonson really did was to work out his own ideas of comedy and tragedy, and he expressly claimed the right to do so. The most scrupulous adherence to the unity of time, and the most rigid exclusion of tragic elements from comedy, do not make a play classical. Ben Jonson conformed to these externals; but there was not a more violently unclassical spirit than his among all the writers for the stage in that generation. His laborious accumulation of learned details, his fantastic extravagance of comic and satirical imagination, the heavy force of his expression, his study of "humours," had their origin in his own nature, and not in the models of Greece and Rome. 66 Jonson, according to his own account, was of Scotch extraction, his grandfather being a Johnstone of Annandale, who settled in Carlisle, and was taken into the service of Henry VIII. His father, who suffered persecution under Mary, and afterwards became a grave minister of the gospel," died before our poet's birth. Whether or not his mother married a bricklayer as her second husband, it would seem that in his youth he was apprenticed to that trade, but not before he had received at least the rudiments of a good education at Westminster School under Camden, a patron to whom he was never backward in acknowledging his obligations. From bricklaying he went in disgust to soldiering, and served a brief campaign in, the Low Countries, distinguishing himself in a single combat with a champion of the enemy, whom he killed and stripped in the sight of both camps. How he began his connection with the stage is not known. He is called "bricklayer" 2 in 1598 in a letter of Henslowe's giving an account of a 1 His picture of the Court of Augustus, which Lamb praises so highly, was founded probably on what he saw or what he desiderated at the Court of England. Jonson seems always to have had friends among the courtiers. 2 Collier's Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' p. 50. It would not have been at all unlike the man to work as a bricklayer while writing for the stage. He might have enjoyed the defiance of public opinion in honest labour. This would give Y duel that he fought in that year with a player; but before that time he had begun to write plays. A version of his "Every Man in his Humour" would seem to have been put on the stage in 1596, and the play was published in 1598. The dates of the production of his subsequent plays, as given by Gifford, are as follows: "The Case is Altered," published 1598; "Every Man out of his Humour," 1599; "Cynthia's Revels," 1600; "Poetaster," 1601; "Sejanus," 1603; "Eastward Ho!" (written in conjunction with Chapman and Marston), 1605; "Volpone, or The Fox," 1605; "Epicone, or The Silent Woman," 1609; "The Alchemist," 1610; "Catiline," 1611; "Bartholomew Fair," 1614; "The Devil is an Ass," 1616; "The Staple of News," 1625; "The New Inn," 1630; "The Magnetic Lady," 1632; "The Tale of a Tub," 1633. These plays were not the author's chief means of living they were not as a rule popular. He told Drummond in 1618 that all his plays together had not brought him £200. A more lucrative employment was the preparation of Masques for the Court he seems to have furnished the Court with a masque or other entertainment almost every year from the accession of James till 1627, when his quarrel with Inigo Jones lost him this pleasant source of income. In 1613 he went abroad in charge of the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1616 he obtained from the Crown a pension of 100 marks. This was confirmed to him by Charles; yet from his loss of the Court entertainments, and the failure of the last plays that he wrote, his closing years were embittered by distressful poverty. In his celebrated conversations with Drummond during his visit to Scotland in 1618-19, he complained that poetry had "beggared him when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant;" and his circumstances at that time were affluent compared with what they were in his later years. Jonson's person was not built on the classical type of graceful or dignified symmetry: he had the large and rugged dimensions of a strong Borderland reiver, swollen by a sedentary life into huge corpulence. Although in his later days he jested at his own "mountain belly and his rocky face," he probably bore his unwieldy figure with a more athletic carriage than his namesake the lexicographer. Bodily as well as mentally he belonged to the race of Anak. His position among his contemporaries was very much what Samuel Johnson's might have been had he been contradicted and fought against by independent rivals, jealous and resentful of his dictatorial manner. Ben Jonson's large and irascible personality could not have failed to command respect; but a literality to Dekker's taunt of "the lime-and-mortar poet." But Jonson is entered as 66 player" in 1596. He can hardly be supposed to have returned to bricklaying. his rivals had too much respect for themselves to give way absolutely to his authority. They refused to be as grasshoppers in his sight. We should do wrong, however, to suppose that this disturbed the giant's peace of mind. Gifford, who makes a good many mistakes in the course of his rabidly one-sided memoir of Jonson, is certainly right in saying that he was not an envious man. His arrogance was the arrogance of irascible and magnanimous strength-good-natured when not thwarted, and placable when well opposed. If his rivals refused to be as grasshoppers, he accepted them contentedly at their own valuation, with, perhaps, passing fits of occasional ill-temper. There is no evidence to support his alleged jealousy of Shakespeare: it is quite possible that he may have made occasional sharp remarks about his great contemporary; but when he sat down to remember the worth of the mighty dead, his words breathed nothing but sincere and generous admiration and warm friendship. His relations with Marston and Inigo Jones are typical of the man. He quarrelled with them and showed them up, was reconciled, and quarrelled again. He took offence at Marston, and ridiculed him unmercifully as Crispinus "The Poetaster"; became friends with him again; received the dedication of his "Malcontent"; and wrote with him and Chapman in "Eastward Ho!" yet told Drummond that he had many quarrels with Marston. He scoffed at Inigo Jones in "Bartholomew Fair" as Lanthorn Leatherhead, a puppetseller and contriver of masques;1 co-operated with him afterwards in the preparation of Court entertainments; and finally broke with him utterly, and tried to extinguish him with lofty contempt. There seems to be no denying that Ben was irascible and difficult to get on with. Yet there was a fundamental large-hearted goodhumour in him too. We must not judge of him altogether by his conversations with Drummond, as Drummond himself did he was the sort of man that falls into fits of incontinent railing and depreciation, and so conveys an erroneous impression of his normal In his better moods he was not unwilling to laugh at his own failings. He had many friends among the great patrons of poetry. inner nature. When we examine into the alleged correctness of Jonson's plays, we find curious evidence of how his known acquaintance with the classics has imposed upon his critics. "Generally speaking," says Gifford, "his characters have but one predominating quality his merit (whatever it be) consists in the felicity with which he combines a certain number of such personages, distinct from one 1 Gifford denied this without authority. It is supported by the Drummond conversations, in which Jonson said (in 1618) that he had told Prince Charles that when he wanted words to set forth a knave, he would name him an Inigo;" and also by the language of his final "Expostulation with Inigo Jones." |