Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The Witch, an ill-constructed play which raises the problems above referred to, has also an Italian plot, apparently from Machiavelli's 'Florentine Histories' through the French. Middleton is more at home in describing criminals and ruffians than supernatural beings; and his witches are rather the vulgar hags of popular superstition than the unearthly beings that accost Macbeth on the blasted heath, as Lamb pointed out in an admirable paragraph. Shakespeare in Macbeth gives the stage direction, 'Music and a song: "Black spirits," &c.' The 'Charm-song' of the witches going about the cauldron is thus given by Middleton:

Hecate. Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray, Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may !

Titty, Tiffin,
Keep it stiff in ;
Firedrake, Puckey,

Make it lucky;
Liard Robin,

You must bob in ;

Round, around, around, about, about!

All ill come running in, all good keep out ! First Witch. Here's the blood of a bat. Hec. Put in that, O, put in that! Second Witch. Here's libbard's-bane.

Hec. Put in again!

First Witch. The juice of toad, the oil of adder. Sec. Witch. Those will make the younker madder. Hec. Put in-there's all-and rid the stench. Firestone. Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench.

All the Witches. Round, around, around, &c.

The flight of the witches by moonlight is described with vigour and gusto; if the scene was written before Macbeth, Middleton deserves the credit of true poetical imagination :

Hecate. The moon's a gallant; see how brisk she rides!
Stadlin. Here's a rich evening, Hecate.
Hec. Ay, is 't not, wenches,

To take a journey of five thousand mile?
Hoppo. Ours will be more to-night.
Hec.

Heard you the owl yet?

Stad.

As we came through now. Hec.

O'twill be precious!

Briefly in the copse,

'Tis high time for us then. Stad. There was a bat hung at my lips three times As we came through the woods, and drank her fill: Old Puckle saw her.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Spirit. All goes still to our delight:

Either come or else
Refuse, refuse.

Hec. Now, I'm furnish'd for the flight.

Fire. Hark, hark, the cat sings a brave treble in her own language!

Hec. [going up.] Now I go, now I fly,

Malkin my sweet spirit and I.

O what dainty pleasure 'tis

To ride in the air

When the moon shines fair,

And sing and dance, and toy and kiss!

Over woods, high rocks, and mountains,

Over seas, our mistress' fountains,

Over steep towers and turrets.

We fly by night, 'mongst troops of spirits:
No ring of bells to our ears sounds,
No howls of wolves, no yelps of hounds;
No, not the noise of water's breach,

Or cannon's throat our height can reach. [Voices above.] No ring of bells, &c.

Leopard's-bane, mandragora or mandrake, panax (ginseng), selago (lycopodium), and other herbs named have magical or medicinal properties; and serpents' eggs or snake-stones (often ammonites, supposed to be petrified snakes or in some mysterious way derived from serpents) were sovereign charms from the days of the Druids on.

Shakespeare in Macbeth gives merely the direction, 'Song within: “Come away, come away," &c.' Middleton's works were edited by Dyce (5 vols. 1840) and by Bullen (8 vols. 1885-86).

John Marston (1575?-1634), a rough and vigorous satirist and dramatic writer, seems to have been born at Coventry, and studied at Brasenose College, Oxford. He must have written all his plays between 1602 and 1607, when he gave up playwriting, took orders, and in 1616 accepted the living of Christchurch in Hampshire. The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image (1598), a somewhat licentious poem, was condemned to the flames by Archbishop Whitgift. The Scourge of Villany is mainly uncouth and obscure satire. The gloomy and ill-constructed tragedies, Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge (1602), contain passages of striking power with much fustian. The Malcontent (1604), more skilfully constructed, was dedicated to Ben Jonson, between whom and Marston there were many quarrels and reconciliations. The Dutch Courtezan (1605) is full of life; Eastward Hoe (1605; written with Chapman and Jonson) is far more genial than any of Marston's own comedies. For uncomplimentary allusions to the Scots the authors were imprisoned (see page 402). Parasitaster, or the Fawn (1606), spite of occasional tediousness, is an attractive comedy; Sophonisba (1606) appals with its horrors. What You Will (1607) has many flings at Ben Jonson. The rich and graceful poetry scattered through The Insatiate Countesse (1613) is unlike anything in Marston's undoubted works, and was probably added by another hand.

Even in the least admirable passages one stumbles on pregnant thoughts pithily worded ; thus in the Dutch Courtezan, on the difference between the lovely courtesan and a wife, an old knight says:

Hell and the prodegies of angrie Jove
Are not so fearefull to a thinking minde
As a man without affection. Why, frend,
Philosophie and nature are all one;

Love is the center in which all lines close
The common bonde of being.

Some of the phrasing is wonderfully modern, in spite of antique environment: thus 'the fatt's in the fire' alongside of pre-Elizabethan archaism; 'Mr Mulligrub' does not sound Elizabethan; and the courtesan's broken English is not unlike Pennsyl

vania Dutch. In the Insatiate Countesse, a good wish at a wedding is thus worded:

O may this knot you knit,

This individual Gordian grasp of hands, In sight of God soe fairly intermixt, Never be severed, as Heaven smiles at it, By all the darts shot by infernall Jove! Coarseness was rather characteristic of Marston: his comedies contain strong, biting satire; Hazlitt thought his forte was impatient scorn and bitter indignation against the vices and follies of men, vented either in comic irony or in lofty invective. In What You Will Quadratus introduces a lyrical exposition of his hyper-epicurean philosophy of life: My fashions knowne: out rime: take't as you list: A fico for the sower brow'd Zoilist:

Musicke, tobacco, sack, and sleepe
The tide of sorrow backward keepe.
If thou art sad at others fate,
Rivo, drinke deepe, give care the mate.
On us the end of time is come,
Fond feare of that we cannot shun;
While quickest sence doth freshly last

Clip time aboute, hug pleasure fast.
The sisters revell out our twine,

[ocr errors]

checkmate

He that knows little's most devine. Rivo, a drinking challenge of doubtful origin, is also used by Shakespeare's Prince Hal.

The following humorous autobiographical sketch of a scholar and his dog, also from What You Will, in points suggests Goethe's Faust and Browning as well as Shakespeare:

I was a scholler: seaven usefull springs
Did I defloure in quotations

Of cross'd oppinions boute the soule of man;
The more I learnt, the more I learnt to doubt.
Knowledge and wit, faithes foes, turne fayth about.
Delight, my spaniell, slept whilst I bausd leaves,
Tossed ore the dunces, por'd on the old print
Of titled wordes: and stil my spaniell slept.
Whilst I wasted lamp-oile, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veins and still my spaniel slept.
And still I held converse with Zabarell,
Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty sawe
Of antick Donate: still my spaniell slept.
Still on went I; first, an sit anima;
Then, an it were mortall. O hold, hold!
At that they're at brain buffets, fell by the eares
A maine pell-mell together-still my spaniell slept.
Then, whether twere corporeal, local, fixt,
Ex traduce, but whether 't had free-will
Or no, hot philosophers

Stood banding factions, all so strongly propt;
I staggerd, knew not which was firmer part,
But thought, quoted, reade, observ'd, and pried,
Stufft noting-books: and still my spaniell slept.
At length he wakt, and yawned; and, by yon sky,
For aught I know, he knew as much as I.

1 Bause is a rare and doubtful word, probably meaning to kiss (from Low Latin basiare). 2 Zabarella was a (now forgotten) sixteenth-century Italian philosopher; Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus were the heads of the two great schools of Catholic theology; Donatus was a fourth-century grammarian. 3 Whether there is a soul. Creationism' taught that the soul was created for each human body, 'Traducianism' that it was derived ex tras duce from the parents.

1

2

From 'Antonio and Mellida.'

[Of the prologue to Antonio's Revenge, the second of the two plays forming The Historie of Antonio and Mellida, Charles Lamb says: This prologue, 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 days, "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 th' Apocalypse heard cry."']

The rawish danke of clumzie winter ramps
The fluent summers vaine; and drizling sleete
Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numd earth,
Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juyceles leaves,

From the nak't shuddring branch; and pils the skinne
From off the soft and delicate aspectes.

O now, me thinks, a sullen tragick sceane
Would suite the time, with pleasing congruence.
May we be happie in our weake devoyer,

And all parte pleased in most wisht content;
But sweate of Hercules can nere beget
So blest an issue. Therefore, we proclaime,
If any spirit breathes within this round,
Uncapable of waightie passion

(As from his birth, being hugged in the armes,
And nuzzled twixt the breastes of happinesse),
Who winkes, and shuts his apprehension up
From common sense of what men were, and are,
Who would not knowe what men must be-let such
Hurrie amaine from our black visag'd showes :
We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast
Nail'd to the earth with griefe, if any heart
Pierc't through with anguish pant within this ring,
If there be any blood whose heate is choakt
And stifled with true sense of misery,

If ought of these straines fill this consort up-
Th' arrive most welcome. O that our power
Could lackie or keepe wing with our desires,
That with unused paize of stile and sense,
We might waigh massy in judicious scale.

Yet heere's the prop that doth support our hopes,
When our sceanes falter, or invention halts,
Your favour will give crutches to our faults.

[Antonio, son to Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, whom Piero, Venetian prince and father-in-law of Antonio, has murdered, slays Piero's little son, Julio, as a sacrifice to the spirit of Andrugio.The scene is in a Churchyard and the time is Midnight.]

Julio. Brother Antonio, are you here, i' faith? Why doe you frowne? Indeed my sister said That I should call you brother; that she did, When you were married to her.

Busse me good truth, I love you better then my father, 'deede.

Antonio. Thy father? Gratious, O bounteous Heaven!
I doe adore thy justice: Venit in nostras manus
Tandem vindicta, venit et tota quidem.

Jul. Truth, since my mother dyed, I lov'd you best.
Something hath angred you; pray you, look merily.
Ant. I will laugh, and dimple my thinne cheeke
With cap'ring joy; chuck, my heart doth leape
To graspe thy bosome. Time, place, and blood,
How fit you close togither! Heavens tones
Strike not such musick to immortall soules

[blocks in formation]

O that I knewe which joynt, which side, which lim,
Were father all, and had no mother in 't,
That I might rip it vaine by vaine, and carve revenge
In bleeding races; but since 'tis mixt together,
Have at adventure, pel mell, no reverse.
Come hither, boy. This is Andrugio's hearse.
Jul. O God, youle hurt me. For my sisters sake,
Pray you doe not hurt me. An you kill me, 'deede,
Ile tell my father.

Ant. O, for thy sisters sake, I flagge revenge.

Andrugio's Ghost. Revenge!

Ant. Stay, stay, deare father, fright mine eyes no more. Revenge as swift as lightning bursteth forth,

And cleares his heart. Come, prettie tender childe,

It is not thee I hate, not thee I kill.

Thy fathers blood that flowes within thy veines

Is it I loath; is that revenge must sucke.

I love thy soule and were thy heart lapt up

In any flesh but in Piero's bloode,

I would thus kisse it; but being his, thus, thus,
And thus Ile punch it. Abandon feares.

Whil'st thy wounds bleede, my browes shall gush out

teares.

Jul. So you will love me, doe even what you will.

Ant. Now barkes the wolfe against the fulle cheekt

moon;

Now lyons half-clamd entrals roare for food;

Now croakes the toad, and night crowes screech aloud,
Fluttering 'bout casements of departed soules;
Now gapes the graves, and through their yawnes let loose
Imprison'd spirits to revisit earth;

And now swarte night, to swell thy hower out,
Behold I spurt warme bloode in thy blacke eyes.

[Stabs Julio. From under the stage a groane.
Howle not, thou putry mould; groan not, ye graves.
Be dumbe, all breath. Here stands Andrugio's sonne,
Worthie his father. So I feele no breath.
His jawes are falne, his dislodg'd soule is fled :
And now there's nothing but Piero left.
He is all Piero, father all. This blood,
This breast, this heart, Piero all:
Whome thus I mangle. Spirit of Julio,
Forget this was thy trunke. I live thy friend.
Mayst thou be twined with the softst imbrace
Of clere eternitie: but thy fathers blood

I thus make incense of, to vengeance.
Ghost of my poysoned sire, sucke this fume,
To sweet revenge perfume thy circling ayre
With smoake of bloode. I sprinkle round his goare,
And dewe thy hearse with these fresh reeking drops.
Loe thus I heave my blood-died handes to heaven,
Even like insatiate hell, still crying More!
My heart hath thirsting dropsies after goare.
Sound peace and rest to church, night ghosts, and graves;
Blood cries for bloode, and murder murder craves.

(From Part II. Act II.)

Antonio's Latin quotation is an adaptation of two lines from Seneca's Thyestes; flagge is 'let drop;' half-clam'd is 'halfclemmed,' 'half-starved;' for 'cleares his heart' Mr Bullen reads 'cleaves;' putry (in the old editions, pury) is 'putrid.'

Night is thus prayed for:

And now, yee sootie coursers of the night,
Hurrie your chariot into hels black wombe.

Nightfall is described:

The gloomie wing of Night begins to stretch
His lasie pinion over all the ayre.

And daybreak:

For see, the dapple gray coursers of the morne
Beat up the light with their bright silver hooves,
And chase it through the skye.

In the Insatiate Countesse Night is personified:
Night like a solemne mourner frownes on earth,
Envying that day should force her doff her roabes,
Or Phoebus chase away her melancholly.
Heavens eyes looke faintly through her sable masque,
And silver Cinthia hyes her in her sphære,
Scorning to grace black Nights solemnity.
Marston has paraphrased Shakespeare in

Feare is my vassal; when I frowne he flyes;
A hundred times in life a coward dyes.

A storm at sea is recorded with superfluous conceits and overstrained imagery, carrying lack of dignity over the verge of the ridiculous:

We gan discourse; when loe! the sea grewe mad,
His bowels rumbling with winde passion;
Straight swarthy darkenesse popt out Phoebus eye,
And blur'd the jocund face of bright-cheekt day,
Whilst crud'led fogges masked even the darknesse browe;
Heaven bade's good night, and the rocks gron'd
At the intestine uprore of the maine.

Nowe gustie flawes shook up the very heeles

Of our maine mast, whilst the keene lightning shot
Through the black bowels of the quaking ayre.

There are editions of Marston by Halliwell-Phillipps (1856), from which the above extracts are, with a few minor alterations, transcribed, and by Mr A. H. Bullen (1887).

Philip Massinger (1583–1640), one of the most accomplished and eloquent dramatists of his time, lived the precarious life of a writer for the stage, died in poverty, and was buried at St Saviour's, Southwark, in the grave of his colleague, Fletcher, with no other memorial than the note in the parish register, Philip Massinger, a stranger'-meaning he did not belong to the parish. His father, as appears from the dedication of one of his plays, was in the service of the Earl of Pembroke, was entrusted with letters to Queen Elizabeth, and was otherwise employed in confidential negotiations. Whether Philip, who was born at Salisbury, as a page ever wandered in the marble halls and pictured galleries of Wilton, that princely seat of old magnificence, where Sir Philip Sidney composed his Arcadia, is not certainly known; in 1602 he was entered of St Alban Hall, Oxford. He seems to have quitted the university abruptly in 1606, and to have commenced writing for the stage. The first notice of him is in Henslowe's diary, about 1613, where he makes a joint application, with N. Field and R. Daborne, two other playwrights, for a loan of £5, without which, they say, they could not be bailed. The sequel of Massinger's history is but an enumeration of his plays. He was found dead in his bed in his house on the Bankside one March morning in 1639-40. He wrote a great number of pieces, of which fifteen written by him unaided have been preserved. The manuscripts of eight others of his plays were in

existence in the middle of the eighteenth century, but they fell into the hands of John Warburton, Somerset herald, who had collected no less than fifty-five English dramas of the golden period, many of them rare, some of them unique, but all of them. through his carelessness, burnt for kitchen uses by his ignorant domestic. Much of Massinger's best work is inextricably mixed up with that of Fletcher and others. It is difficult to say how far he was concerned in the authorship of plays that pass under the name of 'Beaumont and Fletcher.' Probably the earliest of his extant plays is the unpleasant Unnatural Combat, printed in 1639. The first pub lished is The Virgin Martyr (1622), partly by Dekker. In 1623 was published The Duke of Milan, a fine but rhetorical tragedy. The Bondman, The Renegado, and The Parliament of Love were licensed in 1623-24. The Roman Actor (1626) abounds in eloquent declamation. TH Great Duke of Florence, produced in 1627, has a delightful love-story, whereas Massinger's female characters are usually unattractive and sometimes odious. The Maid of Honour (1628) is, like the Bondman, full of political allusions. The Picture, licensed in 1629, has an improbable plot. The Emperor of the East (1631) has the same merits and faults as the Duke of Milan. Field joined Massinger in writing The Fatal Dowry (1632). The City Madam (licensed in 1632) and A New Win to Pay Old Debts (which, printed in 1633, kept the stage till well into the nineteenth century, are Massinger's most masterly comedies-brilliant satirical studies, though without warmth geniality. A Very Woman (1634) is Fletcher's Woman's Plot revised by Massinger. The Guar dian dates from 1633, The Bashful Lover from 1636. Believe as you List (1631) was first printed from MS. in 1844. The powerful and state. Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619. by Massinger and Fletcher, was first printed in vol. ii. of Bullen's Old Plays (First Series).

