dent, Juliet and Cordelia, Imogen and Miranda, Katherine and Cleopatra, Perdita and Ophelia ?—that it was accident which reflected on the never-dying page of the dramatist of the Blackfriars the thunderous gloom of Lear's moral atmosphere, the fairy-peopled sunshine of Prospero's enchanted isle, the moonlit stillness of the garden at Belmont, the merry lamp-light of the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, or the warm English daylight of Windsor? No! such an opinion would be no less absurd (we had almost written blasphemous) than the sceptic's fancy that this earth was the result of blind chance and a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

From the works of Shakspeare may be gleaned a complete collection of precepts adapted to every condition of life and to every conceivable circumstance of human affairs. The wisest and best of mankind have gone to him for maxims of wisdom and of goodness

maxims expressed with the artlessness and simplicity of a casual remark, but pregnant with the thought of consummate experience and penetration: from him the courtier has learned grace, the moralist prudence, the theologian divinity, the soldier enterprise, the king royalty: his wit is unbounded, his passion inimitable, his splendour unequalled; and over all these varied glories he has thrown a halo of human sympathy no less tender than his genius was immeasurable and profound, a light reflected from the most gentle, generous, loving spirit that ever glowed within a human heart: the consummate union of the Beautiful and the Good.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SHAKSPEARIAN DRAMATISTS.

Ben Jonson: The Humours - His Roman Plays - Comedies-Plots. Beau mont and Fletcher-Massinger-Chapman-Dekker-Webster-Middleton -Marston-Ford- Shirley.

WE now come to a galaxy of great names, whose splendour, albeit inferior to the unmatched effulgence of Shakspeare's genius, yet conspires to glorify the reigns of Elizabeth and James. The literary triumphs of this wonderful epoch are principally confined to the drama, which "heaven of invention" was, to use the beautiful expression of one of these playwrights, "studded as a frosty night with stars;" and deeply indeed do we regret that our space will only permit us to give a very short and cursory notice of the individual members of this admirable class of writers

"those shining stars, that run

Their glorious course round Shakspeare's golden sun.”

The first of these illustrious dramatists whom we shall notice is Ben Jonson, a mighty and solid genius, whose plays bear an impress of majestic art and slow but powerful elaboration, distinguishing them from the careless ease and unpremeditated abundance so strongly characterising the drama of this period. He was born in 1574, ten years after Shakspeare, who honoured him with his close friendship and well-merited protection. He was undoubtedly one of the most learned men of this or indeed any age of English literature; and he brought to his dramatic task a much greater supply of scholastic knowledge than was possessed by any of his contemporaries. Educated at Cambridge, he adopted the stage as his profession when about twenty years of age, and when he had already acquired very extensive knowledge of the world, and experience in various scenes of "many-coloured life," in the university and even in the camp: for Ben had served with distinguished bravery in the wars of the Low Countries. As an actor he is reported to have completely failed, but it was at this period that he began to exhibit, in the literary department of his profession, that genius which has placed his name next to that of the greatest. Like all his contemporary dramatists, Jonson began by repairing and adapting older plays, and his name is connected, like that of so many of the dramatic débutans of this period, with several of such recastings; for example, with that of Hieronymo,' &c. It was not till 1596 that he produced his first original piece, the admirable comedy of 'Every Man in his Humour,' which gave infallible proof that a new and powerful genius had risen on the English stage. This comedy was brought out (considerably altered from its first sketch,) at the Globe theatre, in 1598, and in some degree, it is related, through the instrumentality of Shakspeare, who acted a principal part in the piece. It was soon evident that Jonson had cut out for himself a new path in the drama; and he rapidly attained, and steadily preserved, the highest reputation for genius and for art. In fact, Jonson, during the whole of his life, occupied a position at the very head of the dramatists of the day--a position perhaps even superior to that of Shakspeare himself. Nor is this wonderful. The qualities of Jonson's peculiar excellence were more obvious and appreciable than the delicate and, as it were, coy merits of the great poet, whose works, possessing all the depth and universality of nature, require no less study, subtlety, and discrimination in him who would understand them as they deserve. All, on the contrary, could admire Jonson's wonderful knowledge of real life, his vast and accurate observation of human vices and follies, his somewhat rough but straightforward and vigorous delineations of character, and the epigrammatic condensation of a strong and masculine style, armed with all the weapons of classic rhetoric, and decorated with the splendours of unequalled learning. Jonson was, in short, a great comic dramatist; and it will be found that the chief excellence even of his two

tragedies is less of a tragic than of a comic kind, and that they please us rather by their admirable delineations of manners than by those pictures of passion and sentiment which it is the legitimate province of tragedy to present. The peculiar excellence of this great writer lay in the representation of the weaknesses and affectations of common and domestic life—in the delineation of what were then called the "humours," a word which may be explained to mean those innate and peculiar distortions and deformities of moral physiognomy with which nature has stamped the characters of individuals in every highly artificial and civilized state of society, and which are afterwards exaggerated and rendered inveterate by vanity and affectation. In delineating these obliquities of character Jonson proceeded philosophically, we may even say scientifically: he appears to have carefully and minutely anatomised the follies and foibles of humanity, and to have accumulated in his comic or satiric pictures (for his comedy is of the satiric kind) every trait and little stroke of the particular folly in question, with a most consummate skill and industry; frequently concentrating in one character not only all the moral phenomena which his own vast and accurate observation could supply, aided as that was by a systematic and elaborate classification, but often exhausting all the touches left us in the moral portraits of the historians and satirists of antiquity.

