In “Love’s Mistress; or, The Queen’s Masque,” the stage chronicler or historian of the Four Ages appears as something more of a dramatic poet: his work has more of form and maturity, with no whit less of spontaneity and spirit, simplicity and vivacity. The framework or setting of these five acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the leading parts, is sustained with lively and homely humor from induction to epilogue: the story of Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier skill and more graceful simplicity by Heywood than afterward by Molière and Corneille; though there is here nothing comparable with the famous and exquisite love scene in which the genius of Corneille renewed its youth and replumed its wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless and hapless Théophile’s. The fortunes of Psyche in English poetry have been as curious and various as her adventures on earth and elsewhere. Besides and since this pretty little play of Heywood’s, she has inspired a long narrative poem by Marmion, one of the most brilliant and independent of the younger comic writers who sat at the feet or gathered round the shrine of Ben Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutchman’s poet laureate, than which nothing more portentous in platitude ever crawled into print, and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wooden verse evoked from Shadwell’s great predecessor in the office of court rhymester an immortalizing reference to “Prince Nicander’s vein”; a magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty example of metrical romance by Morris.
“Inexplicable and eccentric as were the moods and fashions of dramatic poetry in an age when Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything so singular in its composition and so mysterious in its motive as ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ the most eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or perhaps of any time, is probably ‘The Rape of Lucrece.’” This may naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the party-colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed and checkered with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce. But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than classical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or essentially to the third rather than to the second of the four sections into which Heywood’s existing plays may be exhaustively divided, which stands on the verge between them with something of the quaintest and most graceful attributes of either. The fine instinct and the simple skill with which the poet has tempered the villany of his villains without toning down their atrocities by the alloy of any incongruous quality must be acknowledged as worthily characteristic of a writer who at his ethical best might be defined as something of a plebeian Sidney. There are touches of criminal heroism and redeeming humanity even in the parts of Sextus and Tullia: the fearless desperation of the doomed ravisher, the conjugal devotion of the hunted parricide, give to the last defiant agony of the abominable mother and son a momentary tone of almost chivalrous dignity. The blank verse is excellent, though still considerably alloyed with rhyme: a fusion or alternation of metrical effects in which the young Heywood was no less skilful and successful, inartistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success may seem to modern criticism, than the young Shakespeare.
The eleven plays already considered make up the two divisions of Heywood’s work which with all their great and real merit have least in them of those peculiar qualities most distinctive and representative of his genius: those qualities of which when we think of him we think first, and which on summing up his character as a poet we most naturally associate with his name. As a historical or mythological playwright, working on material derived from classic legends or from English annals, he shows signs now and then, as occasion offers, of the sweet-tempered manliness, the noble kindliness, which won the heart of Lamb: something too there is in these plays of his pathos, and something of his humor: but if this were all we had of him we should know comparatively little of what we now most prize in him. Of this we find most in the plays dealing with English life in his own day: but there is more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in his chronicle histories or his legendary complications and variations on the antique. The famous and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher cannot often be forgotten but need not always be remembered in reading “The Four Prentices of London.” Externally the most extravagant and grotesque of dramatic poems, this eccentric tragicomedy of chivalrous adventure is full of poetic as well as fantastic interest. There is really something of discrimination in the roughly and readily sketched characters of the four crusading brothers: the youngest especially is a life-like model of restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when incarnate in a hot-headed English boy; unlike even in its likeness to the same type as embodied in a French youngster such as the immortal d’Artagnan. Justice has been done by Lamb, and consequently as well as subsequently by later criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which breaks out by flashes in this quixotic romance of the City, with its serio-comic ideal of crusading counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowledge been observed that in the scene “where they toss their pikes so,” which aroused the special enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose own prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of the Burning Pestle, Heywood, the future object of Dryden’s ignorant and pointless insult, anticipated with absolute exactitude the style of Dryden’s own tragic blusterers when most busily bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean epigram.
Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue in “Tyrannic Love” or “The Conquest of Granada”:
“Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play? Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey.” “Rapier and pike this combat shall decide: Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride.” “I’ll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be, And feign to do my cunning after me.”
