Una Ellis-Fermor

[In the following chapter from her frequently cited critical study of Jacobean drama, originally published in 1936, Ellis-Fermor emphasizes the "sense of defeat" that characterized drama of the Jacobean period in contrast with the "vitality" of the Elizabethan era. She notes the increasingly unresolved treatment of evil and the sense of a decaying civilization that characterized the era and asserts that Jacobean drama anticipated a changing collective worldview in its separation of poetry, philosophy and science from the realm of religion.]

The mood of the drama from the early Elizabethan to the late Jacobean period appears to pass through three phases, each reflecting with some precision the characteristic thought, preoccupation or attitude to the problems of man's being of the period to which it belongs. That of the Elizabethan age proper, the drama of Greene, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe and the early work of Shakespeare, is characterized by its faith in vitality, its worship of the glorious processes of life, an expansion and elation of mind which corresponds directly to the upward movement of a prosperous and expanding society. This robust gusto appears directly in the comedies of Shakespeare and only less directly in Romeo and Juliet, instinct with the sense of the nobleness of life; it is there in the vigour of the Spanish Tragedy no less than in the tenderness of Greene or Peele's tremulous response to loveliness. But already within this age another movement sets in, paradoxically, it might seem, were it not that one age always overlaps another and thought is for ever anticipated in germ. Marlowe, the leader of the earlier age in tragic thought, already points it towards the sense of defeat that was so marked a characteristic of the Jacobeans. For all his strength, for all the desperate valour of his aspiration, the final position of each play in turn is an intimate defeat of aspiration itself. This runs through a protean series of forms, as might be supposed of an Elizabethan thinker, to culminate in the quiescence of Edward II. Marlowe's keen spiritual sense sees through the delusion of prosperity that intoxicates his contemporaries as a whole and anticipates that mood of spiritual despair which is its necessary result and becomes the centre of the later tragic mood. And this position is reached by Marlowe through one section of his experience which is, in its turn, an epitome of the experience that touched a large number of the Jacobean dramatists after him, his exploration of the system of Machiavelli.

The impact of this system came obliquely to the Elizabethans, through the preposterous stage figure of the pseudo-Machiavellian villain, which presented truly neither Machiavelli's individual precepts nor the balance of his thought as a whole. Yet, because of the perversions suffered by his thought in transmission, what was received by the Elizabethan drama brought with it not only the withering breath of matter-of-fact materialism proper to his method, but a more bitterly cynical individualism than he had ever implied. This, touching some of the playwrights immediately (while others it almost missed), spread gradually over the habit of tragic thought, reinforced by the tradition of Marlowe's study of spiritual defeat.

It was reinforced still more effectively after the turn of the century by the apprehensions and the disillusionment that spread through political and social life with the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, the influence of his court and the instability of the first years of his reign. This mood, culminating as it did in and about the year 1605, took the form for public and private men alike of a sense of impending fate, of a state of affairs so unstable that great or sustained effort was suspended for a time and a sense of the futility of man's achievement set in. One immediate corollary of this is a preoccupation with death where the Elizabethan had been in love with life. Even when the actual threat was removed, those who survived found the great age gone and themselves the inheritors of poverty of spirit.

These things then were the heritage of the Jacobean drama on the threshold of its growth: spiritual uncertainty springing in part from the spreading of Machiavellian materialism emphasized by Marlowe's tragic thought and in still greater degree from the cause which has reproduced it to-day for us, fear of the impending destruction of a great civilization. The greatest plays of the years 1600-12 form a group reflecting this mood in one form or another: Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, The Malcontent, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Volpone, Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Tragedy of Byron, The Alchemist, The Atheist's Tragedy, The Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The White Devil. Through all these runs, besides the sense of spiritual emptiness or fear, a growing tendency to hold more closely to the evidence of the senses and of practical experience, to limit knowledge to a non-spiritual world of man and his relations with man. Comedy thus, with Marston, Ben Jonson, Middleton, Chapman, becomes increasingly immediate and concentrated upon the manners, habits and morals of man as a primarily social, non-poetic and non-spiritual animal. Tragi-comedy with Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger escapes into romance. Most significant of all, tragedy, the form of drama responsible for interpreting to man the conditions of his own being, becomes satanic, revealing a world-order of evil power or, if it attempt excursions beyond man's immediate experience, bewildered and confused. This, passing through the work indicated above, finds its fullest expression in the unremitting satanism of Tourneur and, belatedly, in the scientific detachment of Middleton.

After the spiritual nadir of the middle years of the period a slow return to equilibrium sets in. The great age has gone, but so has the age of brooding, Senecan apprehension. 'O nos dura sorte creatos', that phrase which epitomizes (for the early Jacobeans, as for Seneca or for us) the inexplicable fate of a generation born for destruction, is no longer the instinctive expression of their perplexity. Satanism and a revived Senecanism go hand in hand for a time, but gradually they give place to a mood that is sometimes serenity, sometimes indifference, but, in either case, that of an age that has ceased to live in touch with catastrophe. The resolution is complete in Shakespeare's latest plays, it breaks through imperfectly in incidental touches in the Duchess of Malfi, more strongly in the later plays of the Middleton-Rowley group, and is supreme in Ford. 'Look you, the stars shine still.' They do, indeed; but the whole gamut of tragic experience lies between Greene or Peele at the beginning and Ford at the end of the period, like as their moods and cadences sometimes are, and the severity, the increasingly undramatic continence which is the most marked feature of Ford's development, shows that a phase is closing, that he is the last spokesman of a dramatic period that, from the first plays of the early Elizabethans to his latest work, had been one continuous sequence in three clearly defined movements. It is with the last two of these that this study is primarily concerned, but something must be said first of the earlier, from which the later originated.

