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CHAPTER VIII

DRAMATIC TASTE OF THE CITY: ROMANCE AND MORALITY: MUNDAY, HEYWOOD, DEKKER,

MIDDLETON

CHARLES LAMB, in the preface to his Specimens of the British Dramatists, explains that his purpose in publishing his selections was first to illustrate "the manner in which our ancestors felt when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations"; and next to show "how much of Shakespeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind." His book is a delightful one, but it can scarcely be said that it attains either of the objects with which it was written. An act, a scene, or a single speech of a play, detached from its context, fails to throw the least light on the feelings with which the play as a whole was witnessed by the spectators on the stage. Still less can such "specimens" furnish a measure of the relative proportion in which the genius of Shakespeare stands to that of any of his contemporaries. On the contrary, the ecstatic and unmeasured enthusiasm of the comments appended by Lamb to his extracts has the effect of raising in the mind an idea of the colossal greatness of all the Elizabethan dramatists, which is by no means sustained when their works are examined organically.

A great drama must satisfy two conditions: it must be written in conformity with the universal laws of art, and it must reflect the characteristic taste of those for whose

gratification it was first composed. Judged by this canon the genius of Shakespeare stands in a class apart from all his contemporaries. Like them, indeed, he played his part in promoting on the stage an artistic movement which no single dramatist can be said to have originated, and I have endeavoured to point out in detail how largely the form of his plays was determined by a consideration for the taste of his audience. But he was a man so amply endowed by nature with the genius of poetry that his creations seem (though they actually are not) to be independent of time and place. The purpose of playing, as he understood it, was to hold the mirror up to nature. Possessing a profound knowledge of stage-craft, and understanding what Aristotle calls the "weakness of the spectators," his invention was, nevertheless, always employed in devising how he might turn the public taste and the traditions of the theatre to the service of fine art. Hence his plays in themselves constitute the standard of perfection, by reference to which the performances of the other dramatists of the age must be examined and judged.

None of his contemporaries, with the exception perhaps of Ben Jonson, cherished a like lofty ideal of art; to all the rest the description of "hack playwright," improperly used by Grant White of Shakespeare, may be justly applied. Men of great skill and much learning, many of them even possessed of fine genius, they were dramatists by profession, poets only in a subordinate sense. Though they imitated Nature, it was always with an eye to the conditions of the stage, and in the main hope of pleasing those upon whose favour they were immediately dependent. Since the scope of their work was strictly limited by these local and temporary considerations, it has failed to produce the same universal pleasure as Shakespeare's, being either so devoid of general interest, or so deeply tinged with the particular manners of the time, as to be uncongenial to posterity, which is mainly occupied with its own concerns. For this very reason the minor Elizabethan dramatists have a special historical interest; but if we are to value them on Lamb's principle,

as the mirrors of our ancestors' feelings, we must study them in the light of universal laws of art, and rank the works of each poet in their proper place and proportion, seating ourselves in imagination among the spectators in the Elizabethan theatre, observing the constitution and temper of the audience, noting the social changes which modified the transient fashions of the stage. In a word, while the plays of Shakespeare are the standard of art in the romantic drama, the plays of his successors measure the progress of romantic taste.

The usually round form of the English theatres,1 built in considerable numbers in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, was probably suggested by the Old Bear Garden and Paris Garden on the south side of the Thames, which had been previously erected for the entertainments of bull and bear-baiting: indeed some of the theatres, when plays were not being performed in them, were used for these ruder amusements, and were accordingly provided with a movable stage. On the other hand, the internal arrangements of the theatre may have been to some extent adapted from the old inns, in the yards of which, before the erection of theatres, plays were frequently performed, while the spectators thronged around the stage or witnessed the spectacle from the windows and the external galleries and passages. The playhouses had no roof, but part of the stage was protected by a covering called "the heavens," sometimes, but not always, supported by pillars; behind this was the tiring house for the actors, surmounted by a tower from which announcement was made to the public outside, either by the sounding of a trumpet or the display of banners, that the performance was about to begin. Seats could be obtained in different parts of the theatre, at prices ranging from twopence or threepence up to eighteenpence. The bulk of the spectators stood in the yard or pit; the best places were the boxes looking sideways on the stage, which, in Elizabeth's time, were probably occupied by the aristocratic part of the audience: it was not till almost the end of the Queen's

1 The Fortune seems to have been the only theatre built in a square form.

reign that we have any evidence of the presence of spectators on the stage itself. Smoking was allowed and refreshments circulated in all parts of the house.

From this arrangement it is evident that-assuming an audience with distinct ideas of their own as to what constituted dramatic life and action-the judgment of the pit would have had a preponderating weight in determining the ideas of the dramatist. Moreover, the romantic drama came into existence precisely at the period when the enthusiasm of this part of the audience, elevated above their ordinary thoughts and feelings by the consciousness of the growing greatness of their country, and of the influence which they themselves could indirectly exert in determining the course of national affairs, required to find some form of outward expression on the stage. The democratic tendency of taste in the early days of the romantic drama may be inferred from the description given by Dekker of the audience at the close of this period :

Sithence then the place is so free in entertainment, allowing a stool as well to the Farmer's son as to your Templar: that your stinkard has the self-same liberty to be there in his Tobaccofumes which your sweet courtier hath and that your Carman and Tinker claim as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to give judgment on the play's life and death, as well as the proudest Momus among the tribes of critic: it is fit that he whom the most tailors' bills do make room for, when he comes, should not be basely (like a viol) cased up in a corner.1

To the robust imagination, the naive enthusiasm, and the adventurous ignorance of such an audience as is here described, the masters of the early romantic drama dedicated their art; the taste of the turbulent apprentices of the city, the swaggering soldiers of fortune, returned from service in the Low Countries, the "carman and tinker," accustomed to the realistic imitation of Nature in the Moralities, is reflected in their plays. Hence the torrents of blood that flow in the tragedies of Kyd; the strong and animated representation of the passion of 1 Dekker's Gulls Horn Book, 1609, chap. 6.

Revenge in Titus Andronicus; "the mighty line" "bombasted out" in plays like The Battle of Alcazar, and dear to the minds of the Nyms and Pistols who transferred the style from the boards of the theatre to the "slang" of ordinary life. So marked was the character of this early form of Romance, that the popular ideal of the Armada period continued for almost a generation to influence the art of the dramatist: "He that will swear" -says Ben Jonson in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair -"Jeronimo and Andronicus are the best plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at here, as a man whose judgment shows it is constant and hath stood still these five-and-twenty or thirty years."

As the performance of plays in the theatre grew into a settled form of entertainment, the simpiepopular idea of Romance, developed out of the experiments of Marlowe and his school, diverged into a great variety of forms, adapted to the tastes of different portions of the audience. There was, in the first place, the highest form of poetic romance, represented by the genius of Shakespeare, not limited by the range of any section of the national imagination, but grounded on what was best in the characters of all, carrying the spectators out of themselves into an ideal sphere of action, and fusing the conflicting traditions of the stage into novel and harmonious effects of art. Opposed to this was what may be called the anti-romantic taste of the more learned and critical portion of the audience, instructed in the culture of the Italian Humanists, and holding with Jonson that, as the end of the drama was the direct imitation of manners, the true form of imitation was a species of play compounded of the Vetus Comedia and the English Morality. Incapable of fully appreciating either the poetic idealism of Shakespeare or the classic learning of Jonson, the London citizen cherished an idea of romance peculiar to himself, in which the love of enterprise and adventure was mixed with a sentimentalism at once generous and domestic. His conceptions of action were vaguely formed from reading the chronicles of Holinshed, patriotic