Mrs. Humphry Ward - "The Testing of Diana Mallory"

Sam R. Watkins - "Co. Aytch"

Frank Frost Abbott - "The Common People of Ancient Rome"

May Sinclair - "The Romantic"

Books: Book review: 'The Mercy Papers' and 'Downtown Owl'
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The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 written by Charles Lamb

C >> Charles Lamb >> The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4




[Footnote 1: Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor
Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself,
and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's
Letters_.]

* * * * *

THOMAS DECKER.

_Old Fortunatus_.--The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where
Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which
himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamored to
frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans
is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He
is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the
world are with him,

"A swarm of fools
Crowding together to be counted wise."

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they,
quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's
sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to
the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to
this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most
alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and
the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and
folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle
mind's religion; the liberal superstition.

_The Honest Whore_.--There is in the second part of this play, where
Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her
profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without
violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the
_strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts
of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be
suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and
minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective
fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective,
that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer
against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his
unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new
province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the
enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such
proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not
that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry--perhaps
was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very
extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!

* * * * *

JOHN MARSTON.

_Antonio and Mellida_.--The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the
first part of this tragedy,--where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished
his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon
the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no
attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of
Lear and Kent, in that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear,
manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected
resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair
and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he
brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest
style of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the
"infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some
"pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue to the second part,
for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of
preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old
tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly
commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of
"intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in
without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn
a preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse
heard cry."

_What You Will_.--_O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd_. Act
1. Scene 1.--To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we
must advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a
phenomenon habited like the merchant here described would have
excited among the flat round caps, and cloth stockings upon 'Change,
when those "original arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were
in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction
and grace." The blank uniformity to which all professional
distinctions in apparel have been long hastening is one instance of
the decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has contributed or
not to make us a more intellectual, has certainly made us a less
imaginative people. Shakespeare knew the force of signs: a "malignant
and turbaned Turk." This "meal-cap miller," says the author of God's
Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious
outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of the fair
Marieta.

* * * * *

AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

_The Merry Devil of Edmonton_.--The scene in this delightful comedy,
in which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend,"
touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader
happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to
this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only
in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler,
than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How
delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that
Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend reminds
him! I wish it could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for
believing, that Michael Drayton was the author of this piece. It
would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my
native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the
fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left
a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honorable
mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion
beyond the dreams of old mythology.

* * * * *

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

_A Woman Killed with Kindness_.--Heywood is a sort of _prose_
Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But
we miss _the poet_, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and
above the surface of _the nature_. Heywood's characters, in this
play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we
see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakspeare makes us
believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are
nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem
old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

_The English Traveller_.--Heywood's preface to this play is
interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the opinion of
posterity, which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There
is a magnanimity in authorship, as in everything else. His ambition
seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players
speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever
contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a
slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of
such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and
the Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that
a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

* * * * *

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A Fair Quarrel_.--The insipid levelling morality to which the modern
stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as
these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment,
a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the
vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which
the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could
discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a
beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is
hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never
so absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre
to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the
amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of
disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic
morality, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble
of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the
boundaries of honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance
which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to
be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when
that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering,
to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which
the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen
an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done, in a feigned
story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater
delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to
the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of
honor as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against
duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far
better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honor; and he
would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old
Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.

* * * * *

WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A New Wonder; a Woman never Vext_.--The old play-writers are
distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition,--they show
everything without being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune is to be
exhibited, they fairly bring us to the prison-grate and the
alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is always a gentleman; he may be
known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by wearing black. Our
delicacy, in fact, forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. It is
never shown in its essential properties; it appears but as the
adjunct of some virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from
the approbation of which relief the spectators are to derive a
certain soothing of self-referred satisfaction. We turn away from the
real essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, moral
duties; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly represented, the
relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves, and moral
philosophy lose the name of a science.

* * * * *

THOMAS MIDDLETON.

_The Witch_.--Though some resemblance may be traced between the
charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this play, which is
supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much
from the originality of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished
from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are
creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire mischief, might
resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood,
and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first
meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his
destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt
the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a
son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of
their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul
anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether
they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so
they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and
lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them.
Except Hecate, they have no _names_; which heightens their
mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties which the other
author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are
serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with mirth. But in a
lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their
power, too, is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars,
jealousies, strifes, "like a thick scurf" over life.

* * * * *

WILLIAM ROWLEY,--THOMAS DECKER,--JOHN FORD, ETC.

_The Witch of Edmonton_.--Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs
from the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain,
traditional old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and
ignorant; the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That
should he a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county at his heels,
that would lay hands on the Weird Sisters. They are of another
jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, the author
(or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something
frightfully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar.