The double life of the age, the outer life of event and action and the inner of reflection and thought, stored in the drama, finding a high imaginative interpretation in theme, in commentary and, perhaps most fruitfully, in incidental and revealing imagery, is markedly different in the first two phases of the period, the Elizabethan proper and the early Jacobean. The notable changes that came with the turn of the century and the last years of Elizabeth form, in poetry as in social and political life, a division between the world of the 'nineties now past and the age we call Jacobean, setting in before the actual accession of James. In drama especially, the second grew out of the first, was in fact so directly fathered by it that the relationship between them forms the most fitting introduction to the later growth.

In the earlier drama, the Elizabethan, the qualities most marked are clarity and exhilaration, the material chosen the tumultuous event of war and conquest or the romance of fairy tale, myth or love. It reflects, as great poetic drama must, rather the desires of its audience than their normal lives, gathering together the moments of heightened experience in which they have lived most swiftly rather than the normal alternating of rapid event and inertia. The imperishable instinct for horrors that chill the blood and raise the hair is satisfied simply, lustily, childishly (almost, in the case of Kyd, gaily), with a gusto as healthy as high winds in spring; The Spanish Tragedy, The Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, even Arden of Feversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy, do not so much represent the average effect of Elizabethan daily life as reveal a hearty, credulous love of straightforward bloodshed, murder and mutilation uncontaminated by sophisticated skill of setting. Equally robust and rude is the new patriotism, the sudden realization of nationalism which runs a whole gamut,

from jingoism in Peele's Edward I through Gaunt and his compeers to the gravity of Henry V, the bright exhilaration of the last scene of the Arraignment of Paris or the chivalry of Greene. The average man's eager preoccupation with politics foreign and domestic finds its account in a whole world of historical plays, Shakespeare's, Greene's, Marlowe's, Peele's and a host of chronicles given over wholly or in part to the exploration of problems of government of the nature of king-ship, the king-becoming virtues, the evolution of the common Elizabethan's idea of a state. And beside this vivid mirroring of event are the plays of fantasy and romance, the delicate myths of Lyly, the diaphanous joy and humour of Peele's Arraignment and Old Wives' Tale, the straightforward tenderness of Greene's romantic scenes, their descendants in the early romantic plays of Shakespeare. Scattered throughout this drama are reflections of speculative thought carried out in the same mood of bold exploration, more amply revealed in the prose and metaphysical verse, but never with more depth of implication than in Tamburlaine and Faustus. All this, most noticeably, is not a literature of escape from, but a road to life; a way into reality by

imaginative experience strictly related to, though no mere reproduction of, the experience of every day. Above all it is a literature of radiant comedy and of tragedy (and it produced very little genuine tragedy outside Faustus and Romeo and Juliet) still breathless from its first contemplation of the magnitude of fate.

But already Marlowe's decisive genius had made a significant modification in the field of experience to be drawn on by the drama, had defined the underlying mood that was to be a main factor in the development of English tragedy and in so doing had delimited indirectly the mood and field of its comedy. The full effect of his emphatic decision does not show itself immediately and might indeed never have done so had not much else in the fortunes and experience of the Jacobean age been propitious, but, coming when he does, the first explorer of tragic thought in English drama, he imposes something of his interpretation, contributes at least to the force and direction of its progress. For in Marlowe we find, earlier than in any of his contemporaries, the significant schism between the ideal or spiritual world and the world pragmatically estimated by everyday observation, which seems, in one form or another, to be an essential part of any tragic conception of the universe. The cleavage is anticipated in Tamburlaine and presented in its full operation in Faustus, where the possibility of reconciling the course of man's life with the aspiration of his spiritual instincts is rejected. 'Belike we must sin and so consequently die. Aye, we must die an everlasting death.' The separation between the two worlds is complete and the total of man's experience for him is thereafter no true universe but a battleground, a dual presentation of mutually contradictory experiences. Rejecting, then, the medieval Church's conclusion upon this conflict, Marlowe, a true pragmatic Elizabethan in this, accepts the immediate and actual world as real and arrives, through the series of historical plays, at some kind of synthetic interpretation of the half he has chosen to retain. But the invisible world he has rejected troubles him, though the Church's anathemas do not, and nearly to the end a note of defiance betrays his insecurity: 'Of this am I assured, that death ends all.' He is not assured, and, what is more important, he transmits to the succeeding dramatic tradition a limited interpretation, a deliberately truncated universe, a world that is self-contained in its actualism, seeking its synthesis and its elucidation within its own bounds, rejecting that wider universe of the soul of which the writers outside the drama still for a while remain free.

Marlowe in this is less an innovator than a thinker coming at the climax of a movement, defining what has long been implicit and, in so defining, giving to it a fresh direction, a modified or intensified significance. The beginnings of this movement may be traced in the separation of drama from the medieval Church and the slow process of secularization has occupied some three hundred years. But because of this act of separation, in spite of the retention of doctrinal and traditional themes, the drama seems to have grown beneath the surface during that interval into the least ecclesiastical—if not an anti-ecclesiastical—art. It was at the hands of Marlowe that the Church finally lost the drama but his attitude of religious atheism would not have been enough alone to separate the world of the drama from the complete universe still contemplated by many of his contemporaries if it had not been for the part played by Church and drama in their mutual misinterpretations of each other and of that universal whole.

For, partly through the accident of Marlowe's leadership, but partly also through conscious or unconscious anti-ecclesiasticism, the dramatists arrive earlier than the body of their contemporaries at a uniform rejection of the element of religion which habitually plays so large a part in the evolution of drama and so small a part in its full development. For outside the drama we can still meet in Marlowe's contemporaries of the late sixteenth century either a simple piety or a philosophic interpretation capable of beholding the apparent conflict as two aspects of a single world, capable of dwelling in this single world, this true universe where the seen is only an image of the unseen, of passing easily and without anxiety from contemplation of one aspect to that of the other. Whether in Sidney's sonnets, in Nashe's verses on the plague, in the description of the death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in Hooker's survey of the nature of Law, in Bacon's pseudo-Aristotelian interpretation of First and Second Causes, there is, in all these, no doubt as to the relations of the spiritual world and the world of observed fact, nor as to the validity of man's judgment in supposing the seen to be the image and instrument of the unseen.