This will remind the reader not so much of the “Rehearsal” as of Butler’s infinitely superior parody in the heroic dialogue of Cat and Puss.
It is a pity that Heywood’s civic or professional devotion to the service of the metropolis should ever have been worse employed than in the transfiguration of the idealized prentice: it is a greater pity that we cannot exchange all Heywood’s extant masques for any one of the two hundred plays or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he “had either an entire hand, or at least a main finger.” The literary department of a Lord Mayor’s show can hardly be considered as belonging to literature, even when a poet’s time and trouble were misemployed in compiling the descriptive prose and the declamatory verse contributed to the ceremony. Not indeed that it was a poet who devoted so much toil and good-will to celebration or elucidation of the laborious projects and objects both by water and land which then distinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs, pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas Brothers and their most ingenious parent were employed in a more honorable capacity than the subordinate function of versifier or showman — an office combining the parts and the duties of the immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr. Shum. Lexicographers might pick out of the text some rare if not unique Latinisms or barbarisms such as “prestigion” and “strage”: but except for the purpose of such “harmless drudges” and perhaps of an occasional hunter after samples of the bathetic which might have rewarded the attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these pageants must be as barren and even to them it would presumably be as tedious a subject of study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood’s or Shakespeare’s time there is something comparatively not contemptible; the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a simple historic purity and dignity of its own; the dulness is not so dreary as the dulness of mediaeval prosers, the commonplace is not so vulgar as the commonplace of more modern scribes.
“The Trial of Chivalry” is a less extravagant example of homely romantic drama than
“The Four Prentices of London.” We owe to Mr. Bullen the rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. Fleay the determination and verification of its authorship. In style and in spirit it is perfect Heywood: simple and noble in emotion and conception, primitive and straightforward in construction and expression; inartistic but not ineffectual; humble and facile, but not futile or prosaic. It is a rather more rational and natural piece of work than might have been expected from its author when equipped after the heroic fashion of Mallory or Froissart: its date is more or less indistinctly indicated by occasional rhymes and peculiar conventionalities of diction: and if Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may now and then suggest to his reader the figure of Sancho Panza in his master’s armor, his pedestrian romance is so genuine, his modest ambition so high-spirited and high-minded, that it would be juster and more critical to compare him with Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements of his esquire. Dick Bowyer, whose life and death are mendaciously announced on the catch-penny title-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol”) “does not die,” is a rather rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff British soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to better advantage in other plays of Heywood and his fellows. That this must be classed among the earlier if not the earliest of his works we may infer from the primitive simplicity of a stage direction which recalls another in a play printed five years before. In the second scene of the third act of “The Trial of Chivalry” we read as follows: “Enter Forester, missing the other taken away, speaks anything, and exit.” In the penultimate scene of the second part of “King Edward IV.” we find this even quainter direction, which has been quoted before now as an instance of the stage conditions or habits of the time: “Jockie is led to whipping over the stage, speaking some words, but of no importance.”
A further and deeper debt of thanks is due to Mr. Bullen for the recovery of “The Captives; or, The Lost Recovered,” after the lapse of nearly three centuries. The singularly prophetic sub-title of this classic and romantic tragicomedy has been justified at so late a date by the beneficence of chance, in favorable conjunction with the happy devotion and fortunate research of a thorough and a thoroughly able student, as to awaken in all fellow-lovers of dramatic poetry a sense of hopeful wonder with regard to the almost illimitable possibilities of yet further and yet greater treasure to be discovered and recovered from the keeping of “dust and damned oblivion.” Meantime we may be heartily thankful for the recovery of an excellent piece of work, written throughout with the easy mastery of serious or humorous verse, the graceful pliancy of style and the skilful simplicity of composition, which might have been expected from a mature work of Heywood’s, though the execution of it would now and then have suggested an earlier date. The clown, it may be noticed, is the same who always reappears to do the necessary comicalities in Heywood’s plays; if hardly “a fellow of infinite jest,” yet an amusing one in his homely way; though one would have thought that on the homeliest London stage of 1624 the taste for antiphonal improvisation of doggrel must have passed into the limbo of obsolete simplicities. The main plot is very well managed, as with Plautus once more for a model might properly have been expected; the rather ferociously farcical underplot must surely have been borrowed from some fabliau. The story has been done into doggrel by George Colman the younger: but that cleanly and pure minded censor of the press would hardly have licensed for the stage a play which would have required, if the stage-carpenter had been then in existence, the production of a scene which would have anticipated what Gautier so plausibly plumed himself upon as a novelty in stage effect — imagined for the closing scene of his imaginary tragedy of “Heliogabalus.”
