The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare Part 19

The manner in which his friend Dekker represents him, shortly after, reaching the Elysian fields, leaves little doubt that his life was shortened not only by his angry pa.s.sions, but by sheer want: "Marlow, Greene and Peele had got under the shades of a large vyne, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their colledge, still haunted with the sharpe and satyricall spirit that followed him heere upon earthe: for Nash inveyed bitterly, as he had wont to do against dryfisted patrons, accusing them of his untimely death, because if they had given his Muse that cherishment which she most worthily deserved, hee had fed to his dying day on fat capons, burnt sack and sugar, and not so desperately have vent.u.r.de his life and shortned his dayes by keeping company with pickle herrings."[289]

III.

Some of Shakespeare's contemporaries attempted to give their readers "the like" of Nash's wit, and tried their hand either at the picaresque novel or at the reproduction of scenes taken from ordinary life, of which Greene also had left some examples. The comic school was far from equalling the fecundity of its romantic rival; it existed however, and though absolutely forgotten now, it helped to keep up and improve the natural gift of observation which belonged to the English race.

One of the most extraordinary ventures ever attempted in the picaresque style was made by Henry Chettle, another member of the group to which Greene, Nash, and the others belonged. He was, like Nash himself, a personal friend of Greene, and published after his death his "Groats-worth of wit," 1592, for which, as we have seen, he had to offer in his next pamphlet explanations and apologies, among others, to Shakespeare. Chettle seems to have followed the literary career usual in his time; he composed many dramas alone[290] or in collaboration; he was perpetually borrowing money from the notorious Henslowe, and he was occasionally lodged in Her Majesty's prisons. In 1595 he published his "Piers Plainnes seaven yeres prentiship,"[291] in which we find, mingled together, Sidney's Arcady, Greene's romantic heroes, and the customary incidents of picaresque novels. The scene is laid in Tempe; there are Menalcas and Corydons; there are sheep who are poetically invited by their keeper to eat their gra.s.s:

"Sport on faire flocke at pleasure Nip Vestaes flouring treasure."

There is too Piers Plain, now a shepherd but formerly nothing short of a picaro, who has seen much and has followed many trades, and served many masters. His companions asked for his story, and he very willingly agreed to tell them what he had been, "and what the world is," no mean subject to be sure, and no wonder that he "cravde pardon to sit because the taske was long, which they willingly graunted." Piers, according to the picaresque traditions, had been the servant of many masters; he tells his experience of them in the first person, following also in this the rules of the picaresque tale. He first introduces us to a swaggering and cowardly courtier, and plays his part in intrigues and conspiracies.

Then he describes the "vertuous and famous virgin aeliana," Queen of Crete, who delighted in hunting, and went to the woods "Diana-like." To be "Diana-like," she dressed as follows:

"On her head she wore a coronet of orientall pearle; on it a chaplet of variable flowers perfuming the ayre with their divers odors, thence carelessly descended her amber coloured hair ... Her buskins were richly wrought like the Delphins spangled cabazines; her quiver was of unicornes horne, her darts of yvorie; in one hand she helde a boare speare, the other guided her Barbary jennet, proud by nature, but nowe more proude in that he carried natures fairest worke, the Easterne worlds chiefe wonder." In a somewhat similar style Zucchero painted the Queen, not of Crete, but of England, and when dressed in this fashion, Her Majesty too, was supposed to be represented "Diana-like."

Of the misrule in Crete, and of the dangers aeliana runs from the incestuous pa.s.sions of her uncle, and of her escape through the providential intervention of Prince aemilius, we shall say nothing; nor of the "frolicke common-wealth" established in Thrace, feeling as we do some sympathy with Corydon, who interrupts the speaker, saying: "Reach hither thy bottle that we may drinke round; I am sure thou must needes be dry with talking when I am so a thirst with hearing." Piers pa.s.ses from the court to the shop of a dealer in old clothes and an usurer. He leads a very miserable life, and we have sordid descriptions of scenes in low life with which Chettle was better acquainted than with the loves of aemilius and aeliana. Princes and princesses come in again; there are revolutions, awful dangers and marvellous deliverances. All ends happily, and Piers and his hearers agree to meet "at theyr ploughman's holidaye. Where what happened, if Piers Plainnes please, shall per adventure be published." This "adventure" never took place. The incoherent mixture of the picaresque, romantic, and Arcadian tale resulted in such an unpalatable compound that even novel-readers of Shakespeare's time objected to a narration of this kind, and did not trouble Chettle with a demand for its continuation.