This still characteristic attitude, this unrestricted citizenship in two worlds simultaneously, this power of transfusing the world of affairs suddenly with irradiation from a spiritual universe at once circumambient and interpenetrating, this rhythm of which Marlowe's hard, clear thought had helped to denude the drama, is never better seen than in the man who seems himself an epitome of his age, Sir Walter Ralegh. In him is laid bare more clearly than perhaps in any other one man the process by which the best of both these worlds is achieved. In his letters and the records of his life we find an explorer associated with every major expedition of the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, a leader of great practical acumen and an almost matchless power of controlling men, a soldier of some distinction and an able captain; a courtier and adventurer who had made his way by studying the whims of the Queen and made himself hated by forcing others in turn to study his; a statesman who achieved eminence, in Ireland if not in England; an historian and chronicler second to none in his age; a scientist among the first and no mean mathematician; a bold, adventurous man whose instinct for intrigue was only checked by his impatience of the processes of intriguing; a worldling—but such a one as reminds us there are worse things than a good worldling. And out of this medley of intrigue and adventure, extravagance and violence, comes a voice of grave assurance:

Blood must be my bodies balmer,
No other balme will there be given
Whilst my soule like a white Palmer
Travels to the land of heaven.

Nor is this a paradox. Ralegh, bred up as so many of his generation to 'hold the world but as the world', pursued it whole-heartedly in the half-conscious assurance that the other was at hand the moment he chose to withdraw into it. It was indeed about them on every side, and though they did not necessarily mingle the two, they did not forget which claimed precedence. Indeed, the mind of Ralegh (and of not a few contemporaries of like habit) has a double motion like the planets of Faustus's system, and while the daily revolution is concerned only with worldly business, the primum mobile is ever exerting, unseen, the quiet and irresistible pressure of its heavenly sway.

Such things as these are not the momentary indications of a passing mood, but rather the decantation of his thought, clear, simple and quintessential, so closely related to the sum of precedent experience as to be alone capable of completing and containing it. This apparent paradox—in truth the simplest of conditions—is the characteristic approach to life of Ralegh and of many of his contemporaries.

It is, then, this unity, whether in terms of Bacon's immense lucidity or Hooker's, or of Ralegh's snipe-like flight, threading from world to world, it is this acceptance of both the outer and the inner world, the seen and the unseen, the evidence of observed fact and the intuition of a spiritual universe, which Marlowe rejects and the drama after him is for a time powerless to recover, though here and there an individual such as Dekker makes a faint attempt. The denial of dogmatic theology gives a momentary freedom to the range of thought, a sudden and immense increase of stature and dignity to the figure of man who thus becomes the significant deity, at once priest and victim, of his own universe. For a time with Marlowe himself the stirring of this freedom, like a dark wind of thought, moves him to an exultation higher than the contemplations of his contemporaries whether in poetry or in drama. But even in him the mood dies down and the gigantic figure of Faustus, archtype of man's defiance in defeat, shrinks in Mortimer 'to a little point, A kind of nothing'.

The sinking of the clear exaltation of Elizabethan dramatic poetry into the sophisticated, satirical, conflicting mood, deeply divided, of the Jacobean drama has many concurrent causes other than Marlowe's rejection, after Faustus, of that 'wonder which is broken knowledge'. There were far-reaching political and social changes consequent upon the death of Elizabeth and the changing of the dynasty and these were felt by anticipation some years before that death actually happened. The apprehension, regret and disillusionment inevitable to the conscious passing of a long period of high civilization were not in this case unfounded, and those who had known the great age, even those who had only grown to manhood during its latest years, were touched by them, often (like the generation that succeeded the Great War) without being able to define their loss in what had passed. Moreover, the literature, and especially the drama, had reached a stage of its development in which some transition from wonder and discovery to assessment and criticism was inevitable; this would have happened had Elizabeth been immortal. As it was, the phase, within the drama itself, of testing and questioning the findings and methods of the earlier age coincided with a period of disillusionment and apprehension in the world from which that drama drew its themes and this, combined with the still living tradition of Marlowe's thought, set up a mood which resembles on one side that of English poetry in the second and third decades of the twentieth century and on another that of Seneca and his public in the first.

This was especially emphasized in the dramatic tradition by a factor which, though partly accidental, is of overwhelming importance, the impact upon the poetic universe of the Elizabethans of the thought of Machiavelli. Nothing could have been more alien to Elizabethan dramatic poetry, as it appears in the early work of Marlowe, Peele, Greene and Shakespeare, than Machiavelli's cold, scientific appraisal of the poverty of man's spirit. Although, in their utter inability to grasp the essentials of his system, they at first twisted his thought into some likeness to their own healthy love of melodramatic villainy, enough of his clear, withering honesty survives the perversion to drive the drama with irresistible force towards the acceptance of a materialist universe. For (and it is there that one accidental element occurs) through Gentillet's perversion of the system in the Contre-Machiavel, a figure so suitable for drama was evolved from Machiavelli's essentially undramatic philosophy that the Machiavellian villain became one of the most popular stage figures for twenty years and nearly every tragic dramatist from Marlowe to Webster adds his share. Again it is Marlowe who is responsible for the acclimatizing of Machiavellianism in England, and so again it is in Marlowe's own career that the trend of the later drama is anticipated. While the Machiavellian villain appealed to Kyd and to many of his public only as a theatrical figure apt for promiscuous villainy (which would have had relatively little lasting effect), Marlowe was concerned with the real system that lay behind this farrago of preposterous melodrama, came to a limited understanding of Machiavelli himself and so transmitted to his successors the results of his exploration of a materialist and approximately satanic interpretation of life. His own discovery of Machiavelli came hard upon the heels of the negative conclusions of Faustus and confirmed in him the rejection of the spiritual universe by offering him a systematic, logical, self-contained and severe interpretation of the world of facts which might else have been left disparate and inconclusive. The ardour of Marlowe's early Machiavellianism in the Jew of Malta and the Massacre at Paris is only matched by the pressure it exerted upon the subsequent tradition.

For Machiavelli, although easily misrepresented, was no mean force. One of the greatest, in some ways the most independent of assessors of human values, deeply civilized, trained to the highest point of sagacity and scientific precision, honest as few men are honest, Machiavelli offered to the mind that could grasp him with any completeness a compact, unshakeable interpretation of civilization based frankly upon the assumption of weakness, ingratitude and ill-will as essential elements of human character and society, upon the acceptance of religion only as the means of making a people docile to their governors, upon the open admission of cruelty, parsimony and betrayal of faith as necessary (if regrettable) instruments. It is the sublime honesty of thus setting down what many men assumed in action but denied in profession that caught Marlowe's imagination; it was Marlowe's exploration of the system that imposed upon a drama already the inheritor of spiritual bewilderment a tradition by which it proceeded to a deeper and deeper confusion. Moreover, the Machiavellian theory of society, in the hands of its more serious students such as Marlowe, reached English drama in a peculiarly vicious form, again partly as the result of an accident. Lacking the background of Machiavelli's experience (a country invaded by foreigners, given over to civil conflict between State and State for which there seemed no remedy in the ordinary course of political event), they missed the motive upon which the writing of The Prince at least depends: 'justum enim est bellum quibus necessarium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes' [ Il Principe, XXVI]. The dramatists, without a single exception, pass by without perceiving it the burning vision of the twenty-sixth chapter of The Prince, the great sixteenth-century vision of Italia Redenta—redeemed by the one thing that could unite it, the dominance of a just, firm, ruthless leader.

…..

I cannot describe the love with which he would be received in all those provinces that have suffered from these foreign invasions; with what thirst for vengeance, with what dogged faith, with what religious reverence, with what tears. What doors would be shut against him? What people would refuse him obedience? What envy would oppose him? What Italian would refuse him allegiance?

(Il Principe, XXVI.)

By omitting the corner-stone of his thought, this vision of national union and liberation, by isolating from their context the most startling of his individual statements on religion, war and government and by appealing directly and indirectly to current sixteenth-century superstition and sentiment, it was easy for the popular purveyors of the tradition to display his books as the grammar of a diabolic creed, inculcating a policy of self-seeking and cynical aggression. So easy was it to spread this impression that even Marlowe, who seems to have read Machiavelli himself, appears to have read him partly by the light of this prejudice and to produce a materialist interpretation tinged with satanism which is certainly not Machiavelli's, though the process by which it is derived is an easy one:

…..

I have thought it better to investigate the actual truth of the matter than what we imagine it to be … because how we live is so far away from how we ought to live that he who leaves what is done for the sake of what ought to be done brings about his own ruin rather than his own preservation.

(Il Principe, XV.)

One would prefer to be both [loved and feared]; but since it is difficult to manage both at once, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when one has to let go one or the other.

(Il Principe, XVII.)

From the evidence of our own times it can be seen that those princes have achieved greatly who have taken little count of good faith and have known how to mislead men with their astuteness and in the end they have overcome those who have relied on loyalty…. Now if men were all good this precept would not be good; but since men are bad and will not observe it [faith] with you, you also need not observe it with them…. I will go so far as to say this, that if you have them [virtues] and always practise them they are dangerous; but they are useful if you appear to have them: as, to appear compassionate, faithful, humane, upright and religious—and to be such, but to have a mind so constituted that, when it is necessary to be the opposite you may be able to change to it.

(Il Principe, XVIII.)

As all writers point out who treat of the organization of society and as every history illustrates, he who organizes a republic and appoints its laws, must of necessity assume all men to be bad and that they will try to exercise their evil instincts whenever a favourable opportunity offers. If this evil remains quiescent for a time, there is a hidden reason for it, which, from our having no contrary experience, is not recognized…. Men do not work in the direction of good unless forced by necessity.

(Discorsi, I, iii.)

When I consider how it happens that the men of antiquity were fiercer lovers of liberty than those of to-day I am inclined to believe that it comes from the same cause as our lack of robustness, and that cause is the difference in upbringing then and now, arising from the difference of religions…. Our religion has glorified men of humble and contemplative mind more than men of action. It has in fact declared man's highest good to stand in humility and abjection, in contempt of human things: where the other placed it rather in greatness of soul, in strength of body and in all those other things that tend to make men valiant. And if our religion ever recommends strength, it demands rather that you should be strong in suffering than that you should achieve a valiant deed. This way of life seems to have weakened the world and given it over as a prey to evil men. They are secure in their control of it, knowing that the majority of mankind, having in mind their places in paradise, think more of supporting injuries than of avenging them.

(Discorsi, II, ii.)

The figure of the self-seeking 'politician', with no object beyond his own supremacy, though full of melodramatic promise is actually unrealizable, and Marlowe himself perceived its insufficiency as soon as he examined it closely. But the unreal and fantastic figure of the Machiavellian continued to attract, with a curious, sinister fascination, both dramatists and public until well into the second decade of the seventeenth century. Always it contained the elements of its own destruction, always it operated in a world in which there was 'no place to mount' to any significant height, and it transmitted also something of the real pragmatical estimate of Machiavelli, resulting in an uneasy attempt to limit their reading of life, even in tragedy to, 'la verità effettuale della cosa', edged with the unspoken fear that 'losing this world we lose all'. Shakespeare alone of all the major dramatists appears to escape; he followed Marlowe's conclusion (after working over the same ground in his double picture of Richard of Gloucester) and rejected the pseudo-Machiavellian villain as a figure psychologically contradictory and so, ultimately, dramatically valueless. But he does not seem to accept, either directly or indirectly, the Machiavellian scale of values whose oppressive influence can be traced, to greater or less degree, in most of the succeeding tragedy. Marlowe remains, then, the main channel by which this interpretation of life entered the Jacobean drama; Kyd it is true anticipates him, but the others derive from him. Greene's study [James IV] is a childish repudiation of his; Shakespeare and Tourneur take over his findings with their own elaboration; Chapman's picture (far more superficial than it appears at first glance) is a reasonable enough reaction against Marlowe's; Marston's though partly original is often a confused and incompletely synthesized acceptance of his deductions, and Webster, who makes the most deeply original studies after Marlowe's, is caught immediately into the world of Machiavellian values that the later work of Marlowe had bequeathed.

While we look up to Heaven we confound
Knowledge with knowledge.

Webster's words, then, not only sum up the content of his own great tragedies, but are the most nearly universal comment that was made upon the world of chaotic thought behind the Jacobean drama. The outer and the inner worlds have become two; Bacon's First Cause working through Second Causes has vanished, at least from the world the drama presents, and their philosophy,

that leaned on heaven before
Shrinks to a second cause and is no more.

The visible is no longer either the image or the instrument of an invisible world, but exists in and per se as an alternative truth in conflict with the other and offering a rival interpretation of phenomena. So marked is this divergence that there is hardly a dramatist who can bring the two together. In comedy this is not necessarily noticed because it is a prerogative of comedy to select its material from a wide range of possibilities, farce, satire, romance, fairy-tale and others, so that no individual play suggests limitation and only the consideration of the whole body of comedy reveals that after about 1600 there is something lacking, that there is an emphasis on the immediate and a rejection of the remote, a habit of accurate satiric observation rather than poetic or romantic idealization. But in tragedy, whose function is different from that of comedy and not merely complemental to it, which must by its very nature try to evaluate all the known issues of life and attempt an estimate of that total validity, this is apparent at once in the whole body and in nearly all individual specimens. There is hardly a tragedian of standing in whom the basis, implicit or explicit, of his tragic conception is not this sense of the loss of a spiritual significance from within the revealed world of fact and event. And as the world has become two, of which the dramatists have chosen for their province the immediate, so knowledge has become dual and what is valid in the one is meaningless in the other; to pass from one to the other is no longer as with Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, even Ralegh, to look through the manifestation to the thing manifested but to 'confound knowledge with knowledge'. In that vast range of drama very few characters (except those officially concerned, priests, friars and the like) ever attempt this glance out from the world in which their fortunes move to the circumambient reality which assigns at once its proportions and its rhythm. In the world of Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, there is crime and suffering, often of Aeschylean depth, but no hint of the Aeschylean resolution of evil through the education that suffering brings. If there is any comment (and often enough the tragedy ends in a crash of hardy and unmoved defiance) it is at most a thin, wavering doubt, a wandering scent blown for a moment on the tempest across the dark action of the final catastrophe. 'I limned this night-piece and it was my best' is the typical, unbending summing up of the first, and, of the last, d'Amville's repudiation of Nature ('Sure there is some power above Her that controls her force'), a belated reaching out to another world of knowledge which he cannot grip and which only confounds that to which he is committed. With Shakespeare, in the corresponding phase of his thought, though perhaps only in Lear, this other illumination penetrates the 'deep pit of darkness' in which 'womanish and fearful mankind dwell(s)' and there is a momentary indication of what may lie beyond, the realization 'I have ta'en Too little care of this' with the sequent education by suffering of the people that share the central experience. Stronger, or at least more explicit, is the Duchess of Malfi's confident piety, but it is obliterated and washed over by subsequent event as though the dramatist himself renounced it, except as a will-o'-the-wisp of thought, of no permanence or stability. Only Dekker, who never grappled hard enough with the material of his themes to produce coherent tragedy, carried into the drama that capacity for sudden and swift withdrawal into a world quite other, a simple and explicit piety which recalls the earlier serene transitions of the Elizabethans.

For the most part the tragedy, outside certain of Shakespeare's, accepts with protesting wonder or with stoical resolution the 'wearisome Condition of Humanity', its insecure progress through vicissitude and confusion to an unjust and ineluctable fate. It is the argument of Faustus now expanded into terms embracing all common experience: 'We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves.'

Alone, forsaken, frindless onn the shore
with many wounds, with deaths cold pangs imbrased
writes in the dust as onn that could no more
whom love, and tyme, and fortune had defaced.
of things so great, so longe, so manefolde
with meanes so weake, the sowle yeven then departing
the weale, the wo, the passages of olde
and worlds of thoughts discribde by onn last sythinge.
as if when after phebus is dissended
and leves a light rich like the past dayes dawninge,
and every toyle and labor wholly ended
each livinge creature draweth to his restinge
wee should beginn by such a partinge light
to write the story of all ages past
and end the same before th'aprochinge night.

The sense of the lateness of time, the weariness of spirit, the burden of fruitless experience is heavy upon these lines as it is upon Measure for Measure, Troilus, Lear and Timon, as it is intermittently through Hamlet, Cymbeline, Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, as it remains in Tis Pity and The Broken Heart. It is indeed an Embassy of Death at which we assist in this drama, not continuously, except in a few plays such as Philaster and The Broken Heart, but recurrently, knowing that at any moment a character may fall suddenly in love with his own death.

And that love of death grows, as much as from anything, from the inexplicableness of the world to which the drama has delimited its thought. Paradoxically, it has narrowed down the issue, abandoning the metaphysical universe to limit itself to the palpable and actual that can be pragmatically assessed, only to find itself the inheritor of a host of obstinate questionings, not only the 'blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized' but the half-fretful, insistent, monotonous questionings of destiny, conduct, motive, even his very nature itself. 'Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is it to leave betimes?'

But, and Greville himself was the first to admit it, man's understanding is imperfect, his immediate environment rather bewilders than befriends him and the 'twilight of Deliberation' which obscures all conclusion in the tragic period of Shakespeare, Tourneur and Webster, only gives place to a frivolity of debate, an endless questioning and requestioning in Beaumont and Fletcher.