There are touches of pathetic interest and romantic invention in “A Maidenhead Well Lost”: two or three of the leading characters are prettily sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is a graceful compromise between unambitious poetry and mildly spirited prose: but it is hardly to be classed among Heywood’s best work of the kind: it has no scenes of such fervid and noble interest, such vivid and keen emotion as distinguish “A Challenge for Beauty”: and for all its simple grace of writing and ingenuous ingenuity of plot it may not improbably be best remembered by the average modern reader as remarkable for the most amusing and astonishing example on record of anything but “inexplicable” dumb show — to be paralleled only and hardly by a similar interlude of no less elaborate arrangement and significant eccentricity in the sole dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche— “La Reine d’Espagne.”
Little favor has been shown by modern critics and even by modern editors to “The Royal King and the Loyal Subject”: and the author himself, in committing it to the tardy test of publication, offered a quaint and frank apology for its old-fashioned if not obsolete style of composition and versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam was right and Dyce was wrong in his estimate of a play which does not challenge and need not shrink from comparison with Fletcher’s more elaborate, rhetorical, elegant, and pretentious tragicomedy of “The Loyal Subject”; that the somewhat eccentric devotion of Heywood’s hero is not more slavish or foolish than the obsequious submission of Fletcher’s; and that even if we may not be allowed to make allowance for the primitive straightforwardness or take delight in the masculine simplicity of the elder poet, we must claim leave to object that there is more essential servility of spirit, more preposterous prostration of manhood, in the Russian ideal of Fletcher than in the English ideal of Heywood. The humor is as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sympathetic interest in this primitive tragicomedy; but the comic satire on worldly venality and versatility is as genuine and honest as the serious exposition of character is straightforward and sincere.
The best of Heywood’s romantic plays is the most graceful and beautiful, in detached scenes and passages, of all his extant works. The combination of the two plots — they can hardly be described as plot and underplot — is so dexterously happy that it would do the highest credit to a more famous and ambitious artist: the rival heroes are so really noble and attractive that we are agreeably compelled to condone whatever seems extravagant or preposterous in their relations or their conduct: there is a breath of quixotism in the air which justifies and ennobles it. The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit: it is the more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from Heywood. But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood’s genius at its happiest and brightest as “A Challenge for Beauty.”
The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as difficult to determine in the work of Heywood as in the character of his time: the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have been classed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which their author’s fame must principally and finally depend than among those which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his work. There is much the same fusion of interests, as there is much the same mixture of styles, in the conduct of a play for which we have once more to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at once of Heywood and of his admirers. That Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author of a play which a few years ago had never seen the light is as evident as that his estimate of the fine English quality which induced this recognition was justified by all rules of moral evidence. There can be less than little doubt that “Dick of Devonshire” is one of the two hundred and twenty in which Heywood
had “a main finger” — though not, I should say, by any means “an entire hand.” The metre is not always up to his homely but decent mark: though in many of the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of effect. Dick Pike is a better study of the bluff and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in “The Trial of Chivalry”: and the same chivalrous sympathy with the chivalrous spirit and tradition of a foreign and a hostile nation which delights us in “A Challenge for Beauty” pervades and vivifies this long-lost and long-forgotten play. The partial sacrifice of ethical propriety or moral consistency to the actual or conventional exigences of the stage is rather more startling than usual: a fratricidal ravisher and slanderer could hardly have expected even from theatrical tolerance the monstrous lenity of pardon and dismissal with a prospect of being happy though married. The hand of Heywood is more recognizable in the presentation of a clown who may fairly be called identical with all his others, and in the noble answer of the criminal’s brother to their father’s very natural question: “Why dost thou take his part so?”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 346
