Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/457

437 ENGLISH.] DRAMA 437 wards to so large an extent became dissociated. But the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of tlte public cf the &quot;Augustan&quot; age, and of that which succeeded it, in general were fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of the poetic drama remained irreconcilable during a long period of our literature. There is every reason to conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of artificiality, and stiffened into apparently immutable forms in such actors as Macklin and Quin. The rrick. genius of Garrick, whose theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, opened a new era in his art. His unparal leled success was due in the first instance to his incompar able natural gifts ; but these were indisputably enhanced by a careful and continued literary training, and ennobled by a purpose which prompted him to essay the noblest, as he was capable of performing the most various, range of English theatrical characters. By devoting himself as actor and manager with special zeal to the production of Shake speare, Garrick permanently popularized on the national stage the greatest creations of our drama, and indirectly helped to seal the doom of the surviving tendency to main tain in the most ambitious walks of our dramatic literature the nerveless traditions of the pseudo-classical school. A generation of celebrated actors and actresses, many of whom live for us in the drastic epigrams of Churchill s Rosciad (1761), were his helpmates or his rivals ; but their fame has paled, while his is destined to endure as that of one of the typical masters of his art.
 * line of The contrast between the tragedy of the 18th century

s Q dy. and those plays of Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans which already before Garrick were known to the English stage, was indeed weakened by the mutilated form in which these generally, if not always, made their appearance there. Even so, however, there are perhaps few instances in theatrical history in which so strange a competition was so long sustained. In the hands of the tragic poets of the age of Pope, as well as of that of Johnson, tragedy had hopelessly stiffened into the forms of its accepted French models. Direct reproductions of these continued, as in the case of Ambrose Philips s (c. 1671- 1749) and Charles Johnson s (1679-1748) translations from Racine, and Aaron Hill s (1685-1750) from Voltaire. Among other tragic dramatists of the earlier part of the century may be mentioned J. Hughes (1677-1720), who, after assisting Addison in his Cato, produced at least one praiseworthy tragedy of his own ; l E. Fenton (1683-1730), a joint translator of &quot; Pope s Homer&quot; and the author of one extremely successful drama; 2 and L. Theobald (d. 1744), the first hero of the Dunciad, who, besides translations of Greek dramas, produced a few more or less original plays, one of which he was daring enough to father upon Shakespeare. 3 A more distinguished name is that of J. Thomson (1700-1748), whose unlucky Sophonisba and subsequent tragedies are, however, barely remembered by the side of his poems. The literary genius of E. Young (1681-1765), on the other hand, possessed vigour and variety enough to distinguish his tragedies from the ordinary level of Augustan plays ; in one of them he seems to challenge comparison in the treat ment of his theme with a very different rival ; 4 but by his main characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his contemporaries. The endeavours of G. Lillo (1693- 1739) to bring the lessons of tragedy home to his fellow- citizens were destined to exercise a powerful influence upon the early progress of the German drama, and not to remain without significance for the history of our own ; but his pedestrian muse failed in the end to satisfy higher artistic demands than those met in his most popular 1 The Sicye of Damascus. 3 The Double Falsehood. 2 Ma.ria.mne. 4 The Revenge (Othello). play, 5 and broke down in the attempt to carry the terrors of Macbeth into the regions of domestic tragedy. 6 &quot; Classical &quot; tragedy in the generation of Johnson pursued the even tenor of its way, the dictator himself treading with solemn footfall in the accustomed path&quot;, and Mason (1725-1797) making the futile attempt to produce a close imitation of Greek models. The best-remembered tragedy of the century, Home s Douglas (1757), was the production of an author whose famous kinsman, David Hume, had advised him &quot; to read Shakespeare, but to get Racine and Voltaire by heart.&quot; The indisputable merits of the play cannot blind us to the fact that Douglas is the child of Merope. While thus no high creative talent arose to revive the Englist poetic genius of English tragedy, comedy, which had to opera, contend against the same rivals, naturally met the demands of the conflict with greater buoyancy. The history of the most formidable of those rivals forms no part of this sketch (nee OPERA) ; but the points of contact between its progress and the history of our dramatic literature cannot be altogether left out of sight. H. Purcell s (1658-1695) endeavours to unite English music to the words of English poets were now a thing of the past ; the isolated efforts of Addison 8 and others to recover the operatic stage for the native tongue had proved powerless. Italian texts, which had first made their entrance piecemeal, in the end asserted themselves in their entirety ; and the German genius of Handel completed the triumphs of a form of art which no longer had any connection with the English drama, and which reached the height of its fashionable popularity about the time when Garrick began to adorn the national stage. In one form, however, the English opera was preserved as a pleasing species of the popular drama. The pastoral drama had (in 1725) produced an isolated aftergrowth in Allan Ramsay s Gentle Shepherd, which, with genuine freshness and humour, but without a trace of burlesque, transferred to the scenery of the Pentland Hills the lovely tale of Florizel and Perdita. The dramatic form of this poem is only an accident, but it doubtless suggested an experiment of -a different kind to the most playful of London wits. Gay s &quot; Newgate Pastoral ; of The Beggar s Opera (1728), in which the amusing text of a burlesque farce was interspersed with songs set to popular airs, caught the fancy of the town by this novel com bination, and became the ancestor of a series of agreeable productions, none of which, however, have ever rivalled it in celebrity. Among these the pieces of J. Bickerstaff 9 (c. 1735-c. 1788) and of C. Dibdin 10 (1745-1814) may bo signalized. The opera in England as elsewhere thus absorbed what vitality remained to the pastoral drama, while to the ballet and the pantomime (whose glories in England began at Covent Garden in 1733, and to whose popularity even Garrick was obliged to defer) was left (in the 18th century at all events) the inheritance of the external attractions of the mask and the pageant. In the face of such various rivalries it is not strange that Corned] comedy, instead of adhering to the narrow path which Burlcs( jl Steele and others had marked out for her, should have permitted herself some vagaries of her own. Gay s example pointed the way to a fatally facile form of the comic art ; and burlesque began to contribute its influence to the decline of comedy. In an age when party-government was severely straining the capabilities of its system, dramatic satire had not far to look for a source of effective season ings. The audacity of H. Fielding (1707-1754), whose regular comedies (original or adapted) have secured no enduring remembrance, but whose love of parody was p George J}arnv:ell. 7 Irene (1749). 9 Love in a Village, &c. 6 The Fatal Curiosity (Act iii.). 8 Rosamunda. 10 The Waterman, &a