It is indeed in this stoic endurance that they come, if at all, to rest. In those parts of their plays that hint a solution, define in any way a tragic conception, the dramatists seem to assume a dual world, sometimes (as with Webster) near to Euripides' view of man doomed to destruction by the gods which, less noble than he, are yet stronger, sometimes, as in Marston, Tourneur, one phase of Chapman and another mood of Webster, even in Shakespeare, and in one side of Ford, to that obstinacy of defeat which grew from their growing sense of the futility of man's endeavour, of the doom which waited not upon him only, but upon the civilization he had built. Small wonder that the dramatists, shaken by the impact of the Machiavellian disillusionment and the fading of glory and disintegration of faith and tradition that so amply bore it out, fell back upon an older, over-shadowing influence, the Seneca of their childhood. The Elizabethans had rifled Seneca with glee as great as that with which they had earlier appropriated the pseudo-Machiavellian villain; they looked upon him as a store-house of theatrical themes and tricks, but outside the Senecan play proper they paid little attention to his sentiments or his poetry. The Jacobeans, when his resources in this line had been assimilated or transformed by forty years of use, remembered him not as the source which 'let blood line by line', 'will afford you whole … handfulls of tragical speeches', but as the moralist whose 'sententiae' and images had fixed themselves in their minds from the pages of their schoolbooks. That the Stoic generalizations they reproduced were not necessarily his, were at least equally those of Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and later European borrowers, was beside the point. Except for a scholar like Ben Jonson the source of the thought was immaterial; it was its aptness to their present need that mattered. Moreover, in this it was, I fancy, Seneca who came nearest to them; his disillusionment was the greater, his rhetoric the more specious; he lived too far from any golden age to have even their fading memory of its glory, but he shared their vision of a decaying civilization, he opened to them the language of undefeated despair. Tourneur with his enveloping atmosphere of evil, Webster with his juxtaposition of keen pathos and horror, Shakespeare in Lear or Timon's vision of the falling hierarchy of civilization from which 'degree' has been taken away, Greville with his sense of the weary paradoxes of man's life, all touch Seneca's most characteristic thought and touch it intimately. Some if not all of their plays have for setting that City of Dreadful Night which meets us in Thyestes, but more potent than the survival of his sense of horror is the affinity of experience that echoes his vision, sometimes accompanied by that very cosmic imagery with which he himself sought to universalize it.

… Nondum
Nocte parata non succedunt
Astra, nec ullo micat igne polus.
Nec Luna graves digerit umbras.
Sed quidquid id est, utinam nox sit.
Trepidant, trepidant pectora magno
Percussa metu, ne fatali
Cuncta ruina quassata labent,
Iterumque deos, hominesque premat
Deforme chaos: iterum terras,
Et mare et ignes, et vaga picti
Sidera mundi Natura tegat.
Non aeternae facis exortu
Dux astrorum secula ducens
Dabit aestatis Brumaeque notas.
Non Phoebeis obvia flammis
Demet nocti Luna timores,
Vincetque sui fratris habenas
Curvo brevius limite currens.
Ibit in unum congesta sinum
Turba deorum.
Nos e tanto visi populo
Digni, premeret quos everso
Cardine mundus.
In nos aetas ultima venit,
O nos dura sorte creatos,
Seu perdidimus solem miseri,
Sivi expulimus! abeant questus.
Discede timor. Vitae est avidus,
Quisquis non vult, mundo secum

Pereunte, mori.
[Thyestes, 828-48, 880-89. (Chorus IV.)]

Everything in this passage can be paralleled, not as mere imitation but as proof of an analogous experience, of a participated mood, in one part or another of the Jacobean drama. The dark beauty of the opening description (like that of Hercules' descent to hell or that, still more deeply imagined, of the House of Atreus) has the very quality of Tourneur's massive gloom, the unrelenting evil, sustained and cumulative; the pathos that Seneca touches with unfaltering sureness when he speaks of peace, children, the obscure life, woods and mountains is not unworthy of comparison with Shakespeare's and with Webster's; Seneca the stoic watching the dying civilization about him crumbling to its destruction anticipates Shakespeare's vision 'We have seen the best of our time' no less than he does the only comfort Shakespeare himself can offer in that phase, 'the readiness is all'. Small wonder the Jacobeans turn back to their memories of Seneca like children to a schoolmaster.

Piety, and Feare,
Religion to the Gods, Peace, Justice, Truth,
Domesticke awe, Night-rest and Neighbourhood,
Instruction, Manners, Mysteries and Trades,
Degrees, Observances, Customes and Lawes,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let Confusion live.
[Timon of Athens, IV, i, 15-21]

The revulsion from this spectacle of universal decay and corruption, if it be not always so intense as in Timon, Lear, The Revenger's Tragedy is almost invariably like Seneca's own: 'O nos dura sorte creatos', the acceptance of the bitter fate, the sense that there is 'No safe place on the ridge of the world', the stoic acceptance of death, with or without the stoic fortitude, and the true stoic repudiation of wealth, power and high place. This repudiation occupies with the Jacobean dramatists approximately the same position as in Seneca's drama: it is freely professed, in the form of wistful comments, but only very rarely practised by the characters as portrayed dramatically:

Stet quicunque volet, potens
Aulae culmine lubrico:
Me dulcis saturet quies,
Obscuro positus loco,
Leni perfruar otio.
Nullis nota Quiritibus
Aetas per taciturn fluat.
Sic cum transierint mei
Nullo cum strepitu dies,
Plebeius moriar senex.
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus,
Ignotus moritur sibi.
[Thyestes, 391-403.]