His Roman plays, indeed, 'Catiline' and 'Sejanus,' the two tragedies of which we have spoken, and the comedy of 'Poetaster,' may be considered as absolute mosaics of language, of traits of character and points of history, extracted from the works of Tacitus, of Sallust, of Juvenal, of Horace—in short, the quintessence of Roman literature. Yet such is Jonson's skill, and so perfect a harmony was there between the vigorous, majestic, Roman character of his own mind, and the tone of the literature which he studied so profoundly, that this mosaic, though composed of an infinite number of distinct particles, has the most absolute unity of effect. Nay, more, he has done the same thing in those comedies which have for their subject modern domestic life and modern manners; and he has managed to introduce, in the portraiture of the ludicrous and contemptible persons of English citizen life in the sixteenth century, the strokes of humour and character taken from the delineations of Roman manners executed by the great satiric artists of the time of the Cæsars. This is undoubtedly a point of consummate skill in rendering available the stores of a species of learning which we should at first sight consider rather as an encumbrance than a useful instrument; but it arises also in some measure from that classical tone of character which we have attributed to Jonson: he was, indeed,

"More an antique Roman than a Dane."

It must, however, be confessed that Jonson's characters are some

times too elaborate, too scientific, and overloaded with details which, though individually true and comic, are never found concentrated in one person. He has therefore been accused, and not unjustly, of painting, not men and women, but impersonations of their leading follies and vices. And in this respect a parallel between Jonson and Shakspeare would be exceedingly unfavourable to the former. Both have given us admirable portraits, for example, of braggarts, of coxcombs, and of fools; but while Shakspeare's are real men and women, with real individuality of their own, but in whom the bragging, the coxcombry, the folly happen to be remarkable features, the comic characters of Jonson cannot be separated from the predominant folly ridiculed. We might conceive Parolles becoming a modest and sensible man, Osric a plain-spoken and downright citizen, and Slender or Aguecheek transformed by some miracle into reasonable beings, and something of them would remain; but imagine Bobadil cured of his boasting, Sir Fastidious of his courtly puppyism, or the exquisite Master Stephen of his imbecility, and nothing would be left. behind.

In the construction of his plots Jonson is immeasurably superior to all the other dramatists of the period. Naturally haughty and confident in his own genius, and entertaining, too, a much higher opinion than was common at the time of the gravity and importance of the dramatist's office, he scorned to found his plays upon the substructure of the Italian novelist or the legends of Middle Age history; and consequently we are never offended in his dramas with that improbability of incident, inconsistency of character, hurried and imperfect development, which is the principal structural defect of most of the dramatic works of this period—a defect, indeed, from which Shakspeare's productions are by no means free. His plots Jonson always invented himself; and some of them are perfect models of complicated yet natural intrigue. It has been justly said that the comedy of the Silent Woman,' of the Alchemist,' of 'Volpone,' are inimitable as series of incidents, natural, yet interesting, gradually and necessarily converging to a catastrophe at once probable and unexpected.

The language of this great dramatist is in the highest degree vigorous, picturesque, and lively: it possesses, it is true, little or Lone of that sweet and flowing harmony, that living and transparent grace, which makes the golden verses of our Shakspeare absolutely superior to the far-famed diction of the Greek poets; but it is an admirably strong and flexible medium for his acute and masterly exhibition of character; and though in general not much elevated above the level of weighty and powerful prose, sometimes rises to a considerable pitch of rhetorical splendour. It must be confessed that Jonson wants that deep sympathy with human nature which is the true source of grace of language, as it is of tenderness of thought;

but there is often to be found in him a kind of gallant bravery of language, a splendour of imagery, recalling to us the dusky glow of his great prototype Juvenal, with whose genius the literary character of Jonson has many points of resemblance. Both writers describe the follies of their kind in a contemptuous and sarcastic spirit, and their crimes with a powerful but somewhat too declamatory invective; and both appeared to have less sympathy with virtue than detestation for vice they were both, too, inclined to treat with indifference, if not with contempt, the virtues and graces of the female character-a sure sign of hardness of mind. Jonson's two Roman plays, 'Catiline' and 'Sejanus,' are of course founded on the history, the former of Sallust, and the latter of Tacitus. Though presenting a noble and impressive copy of the terrible outlines of their subject, it may be objected that the principal characters in each are so unmixedly hateful or contemptible, that they are unfit for the purposes of the tragic dramatist. The senate scene in the latter, and the character of Tiberius, are very grandly conceived, and the assembly of conspirators in Catiline,' together with the description of the battle and the death of the hero, related by Petreius, are among the finest declamatory passages in English poetry. These two dramas are in

verse.

Of the comedies the finest, in point of richness of character, are 'Every Man in his Humour,' the Alchemist' (the scenes of which are in London), and 'Volpone.' In the first the characters are numerous and admirably delineated; the interest of the second rests upon the jovial villany and cunning sensuality of the hero; and the third contains some richly-contrasted touches of vulgar knavery and self-deluding expectation, wrought up with astonishing vivacity. We have already spoken of the excellence of plot which characterises the Silent Woman,' though the chief personage is a character so rare as to be, if not impossible, at least so improbable that nothing but its exquisite humour can reconcile us to it. Bartholomew Fair' is full of satire and animation, but would have little interest for a reader of the present time, being a satire upon the Puritans; and of the other pieces some are merely local and temporary attacks on individuals, as the 'Poetaster,' Cynthia's Revels,' and the 'Tale of a Tub,' while others are generally considered inferior in merit: we may instance the Magnetic Lady,' the 'Staple of News,' and the New Inn.' The comedies are written, some entirely in prose, some in mingled prose and verse. It would be unjust not to state that, though the above remarks will be found to apply generally to Jonson, he has occasionally attained to a high degree of fanciful elegance of language and a singular delicacy of harmony. Many passages may be cited, particularly from his Masques, his unfinished pastoral comedy of the 'Sad Shepherd,'-a most exquisite fragment