[ocr errors]

Some of Massinger's plays are (as Coleridge said as interesting as a novel; others are as solid as a treatise on political philosophy. His verse, though fluent and flexible, lacks the music and magic of Shakespeare's. No writer repeats himself more frequently. His comedy resembles Ben Jonson's in its eccentric strength, in its exhibitions of wayward human nature, and in its use of rather typical and conventional characters. The greediness of avarice, the tyranny of unjust laws, and the miseries of poverty are drawn with a powerful hand. The luxuries and vices of a city life afford scope for indignant and forcible invective. Genuine humour or sprightliness Massinger had none. His dialogue is often coarse and indecorous, and his low characters are too depraved. His genius was rather descriptive and rhetorical than impassioned or dramatic; yet there is a certain serious dignity that impresses. The versification is smooth and mellifluous; in his early plays rhyme and prose are freely used; in the later, mainly blank verse.

Charles Lamb said that his English style is purer and freer from violent metaphors and harsh constructions than that of any contemporary dramatist. The influence of Spanish and Italian models is conspicuous; he was skilled in his management of the plot, and showed mastery of stage mechanism.

Pregnant lines or short passages in the plays are: Better the devil's than a woman's slave;' 'Death hath a thousand doors to let out life;' 'Gold can do much, but beauty more;' 'Ambition, in a private man a vice, is in a prince the virtue ;' 'Virtue not in action is a vice;' and 'When we go not forward, we go backward.' Massinger's best woman character is Camiola in the Maid of Honour. It is in her mouth (speaking to the King of Sicily) that Massinger puts a very frank impeachment, controversial rather than poetic, of the sacrosanct doctrine of the divine right of kings:

With your leave I must not kneel, sir,
While I reply to this: but thus rise up
In my defence, and tell you, as a man,

(Since, when you are unjust, the deity

Which you may challenge as a king, parts from you,) 'Twas never read in holy writ or moral,

That subjects on their loyalty were obliged

To love their sovereign's vices.

Camiola, too, it is who, when she hears that her lover is imprisoned by his enemy and abandoned by his king, says-her loyalty all but forgotten

Pray you stand off!

If I do not mutter treason to myself

My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him; He is my king.

From 'A New Way to pay Old Debts.'

Sir Giles Overreach. To my wish we are private.

I come not to make offer with my daughter

A certain portion; that were poor and trivial :

In one word, I pronounce all that is mine,

In lands or leases, ready coin or goods,

With her, my lord, comes to you; nor shall you have
One motive to induce you to believe

I live too long, since every year I'll add
Something unto the heap, which shall be yours too.
Lord Lovell. You are a right kind father.
Over. You shall have reason

To think me such. How do you like this seat?
It is well wooded and well watered, the acres
Fertile and rich: would it not serve for change,
To entertain your friends in a summer progress?
What thinks my noble lord?

Lov.

'Tis a wholesome air,

And well built pile; and she that's mistress of it, Worthy the large revenue.

Over.

She the mistress!

[blocks in formation]

Over. You do conclude too fast; not knowing me, Nor the engines that I work by. 'Tis not alone The Lady Allworth's lands, for those once Wellborn's

[merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small]

Shall e'er be sullied with one taint or spot
That may take from your innocence and candour.
All my ambition is to have my daughter
Right honourable; which my lord can make her :
And might I live to dance upon my knee
A young Lord Lovell, born by her unto you,

I write nil ultra to my proudest hopes.
As for possessions and annual rents,
Equivalent to maintain you in the port
Your noble birth and present state requires,
I do remove that burden from your shoulders,
And take it on mine own; for though I ruin
The country to supply your riotous waste,
The scourge of prodigals (want) shall never find you.
Lov. Are you not frighted with the imprecations
And curses of whole families, made wretched

By your sinister practices?

« AnteriorContinuar »