Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens. The original reads:

  So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn, Shew the care-pinèd hearts that sue to them.

  The word Shew is an obvious misprint — but more probably, I venture to think, for the word Shun than for the word Fly, which is substituted by Mr. Collier and accepted by Dr. Grosart.

  There are many traces of moral or spiritual weakness and infirmity in the writings of Dekker and the scattered records or indications of his unprosperous though not unlaborious career: but there are manifest and manifold signs of an honest and earnest regard for justice and fair dealing, as well as of an inexhaustible compassion for suffering, an indestructible persistency of pity, which found characteristic expression in the most celebrated of his plays. There is a great gulf between it and the first of Victor Hugo’s tragedies: yet the instinct of either poet is the same, as surely as their common motive is the redemption of a fallen woman by the influence of twin-born love and shame. Of all Dekker’s works, “The Honest Whore” comes nearest to some reasonable degree of unity and harmony in conception and construction; his besetting vice of reckless and sluttish incoherence has here done less than usual to deform the proportions and deface the impression of his design. Indeed, the connection of the two serious plots in the first part is a rare example of dexterous and happy simplicity in composition: the comic underplot of the patient man and shrewish wife is more loosely attached by a slighter thread of relation to these two main stories, but is so amusing in its light and facile play of inventive merriment and harmless mischief as to need no further excuse. Such an excuse, however, might otherwise be found in the plea that it gives occasion for the most beautiful, the most serious, and the most famous passage in all the writings of its author. The first scene of this first part has always appeared to me one of the most effective and impressive on our stage: the interruption of the mock funeral by the one true mourner whose passion it was intended to deceive into despair is so striking as a mere incident or theatrical device that the noble and simple style in which the graver part of the dialogue is written can be no more than worthy of the subject: whereas in other plays of Dekker’s the style is too often beneath the merit of the subject, and the subject as often below the value of the style. The subsequent revival of Infelice from her trance is represented with such vivid and delicate power that the scene, short and simple as it is, is one of the most fascinating in any play of the period. In none of these higher and finer parts of the poem can I trace the touch of any other hand than the principal author’s: but the shopkeeping scenes of the underplot have at least as much of Middleton’s usual quality as of Dekker’s; homely and rough-cast as they are, there is a certain finish or thoroughness about them which is more like the careful realism of the former than the slovenly naturalism of the latter. The coarse commonplaces of the sermon on prostitution by which Bellafront is so readily and surprisingly reclaimed into respectability give sufficient and superfluous proof that Dekker had nothing of the severe and fiery inspiration which makes a great satirist or a great preacher; but when we pass again into a sweeter air than that of the boudoir or the pulpit, it is the unmistakable note of Dekker’s most fervent and tender mood of melody which enchants us in such verses as these, spoken by a lover musing on the portrait of a mistress whose coffin has been borne before him to the semblance of a grave:

  Of all the roses grafted on her cheeks, Of all the graces dancing in her eyes, Of all the music set upon her tongue, Of all that was past woman’s excellence In her white bosom, look, a painted board Circumscribes all!

  Is there any other literature, we are tempted to ask ourselves, in which the writer of these lines, and of many as sweet and perfect in their inspired simplicity as these, would be rated no higher among his countrymen than Thomas Dekker?

  From the indisputable fact of Middleton’s partnership in this play Mr. Dyce was induced to assume the very questionable inference of his partnership in the sequel which was licensed for acting five years later. To me this second part seems so thoroughly of one piece and one pattern, so apparently the result of one man’s invention and composition, that without more positive evidence I should hesitate to assign a share in it to any colleague of the poet under whose name it first appeared. There are far fewer scenes or passages in this than in the preceding play which suggest or present themselves for quotation or selection: the tender and splendid and pensive touches of pathetic or imaginative poetry which we find in the first part, we shall be disappointed if we seek in the second: its incomparable claim on our attention is the fact that it contains the single character in all the voluminous and miscellaneous works of Dekker which gives its creator an indisputable right to a place of perpetual honor among the imaginative humorists of England, and therefore among the memorable artists and creative workmen of the world. Apart from their claim to remembrance as poets and dramatists of more or less artistic and executive capacity, Dekker and Middleton are each of them worthy to be remembered as the inventor or discoverer of a wholly original, interesting, and natural type of character, as essentially inimitable as it is undeniably unimitated: the savage humor and cynic passion of De Flores, the genial passion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, are equally lifelike in the truthfulness and completeness of their distinct and vivid presentation. The merit of the play in which the character last named is a leading figure consists mainly or almost wholly in the presentation of the three principal persons: the reclaimed harlot, now the faithful and patient wife of her first seducer; the broken-down, ruffianly, light-hearted and light-headed libertine who has married her; and the devoted old father who watches in the disguise of a servant over the changes of her fortune, the sufferings, risks, and temptations which try the purity of her penitence and confirm the fortitude of her constancy. Of these three characters I cannot but think that any dramatist who ever lived might have felt that he had reason to be proud. It is strange that Charles Lamb, to whom of all critics and all men the pathetic and humorous charm of the old man’s personality might most confidently have been expected most cordially to appeal, should have left to Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the honor of doing justice to so beautiful a creation — the crowning evidence to the greatness of Dekker’s gifts, his power of moral imagination and his delicacy of dramatic execution. From the first to the last word of his part the quaint sweet humor of the character is sustained with an instinctive skill which would do honor to a far more careful and a far more famous artist than Dekker. The words with which he receives the false news of his fallen daughter’s death: “Dead? my last and best peace go with her!” — those which he murmurs to himself on seeing her again after seventeen years of estrangement: “The mother’s own face, I ha’ not forgot that” — prepare the way for the admirable final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, and his ostentation of obduracy relaxes into tenderness and tears. “Dost thou beg for him, thou precious man’s meat, thou? has he not beaten thee, kicked thee, trod on thee? and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? has he not pawned thee to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust? yet wouldst have me save him? — What, dost thou hold him? let go his hand: if thou dost not forsake him, a father’s everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads!” The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection of exquisite accuracy in expression which must be recognized at once and remembered forever by any competent reader of this scene is the highest quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here displayed at its highest: the more poetic or romantic quality of his genius had already begun to fade out when this second part of his finest poem was written. Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production of evidence against hims
elf; and the scene is no doubt theatrically effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded, noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate affection was so simply and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.

  But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of “Twelfth Night” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the demerits of the two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross, so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest, was Thomas Heywood. In style and versification the patriotic and anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of “The Whore of Babylon” is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited and fluent, with gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation vacuous and vehement. An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the “Persae”; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pass by him, remains alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime perfection. Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing. The Empress of Babylon is but a poor slipshod ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic beadle: “non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e passa.”

  Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on those other three poets. The next play which bears his name alone was published five years later than the political or historical sketch or study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a tolerable if not a creditable piece of work. It is difficult to abstain from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, “If this be not a good Play, the Devil is in it.” A worse has seldom discredited the name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden’s delectable tragedy of “Amboyna,” Lee’s remarkable tragicomedy of “Gloriana,” Pope’s elegant comedy of “Three Hours after Marriage,” are scarcely more unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that it must have been written against time in a debtor’s prison, under the influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would have flung at the tapster’s head with an accompaniment of such language as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law. I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of this play I have never come across in all the range of that excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general workmanship.

  As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy play:

  Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined To any bendings: lest his youthful brows Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste, The body feels consumption: good or bad kings Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs. Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.

  The vigorous melody of these “masculine numbers” is not more remarkable for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes out in pleasantries like this:

  King. What are you, and whence come you? Rufman. From Helvetia. Spendola. What hell says he? Jovinelli. Peace; you shall know hot hell [sic] time enough.

  “I hope here be proofs” that my strictures on the worst work of a poet whose best work I treasure so heartily, and whose best qualities I rate so highly, are rather too sparing than too severe.

  This supernatural and “superlunatical” attempt at serious farce or farcical morality marks the nadir of Dekker’s ability as a dramatist. The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of “Grim the Collier of Croydon,” which is perhaps more likely to have been the writer’s immediate model than the original story by Machiavelli. The two remaining plays now extant which bear the single name of Dekker give no sign of his highest powers, but are tolerable examples of journeyman’s work in the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. “Match Me in London” is the better play of the two, very fairly constructed after its simple fashion, and reasonably well written in a smooth and unambitious style: “The Wonder of a Kingdom” is a light, slight, rough piece of work, in its contrasts of character as crude and boyish as any of the old moralities, and in its action as mere a dance of puppets: but it shows at least that Dekker had regained the faculty of writing decent verse on occasion. The fine passage quoted by Scott in The Antiquary and taken by his editors to be a forgery of his own, will be familiar to many myriads of readers who are never likely to look it up in the original context. Of two masks called “Britannia’s Honor” and “London’s Tempe” it must suffice to say that the former contains a notable specimen of cockney or canine French which may serve to relieve the conscientious reader’s weariness, and the latter a comic song of blacksmiths at work which may pass muster at a pinch as a tolerably quaint and lively piece of rough and ready fancy. But Jonson for the court and Middleton for the city were far better craftsmen in this line than ever was Dekker at his best.

  Two plays remain for notice in which the part taken by Dekker would be, I venture to think, unmistakable, even if no external evidence were extant of his partnership in either. As it is, we know that in the winter which saw the close of the sixteenth century he was engaged with the author of “The Parliament of Bees” and the author of “Englishmen for My Money” in the production of a play called “The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy.” More than half a century afterward a tragedy in which a Spanish Moor is the principal and indeed the only considerable agent was published, and attributed — of all poets in the world — to Christopher Marlowe, by a knavish and ignorant bookseller of the period. That “Lust’s Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen,” was partly founded on a pamphlet published after Marlowe’s death was not a consideration sufficient to offer any impediment to this imposture. That the hand which in the year of this play’s appearance on the stage gave “Old Fortunatus” to the world of readers was the hand to which we owe the finer scenes or passages of “Lust’s Dominion,” the whole of the opening scene bears such apparent witness as requires no evidence to support and would require very conclusive evidence to confute it. The sweet spontaneous luxury of the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her paramour out of sullenness has the very ring of Dekker’s melody: the rough and reckless rattle of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a sudden vehemence of change and energy; the constant repetition or reiteration of interjections and ejaculations which are evidently supposed to give an air of passionate realism and tragic nature to the jingling and jerky dialogue; many little mannerisms too trivial to specify and too obvious to mistake; the occasional spirit and b
eauty, the frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous and uncertain style; the faults no less than the merits, the merits as plainly as the faults, attest the presence of his fitful and wilful genius with all the defects of its qualities and all the weakness of its strength. The chaotic extravagance of collapse which serves by way of catastrophe to bring the action headlong to a close is not more puerile in the violence of its debility than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker; conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a malcontent or rather to a lenient reader, the improvisations of inebriety. There is but one character which stands out in anything of life-like relief; for the queen and her paramour are but the usual diabolic puppets of the contemporary tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood in the part of the honest and hot-headed young prince. This too is very like Dekker, whose idle and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain a diffused or divided interest, but except when working hopelessly and heartlessly against time was likely to fix on some special point, and give life at least to some single figure.