by Will Durant
Shall we tarry with Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Cyril Tourneur, and John Marston, or beg them to let us off with a humble salute to their flickering fame? John Fletcher cannot be so scrimped, for in his heyday (1612–25) England honored him, in the drama, only next to Shakespeare and Jonson. Son to a Bishop of London, nephew or cousin to three poets of a sort, he was nursed on verse and reared with rhyme; and to all this heritage he added the privilege of collaborating with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Massinger on The Spanish Curate, and, with most success, with Francis Beaumont.
“Frank” was also to the manner born, being the son of a prominent judge, and brother to a minor poet who eased by a year the way for Frank’s entrance into the world. Failing to graduate from Oxford or the Inner Temple, Beaumont tried his hand at voluptuous poetry, and joined with Fletcher in writing plays. The two handsome bachelors shared bed and board, goods and clothes, mistresses and themes; “they had one wench between them,” says Aubrey, and “a wonderful consimility of phansey.”33 For ten years they collaborated in producing such plays as Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The dialogue is vigorous but windy, the plots artfully tangled but artificially resolved, the thought seldom reaching to philosophy; nevertheless, toward the end of the century (Dryden assures us) these dramas were twice as popular on the stage as Shakespeare’s.34
Beaumont died at thirty, in the year of Shakespeare’s death. Thereafter Fletcher wrote, alone or with others, a long series of plays successful and forgotten; some of his comedies of involved and boisterous intrigue stemmed from Spanish models, and in turn, with their accent on adultery, led to the Restoration drama. Then, tiring of these bloody or bawdy scenes, he issued (1608) a pastoral play, The Faithful Shepherdess, as nonsensical as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and sometimes rivaling it in poetry. Clorin, her shepherd lover dead, retires to a rustic bower by his grave, and vows to stay there intact till her death:
Hail, holy earth, whose cold arms do embrace
The truest man that ever fed his flocks
By the fat plains of fruitful Thessaly!
Thus I salute thy grave; thus do I pay
My early vows and tribute of mine eyes
To thy still-lovéd ashes; thus I free
Myself from all ensuing heats and fires
Of love; all sports, delights, and jolly games,
That shepherds hold full dear, thus put I off:
Now no more shall these smooth brows be begirt
With youthful coronals, and lead the dance;
No more the company of fresh fair maids
And wanton shepherds be to me delightful,
Nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipes
Under some shady dell, when the cool wind
Plays on the leaves: all be far away,
Since thou art far away, by whose dear side
How often have I sat crowned with fresh flowers
For summer’s queen, whilst every shepherd’s boy
Puts on his lusty green, with gaudy hook,
And hanging scrip of finest cordevan.
But thou art gone, and these are gone with thee,
And all are dead but thy dear memory;
That shall outlive thee, and shall ever spring,
Whilst there are pipes or jolly shepherds sing.
The idyl had one performance and disappeared from the stage. What chance had such a paean to chastity in an age still simmering with the Elizabethan fire?
The most powerful and disagreeable of the Jacobean dramatists is John Webster. We know almost nothing of his life, and it is just as well. We gather his mood from the preface to his best play, The White Devil (1611), where he calls the audience “ignorant asses,” and deposes that “the breath that comes from the incapable multitude is able to poison … the most sententious [profound] tragedy.” The story is that of Vittoria Accoramboni, whose sins and trial (1581–85) had stirred Italy in Webster’s childhood. Vittoria feels that her husband’s income does no justice to her beauty. She accepts the attentions of the moneyed Duke of Brachiano, and suggests that he dispose of her husband and his own wife. He attends to the matter at once, with the aid of Vittoria’s pander brother Flamineo, who provides for these crimes the most cynical obbligato in all English literature. She is arrested on suspicion, but defends herself with such audacity and skill as scares a lawyer out of his Latin and a cardinal out of his hat. She is kidnaped from justice by Brachiano; they are pursued; finally pursuers and pursued, the just and the unjust, are slaughtered in a dramatic holocaust that left Webster’s blood lust sated for a year. The plot is well managed, the characters are consistently drawn, the language is often virile or vile, the crucial scenes are powerful, the poetry rises at times to Shakespeare’s eloquence. But to a taste made squeamish by civilization the play is deformed by the forced and gutter coarseness of Flamineo, by the hot curses that pour even from pretty mouths (“Oh, could I kill you forty times a day, and use’t four years together, ‘twere too little!”),35 by the pervasive obscenity, the word whore on every second page, the endless double meanings that would have made even Shakespeare blush.
