Plays and Puritans

‘3rd GipsyLook how the winds upon the waves grow tame,   Take up land sounds upon their purple wings,And, catching each from other, bear the same   To every angle of their sacred springs.So will we take his praise, and hurl his name   About the globe, in thousand airy rings.’* * * *

Let us pass on.  Why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit?

There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here, and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible.  The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy’s expense, in ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women’s parts acted by boys.  Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked nevertheless.  What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans is hard to conceive.  Prynne, in his ‘Histriomastix,’ may have pushed a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses’ law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that, therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a similar practice would produce a similar evil.  Our firm conviction is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty certainly to send him to the devil.  Let any man of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy’s mind which would be produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in almost every play.  We appeal to common sense—would any father allow his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of mankind?  And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving.  The Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters than Terence’s on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes?  Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere defilement of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but that, from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and that when pretty little Cupid’s mother, in Jonson’s Christmas masque, tells how ‘She could have had money enough for him, had she been tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king’s players,’ and how ‘Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and old Mr. Hemings too,’ she had better have tied a stone round the child’s neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation more money to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native town, on the fruits of others’ sin.  Honour to old Prynne, bitter and narrow as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor children whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but, while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to be regenerate in baptism.  Prynne used that argument too, and declared these stage-plays to be among the very ‘pomps and vanities which Christians renounced at baptism.’  He may or may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old heathen pantomimes and games of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for Prynne’s reading seems to have been quite enormous).  Those very prelates could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught in them which could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps it had really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes had with the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had retained in her Catechism the old Roman word ‘pomps,’ as one of the things which were to be renounced; and as ‘pomps’ confessedly meant at first those very spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to testify against something, and probably against the thing in England most like the ‘pomps’ of heathen Rome.  Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two was the better Churchman—Prynne, who tried to make the baptismal covenant mean something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as ‘The Ordinary’ to be written by his especial protégé, Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and acted before him probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by christened boys.  We do not pretend to pry into the counsels of the Most High; but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when combined with lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history tells us that it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we need look no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century prelates (whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why it pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of destruction.

There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century, new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and that is, the apotheosis of Rakes.  Let the faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors, have been what they may, that class of person was in their time simply an object of disgust.  The word which then signified a Rake is, in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even up to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin.  In Italy, even, fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the other nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his ‘Corteggiano’ (about 1520), regretting the modest and respectful training of the generation which had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.

But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth’s reign) fathers became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the young gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and Charles, with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering, beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set forth not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of ‘Monsieur Thomas’) virtues without which a man is despicable.  On this point, as on many others, those who have, for ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether unfair.  There is no immorality of the court plays of Charles II.’s time which may not be found in those of Charles I.’s.  Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master’s till to pay his losses at a betting-office.  True; we of this generation can hardly afford to throw stones.  The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England.  Better days, however, have dawned; ‘Tom and Jerry,’ instead of running three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as ‘Monsieur Thomas’ would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would, instead of winning a good wife, be ‘cut’ by braver and finer gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?

There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage of profligate scapegraces on the stage.  They would not have been endured on the stage had they not been very common off it; and if there had not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been.  If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible.  But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity.  Take him as he stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers.  He would have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a man-of-war—anything where he could find a purpose and a work.  Doubt it not.  How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life.  And even at such a youth’s worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to deal out to him the same measure as we do to the offences of the cool and hoary profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false professor.  But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and practically revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against what sin is it revealed?  It was not left for our age to discover that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot and cold steel did.

‘But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.’  The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse.  If it be said that Shakspeare’s is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother play-writers.  True, there is far less of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his compeers: but they are there.  And what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to expunge before we can now represent his plays.  If it be said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the higher elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation.  The Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and brother poets did not see.  And it is surely a matter of fact that the deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare’s plays (and them alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has assigned to him.

‘I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men’s witty labours, especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr. Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood.’

