6

In

tragedies with their moralising tendency may be regarded as examples. But such special maxims, owing to their very nature, express but a very small part of life and humanity, and accordingly, in their narrowness, are unable to give the dramatic work of art-which is to present full and complete men-an inner organic unity. Hence Beaumont and Fletcher endeavour to obtain this unity in a different way, in a more external manner. this they again meet Ben Jonson. For as the latter, in following the Aristotelian unities, endeavoured, at all events, to adhere to the unity of time and place, and in most cases dropped the unity of action, so they, on the contrary, strove most towards attaining the unity of action, and disregarded the unities of place and time. In many of their better pieces-such as Valentinian,' The Bloody Brother,' 'A King or no King,' 'The Knight of Malta,' The Elder Brother,' Wit without Money,' 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,'-they have, by the rigorous development of an all-embracing intrigue, succeeded perfectly in giving the drama an external finish, such as is not met with, to the same extent, in any one of Jonson's pieces; in others, such as Philaster,' The Maid's Tragedy,' 'The Double Marriage,' 'The Two Noble Kinsmen,' The Little French Lawyer,' we indeed still find side-paths running along by the high road of the action, but these are so closely, so smoothly and so naturally connected with the former, that the unity of the whole is not disturbed. This again shows the finer tact and the higher poetical talent of the two friends. For of the three Aristotelian unities, the unity of action is the most important, the most necessary; without it the unities of place and time, even though ever so strictly observed, cannot accomplish anything. But even the unity of action alone produces in all cases but a certain external finish; it does not necessarily include the ideal character of the drama, and if the latter is not supported and penetrated with an inner intellectual. unity, the whole piece will nevertheless internally fall asunder. In Valentinian,' for instance-in spite of the strict observation of the unity of the intrigue which turns throughout upon the outrage committed upon Lucinathe fate of tius has not the slightest connection with

6

6

that of Maximus and of Valentinian; and thus the piece in reality describes three different careers of the most different significance, and these run on by the side of one another, without in any way affecting each other, and accordingly, the piece when carefully examined is found to be divided into three separate dramas. The external unity of action cannot produce what it ought, except when combined with a kind of characterisation which-as in Greek tragedy-represents the persons in typical ideality, as the universally recognised prototypes and models of humanity. If, as is invariably the case in the English. drama, these are so strongly individualised, that the personal, the special, are peculiarly prominent in them, then the unity of the action is not merely unable to embrace the variety of careers, but the more strictly it is adhered to, the more it disturbs the general applicability of the represented action-its significance for all mankind—and the drama degenerates into a dramatised anecdote, or at most has the value of a good historical representation of a single incident.

I shall pass over Massinger, Ford, Field, and the less important talents which followed Beaumont and Fletcher; for although Philip Massinger (born in 1584, appeared as a dramatic poet after 1606, probably not till 1609-10, and died in 1639) is completely their equal in poetic gifts, still his whole peculiarity consists only in the fact that, having a bold, energetic mind agitated by strong feelings, he everywhere lays on his colours more powerfully; hence, the merits as well as the defects of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramatic style appear in him more decided and more glaring.* It was, in fact, not my intention to bring

* Thus for instance the superficial, unpoetical conception of tragedy in his Duke of Milan, The Unnatural Combat, The Fatal Dowry, and others (The Virgin Martyr forms an exception, but is in reality no tragedy, but a dramatised legend, in which an angel-the page Angelo -plays the chief part, and reminds us of Calderon's Autos). In his comedies the satirical element is more decidedly maintained, especially in The City Madam, The New Way to pay Old Debts and others. In these two comedies, as well as in The Parliament of Love, The Maid of Honour, The Picture, The Guardian, we find an undisguised inclination to lead the representation in the end back to a common moral, an inclination which in him even occupies a place in his tragedies, such as