Webster returned to the shambles in The Duchess of Malfi (1613). Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, forbids his young widowed sister, the Duchess of Amalfi, to marry again, for if she dies mateless he will inherit her fortune. She mourns her enforced chastity:
The birds that live i’ the field
On the wild benefit of nature, live
Happier than we, for they may choose their mates,
And carol their sweet pleasures to the spring.36
Excited by lust and prohibition, she lures her steward, Antonio, into a secret marriage and a precipitate bed. Ferdinand has her killed. In the final act someone is slain almost every minute; doctors are ready with poisons, ruffians with daggers; no one has the patience to wait for a legal execution. The worst villain of the piece—who kills the Duchess, steals her property, takes a mistress and then murders her—is a cardinal; Webster was no papist. Here, too, are doubles-entendres of quite urological candor, a resolve to exhaust the vocabulary of execration, and a wild, indiscriminate condemnation of human life. Only in the remote corners of this dark canvas do we find nobility, fidelity, or tenderness. Ferdinand forgets himself and is soft for a line as he looks upon his sister, still beautiful in death:
Cover her face! Mine eyes dazzle, she died young …37
But he soon recalls himself to barbarism.
Let us hope to find something sweeter than all this in the man who could write “Drink to me only with thine eyes.”
V. BEN JONSON: 1573?–1637
He was a posthumous product, being born in Westminster a month after his father’s death. He was christened Benjamin Johnson; he dropped the h to distinguish himself, but the printers continued to use it, over his dead body, till 1840; it still appears in the plaque on Westminster Abbey’s walls. The mother, having had a minister for her first husband, took a bricklayer for her second. The family was poor; Ben had to scrape for an education; only the kindness of a discerning friend financed his entry into Westminster School. There he had the luck to come under the influence of its “under-master,” the historian and antiquarian William Camden. He took to the classics with less than normal animosity, made intimates of Cicero, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus, Quintilian, and later claimed, apparently with justice, to know “more in Greek and Latin than all the poets of England.”38 Only his excitable “humour” and the rough-and-tumble of the London world kept his learning from ruining his art.
After graduating from Westminster, he attended Cambridge, “where,” says his earliest biographer, “he continued but a few weeks for want of further maintenance.”39 His stepfather needed him as apprentice bricklayer, and we picture Ben sweating and fretting for seven years as he laid bricks and meditated poetry. Then suddenly he was off to the wars, caught in the draft, or rushing to them as livelier than bricks. He s
erved in the Netherlands, fought a duel with an enemy soldier, killed and despoiled him, and came home to tell expanding tales. He married, begot many children, buried three or more of them, quarreled with his wife, left her for five years, rejoined her, and lived with her incompatibly till her death. Clio herself knows not how he buttered the family’s bread.
The mystery deepens when we learn that he became an actor (1597). But he was bursting with bright ideas and happy lines, and merely reciting other men’s thoughts could not long contain him. He rejoiced when Tom Nash invited him to collaborate on The Isle of Dogs, and doubtless he contributed his share to the “very seditious and slanderous matter” that the Privy Council found in the play. The Council ordered the performance stopped, the theater closed, the authors arrested. Nash, an old hand at such scrapes, lost himself in Yarmouth; Jonson found himself in jail. As the custom of the prison required him to pay for his food, his lodging, and his shackles, he borrowed four pounds from Philip Henslowe, and, released, joined Henslowe’s (and Shakespeare’s) theatrical company (1597).
A year later he wrote his first important comedy, Every Man in His Humour, and saw Shakespeare act in it at the Globe. Perhaps the great dramatist did not relish the prologue, which proposed, despite current example, to follow the classic unities of action, time, and place, and not
To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years … You will be pleased to see
One such today as other plays should be,
Where neither chorus wafts you o’er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please …
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy should choose
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
So Jonson turned his back upon the aristocratic badinage of Shakespeare’s early comedies, and upon the miraculous geography and chronology of the “romantic” drama; he brought the slums of London to the stage, and concealed his erudition in a remarkable reproduction of lower-class dialects and ways. The characters are caricatures rather than complex philosophical creations, but they live; they are as worthless as in Webster, but they are human; they are mentally unkempt, but they are not murderers.
The Latins had used umor to mean “moisture” or “a fluid”; the Hippocratic medical tradition had used humor to designate four fluids of the body—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile; according to the predominance of one or another of these in a person, he was said to be of a sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, or choleric “humour,” or temperament. Jonson defined his own interpretation of the term:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects [feelings], his spirits, and his powers,
In their conflutions, all to run one way—
That may be truly said to be a humour.40
The word came to life in the hilarious portrayal of Captain Bobadil, a direct descendant of Plautus’ miles gloriosus, but reeking with his own peculiar “humour” and unconscious humor—always brave except in peril, bursting to fight except when challenged, a master of the sheathed sword.
The play was well received, and Ben could sow his wild oats less niggardly. He was now bouncy with confidence, proud as a poet, talking to lords without servility, standing his ground stubbornly, absorbing life hurriedly at every chance and pore, relishing forthrightness and rough humor, seducing women now and then, but finally (he told Drummond) preferring “the wantonness of a wife to the coyness of a mistress.”41 He left off acting and lived rashly by his pen. For a time he prospered by writing masques for the court; the light fantastic lines he wrote fitted well the scenes that Jones designed. But Ben, hot-tempered, quarreled widely. In the year of his first success he fell out with Gabriel Spencer, an actor, dueled with him, killed him, and was jailed for murder (1598). To make matters worse for himself, he was converted to Catholicism in prison. Nevertheless he received a fair trial, and he was allowed to plead “benefit of clergy” because he read the Latin psalter “like a clerk”; he was released, but only after having the letter T stamped with a hot iron on his thumb so that he might be readily identified as a second offender if he killed again; all the rest of his life he was a branded felon.
After a year of liberty he was returned to jail for debt. Henslowe again bailed him out, and in 1600 Jonson wooed solvency by writing Every Man out of His Humour. He weighted the comedy with classical tags; added to the dramatis personae three characters who served as a commenting chorus; rained invectives upon Puritans who had “religion in their garments, and their hair cut shorter than their eyebrows”; and brandished his lore at playwrights who were wrecking the Aristotelian unities. Instead of impossible romances about incredible lords, he proposed to show London mercilessly to itself, to
oppose a mirror
As large as is the stage whereon we act,
Where they shall see the time’s deformity
Anatomized in every nerve and sinew
With constant courage, and contempt of fear.42
The play made more enemies than royalties, and it is not recommended reading today. Dissatisfied with the noisy audience at the Globe, Jonson wrote his next comedy, Cynthia’s Revels (1601), for a company of boy actors and a smaller, choicer audience at the Blackfriars theater. Dekker and Marston felt themselves satirized in the play; in 1602 the Chamberlain’s company, angered by the competition of the Blackfriars’ boys, produced Dekker’s Satiromastix (i.e., the satirist flogged), which pilloried Jonson as a puny, pockmarked, conceited pedant, murderer, and bricklayer. The quarrel ended in an exchange of eulogies, and for a time fortune smiled. A prospering lawyer took Ben into his home, and the Earl of Pembroke sent the poet twenty pounds “to buy books.”43 So fortified, he tried his hand at tragedy. He took as his subject Sejanus, the evil favorite of Tiberius. He based his narrative carefully upon Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Juvenal; he achieved a scholarly masterpiece, some moving scenes (e.g., V, x) and stately lines; but the audience resented the long speeches, the tedious moralism of lifeless characters; the play was soon withdrawn. Jonson printed the text and in the margin gave his classical sources, with notes in Latin. Lord Aubigny, impressed, gave the sorrowing author asylum for five years.
He returned to the arena in 1605 with his greatest play. Volpone, or The Fox attacked with burning satire the money lust that raged in London. As usual with comedies—from Plautus to The Admirable Crichton—a clever servant is the brains of the plot. Mosca (Italian for fly) brings to his miser master, Volpone, who pretends to be seriously ill, a succession of legacy hunters—Voltore (vulture), Corbaccio (crow), Corvino (raven)—who leave substantial presents in the hope of being named Volpone’s heir. The “fox” accepts each gift with grasping reluctance, even to borrowing Corbaccio’s wife for a night. Mosca finally deceives Volpone into making the servant sole legatee. But Bonario (good nature) exposes the trick, and the Venetian Senate sends nearly all the cast to jail. The play at last brought the Globe audience to Jonson’s feet.
He moved hurriedly from success to adversity. He collaborated with Marston and Chapman on Eastward Ho! (1605); the government arrested the authors on the ground that the comedy insulted the Scots; the prisoners were threatened with circumcision of their noses and ears, but they were released intact, and such dignitaries as Camden and Selden joined in the banquet given by the liberated triumvirate. Then, on November 7, 1605, Ben was summoned to the Privy Council as a Catholic who might know something about the Gunpowder Plot. Though he had dined with a chief conspirator, Catesby, a month before, he escaped implication; but on January 9, 1606, he was hailed to court as a delinquent recusant. Since he was too poor to be profitably fined, the charge was not pressed. In 1610 he re turned to the Anglican fold, and “with such enthusiasm that he drank all the wine
in the cup when he attended” Communion.44
In that year he staged his most famous play. The Alchemist satirized not merely alchemy, which was a flagging quest, but half a dozen impostures that harried London with quackery. Sir Epicure Mammon is sure that he has found the secret of alchemy:
This night I’ll change
All that is metal in my house to gold,
And, early in the morning, will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers,
And buy their tin and lead up, and to Lothbury
For all the copper … I’ll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall,
And make them perfect Indies … For I do mean
To have a list of wives and concubines
Equal with Solomon, who had the stone
Alike with me; and I will make me a back,
With the elixir, that shall be as tough
As Hercules, to encounter fifty a night
… And my flatterers
Shall be the pure and gravest of divines
That I can get for money …
My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies;