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comedy, if he had any object, would appear | dramas formed upon romances and legendary to be to show that the purposes of craft may produce results entirely unexpected by the crafty one, and that happiness may be finally obtained through the circumstances which appear most to impede its attainment. This comedy is remarkable for containing none of the ribaldry which was so properly objected to in the plays of the early stage. It is characterised, also, by the absence of that melodramatic extravagance which belonged to this period, exhibiting power, indeed, but not the power of real art. These extravagances are well described by the author of "The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres;' although his notion that an effort of imagination, and a lie, are the same thing is very characteristic:-"The writers of our time are so led away with vain glory that their only endeavour is to pleasure the humour of men, and rather with vanity to content their minds than to profit them with good ensample. The notablest liar is become the best poet; he that can make the most notorious lie, and disguise falsehood in such sort that he may pass unperceived, is held the best writer. For the strangest comedy brings greatest delectation and pleasure. Our nation is led away with vanity, which the author perceiving, frames himself with novelties and strange trifles to content the vain humours of his rude auditors, feigning countries never heard of, monsters and prodigious creatures that are not: as of the Arimaspie, of the Grips, the Pigmies, the Cranes, and other such notorious lies." Sidney, writing of the same period of the drama, speaks of the apparition of " a hideous monster with fire and smoke."* And Gosson, having direct reference to some romantic

*Defence of Poesy.'

tales, as 'Common Conditions' was, says,
"Sometimes you shall see nothing but the
adventures of an amorous knight, passing
from country to country for the love of his
lady, encountering many a terrible monster
made of brown paper; and at his return is
so wonderfully changed, that he cannot be
known but by some posy in his tablet, or by
a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece
of cockle-shell." When the true masters of
the romantic drama arose, they found the
people prepared for the transformation of the
ridiculous into the poetical. We have ana-
lysed this very curious comedy from the
transcript in the Bodleian Library made
under the direction of Malone from the only
printed copy, and that an imperfect one,
which is supposed to exist. In the page
which contains the passage
'Farewell, ye
nobles all," &c., Malone has inserted the fol-
lowing foot-note, after quoting the celebrated
lines in Othello, "Farewell the tranquil
mind," &c.:-" The coincidence is so striking
that one is almost tempted to think that
Shakspeare had read this wretched piece."
It is scarcely necessary for us to point out
how constantly the date of a play must be
borne in mind to allow us to form any fair
opinion of its merits. Malone himself con-
siders that this play was printed about the
year 1570, although we believe that this con-
jecture fixes the date at least ten years too
early. It appears to us that it is a remark-
able production even for 1580; and if, as a
work of art, it be of little worth, it certainly
contains the elements of the romantic drama,
except the true poetical element, which could
only be the result of extraordinary indi-
vidual genius.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE LAWFULNESS OF PLAYS.

THE controversy upon the lawfulness of stageplays was a remarkable feature of the period which we are now describing; and pamphlets were to that age what newspapers are to ours. The dispute about the Theatre was a contest between the holders of opposite opinions in religion. The Puritans, who even at that time were strong in their zeal if not in their numbers, made the Theatre the especial object of their indignation; for its unquestionable abuses allowed them so to frame their invectives that they might tell with double force against every description of public amusement, against poetry in general, against music, against dancing, associated as they were with the excesses of an ill-regulated | stage. A Treatise of John Northbrooke, licensed for the press in 1577, is directed against "dicing, dancing, vain plays, or interludes." Gosson, who had been a student of Christchurch, Oxford, had himself written two or three plays previous to his publication, in 1579, of 'The School of Abuse, containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such-like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth.' This book, written with considerable ostentation of learning, and indeed with no common vigour and occasional eloquence, defeats its own purposes by too large an aim. Poets, whatever be the character of their poetry, are the objects of Gosson's new-born hostility:"Tiberius the Emperor saw somewhat when he judged Scaurus to death for writing a tragedy; Augustus when he banished Ovid; and Nero when he charged Lucan to put up his pipes, to stay his pen, and write no more." Music comes in for the same denunciation, upon the authority of Pythagoras, who "condemns them for fools that judge music by sound and ear." The three abuses of the time are held to be inseparable :-" As poetry and piping are cousin-germans, so piping and playing are of great affinity, and all three chained in links of abuse." It is not to be

