CHAPTER II.

THE EARLY RENAISSANCE DRAMA.

ENGLISH literature, though its spirit is so distinctively national, has throughout its course been highly sensitive to foreign influences. To Italian stimulus, more especially, our writers, from Chaucer to Browning, have responded with alacrity; and through the thinner if purer veins of our native poetry there tingles a stream of the rich, full southern blood. Thus, at the eventful epoch which we now reach in the history of the drama, it is from Florence and Rome that a fresh and dominant impulse comes. To trace the course of the Renaissance in Italy is not within our present scope. It is sufficient to note how from the middle of the fourteenth century onward scholars and poets were busied in bringing to life again the buried past of the ancient world: how this movement was gradually accelerated and intensified till it took the form of a violent recoil from mediaevalism and a return to the classical sense of the dignity and interest of human life: how this new birth of a feeling long dead found a majestic expression in architecture, painting, and letters, and gave to the southern peninsula the intellectual primacy of Europe. So when, towards the beginning of the Tudor period, Italy and England were brought into closer communication than before, the southern country could put forth a double claim to the homage of the island power; she appeared bringing forth from her treasury things old and new. She could point to the recent productions of her genius, to the poems of Ariosto and Tasso, the histories of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, to novels, plays, treatises innumerable. But, in

a certain sense, all this splendid achievement was an imitation, a reflex of the infinitely more glorious Past of Classical Antiquity. It was as the inheritor, guardian, interpreter of this Past that Italy stood forth unassailably supreme, the one law-giver in things intellectual. Was it not natural that England, destitute of literary traditions, of fixed native forms of art-for Chaucer's language and metrical system had become more than half obsolete should bow before these august credentials and accept the methods and models proferred to her from the south? What was to be gained by hazardous experiments in prose or verse, when here at hand were methods and forms of tested efficiency and immemorial prestige? So in every branch of letters we find England following a foreign or classical lead. It almost seemed as if native effort would be stifled by alien pressure, and that no more honourable portion was reserved for our literature than to become a series of lifeless imitations of imported models. But, happily, before it was too late, English genius rose insurgent and vindicated its claim. to independent life and power. It is the struggle of the spontaneous, national instinct with external forces that forms one of the most striking aspects of Elizabethan literature, and, in particular measure, of the Elizabethan drama. It may therefore be taken as a leading thread through the period upon which we

now enter.

The play which opens this period, Ralph Roister Doister, was written about 1550, by Nicholas Udall, Headmaster of Eton and afterwards of Westminster. As might be expected from the position of its author, it exhibits in full force the classical influences of the Renaissance, and proves that they were needed to produce the decisive dramatic combination of plot, dialogue, and action which Heywood failed to attain. Ralph Roister Doister is founded upon the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, who is mentioned with Terence in the Prologue as 'bearing the bell' among the learned of the day. Its two principal characters, Ralph Roister Doister, a pusillanimous, vain, and foolish braggart, and Matthew Merigreek, a needy adventurer and parasite, who makes him his tool, are types directly borrowed from the Roman stage. But they are adapted with considerable skill to the conditions

of English life, and made the chief actors in a bourgeois drama, whose plot is natural and well-constructed. Ralph is in love with Christian Custance, a widow betrothed to a merchant, Gawin Goodluck, who is away on a voyage. During Goodluck's absence, Ralph, through the agency of Merigreek, besieges the widow with letters, vows, and visits. She rates this persistent suitor at his true value, but in a spirit of fun gives some encouragement to his attentions. Goodluck arrives home unexpectedly, and finding an apparent courtship in progress between Custance and Ralph, is aroused to jealousy. But Ralph's own foolish speeches help to clear up the situation, and the play ends with his exposure and discomfiture. Thus the comedy, as is interesting to note, turns to some degree upon the same pivot as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and however immeasurably inferior in the qualities of humour and imagination, it may claim to be a respectable forerunner of Shakspere's farcical masterpiece. Its versification is simple and natural, and with a certain note of homely refinement, but it is monotonous in its flow, and lacking in the vigour and verve of Heywood's metre in The Four P's.

