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The second dumb show.

Enter Flamineo, Marcello, Camillo, with four more, as captains: they drink healths and dance: a vaulting-horse is brought into the room: Marcello and two more whispered out of the room, while Flamineo and Camillo strip themselves unto their shirts as to vault; they compliment who shall begin: as Camillo is about to vault Flamineo pitcheth him upon his neck, and, with the help of the rest, writhes his neck about, seems to see if it be broke, and lays him folded double as 'twere, under the horse, etc.

Thus the dramatist saves himself the trouble of representing the course of events in the play, and is ready to concentrate all his energies on the effective scene of the trial of Vittoria for adultery and murder. On the other hand, in The Duchess of Malfi the plot is too slender to bear all the machinery applied to it. The Duchess, having lost her husband, is warned by her two brothers not to marry again, and Bosola, the villain of the drama, is set, unknown to her, as a spy upon her conduct. She marries secretly

her steward Antonio, and Bosola discovers first that she is married, and later who is her husband. He reveals the fact to his employers, by whose orders the Duchess and her children are barbarously murdered. Sixteen persons are employed to work out this simple action, with the necessary result that at least ten parts in the play are superfluous, and scenes have to be invented to give them occupation. The whole of the fourth act is devoted to intensifying the tragic agony of the Duchess's death; yet, though the imagination is glutted with horrors, much still remains incomplete: the Duchess's husband must suffer and justice be done on the murderers, so that the fifth act is crowded with the assassinations of the Duke of Calabria, the Cardinal and his mistress Julia, the villain Bosola, and Antonio.

Where there is so little organic unity of action, it is of course not to be expected that there will be much consistency of character: Webster is content to make his speeches effective for the moment, without considering whether the words are probable and appropriate in the mouth of the person who uses them. Giovanni, who appears in the earlier scenes of Vittoria Corombona as a

prattling innocent, asking "What do the dead do, uncle? Do they eat?" concludes the play with a sermon :—

Remove the bodies-see, my honoured lords,
What use you ought make of their punishment:
Let guilty men remember their black deeds
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds.

Every passion is strained to the highest pitch, for the purpose of harrowing the souls of the spectators. Ferdinand, the wicked Duke of Calabria, after deliberately agonising the last moments of his sister, by presenting to her what she supposes to be the hand of her dead husband, and by surrounding her with a dance of madmen, says to Bosola, the agent of his villainies :

Let me see her face
Again. Why didst not thou pity her? What
An excellent, honest man might'st thou have been,
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, oppos'd thyself,
With thy advanced sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!

I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done 't.1

It is not to be denied that human nature is subject to these violent revolutions of feeling; but they ought to be represented with profound knowledge and skill in order to make them credible. Evidently the scene from which the above passage is taken is imitated from the interview between Shakespeare's Hubert and King John, when the latter supposes Arthur to be dead; but, if any one wishes to note the difference between tragedy and melodrama, let him observe the manner in which Shakespeare has rendered probable the succession of conflicting feelings in John's mind, and then contrast it either with Ferdinand's repentance, or with that of the compassionate murderer Bosola, weeping over the Duchess's dead body :

Oh, she's gone again! there the cords of life broke.
O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps

1 Duchess of Malfi, Act iv. Sc. 2.

On turtles' feathers, whilst a guilty conscience

Is a black register, wherein is writ

All our good deeds and bad, a perspective

That shows us hell! That we cannot be suffer'd

To do good when we have a mind to it!

This is manly sorrow;

These tears, I am very certain, never grew

In my mother's milk: my estate is sunk

Below the degree of fear; where were

These penitent fountains while she was living?
Oh, they were frozen up!1

In his power of imagining and expressing the motives by which men commit great crimes, Webster seems to me to be distinctly inferior to the author of Arden of Feversham: he is superior to the latter only in imagery and versification. In both of these respects he shows himself a close student of Shakespeare, whose unequalled richness of fancy has furnished Webster with many hints, which, like a true artist, he has known how to put out at good interest. No poet was ever more economical of his own resources. Like Seneca, he is always thinking of sentences, and, when he has lighted on a thought which pleases him, he is pretty sure to remember it for future use. Here are some examples :

Perfumes, the more they are chafed, the more they render
Their pleasing scents.- Vittoria Corombona.

Man, like to cassia, is prov'd best, being bruis'd.

-Duchess of Malfi.

Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
But, look'd to near, have neither heat nor light.

-Vittoria Corombona.

This couplet is repeated without change in The Duchess of Malfi.

'Twere fit you think on what hath former bin;
I have heard grief named the eldest child of sin.

I suffer now for what hath former bin:

-Vittoria Corombona.

Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.-Duchess of Malfi.

1 Duchess of Malfi, Act. iv. Sc. 2.

I have seen children oft eat sweet-meats thus,

As fearful to devour them too soon.-Duchess of Malfi.

This is repeated, with the omission of "too soon," in the Appius and Virginia.

You would look up to heaven, but I think

The devil, that rules i' the air, stands in your light.

-Duchess of Malfi.

While they aspire to do themselves most right,

The devil, that rules i' the air, hangs in their light.

-The Devil's Law Case.

A count! he's a mere stick of sugar-candy.-Duchess of Malfi.

'Tis concluded you are a fool, a precious one; you are a mere stick of sugar-candy.—The Devil's Law Case.

For though our national law distinguish bastards
From true legitimate issue, compassionate nature
Makes them all equal.-Duchess of Malfi.

For though our civil law makes differences
Between the base and the legitimate,
Compassionate nature makes them equal.

-The Devil's Law Case.

Such self-repetitions, extremely characteristic of the laborious and economical art of Webster, should be remembered when that is spoken of as almost worthy to be compared with the boundless affluence of Shakespeare's genius.

CHAPTER X

BEN JONSON AND THE ANTI-ROMANTIC REACTION

THE life of Ben Jonson may be described, in the words applied by Pope to the character of Atossa, as "a warfare upon earth." In the early days of his dramatic career we find him at war with two of his fellow playwrights: at war soon afterwards with the players: at war in his decline with the audience who were his judges in the theatre at war in the very eve of his days with the fellow-labourer who shared with him the patronage of the Court. This turbulent experience is set down, by critics who dislike him, solely to the account of a quarrelsome, envious, and malignant temper; and it need not be denied that Jonson had mainly himself to blame for many of the troubles in which he was involved. But to infer from his aggressive self-esteem that his arrogant judgment of other men's work was the reflection of a petty personal jealousy, is to view the art and the character of a great man in false perspective. Jonson's want of moderation was due not only to himself but to his circumstances; to his sense that he was the champion of a worthy cause in art which was not understood by the people; and, however ill-judged was his advocacy of his own principles, the respect in which he was held by his contemporaries, the weight attaching to his name with posterity, and the soundness and solidity of his work, ought to raise him above the charge of meanness with which a petty partisanship has sought to degrade his memory.

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