* * * * *

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

_The Revenger's Tragedy_.--The reality and life of the dialogue, in
which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then
threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their
sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but
my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I
were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the
brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen
and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such
power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike
guilty creatures unto the soul, but to "appall" even those that are
"free."

* * * * *

JOHN WEBSTER.

_The Duchess of Malfy_.--All the several parts of the dreadful
apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the
waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the
tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification
by degrees,--are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary
vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to
bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets.
As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems
not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is become
"native and endowed unto that element." She speaks the dialect of
despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.
To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon
fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is
ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its
last forfeit: this only a Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may "upon
horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They
mistake quantity for quality; they "terrify babes with painted
devils;" but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors
want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

_The White Devil_, _or Vittoria Corombona_.--This White Devil of
Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an
innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless
beauty of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and
are ready to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very
judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators,
and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her, in spite
of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don
Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela,
"without making any profit of her manifest resolution made there in
their hearing."

"So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Does spot the beauty of her budding name!"

I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for the
death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his
drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so
this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling,
which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that
there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would
authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to
Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I
thought that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed full of
that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in
the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty
criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking
distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set
inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating
conversation in a kind of bravery.

* * * * *

JOHN FORD.

_The Broken Heart_.--I do not know where to find, in any play, a
catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this. This
is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high
actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out
his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint
bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of
the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her
nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a
queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the
stake; a little bodily suffering. These torments

"On the purest spirits prey,
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."

What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its
weaknesses! Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so
strong? The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in
imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some
analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here
contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which
we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of
poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or
visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the
heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.
There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the
elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and
Annabella, in the play[1] which stands at the head of the modern
collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that
fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of
beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity,
and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and
degradations of our nature.

[Footnote: "'Tis Pity she's a Whore."]

* * * * *

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.

_Alaham, Mustapha_.--The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among
his poems, might with more propriety have been termed political
treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make
passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient
to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is in nine parts
Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this
writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding must
have held a most tyrannical preeminence. Whether we look into his
plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and
made rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart,
the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, are essentially
comprised in the actions and speeches of Caelica and Camena.
Shakspeare, who seems to have had a peculiar delight in contemplating
womanly perfection, whom for his many sweet images of female
excellence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, has not
raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in
these two women, has done. But it requires a study equivalent to the
learning of a new language to understand their meaning when they
speak. It is indeed hard to hit:

"Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day
Or seven though one should musing sit."

It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express
the emotions of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge,
but sympathetic expressions would be wanting.

* * * * *

BEN JONSON.

_The Case is Altered_.--The passion for wealth has worn out much of
its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of
money as able to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not
considered simply as a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they
introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as
something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as capable of satisfying two
of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying
medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made avarice
quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching,
and handling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no
more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than
Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the Cave
of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's contemplation of his wealth, in the
Rich Jew of Malta; Luke's raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry
and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic
production of Ben Jonson's. Above all, hear Guzman, in that excellent
old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on the "ruddy cheeks
of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump and
full-faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces-of-eight of
Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to
themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. "For to
have them to pay them away is not to enjoy them; to enjoy them is to
have them lying by us; having no other need of them than to use them
for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our senses.
These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our
doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could
handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative."

_Poetaster_.--This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies
of Ben in his own days and ours, who have said that he made a
pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole Court
of Augustus, by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of
the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our
own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express
themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more
elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis
the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and
secret of that kind of intercourse is contained therein. The
economical liberality by which greatness, seeming to waive some part
of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of the essentials; the
prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by commanded
boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity;--these, and a
thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels,
and from those numerous court-masques and entertainments, which he
was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the
poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.

_Alchemist_.--The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of
images, words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act
ii., Scene 2) confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come
pouring out like the successive falls of Nilus. They "doubly redouble
strokes upon the foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to
believe effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there
is no one image which attains the height of the sublime, yet the
confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result equal to the
grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army countervails against single
Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of its
author. It has the whole "matter and copy of the father--eye, nose,
lip, the trick of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as
contemporaries have described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the
Host of the New Inn, have all his image and superscription. But
Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir Samson Legend, in Love
for Love, is such another lying, overbearing character, but he does
not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a "towering bravery" there is in
his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It is as if
"Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury."

* * * * *

GEORGE CHAPMAN.

_Bussy D'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _Byron's Tragedy_, &c.
&c.--Webster has happily characterized the "full and heightened
style" of Chapman, who, of all the English play-writers, perhaps
approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in
passages which are less purely dramatic. He could not go out of
himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate
other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul
to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great
epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one;
for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of
Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he
has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a
reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the
glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of
Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating one of the
zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the
acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to
Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquerable quaintness.
He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the
most violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever
words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all
other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all
in all in poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying
the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers
glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by
words, or in spite of them, be disgusted, and overcome their disgust.