Inferior alike in conception and execution to Roister Doister is Gammer Gurton's Needle, dated about 1566, and generally ascribed to John Still, Master in turn of St. John's and Trinity at Cambridge, and Bishop of Bath and Wells. The play, unlike its predecessor, is by no means such as we should have expected from a scholarly hand, and it furnishes a negative, as Roister Doister a positive, proof that it was only under classical guidance that comedy of the higher type could as yet be written in England. It is a coarse and vigorous sketch of low country life, without a connected plot, and turning upon a single farcical incident. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and Diccon the Bedlam, a mischief-making rogue and vagabond, with many of the characteristics of the Vice of the Morality, accuses Dame Chat, the ale-wife, of stealing it. Hence arises a sad imbroglio into which the whole village is gradually drawn. But, when the commotion is at its height, peace is restored by the discovery of the missing needle sticking in the breeches of Hodge, the Gammer's farm-servant. The humour of the piece

is rude and slight, but, as Ward has pointed out, it is the first English play which employs the device, so often since put to brilliant use, of making the action of the drama turn upon the fortunes of an inanimate property.

In the same year as Gammer Gurton's Needle was performed at Christ's College, another comedy, more suited to the hall of a learned society, was acted at Gray's Inn. This was the Supposes of George Gascoigne, a translation of the Gli Suppositi of Ariosto, which, in its turn, was constructed from materials supplied by Terence and Plautus. The work is important for several reasons. It is our first humorous play in prose; it suggested part of the plot of The Taming of the Shrew; and it illustrates the influence on our stage, not of the Roman drama direct, but of that drama as interpreted by the Italian playwrights 1.

We have thus briefly traced the development of comedy, and have seen that it is the resultant of English, Italian, and classical influences combined, though, in this branch of the drama, the native elements were sufficiently powerful to absorb and give colour to the others. If we turn to tragedy, we shall find that here the alien forces were far more aggressive, and that they made a determined effort to capture the whole field. It is therefore important to realize clearly their exact nature. To the modern student ancient tragedy means, and practically means only, the Athenian drama of the fifth century B.C. That drama deals, as a rule, with a definite crisis or entanglement rather than the gradual development of a character or intrigue : hence its action is usually confined within narrow limits both of time and space. Treating, moreover, stately and solemn themes, it tends to avoid, though with no uniform austerity, the intermixture of lighter episodes, and permeated with the Greek artistic sense it keeps in the background all realistic details of suffering or death. But these features are the spontaneous outcome of a natural instinct; they are not due to the

1 For an account of the influence of the Italian Renaissance drama on the English, see Mr. Churton Collins' The Predecessors of Shakspere, in his Essays and Studies. In this essay, which has been reprinted since the above chapter was written, Mr. Collins shows that the various forms of the Elizabethan drama had their prototypes on the Italian stage.

conscious observance of fixed canons or rules. They are not arbitrary limitations upon the free action of the dramatic spirit, but rather the methods through which that spirit elects to work. Thus had the men of the Elizabethan age been brought into immediate contact with Aeschylus and Sophocles, they would have felt the force of a creative activity, genuinely inspired and inspiring. But this was as far as possible from being the case. After the great masters, with their living and plastic energies, invariably follow the imitators, the pedants, the formalists In his critical treatise, the Poetics, Aristotle, by the mere act of analysis, went some way to systematize and reduce to rule what had been instinctive in the dramatists themselves. Later on, the Romans, with their passion for legal accuracy and precision, carried the process further, with the final result that the free dramatic spirit was handed over to the arbitrary despotism of the Unities.'

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The outcome of five centuries of gradual degeneration may be seen in the tragedies of Seneca, the Roman dramatist of the time of Nero'. In these plays there is little action, and, in its place, we have sententious dialogue, born of the rhetorical and forensic faculty, not of the poetic. Unfortunately for the world, the age of the Renaissance in Italy had much in common with the Neronian age in Rome, and, with a fatal instinct, out of the classical treasures laid bare to its view, it fastened upon these compositions of Seneca as its models of dramatic art. Its playwrights imitated and reproduced them with unceasing diligence, and sought to bring the other literatures of Europe under their spell. Their success in France is among the commonplaces in the history of the drama. In England, there was the danger of a similar result. Here too it was Seneca, not Sophocles, who was taken as the true type of classical art. Between the years 1559 and 1566 five English authors are found translating his plays, a complete edition of which was published in 1581. According to Nash

1 For a full account of Seneca's characteristics and their bearing on our dramatic literature, see the interesting monograph, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, by J. W. Cunliffe. The same subject is treated in Rudolf Fischer's Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragödie.