THE DRAMATISTS OF THE IF royalty ever had any real influence upon its form and mission) that of the Stuarts was depressing, as was the effect of Puritanism. The latter, in some instances, attempted to shift it upon a new and higher line, as the noble strains of Milton show. The transition period after the death of Shakespeare was marked with the contrasts inevitable in all such developments, especially when a forcing process has been at work. The decline of the Shakespearean school was partly due to natural causes and partly to changes in public taste, and to the grim phase which politics assumed. The people grew weary of plays which stirred horror and loathing rather than pleasure. Even the harmless masques in court and castle lost their power to amuse. The so-called "metaphysical school" of poets catered with some success to the sober fancy of the time. George Herbert and others of his kind did their best to enshrine pious aspirations and reflections in verse not wholly destitute of poetry. The broader-minded Puritans thus strove to reconcile culture with simplicity, no easy task when bigotry was making sure of getting the upper hand, with the aid of well-meaning ignorance. Herrick kept the lamp of true lyric poetry flickering in his remote Pagan parsonage; yet if his dainty trifles were known at all to the masses, their only influence was to embitter the feeling against all who used their gifts, as was believed, in the devil's service. When the political and religious strife was at white heat a thunderbomb was fired that recoiled on its Puritanical author and temporarily revived the drama. This was the famous VI-21 321 book, "Histrio-Mastix; the Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedie," by William Prynne, an able constitutional lawyer, but a rancorous foe to the stage, and, logically, to the right of merrymaking in any guise. He furiously denounced actors as ministers of Satan, theatres as his chapels, and upbraided people who hunted, played cards, danced, enjoyed music, or hung their houses with holly at Christmas, as idolaters and worse. It was perhaps this atrocious assault on liberty that inspired Milton, Selden and others, to write their masques in defiance of the bigots. The king was not content to let the thing find its level in public contempt. The persecuting spirit was quite as active on the worldlings' side. Prynne was arrested and condemned by the Star Chamber to pay £5,000 fine, to stand twice in the pillory and lose his ears while his book was publicly burned. This was in. 1633, and Milton's "Comus" appeared in the year following. The reaction in favor of the drama did not last long. Milton himself merged the serene gaiety of his masque in the grand gravity of his Puritan verse and militant prose. The dramatists and poets in the wake of Shakespeare produced then no commanding works. Parliament, in September, 1642, ordered the closing of theatres "as a becoming measure during the season of public calamity and impending civil war." Six years later it was decreed that all theatres were to be dismantled, and all dramatic entertainments were forbidden. This severity was not relaxed until 1656, but its failure in complete suppression was inevitable. Licentious literature began to be surreptitiously circulated, and coarse farces, played at country fairs during these years, contributed not a little to the outburst under the new king. When the theatres resumed in 1660 the native plays that had last been in fashion, those of Shakespeare and his successors proved to be stale and heavy. Charles and his courtiers had come home from France imbued with its gayer spirit, and the high poetry and penetrating philosophy of the great dramas made too severe demands on their intellectual powers. They had brilliant gifts of their own, which had not been dulled by contact with the versatile-witted French, but the ponderous gaiety of English writers was to them intolerable. They had been under the spell of Molière. That supreme master of comedy had created a model which every dramatist since has followed, but has come far short of equalling. His delineation of character, his tender grace alternating with scathing satire, his portrayal of manners and unfailing natural humor were destined to influence all future stagework, and that of England in particular, through the accident of the Restoration. If, on the one hand, the advent of the second Charles marked an impressive advance in philosophic, scientific and social views, which made for the future welfare of the race through the nation, on the other it produced an outbreak of corrupt humors which did not eradicate the mischief within. Stiff and slow as the flow of English fancy had been in poetry and drama during the beclouded days, it was at least genuinely English. Now came a French invasion of poetical forms and fancies, spiced with the prurient suggestiveness in which that people delight. The new fashion, imported under royal auspices, was bound to be adopted and heightened in the imitation, if possible; but the clumsier English manner only stripped the vulgarity of the airy wit which made it at all tolerable. We may listen to the French critic, Taine, on this: "Debauchery in a Frenchman is only half disgusting (i.e., to a Frenchman); with them, if the animal breaks loose it is without abandoning itself to excess. The foundation is not, as with the Englishman, coarse and powerful. . . . The Frenchman is mild, naturally refined, little inclined to great or gross sensuality, affecting a sober style of talk, easily armed against filthy manners by his delicacy and good taste. . . . It is quite the contrary in England. When we scratch the covering of an Englishman's morality, the brute appears in its violence and deformity." Restoration comedy, destitute of poetry and romance, gave the English "an exact picture of ordinary life... Comedy will give him the same entertainment as real life, he will wallow equally well there in vulgarity and lewdness . . . filthy words will make him laugh through sympathy, shameless scenes will divert him by appealing to his recollections. . . . By representing nothing but vice, it authorized their vices. . . . Rochester and Charles II. could quit the theatre edified in their hearts, more convinced than ever that virtue was only a pretence, the pretence of clever rascals who wanted to sell themselves dear." The helpless state into which English drama had fallen is effectively illustrated by the absurd tinkering with the great plays of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and others, to make them presentable to Restoration audiences. Dryden was a true poet, the greatest in his day, and must have scorned public taste and his own humiliating prostration before it, as he condescended to make coarse and clumsy travesties of plays like "The Tempest" and poems like "Paradise Lost," which latter he actually degraded into an acting opera, entitled "The State of Innocence." Wycherley and other dramatists followed suit in mutilating and infecting noble English plays in the French manner. Tragedies were in more or less demand, but they had to be made of fustian to suit theatres that were schools of gallantry for coarse minds. "Antony and Cleopatra" was another Shakespeare play which Dryden made over, and patched up into a new piece of his own. The restoration of the drama under Charles II. was largely due to the skillful devices of Sir William Davenant (16051669), who succeeded Ben Jonson as poet-laureate. He wrote a large number of plays, poems and masques, but his success is most marked as the reviver of the theatre. Four years before this form of entertainment was re-legalized he boldly produced his own play, "The Siege of Rhodes," as a spectacular opera, a technical evasion of the law. Soon after the arrival of the king two theatrical companies were granted patents under the management of Davenant and Killigrew. New theatres were built, elaborate stage costumes introduced, and actresses fully employed, as had never been done in Shakespeare's time. For the next thirty years or more the actor's art flourished, and clever plays were written, but the licentious drama of the period, artificially captivating for a considerable time, was finally banished from the stage. WILLIAM WYCHERLEY. WYCHERLEY lived longer, wrote more, and wrote more viciously, than any of his fellow-dramatists of the Restoration of whom he is the accepted representative. His merit, and that of his class, consists in the brilliance of dialogue and witty repartee, not in subtleness of plot, and still less in loftiness of purpose. Born in 1640, near Shrewsbury, he was schooled in France, where he exchanged Protestantism for the Catholic faith. On returning to England he returned to his national church, which he once more renounced under the patronage of James II. In 1672 his play, "Love in a Wood,” was produced in London, in outrageous defiance of public decency. A rhymed account of a sea fight between the English and Dutch in which the author took part, serves to show that Wycherley followed the fashion by enlisting for a spell of patriotic service. "The Country Wife," played in 1675, and "The Plain-Dealer" are his cleverest productions, but both are condemned for indecency. Students of contemporary |