Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher Part 28

There is no reason to suppose Satan's address to the sun in the _Paradise Lost_, more than a mere coincidence with these lines; but were it otherwise, it would be a fine instance what usurious interest a great genius pays in borrowing. It would not be difficult to give a detailed psychological proof from these constant outbursts of anxious self-a.s.sertion, that Jonson was not a genius, a creative power. Subtract that one thing, and you may safely acc.u.mulate on his name all other excellences of a capacious, vigorous, agile, and richly-stored intellect.

Act i. sc. 1.-

"_Ovid._ While slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be whorish."

The roughness noticed by Theobald and Whalley, may be cured by a simple transposition:-

"While fathers hard, slaves false, and bawds be whorish."

Act. iv. sc. 3-

"_Crisp._ O-oblatrant-furibund-fatuate-strenuous.

O-conscious."

It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the proportion observed of words ridiculed which have been adopted, and are now common, such as _strenuous_, _conscious_, &c., and a trial made how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of a.s.similability to our language or not. Thus much is certain, that the ridiculers were as often wrong as right; and Shakespeare himself could not prevent the naturalisation of _accommodation_, _remuneration_, &c.; or Swift the gross abuse even of the word _idea_.

"Fall Of Seja.n.u.s."

Act i.-

"_Arruntius._ The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone The dignity and power.

_Silius._ Sure, while he lives.

_Arr._ And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail, To the brave issue of Germanicus; And they are three: too many (ha?) for him To have a plot upon?

_Sil._ I do not know The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the present.

_Arr._ By the G.o.ds, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My sword should cleave him down," &c.

The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Seja.n.u.s, with his James-and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this pa.s.sage, is amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception.

Act ii. Speech of Seja.n.u.s:-

"Adultery! it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread The world's wide face, which no posterity Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent," &c.

The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakespeare over his contemporaries;-and yet what contemporaries!-giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet, in no genuine part of Shakespeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other pa.s.sages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies, and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Seja.n.u.s is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come.

Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune.

This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Seja.n.u.s should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him.

"Volpone."

This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is, from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and sentiment, the strongest proof how impossible it is to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. _Zeluco_ is an instance of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other princ.i.p.als in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects of interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the person in whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover.

"Apicaene."

This is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune.

Act i. sc. 1. Clerimont's speech:-

"He would have hang'd a pewterer's 'prentice once upon a Shrove Tuesday's riot, for being of that trade, when the rest were _quiet_."

"The old copies read _quit_,-_i.e._, discharged from working, and gone to divert themselves."-Whalley's note.

It should be "quit" no doubt, but not meaning "discharged from working,"

&c.-but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade.

Act ii. sc. 1.-

"_Morose._ Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method than by this _trunk_, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds?"

What does "trunk" mean here, and in the first scene of the first act? Is it a large ear-trumpet?-or rather a tube, such as pa.s.ses from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell?

Whalley's note at the end:-

"Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humour is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural _caricatura_."

If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of drama and dramatic personation.

Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:-

"For he knew, poet never credit gain'd By writing _truths_, but things, like truths, well feign'd."

By "truths" he means "facts." Caricatures are not less so because they are found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and the truest defence of old Ben would be to call the _Epicne_ the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of Jonson's _dramatis personae_, lies in this;-that the accident is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it; but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakespeare's comic personages have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features.

But Jonson's are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men,-wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion.

_Nota bene._-All the above, and much more, will have justly been said, if, and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry with the Shakespearian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the Shakespearian be at once fairly owned,-but at the same time as the inferiority of an altogether different _genius_ of the drama. On this ground, old Ben would still maintain his proud height. He, no less than Shakespeare stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a master,-though his be Lattrig and Shakespeare's Skiddaw.