From Chaucer to Tennyson
best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of
the feelings.
Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama
with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the _Sad Shepherd_. Its choral
songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole
poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. The _Knight of the
Burning Pestle,_ written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first
burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and
Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or
Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and
feminine endings.
In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which
beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the
terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in the great murder
scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure passion; but in Webster it is mingled with
something physically repulsive. Thus his _Duchess of Malfi_ is presented
in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of
her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of mad-men and, "behind a
traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if
dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that "terror," which Aristotle
said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its
dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about
them:
She would not after the report keep fresh
As long as flowers on graves.
We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world I
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most
Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams
of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some
abrupt touch of feeling.
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young,
says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and
stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the old
editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be acted by the
shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to
punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was
laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and
Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance,
which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination. It was to
them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles,
luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle
poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides,
atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and
delicate varieties of sin.
But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists
who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I.,
and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666,
and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I.
and the Commonwealth.
In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking
the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there
are a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend
themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought
which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its
attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater
relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer
lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and
political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians, like
Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like
Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in natural
science--which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under
the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom may be mentioned Wallis,
the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist; and Harvey, the discoverer of the
circulation of the blood. These are outside of our subject, but in the
strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry
is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive
treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific attitude of
mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been
drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of
antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious
erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir
Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, or _Inquiries into Vulgar and
Common Errors_, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford
scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim
himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in
listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this _Anatomy_,
in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are
considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections.
The work is a mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked for
anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of
out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne
helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that
the _Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours
sooner than he wished to rise.
The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to
refute were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink,
that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up
rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split
Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope
Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of
negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great
learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same
author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network
Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in
the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx
or lozenge. Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library,
museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special
visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and
deeply read in the school-men and the Christian Fathers. He was a
mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts
have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De
Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, _Religio
Medici_, published in 1642, and _Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial_, 1658, a
discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman
funeral urns dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly
latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose; that stately,
cumbrous, brocaded prose which had something of the flow and measure of
verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing.
Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very
subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily
interests of men. His _Religio Medici_ is full of a wise tolerance and a
singular elevation of feeling. "At the sight of a cross, or crucifix, I
can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my
Saviour." "They only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who
lived before his coming." "They go the fairest way to heaven that would
serve God without a hell." "All things are artificial, for nature is the
art of God." The last chapter of the _Urn Burial_ is an almost
rhythmical descant on mortality and oblivion. The style kindles slowly
into a somber eloquence. It is the most impressive and extraordinary
passage in the prose literature of the time. Browne, like Hamlet, loved
to "consider too curiously." His subtlety led him to "pose his
apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the
Trinity--with incarnation and resurrection;" and to start odd inquiries:
"what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid
himself among women;" or whether, after Lazarus was raised from the
dead, "his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance." The quaintness
of his phrase appears at every turn. "Charles the Fifth can never hope
to live within two Methuselahs of Hector." "Generations pass while some
trees stand, and old families survive not three oaks." "Mummy is become
merchandise; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."
One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who
was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among
other things, a _Church History of Britain;_ a book of religious
meditations, _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_; and a "character" book, _The
Holy and Profane State._ His most important work, the _Worthies of
England,_ was published in 1662, the year after his death. This was a
description of every English county; its natural commodities,
manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its
memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and
excellent common sense. Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the
quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his
writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expression and bits of
eccentric suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and Jeremy
Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of humor was
imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnolia_, and by many
of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.
Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times
imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II.,
bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological
writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are religious classics.
Taylor, like Sidney was a "warbler of poetic prose." He has been called
the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle
elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the poet of the
_Faerie Queene_. In fullness and resonance Taylor's diction resembles
that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His
pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's
pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for
admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and
the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human
faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and
sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls
up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single
passage of Taylor's is the opening chapter in _Holy Dying_. From the
midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates
rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect
things in its wording in all our prose literature. "But so have I seen a
rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as
fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece;
but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and
dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on
darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it