His reputation therefore rests mainly on his dramas. One of his most frequent a.s.sociates in writing them, and one of the most prolific and gifted, Thomas Dekker, was also something of a novelist. He has left, besides a great quant.i.ty of plays, a number of pamphlets written very much in Nash's vein,[292] in which there is some excellent realism, together with the most amusing and whimsical fancies.[293] His biography is a mere repet.i.tion of his friend's life, and the words: Henslowe, drama, penury, pamphlets, prison, quarrels, put together, will give a sufficient idea of the sort of existence led by him as well as by so many of his a.s.sociates.[294] He wrote some of his plays alone, many others with numberless collaborators, such as Chettle, Drayton, Wilson, Ben Jonson (with whom he afterwards had a violent quarrel), Haughton, Day, Munday, Hathaway, Middleton, Webster, Heywood, Wentworth Smith, Ma.s.singer, Ford, Rowley, and even others, for the dramatic faculty was then so very common that any one, so to say, was good enough to act as a collaborator in writing plays.

He had many traits in common with Nash: the same excellent faculty of observation, the same gaiety and _entrain_, with powers of his own to a.s.sociate it with the most exquisite tenderness and pathos; the same love for literature and for the poets, for Chaucer, for Spenser, whose arrival in the Elysian fields he describes in a way to tempt the pencil of a painter: "Grave Spenser was no sooner entred into this chappell of Apollo, but these elder fathers of the divine furie gave him a lawrer and sung his welcome; Chaucer call'd him his sonne and plac'd him at his right hand. All of them, at a signe given by the whole quire of the Muses that brought him thither, closing up their lippes in silence, and turning all their eares for attention to heare him sing out the rest of Fayrie Queenes prayses."[295]

But a marked difference between Dekker and Nash resulted from the fact that Dekker had not only a love of poetry, but a poetical faculty of a high order. He went far beyond the picturesqueness of Nash's word-painting, and reached in his prose as well as in his verse true lyrical emotion and pathos; he had, said Lamb, "poetry enough for anything;"[296] and while Nash's gaiety, true and hearty as it is, takes often and naturally a bitter satirical turn, Dekker's gaiety though sometimes bitter, more usually takes a pretty, graceful, and fanciful turn. "Come, strew apace, strew, strew: in good troth tis a pitty that these flowers must be trodden under feete as they are like to be anon ...

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DEKKER HIS DREAM."]

"Pitty? come foole, fling them about l.u.s.tily; flowers never dye a sweeter death than when they are smoother'd to death in a Lovers bosome, or else pave the high wayes over which these pretty, simpering, setting things call'd brides must trippe."[297]

Intimate literary ties, however, existed between Nash and Dekker; many pa.s.sages in the one remind us of similar things in the other, the result sometimes of actual imitation, sometimes of involuntary reminiscences.

Dekker was well aware of the family likeness between the two, so much so that we see him once calling Nash's ghost to his a.s.sistance, as one from whom he might most naturally gain help: "And thou into whose soule ...

the raptures of that fierie and inconfinable Italian spirit were bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow'd to thy friends, and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat dunce[298] ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with me awhile."[299]

Nash's ghost was most certainly hovering about Dekker when he was writing the pamphlet from which this apostrophe is taken; it taught him how to disrobe for our amus.e.m.e.nt the heroes of antique legends of their dignified looks and dresses, and place their haloed selves in the open daylight of the street below our window. With all his admiration for Marlowe's performance Nash had told, in very ludicrous fashion indeed, the story of Hero and Leander, a.s.sociating in a manner unwarranted by ancient historians their fate with the vicissitudes of Great Yarmouth and the red herring. In the same way Dekker makes choice of that exquisite tale of Orpheus which reads so pathetically in the prose of King Alfred, and he tells it thus:

"a.s.sist mee therefore, thou genius of that ventrous but zealous musicion of Thrace, Euridice's husband, who being besotted on his wife, of whiche sin none but ... should be guiltie, went alive with his fiddle at's backe, to see if he could bail her out of that adamantine prison. The fees he was to pay for her were jigs and countrey-daunces: he paid them; the forfeits if he put on yellow stockings and lookt back upon her, was her everlasting lying there, without bayle or mayne-prize. The loving c.o.xcomb could not choose but look backe, and so lost her: perhaps hee did it because he would be rid of her. The morall of which is, that if a man leave his owne busines and have an eie to his wives dooings, sheele give him the slip though she runne to the divell for her labour."[300]

