Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/453

433 ENGLISH.] D E A M A 433 instances of comic creations; in the entirety of its achieve ments his genius as a comic dramatist remained un- approached. The favourite types of Jonsonian comedy, to which Dekker, J. Marston (1575-1G24), and Chapman had, though to no large extent, added others of their own, were elaborated with incessant zeal and remarkable effect by their contemporaries and successors. It was after a very different fashion from that in which the Roman comedians reiterated the ordinary types of the New Attic comedy, that the inexhaustible verve of T. Middleton (1574-1624), the buoyant productivity of Fletcher, the observant humour of N. Field (c. 1590-c. 1640), and the artistic versatility of Shirley not to mention many later and lesser names mirrored in innumerable pictures of contemporary life the undying follies and foibles of mankind. As comedians of manners more than one of these surpassed the old master, not indeed in distinctness and correctness, the fruits of the most painstaking genius that ever fitted a learned sock to the living realities of life, but in a lightness which did not impair their sureness of touch; while in the construction of plots the access of abundant new materials, and the greater elasticity in treatment which is the result of accumulated experience, enabled them to maintain a steady progress. Thus our comic dramatic literature from Jonson to Shirley is unsurpassed as a comedy of manners, while as a comedy of character it at least defies comparison with any other national literary growth preceding or contemporane ous with it. Though the younger generation, of which W. Cartwright (1611 or 1615-1643) may be taken as an example, was unequal in originality or force to its prede cessors, yet so little exhausted was the vitality of the species, that its traditions survived the interregnum of the Revolution, and connected themselves in some measure with later growths of English comedy. late: The rivals against which in its closing period the old English drama had to contend have been already noticed. From the masks and triumphs at court and at the houses of the nobility, with their Olympuses and Parnassuses built by Inigo Jones, and filled with goddesses and nymphs clad in the gorgeous costumes designed by his inventive hand, to the city pageants and shows by land and water, from the tilts and tournaments at &quot;Whitehall to the more philoso phical devices at the Inns of Court and the academical plays at the universities, down even to the brief but thrilling theatrical excitements of Bartholomew Fair and the &quot; Ninevitical motions &quot; of the puppets, in all these ways the various sections of the theatrical public were tempted aside. Foreign performers French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses paid visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of acting main tained itself at least on the level to which it had been brought by Shakespeare s associates and contemporaries, Burbadge and Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others &quot;of the older sort.&quot; The profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field) occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation of artistic merit in actors who valued the dignity of their own profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the old school of clowns. Women s parts were still acted by boys, many of whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus continued which placed the English theatre at a considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never obtained), and which probably to some extent reacted upon the licence of expression assumed by our dramatists. The arrangement of the stage, which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for their being organically connected with one another, re mained essentially the same as in Shakespeare s days, though the primitive expedients for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was apparently cultivated with much greater care ; and there is no reason to suppose that the English stage of this period had not gone as far as was expedient in a direction in which in feebler times so vast an amount of effort has come to be spent. The drama still depended in the main upon its literary essentials and upon the actor s art ; but the system of prologues and epilogues, and of dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their chief patron, the public. Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its The dran forms continued to enjoy the favour or good-will of the aml ; 1&amp;gt;un court, although a close supervision was exercised over all a attempts to make the stage the vehicle of political references or allusions. The regular official agent of this supervision was the Master of the Revels ; but under James I. a special ordinance, in harmony with the king s ideas concerning the dignity of the throne, was passed &quot; against representing any modern Christian king in plays on the stage.&quot; The theatre could hardly expect to be allowed a liberty of speech in reference to matters of state denied to the public at large ; and occasional attempts to indulge in the freedom of criticism dear to the spirit of comedy met with more or less decisive repression and punishment. 1 But the sympathies of the dramatists were so entirely on the side of the court, that the real difficulties against which the theatre had to contend came from a directly opposite quarter. With the growth of Puritanism the feeling of hostility to the stage increased in a large part of the popu lation, well represented by the civic authorities of the capital. This hostility found many ways of expressing itself. The attempts to suppress the Blackfriars theatre (1619, 1631, 1633) proved abortive; but the representation of stage plays continued to be prohibited on Sundays, and during the prevalence of the plague in London in 1637 was temporarily suspended altogether. The desire of the Puritans of the more pronounced type openly aimed at a permanent closing of the theatres. The war between them and the dramatists was accordingly of a life-and- death kind. On the one hand, the drama heaped its bitterest and often coarsest attacks upon whatever savoured of the Puritan spirit ; gibes, taunts, caricatures in ridicule and aspersion of Puritans and Puritanism make up a great part of the comic literature of the later Elizabethan drama and of its aftergrowth in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. This feeling of hostility, to which Shakespeare was no stranger, 2 though he cannot be connected with the authorship of one of its earliest and coarsest expressions, 3 rose into a spirit of open defiance in some of the master pieces of Ben Jonson ; 4 and the comedies of his contempor aries and successors 5 abound in caricatured reproductions of the more common or more extravagant types of Puritan life. On the other hand, the moral defects, the looseness of tone, the mockery of ties sanctioned by law and conse crated by religion, the tendency to treat middle-class life as the hunting-ground for the amusements of the upper classes, which degraded so much of the dramatic literature 1 Chapman, Marston (and Jonson), Eastward Hoe (1605); dleton, A Game at Chess (1624); Shirley and Chapman, The (1632); Massinger (?), The Spanish Viceroy (1634). 2 Twelfth Night. 9 s The Puritan, or The Widow of Watting Street, by &quot; W. (Wentworjth Smith ?) 4 The Alchemist; Bartholomew Fair, 5 Chapman, An Humorous Day s Mirth; Marston, The Courtesan; Middleton, The Family of Love. VII. - 55 Mid Ball