'Climb, at Court, for me that will,
Tottering favour's pinnacle;
All I seek is to lie still:
Settled in some secret nest,
In calm leisure let me rest,
And far off the public stage,
Pass away my silent age.
Thus, when, without noise, unknown,
I have lived out all my span,
I shall die, without a groan,
An old honest countryman.
Who, exposed to others' eyes,
Into his own heart ne'er pries
Death to him's a strange surprise.'
[translation by Andrew Marvell]

And once the drama has fixed this mood, leading the way, by reason of the conjunction of factors noted at the beginning of this chapter, into the non-spiritual universe by which it was so straitly bound, we begin to recognize signs of the same process at work at last outside it. The violent contrast between the two worlds of Ralegh's mind, though he himself seems to have had no apprehension of it, is now seen to be indicative of the same schism that was growing to open conflict elsewhere. The break is complete in the case of Donne and the contrast between his secular and his divine poems is the measure of the extremity in which so many men could only preserve the spiritual world at all by relinquishing the material, could only reject that interpretation represented by Machiavelli's system by repudiating wholesale the world of observed fact and everyday experience from which that system drew its evidence. Thus the Jacobean drama, leading, as might be expected, the thought of the nation, arrives first at that point of view which spread later through popular thought—poetry, philosophy, science—separating each in turn from religion. The division is first obvious in the early eighteenth century (though discernible in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century deists) when side by side with deism we find Pope's lament over the downfall of a civilization. But the Jacobean dramatists had long before this seen the same vision as he, often a vision of almost infinite despair, the withdrawal of the light of the spirit from within a world that it had once inhabited entire.

As the political dangers of the first half of the reign died away and the Stuart dynasty seemed to be settled upon the throne securely enough to avoid civil war, invasion and economic ruin, the tension of the first decade began to relax. Men no longer lived under the shadow of a half-unknown horror or seemed to move upon the very rim of eternity itself. Gradually there passes that sense of living at the world's end: 'In nos aetas ultima venit'. Imperceptibly at first, a more normal rhythm of mind comes back; everyday life resumes its course. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the romantic tragicomedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, where, though the issues touched are serious enough, there is no sense of bitterness, horror or despair. The horror is resolutely put aside, the great questions rest untouched except as debating topics, the world is becoming a cloud-cuckoo-land of pathos, tender or poignant sentiment, noble reflections and fairy-tale adventures. The end is saved from catastrophe by a mood that gave us clearly to know from the outset that catastrophe was never really imminent. It is the same world as that of Almanzor some fifty years later and its significance, for the purpose of this interpretation, lies in just that quality of evasion, the fact that horror and catastrophe have now become things that can be played with, that the dark world of tragedy can be skirted without that tightening of the nerves, that sickening sense of impending doom, inseparable from the major drama of the first decade. It is the emotional irresponsibleness of Beaumont and Fletcher (whatever be their intentions as academic homilists) that marks the beginning of a new phase, a phase when soldiering is again remote enough to become a nursery game.

Different, but equally significant is the corresponding modulation in the poetry of Shakespeare's last plays and of the Middleton-Rowley tragi-comedies. With Shakespeare the mood is of solution rather than indifference: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest succeed a tragic period in which Shakespeare has been immersed as deeply as Webster, Tourneur, Marston or Chapman in the dismay and foreboding of the Jacobean age, and he arrives at serenity by resolving, not by discarding the earlier experience. Middleton's position is much more like that of Beaumont and Fletcher, for, though he had more dramatic experience behind him at the period of A Fair Quarrel and the succeeding tragi-comedies of the second decade, it was of comedy only, romantic or realistic or both. But in Middleton it is again the mood of an older man who has lived through the tragic age, though, with the sardonic detachment characteristic of one side of him, he has taken no part in its imaginative explorations. The reflections in Middleton's later plays indicate an equanimity as clear and undisturbed as Shakespeare's, but, like Shakespeare's again, they are comments fully aware of the nature of the darker world upon which they reflect and side by side with which, in the case of Middleton, they cohabit. The essential difference between his late tragicomedies and Shakespeare's late plays is, in fact, in this indication of two minds in Middleton's work, where there is one in Shakespeare's. In the later Middleton the sardonic commentary on the fertile culture of human baseness (characteristic of the mood of such plays as A Chaste Maid) went side by side with a steady equanimity in which, as truly as for Webster, 'the stars shine still'; but they went side by side and the one never wholly absorbed the other. In Shakespeare there is no opposition; evil is resolved and converted, as later with Ford, 'A Touch more rare, Subdues all pangs, all feares'.

With Ford, who in this as in much else forms the fitting conclusion to the great Jacobean dramatic period (though his best work falls within the reign of Charles I), the steady serenity reaches its final phase. The clear piety of his early work (those phrases that carry us back to Dekker's intermittent illumination) and the gradually increasing compactness and reticence of his later work rest alike upon a foundation of security. Horror, in spite of the often absurd concessions of his plots, never touches his final conclusion: the soul of goodness in things evil was never more clearly revealed than by the clear sureness of the thought that illuminates the nightmare of event. This is not the evasion of Beaumont and Fletcher nor the divided mind of Middleton, but a secure and accustomed conversion of evil resting upon the assumptions implicit in Shakespeare's latest solutions. The cycle has been completed since the first tragedy of Marlowe. With Ford, to look up to heaven leads not to the fear that we shall 'confound knowledge with knowledge' but to the assurance 'Look you, the stars shine still'.

Arthur C. Kirsch

[In the following introduction, Kirsch distinguishes Jacobean drama from that of the Elizabethan period, focusing on the rise of Fletcherian tragicomedy, satiric drama, and the private theater.]

There are many recognized differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but we still often mis-read plays from both periods by reducing them to a single paradigm. There is, I think, a need to preserve distinctions, and in particular to appreciate some of the distinctive attributes of Jacobean plays. The first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed a number of developments which were ultimately to change the whole character of English drama, and though their effects upon Jacobean dramaturgy were gradual and complex, they were also profound, impinging upon all the major dramatists of the period, including Shakespeare. It is the purpose of this study to illuminate some of these developments and their effects and to understand the ways in which they can help us interpret individual Jacobean plays.