Dekker did not write novels properly so called, but his prose works abound with scenes that seem detached from novels, and that were so well fitted for that kind of writing that we find them again in the works of professional novelists of his or of a later time. His "Wonderfull yeare 1603," from which Defoe seems to have taken several hints, abounds in scenes of this sort.[301] It is a book "wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sicke of the plague. At the ende of all, like a mery epilogue to a dull play sundry tales are cut out in sundry fashions of purpose to shorten the lives of long winters nights that lye watching in the darke for us." Some of these tales are extremely well told, for Dekker is more successful in describing the humours than the terrors of the plague. In one of them we find another copy of the fat hostler so well described already by Nash and, as it seems, inspired by a reminiscence of the picture in "Jack Wilton." Dekker's man is not thinner, cleaner, nor braver than Nash's victualler. He is a country innkeeper: "a goodly fat burger he was, with a belly arching out like a beere-barrell, which made his legges, that were thicke and short like two piles driven under London bridge.... In some corners of [his nose]

there were blewish holes that shone like sh.e.l.les of mother of pearle ...

other were richly garnisht with rubies, chrisolites, and carbunckles, which glistered so oriently, that the Hamburgers offered I know not how many dollars for his companie in an East-Indian voyage, to have stoode a nightes in the p.o.o.pe of their Admirall, onely to save the charge of candles.

"In conclusion he was an host to be ledde before an Emperour, and though he were one of the greatest men in all the shire, his bignes made him not proude, but he humbled himself to speake the base language of a tapster, and uppon the Londoners first arrival, cried: 'Welcome! a cloth for this gentleman!' The linnen was spread and furnisht presently with a new cake and a can, the roome voided, and the guest left, like a French Lord, attended by no bodie."[302]

This new-comer, freshly arrived from London was flying on account of the plague; but it so happened that he had himself already contracted the disease; he was scarcely seated before it grew upon him and he fell dead. Great was the terror in the inn. The host, the maids, all the inmates ran from the corpse and left the house; the terror spread in the borough; no one would even walk near the place.

"At last a tinker came sounding through the towne, mine hosts being the auncient watring place where he did use to cast anchor. You must understand he was none of those base rascally tinkers that with a bandog and a drab at their tayles and a picke staffe at their necks will take a purse sooner then stop a kettle. No this was a devout tinker, he did honor G.o.d Pan; a musicall tinker, that upon his kettle-drum could play any countrey-dance you cald for, and upon Holly-dayes had earned money by it, when no fidler could be heard of. Hee was onely feared when he stalkt through some towns where bees were, for he strucke so sweetely on the bottome of his copper instrument that he would emptie whole hives and leade the swarmes after him, only by the sound."

These two beings, the host and tinker, depicted as vividly by Dekker as Callot would have drawn them, meet in the open air, and the former offers the tinker a crown if he undertakes to bury the dead man. The tinker haggles for better payment and they agree for ten shillings.

"The whole parish had warning of this presently ... therefore ten shillings were leveyed out of hand, put into a rag, which was tyed to the ende of a long pole and delivered, in sight of all the parish, who stood aloofe stopping their noses, by the head boroughs owne selfe in proper person." Nothing dismayed by this awful array, the tinker sits at table, drinks deep, takes the corpse on his back and carries it to a field. Before committing it to the earth he carefully searches its pockets and empties them; he then makes a parcel of the clothes "and carrying that at the end of his staffe on his shoulder, with the purse of seven pounds in his hand, backe againe comes he through the towne, crying aloud: 'Have you any more Londoners to bury; Hey downe a downe dery; Have you any more Londoners to bury?' The Hobbinolls running away from him as if he had beene the dead citizens ghost, and he marching away from them in all the hast he could, with that song still in his mouth."

Another sort of writing congenial to Dekker's temperament, and which novelists of a later date continued to cultivate after him, are those series of counsels or praises in which, with due seriousness, the thing is recommended or praised which ought to be avoided. An example of this kind of satirical composition is the famous "Quinze joyes de mariage,"

in which the pleasant humours of a young wife are described in such a way as to deter even a Panurge from marrying. Another example is the "Grobia.n.u.s"[303] Latin poem of the German F. Dedekind, which enjoyed an immense reputation throughout Europe in the sixteenth century; it contains ironical advice to a gallant with regard to his behaviour so that in any given circ.u.mstances he may be as objectionable and improper as possible.

Dekker translated both works into English, but with many alterations, so numerous indeed, especially in the last, that his book may be considered almost original.[304] He called it "The Guls Horne-booke," or alphabet.

