Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

1831) and Edmund Kean (1787-1833); and the efforts of such performers as these in behalf of the poetic drama, as well as of William Macready (1793-1873) at a somewhat later period, can hardly be overestimated.

The word of three representative men, taken together, may best give an impression of enlightened opinion of the drama in the period. Said Jeffrey: "Of the old English dramatists, then, including under this name (besides Shakespeare) Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Jonson, Ford, Shirley, Webster, Dekker, Field, and Rowley, it may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy. Their illustrations, and figures of speech, are more borrowed from rural life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind. They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is not lawful to look for embellishments." Hazlitt, however, with his usual frankness showed that intelligent appreciation on the part of the public had yet a long way to go. Said he: "It is the present fashion to speak with veneration of old English literature; but the homage we pay to it is more akin to the rites of superstition than the worship of true religion. Our faith is doubtful; our love cold; and knowledge little or none. We now and then repeat the names of some of the old writers by rote, but we are shy of looking into their works." 5 Something of a still more aristo

4

Review of Weber's "The Dramatic Works of Ford," Edinburgh Review, August, 1811.

Lecture I in Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

6

cratic point of view, and one that had much to justify it, was expressed by Byron. This brilliant poet, as a young satirist, showed no sympathy with the performances of Master Betty," the infant Roscius," was repelled by the extravagances of romanticism, and in a noteworthy passage in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (11. 560607) plead for a truer national drama:

66

Now to the Drama turn-Oh! motley sight!
What precious scenes the wondering eyes invite!
Puns, and a prince within a barrel pent,
And Dibdin's nonsense yield complete content.
Though now, thank Heaven! the Rosciomania's o'er,
And full-grown actors are endured once more;
Yet what avail their vain attempts to please,
While British critics suffer scenes like these,
Who but must mourn, while these are all the rage,
The degradation of our vaunted stage!

Heavens! is all sense of shame and talent gone?
Have we no living bard of merit ?-None!

Awake, George Colman! Cumberland, awake!

Ring the alarum bell! let folly quake!
Oh, Sheridan! if aught can move thy pen,

Let Comedy assume her throne again;

Abjure the mummery of the German schools;
Leave new Pizarros to translating fools;

Give, as thy last memorial to the age,

One classic drama, and reform the stage.

79. Closet Drama."-In spite then of the very genuine interest of such men as Lamb and Hazlitt in the standard English drama, it is quite evident that the art of playwriting was at rather a low ebb in the first quarter of the century. The licensing act of 1737 had not encouraged production; moreover under the influence not only of

See in general Chew: The Relation of Lord Byron to Drama of the Romantic Period.

Jeremy Collier but also of the Wesleyan revival a very sober and responsible element of the nation had drawn away from the stage. Many of these very men, however, with something of the spirit of well-poised and cultured Puritans, greatly delighted in the reading of the old masters. Some writers moreover, in the desire to reach a more thoughtful public, deliberately wrote dramas with no thought of ever seeing them actually produced on the stage. Thus arose the "closet drama."

To this class of plays belongs most of the dramatic work of the great poets of the era, though occasionally of course a production witnessed actual performance. Scott wrote The House of Aspen, which was actually put in rehearsal, and The Doom of Devorgoil, which was intended as a melodrama; but no one of his other plays-Halidon Hill, Macduff's Cross, and Auchindrane-was intended for the stage. Also under the German influence (of Schiller rather than Kotzebue, however) Wordsworth wrote The Borderers and Coleridge Osorio. The first of these plays -the reflection of a mood of pessimism and the story of the subjection of the magnanimous Marmaduke to the villainous Oswald-was offered and refused at Covent Garden in 1798; though Coleridge's play, refused at Drury Lane in this same year, later saw production under the name of Remorse (1813), and was sufficiently successful to lead to a temporary revival of the poetic drama. Southey and Coleridge together wrote The Fall of Robespierre (1794), and in the same year Southey wrote Wat Tyler, though this did not appear until 1817. Influenced by his reading in the Elizabethans, Lamb wrote a tragedy, John Woodvil, which was offered to Charles Kemble in 1799 and published in 1802. Landor wrote Count Julian

(1812), and Keats in 1819 designed for Kean Otho the Great, a play to which he attached great hopes but which never saw performance. Shelley, inspired by Guido's portrait of Beatrice Cenci in the Colonna palace, and having in mind Eliza O'Neill, the great tragic actress at Covent Garden, wrote The Cenci (1820). The play has as its central theme Shelley's favorite one of resistance to tyranny, and in its conception of the heroine has marks of undoubted power; dealing with a current and wellknown story of parricide, however, it was not unnaturally refused by the manager. Byron expressed his powerful personality in Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), and if along with these dramatic poems we take Sardanapalus— the story of a dissolute but aspiring hero and his “better angel" Myrrha-we shall have the poet's characteristic productions. It was the irony of fate, however, that he should be most successful in the type of drama at which he sneered. Werner (1822), a play built on one of Harriet Lee's novels, was an experiment in the drama of horror; produced in 1830 it proved to be one of the most successful plays of the period. Two Venetian plays, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, were professedly modeled on Alfieri but were actually reminiscent of Otway. Marino Faliero, over Byron's protest, was presented for six nights in 1821 at Drury Lane, but failed, as the author predicted it would. Manfred remains the representative production of a poet who was subjective and lyric rather than dramatic in his genius.

The effort of these great poets in the field of the drama was but representative of the striving of the period. Perhaps the greatest example of diligence at the time was Joanna Baillie, who in 1798 began the publication of her

Plays of the Passions, her ultimate purpose being to illustrate each one of the dominant human passions by a tragedy and a comedy. She kept at her task until 1812 and produced altogether twenty-eight pieces. In a preface to her first group of plays she set forth her theory of the drama, intending to trace a single passion from its beginning to the final ruin, with recognition of the fact that passion arises from within, without the necessary aid of any external stimulus. "This absorption with a study of emotion per se led to a subordination of plot and all external incident, and so she proposed-all poetic embellishment, to a searching study of isolated passion. Her first volume attracted attention, and Kemble and Mrs. Siddons played De Montfort, but without success.

[ocr errors]

80. Late Georgian Dramatists.-In the London Magazine for April, 1820, Hazlitt proved "very satisfactorily and without fear of contradiction, that no modern author could write a tragedy." The age, he thought, was "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic," but not dramatic. Hardly since Home's Douglas, he declared, had a good tragedy been written. Nevertheless, if there was no good new English tragedy, it was not because there was not sufficient effort to disprove what Hazlitt had said. A few of the more prominent authors of the period are mentioned herewith. In the general connection hardly too much emphasis can be placed upon the work of Macready, who again and again proved himself a great sponsor for the poetic drama. Among other things this distinguished "Thorndike, 340.

For the reference we are indebted to H. Child: "Nineteenth Century Drama," C. H. E. L., XIII. To the same article the chapter is largely indebted for the discussion of Sheil, as well as some other things.

« ForrigeFortsæt »