While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing in Shakspeare beyond the same ‘happy and copious industry’ which he sees in Dekker and Heywood,—while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real genius in Charles the First’s reign, places Fletcher’s name ‘’Twixt Jonson’s grave and Shakspeare’s lighter sound,’ and tells him that

‘Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit liesI’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fool’s replies.* * * * *Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.* * * * *Nature was all his art; thy vein was freeAs his, but without his scurrility;’ 3

while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare’s marvellous lyrical sweetness, ‘his native wood-notes wild’; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among the cranes?

An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments’ consideration.  It is said, ‘the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime.  It was the fashion of the age.  It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it.  The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.’  Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster’s plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a virtue.  After saying that the licentious and debauched are made ‘as odious in representation as they would be if they were actually present’—an assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to forget that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be, keeps stoutly on the side of virtue—Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that ‘perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless of words, and only considerate of actions.’

To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the fact is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence which cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half of the seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the nineteenth; that the proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader: but that these pages will not be defiled by the details of them.

Let it be said that coarseness was ‘the fashion of the age.’  The simple question is, was it a good fashion or a bad?  It is said—with little or no proof—that in simple states of society much manly virtue and much female purity have often consisted with very broad language and very coarse manners.  But what of that?  Drunkards may very often be very honest and brave men.  Does that make drunkenness no sin?  Or will honesty and courage prevent a man’s being the worse for hard drinking?  If so, why have we given up coarseness of language?  And why has it been the better rather than the worse part of the nation, the educated and religious rather than the ignorant and wicked, who have given it up?  Why?  Simply because this nation, and all other nations on the Continent, in proportion to their morality, have found out that coarseness of language is, to say the least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong to do certain things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of them; that even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose their sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them.  On the whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as insincere.  Certainly, in our day, it will not hold.  If any one wishes to hear coarse language in ‘good society’ he can hear it, I am told, in Paris: but one questions whether Parisian society be now ‘under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue’ than our own.  The sum total of the matter seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again the old Puritans were right.  And quaintly enough, the party in the English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence are the most scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth, are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and benevolent intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a conventional education,—a hot-house training which will render them incapable hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the world.  They themselves republished Massinger’s ‘Virgin Martyr,’ because it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist—for there is every reason to believe that Massinger was one—setting forth how the heroine was attended all through by an angel in the form of a page, and how—not to mention the really beautiful ancient fiction about the fruits which Dorothea sends back from Paradise—Theophilus overcomes the devil by means of a cross composed of flowers.  Massinger’s account of Theophilus’ conversation will, we fear, make those who know anything of that great crisis of the human spirit suspect that Massinger’s experience thereof was but small: but the fact which is most noteworthy is this—that the ‘Virgin Martyr’ is actually one of the foulest plays known.  Every pains has been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not.  If Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we are aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is Dekker’s, and all the poetry Massinger’s.  He confesses—as indeed he is forced to do—that ‘Massinger himself is not free from dialogues of low wit and buffoonery’; and then, after calling the scenes in question ‘detestable ribaldry, ‘a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of filth and dulness,’ recommends them to the reader’s supreme scorn and contempt,—with which feelings the reader will doubtless regard them: but he will also, if he be a thinking man, draw from them the following conclusions: that even if they be Dekker’s—of which there is no proof—Massinger was forced, in order to the success of his play, to pander to the public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate these villanies; that the play which, above all others of the seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety, devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of the Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable to the laws against abominable publications.

No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?

Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the ‘Duchess of Malfi.’  A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare’s time.

The whole story of ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ is one of sin and horror.  The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the basest passions.  But the play is not a study of those passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature.  There is no trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all but forgotten.  The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct under those circumstances.  This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest.  His characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form.  Now and then he essays to draw a character: but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the ‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act.  Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has ever approached.

But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim.  He has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power.  There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’  To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay.  Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’ 4—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.

Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general.  We will say no more on this matter, save to ask, Cui bono?  Was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?

The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all.  General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such purpose.  What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward.  That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful.  Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection.  He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person.  If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards.  In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive.  He hears his mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is not of much importance.