He gives in it a lively description of the humours of gallants in the time of Shakespeare, of the places they used to frequent, and the company they liked to meet. Grobianism differs from the picaresque tale by the absence of a story connecting the various scenes, but it resembles it in the opportunity it affords for describing a variety of characters, humours, and places. In the same way as we follow the picaro in the houses of his several masters, we here follow the gallant from his rooms to his ordinary, and from St. Paul's to the play. We climb with him to the top of the cathedral, we show our new garments in the walks, meet courtiers, soldiers and poets at dinner, stroll at night in the dark streets of the city and fall in with the watch. Here, again, Dekker paints from life scenes with which he was familiar, and we have but to follow his footsteps to become acquainted with the haunts of the Bohemians of his time, and of the great men too, of Jonson and Shakespeare themselves.

The scene at the theatre is the most original and lively of all. The serio-comic advice to the gallant how he "should behave himself in a playhouse"[305] is a perfect picture of what was daily taking place, be the play Shakespeare's "Hamlet" or Dekker's "Patient Grissil."[306] Of course the gallant must sit on the stage and "on the very rushes," which in the theatre, and also in palaces and houses, continued as in the Middle Ages to serve for carpets;[307] he will not care for the disapprobation of the groundlings, but must plant himself valiantly, "beating downe the mewes and hisses of opposed rascality.

"For do but cast up a reckoning; what large commings-in are pursd up by sitting on the stage? First a conspicuous eminence is gotten; by which meanes, the best and most essencial parts of a gallant (good cloathes, a proportionable legge, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tollerable beard), are perfectly revealed."

Of course you must choose with the greatest care your time to come in.

"Present not your selfe on the stage especially at a new play until the quaking Prologue hath, by rubbing, got [colour] into his cheekes and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that hees upon point to enter; for then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you dropt out of ye hangings, to creepe from behind the arras, with your tripos or three-footed stoole in one hand and a teston (_i.e._, six pence) mounted betweene a forefinger and a thumbe in the other; for if you should bestow your person upon the vulgar when the belly of the house is but halfe full, your apparell is quite eaten up, the fashion lost ..."[308]

When the play is well begun, there is also a special behaviour to observe: "It shall crowne you with rich commendation to laugh alowd in the middest of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest tragedy; and to let that clapper your tongue, be tost so high that all the house may ring of it: your lords use it; your knights are apes to the lords, and do so too ... be thou a beagle to them all.... [At]

first, all the eyes in the galleries will leave walking after the players and onely follow you; the simplest dolt in the house s.n.a.t.c.hes up your name, and when he meetes you in the streetes, ... heele cry: 'hees such a gallant.' ... Secondly you publish your temperance to the world, in that you seeme not to resort thither to taste vaine pleasures with a hungrie appet.i.te; but only as a gentleman to spend a foolish houre or two, because you can doe nothing else; thirdly you mightily dis relish the audience and disgrace the author." Perhaps the next time he will be wise enough to offer you a dedication sonnet "onely to stop your mouth."

The getting away must not be less carefully performed than the getting in. If you owe the author a particular grudge, mind you leave just in the middle of his play: "bee it Pastoral or Comedy, Morall or Tragedie, you rise with a screwd and discontented face from your stoole to be gone: no matter whether the scenes be good or no; the better they are, the worse you distast them. And being on your feet, sneake not away like a coward; but salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spred either on the rushes or on stooles about you; and draw what troope you can from the stage after you. The mimicks are beholden to you for allowing them elbow roome; their poet cries perhaps, 'A pox go with you'; but care not for that; there is no musick without frets."

But the rain outside may deprive you of the benefits of this carefully laid plan. In that case, and this is the last piece of advice, here is what you must do: "If either the company or indisposition of the weather binde you to sit it out, my counsell is then that you turne plain ape: take up a rush, and tickle the earnest eares of your fellow gallants to make other fooles fall a laughing; mewe at pa.s.sionate speeches; blare at merrie; find fault with the musicke; whew at the children's action, whistle at the songs."

Dekker knew only too well such gallants as those he describes, and if his picture of a theatre in Shakespeare's time seems now somewhat exaggerated, if we cannot conceive "Hamlet" or "Romeo" performed while gallants on the stage tickle each other's ears with rushes picked from the stage boards, let us remember as a confirmation of his accuracy that such customs were prevalent, not only in England, but in Europe. In France especially, even in the time of the Grand Roi, when Moliere and Corneille were shining in all their glory, we have Moliere's corroborating evidence that these customs had not been abolished.

