CHAPTER I

THE EPIC AND LYRIC ELEMENTS IN THE EARLY

ROMANTIC DRAMA

THE History of Poetry on the English Stage is, roughly speaking, confined within a period limited on one side by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and on the other by the ordinance of the Long Parliament closing the theatres in 1642. Before the earlier of these two dates our dramatic poetry is rude and embryonic, nor does it include among its motives the principle of romance which is generally recognised as being the characteristic feature of our stage. After the reopening of the theatres the stage, by the aid of rhyme, music, and scenic machinery, was illuminated with a certain external splendour, but its historic life and genius was withered at the root. Between the two dates I have mentioned the poetic drama assumed its proper artistic form, rose to a splendid zenith, and sank in a not inglorious decline. I shall attempt in the following pages to trace the course of this poetical movement through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I.; to show how the drama reflected in an ideal form the course of national life and action; to examine the general causes that produced the changes of taste in the theatre; and to illustrate the effect of these changes in the art of particular poets.

As the subject so viewed will appear in a somewhat

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new light, it may be desirable to point out in the first place how the course of our inquiry must necessarily differ from that hitherto pursued by the historians of the stage in England and Germany. The English historians have, with few exceptions, confined themselves to the record of external facts. Malone and Collier did invaluable service by collecting all available information about the antiquities of the English stage; they told us in their histories practically all that can be discovered as to the dates of the production of plays, the building of theatres, the payment of playwrights and actors,—this being knowledge absolutely essential in forming a just idea of the progress of the poetical drama. But they made no attempt to examine the meaning of these facts in their relation to English poetry as a whole, or to compare the English with any other stage; and Dr. Ward, whose admirable History of English Dramatic Literature is designed to fill up the literary void in their system, has naturally restricted himself to judging the merits of our dramatists as individuals, without determining their respective places in the general movement of the drama.

The Germans, on the other hand, have followed the method of what is called "æsthetic" criticism; they interpret the poetical facts with which they have to deal in the light of some a priori theory of their own. Augustus Schlegel, who set the example which has been followed in various shapes by all the German critics, assumed, as the starting-point for his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, the critical axioms by which he sought to justify the existence of the school of Romantic poetry in Germany. He held that the differences in spirit and character between the ancient and modern drama were to be explained by the fundamental differences between the heathen and Christian views of life; he regarded the Attic stage, on the one hand, and the English and Spanish stages, on the other, as the emanations and products of two opposing spirits; Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides being, in his view, the avatars of paganism, Shakespeare and Calderon of

Christianity. Shakespeare, whom he treated as the sole representative of the English drama, appeared to him as being, like Melchizedek, almost "without parents and without descent"; he explained the various developments in the history of drama by a series of logical antitheses, "ancient and modern," "Christian and pagan," "classic and romantic"; the divergences in the form of the Attic and English plays he supposed to be due to the influence, in the one case, of sculpture, par excellence the art of the Greeks, and, in the other, to that of painting, the characteristic art of Christian Europe. The germ of his critical hypothesis is contained in the following passage :

The poetry of the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of desire: the former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope. . . . The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect union and proportion between all the powers, a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at a consciousness of internal discord, which renders such an ideal impossible, and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, so as to blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of the senses are to be hallowed, as it were, by a mysterious connection between higher feelings; and the soul, on the other hand, embodies its forebodings or indescribable intuitions of infinity in types and symbols borrowed from the visible world.1

I am far from denying that this metaphysical antithesis accounts for some of the differences between the ancient and modern dramas; but it does not cover all the facts of the case. There are many Greek tragedies in which the sense of spiritual discord is vividly expressed, notably the Eumenides, the Antigone, and the Philoctetes. Contrarily, were it true that there is between Christian and pagan art the sharp opposition that Schlegel imagines, we should have found the "romantic" style appearing on the stages of all Christian countries; yet Schlegel himself, though apparently unaware of the significance of his admission, recognises the fact that the only countries of

1 Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (Bohn's Edition, 1846), pp. 26, 27.

modern Europe in which this style has flourished are Spain and England; while in Italy and France the form of the drama has been mainly determined by models taken from the classical ages.

The fundamental error in the a priori system of æsthetic criticism is that it applies to the facts it observes "the method of difference," without previously applying "the method of agreement." Had Schlegel compared the Greek and English dramas, side by side, in their origin and in the whole manner of their development, he would certainly have been struck with the many points in which they resembled each other, and he might have discovered deeper reasons for their characteristic divergences than those which he actually assigns. Both in fact had their foundations in the nature of man; both came into existence under very similar conditions of society; both, in perfecting their respective forms, passed through the same inevitable stages of invention and taste. These natural affinities must be appreciated before we can understand the radical differences in their artistic character.

The modern, like the ancient, drama arose out of the instinct of imitation, implanted in all human beings. In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, the first mode of poetically imitating action was the epic song of the single minstrel, and, as Plato very sagaciously divined, epic poetry contains in itself the germ of the drama :

SOCRATES. It is equally narrative, is it not, whether the poet is reciting the occasional speeches, or describing the intermediate events?

GLAUCUS. Undoubtedly it is.

SOCRATES. But when he delivers the speech in the character of another man, shall we not say that, on every such occasion, he aims at the closest resemblance of style to the person introduced as the speaker?

GLAUCUS. We shall of course.

SOCRATES. But when one man assumes a resemblance to another in voice or look is not that imitation?

GLAUCUS. Undoubtedly it is.

SOCRATES. Then in such cases it appears that both Homer and other poets carry on the narrative through the medium of imitation.1

1 Plato, Republic, book iii.