the separate poets before the reader, each in his individuality, but merely to explain in a general way, in what relations the two Schools or tendencies distinguished above, stood to each other, and in what way each endeavoured to solve the problem set before it by the dramatic art of the day. The problem, as we have seen, consisted in giving the English drama its appropriate artistic form, that is, to combine the variety of individual characters and of single deeds and destinies (such as life and history present) under one unity, not only capable externally, of rounding off this variety, and of arranging it, but also of being able to give it an ethical character and a general significance. The result of our enquiry is that neither of the two Schools succeeded in solving the problem. Both struck out upon exactly opposite paths, of which, however, the one was as wrong as the other. The contemporaries and direct successors of Greene and Marlowe looked for unity in a vague, ideal generality by enclosing, as it were, the multiplicity, the individuality of characters and actions in the wide, dilatable circle of a general poetic mood, to which circle-like Heywood and others in some pieces they certainly gave a peculiar, and in some dramas a characteristic colouring by means of a prevailing, definite tendency. But this circle had no

in The Unnatural Combat, The Duke of Milan, The Fatal Dowry. To make up for this Massinger pays less attention to the external unity of the action; his Unnatural Combat embraces two entirely different actions, the one of which turns upon old Malefort, the other upon Theocrine; The Virgin Martyr has three actions; The Renegado even more. His characters, lastly, are even more exaggerated into caricatures or weakened into abstract ideas; thus the younger Novall, Liladam, and Aymer in The Fatal Dowry, Greedy and Marrall in The New Way to pay Old Debts, Dorothea, Theophilus, and Sapritius in The Virgin Martyr, and most of the characters in The Duke of Milan and The City Madam. Ford's best piece is his historical tragedy, Perkin Warbeck. His other dramas are more or less unimportant, in comparison with Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger's best works. A collection of their works exists under the title of, The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford, with an Introduction by H. Coleridge, London, 1839. For further details about the year of Massinger's death, see Collier's Memoirs of the principal Actors, etc., p. xiii.

centre and the periphery was so wide and uncertain, that its boundaries were lost in an imperceptible distance. The definite tendency, however, did not determine and control the whole, but was, in fact, merely an element which especially asserted itself, was no general idea, but a single thought, and, as such, not sufficiently profound and comprehensive to include all the separate parts. Ben Jonson and his associates, on the other hand, looked for unity in the sphere of real, numerical individuality; they understood it after the manner of the ancients, that is, as an external, sensually perceptible, plastic unity. As the unity of place and of time it had, as it were, to be the framework which surrounded and held together the multifarious figures, or, as the unity of the intrigue, of the plot and of the motive, it had to determine the separate deeds and destinies, just as a cause determines its effect. But the external frame only touches the canvas, not the picture itself; and the unity or rather the singleness of the intrigue is incapable of giving to the individual characters, actions, and destinies, the general significance which is expressed by them. And by attempting to trace back the representation to a single moral maxim, they did not get beyond Heywood, with his similar endeavours, and moreover, by the admixture of a prosaic element they robbed their poems of the best part of their poetical lustre.

VOL. I.

CHAPTER V.

SHAKSPEARE'S DRAMATIC STYLE, AND HIS IDEA OF THE DRAMA.

THE question may now arise, did Shakspeare succeed in solving the problem which lay before him, and by what means did he solve it?

In the first place, it was through the profound and clear conception he possessed as to the nature of dramatic art which, even though he may not have originally possessed it, he nevertheless acquired in the course of his poetical

career.

He himself expresses his own opinion upon it, when he makes Hamlet (iii. 2) say that the object of the drama is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."*

It is clear from this explanation that Shakspeare sides with the English popular theatre; his wish was to keep to nature,' to the reality exhibited in life and history; he rejects those efforts which seek to reanimate the unnatural drama of the ancients-unnatural in a double respect, owing to its plastic ideality and also its foreign character. At the same time, however,and this distinguishes him from the English popular poets before and beside him-he gives the drama an essentially ethical relation. He does not intend to paint mere characters, to describe mere human actions and

66

According to S. Johnson the word age in Shakspeare signifies any period of time attributed to something as the whole or part of its duration," and hence, in the present case, not this or that century (about the sixteenth), but more generally every period, the whole course of time, that is, history in general without limitation to any definite period. The words form and pressure do not signify merely external outlines (acts, events, customs, habits, etc.), but are intended to denote that the drama is also to represent the character of the age.