Moliere was annoyed by the same malpractices as Shakespeare, only he did not, like Shakespeare, who never complained of anything or anybody, keep his displeasure to himself. He recurs in more than one of his plays to the indecent behaviour of marquesses sitting on the stage, and there is scarcely one of the particulars mentioned by Dekker which does not find place in Moliere's angry pictures of ill-bred gallants:

"The actors began; every one kept silence; when ... a man with large rolls entered abruptly crying out: 'Hulloa, there, a seat directly!' and disturbing the audience with his uproar, interrupted the play in its finest pa.s.sage....

"Whilst I was shrugging my shoulders, the actors attempted to continue their parts. But the man made a fresh disturbance in seating himself, and again crossing the stage with long strides, although he might have been quite comfortable at the wings, he planted his chair full in front, and, defying the audience with his broad back, hid the actors from three-fourths of the pit.

"A murmur arose, at which any one else would have felt ashamed; but he, firm and resolute, took no notice of it, and would have remained just as he had placed himself if, to my misfortune, he had not cast his eyes on me....

"He began asking me a hundred frivolous questions, raising his voice higher than the actors. Every one was cursing him; and in order to check him, I said, 'I should like to listen to the play.'

"'Hast thou not seen it, marquis? Oh! on my soul I think it very funny, and I am no fool in those matters. I know the canons of perfection and Corneille reads me all that he writes.'

"Thereupon he gave me a summary of the piece informing me, scene after scene, of what was about to happen; and when we came to any lines which he knew by heart, he recited them aloud before the actor could say them.

It was in vain for me to resist; he continued his recitations, and towards the end rose a good while before the rest. For those fashionable fellows, in order to behave gallantly, especially avoid to listen to the conclusion."[309]

Grobianism and the picaresque novel, long survived both Nash and Dekker.

English, Spanish, and French rogues, invented or imitated, swarmed in the English literature of the seventeenth century, without, however, in any case reaching the level attained by "Jack Wilton." Both kinds of writing had to wait for the time of Swift and Defoe to reach their highest point. Defoe has left the best examples of the picaresque tale extant in English literature, and Swift revived Grobianism with unparalleled excellence in his "Directions to Servants" and his "Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at court and in the best companies of England."[310]

As for the "Quinze joyes," turned also into English by Dekker, its popularity was equally great in England; a new and different translation was published in the seventeenth century and had several editions. It was prefaced with a note "to the Reader," in which the satirical aims of the author in this study of woman's foibles is accentuated by a tone of pretended praise, savouring of Grobianism and antic.i.p.ating the sort of ridicule which was to be relished by Pope and the critics of Queen Anne's time. "This treatise ... will at least shake, if not totally explode, that common opinion, viz., that women are the worst piece of the Hexameron creation.... This is the composition of some amorous person, who, animated with the same spirit and affection as I am, hath undertaken, and judged it his duty too, to satisfie you, and he hopes so far as to work upon you a persuasion that the modesty, bashfulness, debonairete and civility, together with all qualifications that adorn and beautifie the soul, are as exemplarily eminent in women of this age as ever they were in any of the former; and instruct you to set a value on their actions as the best creatures in the worst of times, whose vertue must needs shine with the greater l.u.s.tre, being subject to the vain a.s.saults and ineffectual temptations of men grown old, like the times, in wickednes, malice and revenge."[311]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAPRICORNUS.]

FOOTNOTES:

[245] "The first and best part of Scoggins Iests ... being a preservative against melancholy, gathered by Andrew Boord," London, 1626, 8vo. Many of the jests, tricks, and pranks recounted here are to be found in other collections of such anecdotes, English as well as foreign. For example, the coa.r.s.e story explaining "how the French king had Scogin into his house of office, and shewed him the King of England's picture" appears in Rabelais, where however the two kings play exactly opposite parts. Andrew Borde died in 1549.

[246] One of the few pa.s.sages which would raise a laugh even to-day is the rapturous speech with which good Basilius greets the morning after his "mistakes of a night": "Should fancy of marriage keep me from this paradise? or opinion of I know not what promise bind me from paying the right duties to nature and affection? O who would have thought there could have been such difference betwixt women? Be jealous no more O Gynecia, but yield to the preheminence of more excellent gifts," &c.

(bk. iv. p. 410). See also the ridiculous fight between Clinias and Dametas pp. 276 _et seq._; and a story told in verse, bk. iii. p. 390.

Moliere built his "Ecole des maris" upon a similar plot.