Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  “High” and “low” were confused in quite another sense, too, since in the late sixteenth century the audience at the Rose or Curtain comprised courtiers and merchants, scholars and “mechanicals,” poets and pie-men:

  For as we see at all the playhouse doors, When ended is the play, the dance and song, A thousand townsmen, gentlemen and whores Porters and serving-men together throng

  Thus wrote Sir John Davies in 1593, a time when the finest examples of English drama were being composed for this mixed and heterogeneous collection of citizens; it can even be argued that when the audiences were segregated, as they became in the latter half of the seventeenth century, great plays could no longer be written. The early “adulterate” audience, on the other hand, came to see themselves in the hybrid drama of the stage. On the wooden scaffold the actor, considered then to be of low profession, is enunciating the highest sentiments. In the dramatic act, all order and degree are thrown into confusion. In the first part of Henry IV Falstaff speaks in feigned passion:

  For Gods sake Lords, conuay my tristfull Queene, For teares do stop the floudgates of her eyes

  But then the hostess replies, “O Iesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotrie plaiers as ever I see.” The shifting of perspective, and therefore the mixed mode, are complete when the actors remark upon their own theatrical devices.

  In the early seventeenth century, through the agency of playwrights such as Marston and Beaumont, the “tragicomedy” became “the century’s most popular dramatic form,”5 but a “Tragicall Comedie” had already been acted before Elizabeth I in 1564. This conflation of sadness and absurdity has been the native and instinctive mode ever since drama first emerged in England, but now it acquired generic identity. In the frontispiece to Ben Jonson’s Workes in 1616, the regal figure of “Tragicomoedia” is flanked by “Satyr” and “Pastor” playing musical instruments. John Fletcher defined “tragicomedy . . . in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.” Dramatic conventions and theatrical “types” were then thoroughly mingled, just as plots and themes had been. The English “mungrell” idiom was established and defined. Or as Michael Drayton wrote at the end of his celebration of England, Poly-Olbion:

  My muse is rightly of the English straine That cannot long one Fashion intertaine

  As in art, so in life itself. Dryden remarked that his play The Spanish Friar (1680) was “an unnatural mingle” devised in order to please the continuing “Gothic” taste of the English audiences. His funeral was conducted according to the same precepts. As George Farquhar described it, “And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with his life; Variety, and not of a Piece. The Quality and Mob, Farce and Heroicks; the sublime and Redicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in a Hackney Coach.”

  In this period there emerged “anti-masques” celebrating disorder with parodic dance measures, and “semi-operas” of a typically mixed form including spectacle, speech and song as well as “heroic rant, conjuring and magical illusions, singing spirits, music as sexual temptation, political allegory, and interpolated masques.”6 Seventeenth-century virtuosi criticised the “medlie and motlie Designes” of contemporary artistic taste, and in English architecture of the seventeenth century there appeared an idiom which “is neither Italian, French, nor Dutch Baroque but an increasingly interwoven mixture of the three, combined with elements borrowed from none, which are particularly English.”7

  This mixed and motley style can also be applied to the English intelligence. Samuel Johnson wrote of Thomas Browne that “His style is a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another.” It recalls his criticism of the “metaphysicals” for violent juxtaposition of imagery, but they were only mingling the sacred and the secular in the tradition of the mystery plays. Browne himself had a thoroughly English mind.

  The constituents of eighteenth-century drama do not materially differ. The names change, but the reality remains the same. Thus “monstrous medlies” became the most popular form of stage entertainment, earning the rebuke of Alexander Pope in The Dunciad:

  Hell rises, Heav’n descends, and dance on Earth: Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, A fire, a jigg, a battle, and a ball, ’Till one wide conflagration swallows all.

  The most popular and representative drama of the eighteenth century is, without any doubt, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, from which many imitations continue to emerge. The play, first performed in 1728, is concerned with the early eighteenth-century London “underworld” in which a highwayman appropriately named Macheath is pursued both by Lucy, the daughter of a Newgate warder, and by the daughter of a receiver of stolen goods. It may seem simple enough, but its form is mixed and various. The Whitehall Evening Post “found occasion to complain with equal tartness of The Beggar’s Opera then running at the two main London theatres: at one house Lucy was being played as high tragedy, and at the other she was played as low comedy and ‘we scruple not to pronounce them both wrong.’ ” 8 The Beggar’s Opera was neither farcical nor heroical, neither comic nor tragic, but all four at the same time. It was also intended as a parody of the Italian opera—hence the absurdly brazen deus ex machina at the end by means of which Lucy arranges Macheath’s escape—and thus represents both the absorption, and rejection, of foreign influence. Gay had entitled an earlier play The What D’Ye Call It and labelled it as a “Tragic-Comi-Pastoral Farce.” No one seemed to care. The audiences took naturally to it.

