From Chaucer to Tennyson
said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave
pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.) The
humor of _Hudibras_ is not of the finest. The knight and the squire are
discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough
physical drolleries of a pantomime or circus. The deep heart-laughter of
Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor rests, is, of course, not to be
looked for in Butler. But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his
style surprises with all manner of verbal antics. He is almost as great
a phrase-master as Pope, though in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart
doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as for example,
'Tis strange what difference there can be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.
_Hudibras_ has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was
the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire, _M'Fingal_,
some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for
example,
No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.
The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of
the Restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced
silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened under the
patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the Duke of
York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had fought on
the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and
was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years--had
managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656, by
presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with instrumental music
and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy.
This he brought out again in 1661, with the dialogue recast into riming
couplets in the French fashion. Movable painted scenery was now
introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formerly
played by boys. This last innovation was said to be at the request of
the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell Gwynne, was the
favorite actress at the King's Theater.
Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of
the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV.
writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere or his contemporaries
in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been formed
in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and
discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art.
Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in
particular on the _Three Unities_. Dryden followed his example in his
_Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1667), in which he treated of the unities,
and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in preference to blank verse.
His own practice varied. Most of his tragedies were written in rime, but
in the best of them, _All for Love_, founded on Shakspere's _Antony and
Cleopatra_, he returned to blank verse. One of the principles of the
classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic
dramatists of the Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and
others, composed what they called "heroic plays," such as the _Indian
Emperor_, the _Conquest of Granada_, the _Duke of Lerma_, the _Empress
of Morocco_, the _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _Nero_, and the _Rival
Queens_. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their
heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike
remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and
artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine
passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up
on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own
somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his _Phedre_, or
_Iphigenie_, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. These
bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the
_Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at
the King's Theater. The indebtedness of the English stage to the French
did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but
extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's comedy, _An
Evening's Love_, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's _Le Feint
Astrologue_, and his _Sir Martin Mar-all_, from Moliere's _L'Etourdi_.
Shadwell borrowed his _Miser_ from Moliere, and Otway made versions of
Racine's _Berenice_ and Moliere's _Fourberies de Scapin_. Wycherley's
_Country Wife_ and _Plain Dealer_ although not translations, were based,
in a sense, upon Moliere's _Ecole des Femmes_ and _Le Misanthrope_. The
only one of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged the
traditions of the Elizabethan stage was Otway, whose _Venice Preserved_,
written in blank verse, still keeps the boards. There are fine passages
in Dryden's heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous
in language. There is one great scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in
his _All for Love_. And one, at least, of his comedies, the _Spanish_
_Friar_, is skillfully constructed. But his nature was not pliable
enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that, in writing for the
stage, he "forced his genius."
In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the
Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van
Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the _Country Wife_, the
_Parson's Wedding, She Would if She Could_, the _Beaux' Stratagem,_ the
_Relapse_, and the _Way of the World_. These were in prose, and
represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. Amorous
intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them were written
expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the _Committee_ of
Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a
distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and president of the
committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the
estates of royalists. Such were also the _Roundheads_ and the _Banished
Cavaliers_ of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of
Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration
comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a
shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal
hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had
seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities
were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift
generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a
quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was _bourgeois_----reserved for London
trades-people. A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen
were rakes, the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, however, were
all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce
them, and to borrow their husbands' money. For the first and last time,
perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the
audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the
laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man.
(Contrast this with Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women
were represented as worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt.
The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the
situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin
varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal.
The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a
fineness of feeling and that _politesse de caeur_ which marks the
gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic
passion. But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a
prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts.
Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the
Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that
it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws
of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly, that at no
time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The
theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social
condition which we read of in Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of
the Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed,
"artificial" at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the
"heroic play"--was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more
natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy
Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much
toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal
characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy
re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and
Sheridan's _Rivals_, _School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9; our
last strictly "classical" comedies. None of this school of English
comedians approached their model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not
only in his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his
style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and
truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It is a
symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were
rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of
_Macbeth_ and _Julius Caesar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In
conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the
intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth
who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and
Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the
play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of _Troilus
and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of himself as
Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age.
Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon
Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and in his
_Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a horse or
in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times,
in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by water," writes
Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading _Othello, Moor of
Venice_; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but,
having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it seems a mean
thing."
In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took
its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the
Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne
and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted
upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense.
Boileau's _L'Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars Poetica_,
was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it
gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in
Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started
the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets. The Earl of
Mulgrave published two "poems" of this kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and
an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes
even rules a noble poetry"--made a metrical version of Horace's _Ars
Poetica_, and wrote an original _Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same
kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the