The most obvious as well as significant development was the rise of Fletcherian tragicomedy. Beaumont and Fletcher were acknowledged in their own time as members of the "triumvirate of wit" which included Jonson and Shakespeare, but though Jonson's reputation may have been higher among the literati and Shakespeare's influence may have been more profound and enduring, it was they who clearly dominated the repertory of the English stage for the better part of the seventeenth century. They were premier dramatists of the King's Men even before Shakespeare retired, and by the second decade of the century their idea of a play as well as their plays themselves had become the staple of the English theater. They had many collaborators; they gave rise to a host of imitators, including Ford, who is not usually associated with them; they exerted a subtle influence on others, probably including Shakespeare; and the characteristics of the tragicomic form they crystallized eventually acquired canonical status for all drama. Both the theatrical criticism and the plays of the later Jacobean and the Caroline periods are thoroughly subsumed by their dramaturgical principles, and by the Restoration Dryden could state quite accurately that two plays of theirs were performed for every one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's combined. It was only in the 1670s, notably with Rymer's attack, that the authority of their dramaturgy began to be questioned, and even then it continued to exercise a considerable influence, especially upon Restoration comedy. No English dramatists before or since have had so extraordinary an influence.

Another important, if less spectacular, symptom of a change in theatrical taste, particularly in the early years of the century, was the vogue for satiric drama. Initiated by Jonson in 1599 with Every Man out of His Humour, comical satires eventually accounted for the bulk of the repertory of the boys' companies and a considerable proportion of the output of the major dramatists of the first decade of the century, including Marston, Middleton, Chapman, and Jonson himself. [Alfred] Harbage estimates [in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, 1952] that of the fifty-five extant plays which can be assigned with confidence to the coterie theater between 1599 and 1613, "all but a dozen" can be classified as satiric comedies. The effect of this corpus of plays, moreover, was not confined to the years or the theaters in which they were produced: the techniques of dramatic satire unquestionably influenced Beaumont and Fletcher's development of tragicomedy and had a substantial impact upon the tragedies of Webster and Middleton.

Yet another sign of the change in the drama was the rise of the coterie theater itself and the consequent dispersion of the peculiarly heterogeneous audience of the Elizabethan public stage. Though facts are meager and debate is infinite in this matter, there is nevertheless evidence that the audience at the private theater was different from that of the public theater, at any rate had different expectations; that performance by children in the early years had a constitutive effect upon the plays which were produced; and that the resultant kinds of theatrical responses were the ones which were to be increasingly cultivated by seventeenth-century dramatists. Rosencrantz was not the only one to notice the success of the "little eyases," and by 1608 the King's Men had seen the wisdom of acquiring the Blackfriars Theater and performing their repertory there as well at the Globe. For what it reflected, if not for what it caused, there is good reason for taking this as a critical event in English theatrical history.

The rise of tragicomedy, satiric drama, and the private theater are related phenomena. Certain connections are obvious. Coterie audiences clamored for satiric comedy, and their abundance in the repertory of the children's companies is testimony to their demand. Similarly, Fletcherian tragicomedy, though by no means the exclusive preserve of the private theater, clearly originated there and catered very successfully to its tastes. There are also, as we shall see, less obvious correspondences. Satirical comedy is one of the sources of tragicomedy and has in common with it the creation of a peculiarly self-conscious relationship between the audience and the play, and this relationship, in turn, was certainly encouraged by conditions of performance in the private theater.

Naturally, these developments and relationships are not simple. The rise of the private theater, for example, is a particularly vexed question, because though the opposition between the Elizabethan public, platform stage and the essentially private, proscenium arch stage into which it eventually developed is clear enough, the distinctions and relationship between the public and private theaters in the early Jacobean period are extremely complicated and even confusing. Jonson, Middleton, and Shakespeare himself in the last plays—in other words, the first dramatists of the age—wrote for both, and with equal success. Every Man out of His Humour, though it inaugurated a genre which flourished in the coterie theater, was itself a public theater play, and though there is reason to believe that Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest were responding to the stimulus of the private stage, Pericles, the acknowledged prototype of the last plays, was unquestionably written for the public stage. Each theater thus pirated from and was influenced by the other, and currents moved in both directions. Moreover, even where hard and fast distinctions are possible, they do not necessarily explain individual works, since an explanation of the nature of the audience and the circumstances of performances does not in itself, obviously, constitute an interpretation of a play.

Similarly, the genesis and nature of satirical comedy are susceptible to different kinds of interpretation. Both late Elizabethan formal satire and Jacobean satirical comedy can be understood at least in part as responses to contemporary social developments (the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of economic individualism, and so forth), but at the same time their characteristic conventions are highly traditional, even reactionary. Formal satire is indebted to Roman satire and satirical comedies are often deliberate throwbacks to the morality play. The interpretation of these forms, therefore, or of their effect upon other genres, is quite involved.

Tragicomedy itself, finally, has a long and complex Continental history and many roots in earlier English drama, including the whole tradition of what Sidney labelled "mungrell Tragy-comedie." The form Fletcher defined is indeed clear and distinct, and eventually revolutionary, but its immediate effects are problematic. Beaumont and Fletcher's success, though remarkable, was not instantaneous, and their own early plays reveal a network of debts to the Continent as well as to the English public and private theaters. The assessment of the influence of tragicomic dramaturgy upon playwrights in the first two decades of the century, therefore, is difficult, and with a dramatist like Shakespeare, who has a long artistic history of his own, as well as genius, demands particular discrimination and delicacy if it is to be useful at all.

Precisely, therefore, in order to do justice to the dramatists who, like Shakespeare, matter most, the developments of satirical comedy, tragicomedy, and the private theater cannot be treated as reductive formulae…. [By] defining and understanding them we can provide fresh and essential insights into some familiar Jacobean works; but it is also important to remain aware that they influenced different dramatists in different degrees and in different ways, and that the distinctions can be as interesting as the similarities.