  In the last act of The Beggar’s Opera Macheath is in the condemned hold of Newgate when the bell of execution sounds; the gamester or gangster cries out, “Here—tell the Sheriff ’s officers I am ready.” This is a pure theatrical joke, a parody of the same solemn moment in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, written almost fifty years earlier, when Pierre utters the immortal phrase “Come, now I’m ready” as the passing-bell tolls out its note of doom. It is meant to be a comic moment in The Beggar’s Opera, yet instead it enters that enchanted English world where pathos and humour mingle effortlessly. Gay himself noted that, in this scene, “how ludicrous soever the general character of the piece may be . . . the joke ceases.” He adds: “I have observed the tolling of St Pulchre’s Bell received with as much tragical attention and sympathetic terror as that in Venice Preserv’d.” Even within the parody and the burlesque the audience is plunged into pity and horror, before being immediately lifted out of it with the pastiche of a “happy ending.” The power of the heterogeneous form is emphasised by the contemporaneous report that “several thieves and street robbers confessed in Newgate that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of their hero Macheath, before they sallied forth in their desperate nocturnal exploits.”

  The Beggar’s Opera was also considered to be a satire upon the thefts and depredations of Robert Walpole and his administration, so that “high” and “low” were conflated in a more pointed political sense; the whole of society is a highway robbery, in this account, with the face of the prime minister hidden by a scarf. In this context, therefore, we can see the “mungrell” drama of the English as evincing that instinctive egalitarian or levelling spirit which is always present within the English imagination.

  The association of Walpole and Macheath in the form of a “monstrous medlie” was unwittingly complemented by Samuel Johnson’s observation on English politics itself; he wrote in one pamphlet that governments “are never to be tried by a regular theory. They are fabricks of dissimilar materials, raised by different architects, upon different plans.” This distrust of theory and regularity in all cultural proceedings is familiar enough; more significantly, perhaps, public administration itself is seen to partake of the “mixed mode” so instinctive to English cultural expression. The analogy with “different architects” serves only to confirm the native genius since in the eightee
nth century architecture was also of the mixed and mongrel kind. It has been noted that the west front of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, so incongruous a composition, was “an attempt to re-create the effect of a Gothic spire in classical terms,” 9 an odd effect by James Gibb which was immediately copied by less prominent English architects. James Wyatt designed one country house in a curious “amalgam of Roman, Chambersian, Picturesque and Greek Revival elements”10 and the whole mixed effect was deemed beautiful; John Nash, the architect who was most attuned to fashionable taste, built in “Gothic, castellated, Italianate and classical styles.” 11 The garden at Kew once harboured “an Alhambra, a mosque, a Gothic cathedral; a number of classical temples, a classical orangery, a ruined arch, a chinese pagoda and a ‘House of Confucius.’ ”12

  The abiding tendency towards eclectic and heterogeneous ostentation is discussed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his The Englishness of English Art , where he notes that the mixed effect applied also to the mingling of past and present; he infers that in the sixteenth century “funeral monuments were self-consciously made to look medieval,”13 and that eighteenth-century gentlemen’s clubs were designed to resemble Renaissance palaces. He characterises it as “this English quality, the quality that has made England the land of Follies.” He relates it to the reticence or detachment of the English artist, so that the “mixed” mode comes naturally to those who cannot take seriously, or consider very long, one feeling or one style or one theory. He notes also that “England was the first country to break the unity of interior and exterior and wrap buildings up in clothes not made for them but for buildings of other ages and purposes.”14

  In nineteenth-century architecture, too, the “mungrell” tendency is everywhere apparent in edifices which took traditional eclecticism and pastiche to even greater levels. There were four standard styles available— Greek, Italian, Tudor and Gothic—and they could be mixed in any proportion to guarantee the effects which we now call “Victorian.” But there was also the “Flemish Renaissance” style, and the “Queen Anne” style; the New Scotland Yard building combined the modes of the Dutch and French Renaissance, while the Natural History Museum in South Kensington took Romanesque architecture as its model. The Brighton Pavilion was based upon “Hindoo” originals. We may add that breaking “the unity” has always been an English obsession. Alexander Pope thus describes, in English verse

  How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race

  These just representations of general nature begin with the beginning of life itself. In the sixteenth chapter of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, just after Tristram’s mother has suffered a phantom pregnancy, “my mother declared, these two stages were so truly tragicomical, that she did nothing but laugh and cry in a breath.” Tristram Shandy itself is a “medley” or “gallimaufry” taken to its widest and wildest extreme; it is a sterling example of that rambling, wayward, inconsistent and inconclusive native temper which Charles Dickens described as “streaky well-cured bacon.”