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thought that declamation like this would produce any great effect in turning a poetical mind from poetry, or that even Master Gosson's contrast of the "manners of England in old time" and "New England," would go far to move a patriotic indignation against modern refinements. We have, on one hand, Dion's description how Englishmen went naked and were good soldiers; they fed upon roots and barks of trees; they would stand up to the chin many days in marshes without victuals;" and, on the other hand, "but the exercise that is now among us is banqueting, playing, piping, and dancing, and all such delights as may win us to pleasure, or rock us in sleep. Quantum mutatus ab illo!" In this his first tract the worthy man has a sneaking kindness for the Theatre which he can with difficulty suppress: -"As some of the players are far from abuse, so some of their plays are without rebuke, which are easily remembered, as quickly reckoned. The two prose books played at the Bel Savage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain. Jew,' and 'Ptolemy,' shown at the Bull; the one representing the greediness of worldly choosers, and bloody minds of usurers; the other very lively describing how seditious estates with their own devices, false friends with their own swords, and rebellious commons in their own snares, are overthrown; | neither with amorous gesture wounding the eye, nor with slovenly talk hurting the ears, of the chaste hearers. The Blacksmith's Daughter,' and 'Catiline's Conspiracies,' usually brought in at the Theatre: the first containing the treachery of Turks, the honourable bounty of a noble mind, the shining of virtue in distress. The last, because it is known to be a pig of mine own sow, I will speak the less of it; only giving you to understand that the whole mark which I shot at in that work was to show the reward of

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traitors in Catiline, and the necessary go- | thing forgot that might serve to set out the vernment of learned men in the person of Cicero, which foresees every danger that is likely to happen, and forestalls it continually ere it take effect."

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matter with pomp, or ravish the beholders
with variety of pleasure." Lodge, in his re-
ply to Gosson's 'School of Abuse,' had indi-
rectly acknowledged the want of moral pur-
pose in the stage exhibitions; but he con-
tends that, as the ancient satirists were
reformers of manners, so might plays be
properly directed to the same end. Surely
we want not a Roscius, neither are there
great scarcity of Terence's profession: but
yet our men dare not nowadays presume so
much as the old poets might: and therefore
they apply their writings to the people's vein;
whereas, if in the beginning they had ruled,
we should nowadays have found small spec-
tacles of folly, but of truth.
say, unless the thing be taken away, the vice
will continue; nay, I say, if the style were
changed, the practice would profit." To this
argument, that the Theatre might become
the censor of manners, Gosson thus replies:
"If the common people which resort to the-

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The praise of the "two prose books at the Bel Savage," that contained "never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain," is quite sufficient to show us that these prose books exhibited neither character nor passion. The 'Ptolemy' and the Catiline,' there can be no doubt, were composed of a succession of tedious monologues, having nothing of the principle of dramatic art in them, although in their outward form they appeared to be dramas. Gosson 66 says, These plays are good plays and sweet plays, and of all plays the best plays, and most to be liked, worthy to be sung of the Muses, or set out with the cunning of Roscius himself; yet are they not fit for every man's diet, neither ought they commonly to be shown." It is clear that these good plays and sweet plays had not in them-atres, being but an assembly of tailors, tinkselves any of the elements of popularity; therefore they were utterly barren of real poetry. The highest poetry is essentially the popular poetry: it is universal in its range, it is unlimited in its duration. The lowest poetry (if poetry it can be called) is conventional; it lives for a little while in narrow corners, the pet thing of fashion or of pedantry. When Gosson wrote, the poetry of the English drama was not yet born; and the people contented themselves with something else that was nearer poetry than the plays which were "not fit for every man's diet." Gosson, in his second tract, which, provoked by the answer of Lodge to his 'School of Abuse,' is written with much more virulence against plays especially, thus describes what the people most delighted in: As the devil hath brought in all that Poetry can sing, so hath he sought out every strain that Music is able to pipe, and drawn all kinds of instruments into that compass, simple and mixed. For the eye, beside the beauty of the houses and the stages, he sendeth in garish apparel, masks, vaulting, tumbling, dancing of jigs, galliards, moriscos, hobby-horses, showing of juggling casts; no

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ers, cordwainers, sailors, old men, young men, women, boys, girls, and such-like, be the judges of faults there pointed out, the rebuking of manners in that place is neither lawful nor convenient, but to be held for a kind of libelling and defaming." The notion which appears to have possessed the minds of the writers against the stage at this period is, that a fiction and a lie were

the same. Gosson says, "The perfectest

image is that which maketh the thing to seem neither greater nor less than indeed it is; but, in plays, either the things are feigned that never were, as Cupid and Psyche played at Paul's, and a great many comedies more at the Blackfriars, and in every playhouse in London, which, for brevity sake, I overskip; or, if a true history be taken in hand, it is made like our shadows, longest at the rising and fall of the sun; shortest of all at high noon."

It has scarcely, we think, been noticed that the justly celebrated work of Sir Philip Sidney forms an important part of the controversy, not only against the Stage, but against Poetry and Music, that appears to have commenced in England a little previous to 1580.

Gosson, as we have seen, attacks the Stage, | Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and not only for its especial abuses, but because therefore never lieth; for, as I take it, to lie it partakes of the general infamy of Poetry. is to affirm that to be true which is false: So According to this declaimer, it is "the whole as the other artists, and especially the hispractice of poets, either with fables to show torian, affirming many things, can, in the their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape their mischief, discover their shame, discre- from many lies: But the poet, as I said bedit themselves, and disperse their poison fore, never affirmeth, the poet never maketh throughout the world." Gosson dedicated any circles about your imagination to conhis 'School of Abuse' to Sidney; and Spen- jure you to believe for true what he writeth: ser, in one of his letters to Gabriel Harvey, He citeth not authorities of other histories, shows how Sidney received the compliment: but even for his entry calleth the sweet -"New books I hear of none: but only of Muses to aspire unto him a good invention: one that, writing a certain book called 'The In troth, not labouring to tell you what is School of Abuse,' and dedicating it to Master or is not, but what should or should not be. Sidney, was for his labour scorned; if, at least, And therefore, though he recount things not it be in the goodness of that nature to scorn. true, yet, because he telleth them not for Such folly is it not to regard aforehand the true, he lieth not, unless we will say that inclination and quality of him to whom we Nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to dedicate our books." We have no doubt that David; which as a wicked man durst scarce the Defence of Poesy,' or, as it was first say, so think I none so simple would say that called, 'An Apology for Poetry,' was intended Esop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who as a reply to the dedicator. There is every thinketh that Æsop wrote it for actually true reason to believe that it was written in 1581. were well worthy to have his name chroSidney can scarcely avoid pointing at Gosson nicled among the beasts he writeth of. What when he speaks of the "Poet-haters " as of child is there that, coming to a play and seeing "people who seek a praise by dispraising "Thebes' written in great letters upon an others," that they "do prodigally spend a old door, doth believe that it is Thebes? If great many wandering words in quips and then a man can arrive to the child's age, to scoffs, carping and taunting at each thing know that the poet's persons and doings are which, by stirring the spleen, may stay the but pictures what should be, and not stories brain from a thorough beholding the worthi- what have been, they will never give the lie ness of the subject." We have seen how the to things not affirmatively, but allegorically early fanatical writers against the stage held and figuratively, written; and therefore, as that a Poet and a Liar were synonymous. in history, looking for truth, they may go To this ignorant invective, calculated for the away full fraught with falsehood, so in poesy, lowest understandings, Sidney gives a brief looking but for fiction, they shall use the and direct answer:-"That they should be narration but as an imaginative ground-plat the principal liars, I answer paradoxically, of a profitable invention." but truly, I think truly, that, of all writers under the sun, the poet is the least liar, and, though he would, as a poet can scarcely be a liar. The astronomer, with his cousin the geometrician, can hardly escape when they take upon them to measure the height of the stars. How often, think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest which take upon them to affirm:

The notion of Sidney's time evidently was, that nothing ought to be presented upon the stage but what was an historical fact; that all the points belonging to such a history should be given; and that no art should be used in setting it forth beyond that necessary to give the audience, not to make them comprehend, all the facts. It is quite clear that such a process will present us little of the poetry or the philosophy of history. The play-writers of 1580, weak masters as they were, knew their art better than Gosson;

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they made history attractive by changing it
into a melo-drama :-" The poets drive it
(a true history) most commonly unto such
points as may best show the majesty of their
pen in tragical speeches, or set the heroes
agog with discourses of love, or paint a few
antics to fit their own humours with scoffs
and taunts, or bring in a show to furnish the
stage when it is bare. When the matter of
itself comes short of this, they follow the
practice of the cobbler, and set their teeth
to the leather to pull it out. So was the
history of 'Cæsar and Pompey,' and the play
of 'The Fabii,' at the theatre both amplified
there where the drums might walk or the
pen ruffle. When the history swelled or ran
too high for the number of the persons who
should play it, the poet with Proteus cut the
same to his own measure: when it afforded
no pomp at all, he brought it to the rack to
make it serve. Which invincibly proveth on
my side that plays are no images of truth."
The author of The Blast of Retreat,' who
describes himself as formerly "a great af-
fector of that vain art of play-making,"
charges the authors of historical plays not
only with expanding and curtailing the
action, so as to render them no images of
truth, but with changing the historical facts
altogether:-" If they write of histories that
are known, as the life of Pompey, the mar-
tial affairs of Cæsar, and other worthies, they
give them a new face, and turn them out
like counterfeits to show themselves on the
stage." From the author of 'The Blast of
Retreat' we derive the most accurate ac-
count of those comedies of intrigue of which
none have come down to us from this early
period of the drama. We might fancy he
was describing the productions of Mrs. Behn
or Mrs. Centlivre, in sentences that might
appear to be quoted from Jeremy Collier's
attacks upon the stage more than a century
later:-"Some, by taking pity upon the de-
ceitful tears of the stage-lovers, have been
moved by their complaint to rue on their plays, who are not unfitly so called.”

secret friends, whom they have thought to
have tasted like torment: some, having
noted the ensamples how maidens restrained
from the marriage of those whom their
friends have misliked, have there learned
a policy to prevent their parents by steal-
ing them away: some, seeing by ensample of
the stage-player one carried with too much
liking of another man's wife, having noted
by what practice she has been assailed and
overtaken, have not failed to put the like in
effect in earnest that was afore shown in jest.
. . . The device of carrying and recarrying
letters by laundresses, practising with pedlars
to transport their tokens by colourable means
to sell their merchandise, and other kind of
policies to beguile fathers of their children,
husbands of their wives, guardians of their
wards, and masters of their servants, is it not
aptly taught in "The School of Abuse?'"*
Perhaps the worst abuse of the stage of this
period was the licence of the clown or fool
--an abuse which the greatest and the most
successful of dramatic writers found it es-
sential to denounce and put down. The au-
thor of The Blast of Retreat' has described
this vividly :-" And all be [although] these
pastimes were not, as they are, to be con-
demned simply of their own nature, yet be-
cause they are so abused they are abominable.
For the Fool no sooner showeth himself in
his colours, to make men merry, but straight-
way lightly there followeth some vanity, not
only superfluous, but beastly and wicked.
Yet we, so carried away by his unseemly
gesture and unreverenced scorning, that we
seem only to be delighted in him, and are
not content to sport ourselves with modest
mirth, as the matter gives occasion, unless
it be intermixed with knavery, drunken
merriments, crafty cunnings, undecent jug-
glings, clownish conceits, and such other
cursed mirth, as is both odious in the sight
of God, and offensive to honest ears."

*The editor of the tract appends a note :-"He meaneth

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