  The novels of Dickens himself have been alternately praised or blamed for their reliance upon the concatenation of farce and tragedy, pathos and romance. Dickens was much influenced by the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre, and in one speech declared that “every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.” The “stage” of his period was characterised by extravagant plots and exaggerated performances, where tragedy and melodrama jostled each other for attention; he had as a child read the great works of eighteenth-century fiction, with their strange mixture of formality and farce, elegance and violence. The “tragicall comedie” of urban life was compounded by his personal experience; he suffered violent changes in his own childhood, particularly when he was set to work in an old blacking factory. Hence the scrap of dialogue in Nicholas Nickleby:

  “There were hyacinths there this last spring, blossoming in—but you’ll laugh at that, of course.”

  “At what?”

  “At their blossoming in old blacking bottles.”

  As a young man he wrote a parody of Othello with an Irish hero, O’Thello, and he knew already that he possessed a gift for subverting “high” drama; in his early journalism he could mimic “all the voices” from the judge and the beadle to the thief and the vagabond. While writing the comic and picaresque narrative of The Pickwick Papers he began the solemn and pathetic story of the orphan introduced to London servitude in Oliver Twist. But then The Pickwick Papers contains its own sorrowful mysteries, such as the powerful scenes set in Fleet Prison, and Oliver Twist is filled with a wild and hysterical humour. Once more we witness the workings of the native genius, in what Dickens described as “the tragic and the comic scenes . . . sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place.” All of his subsequent works are characterised by the violent transition of moods and themes, so that even in the description of wretchedness and despair he will find a detail which is inimitably comic.

  There is another element here which is less easy of definition. Many contemporaries noticed a certain “hardness” in Dickens’s temperament and demeanour, and it may be that the heterogeneity of his style came from an unwillingness or incapacity to express wholly genuine feeling; every sentiment must be extravagant, and every emotion contrived. The mixed style, after all, was theatrical in origin. Yet it may also be aligned to a national character which, in previous centuries, was known for its violence and insensitivity to suffering.

  It is difficult to express that which is amorphous. Englishness is the principle of appropriation. It relies upon constant immigration, of people or ideas or styles, in order to survive. This “mungrell” condition was perhaps best expressed by Daniel Defoe, of all writers the most various and adaptable. In his poem “The True Born Englishman” the heterogeneity of the English imagination is lent its proper context:

  From this Amphibious Ill Born mob began That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman . . . By which with easie search you may distinguish Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.

  Antiquarianism and English History

  “Britannia”: frontispiece illustration to William Camden’s Britannia, 1600

  CHAPTER 30

  Among the Ruins

  In his twenty-ninth year John Milton wrote in a letter that “my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies.” In Bread Street, London, he studied as if for life.

  Milton is in all respects a profoundly English writer, and became an iconic representative of England for poets as diverse as Blake and Wordsworth. His first great ambition was to compose an epic upon the “Matter of Britain”; in 1639, two years after composing the letter upon his genius, he wrote a poem in which he entreats his pastoral pipe, if “patriis mutata camoenis” (if transformed by native songs), to play a British melody. In another poem of the same period, “Mansus,” he speculates upon the commemoration of English kings in his own native verse. He was aware of his inheritance. The mystical vision surrounding Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is conceived within the vast apparatus of the miracle plays; as one critic has put it, Paradise Lost is “the last of the medieval attempts to write the history of Everyman, to survey the whole course of events from the Creation to man’s final ascent into Heaven, and to relate this course to the universal plan of Divine Providence.” 1

  Paradise Lost was itself immensely influential. The resourceful and melodic verse of that poem revived, for all practical purposes, the role of blank verse in English poetry. Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example, could not have been written without Milton’s example. He became “the English author who could be presented as a classic to a burgeoning middle-class readership.”2 Handel set his poetry to music, and scenes from that poetry were depicted by Blake, Fuseli and a host of other artists aspiring to the sublime. In the year of Milton’s death John Dryden composed an opera of Paradis
e Lost entitled The State of Innocence, thus inaugurating two centuries of Miltonic imitation.

  Even as Milton still wrote, his was known as an “antiquated” style. This could be a term of celebration—“ancient liberty recover’d to the Heroic Poem,” as a 1688 edition of Paradise Lost asserted—or a term of mild opprobrium. One early eighteenth-century history claimed that “Mr. Milton chose to write (if the Expression may be allow’d) a hundred Years backward.” In the 1730s it was suggested by William Warburton that Milton’s archaic style was “best suited to his ‘English History’; his air of the antique giving a good grace to it.” Here Warburton touches upon a presiding element of Milton’s genius and, by natural extension, of the English imagination itself; it lies in the nature, and nurture, of antiquarianism.

  Goethe mocked the English obsession with the ruined fabric of the past. In his Faust Mephistopheles asks:

  Are Britons here? They go abroad, feel calls To trace old battle-fields and crumbling walls . . .

  In the fifth act of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a soldier remarks that: