 Part 1 Chapter 3 of A Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 1, Chapter 3. The Age of Shakespeare. 1564-1616. The Great Age of English Poetry opened with the publication of Spencer Shepard's calendar in 1579 and closed with the printing of Milton's Samson Agonist in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century, English thought passed through many changes and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spencer as his master and who was a boy of eight years at Shakespeare's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of the entirely new school of poets in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But roughly speaking, the dates above given marked the limits of one literary epoch which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan. In strictness, the Elizabethan age ended with the Queen's death in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners and the spacious times of Great Elizabeth have been by courtesy prolonged to the year of restoration, 1660. There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamped them all alike with the Queen's seal. Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reign succeeding hers. The expression Victorian poetry has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elizabethan poetry, the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thedas, great queen of shepherds on the sea. She is Spencer's Gloriana and even Shakespeare, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII and in a more delicate and indirect way in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night's Dream. That very time I marked, but thou couldst not. Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took at a fair vessel thrown by the west and loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow as he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon and the imperial voteress passed on in maiden meditation fancy free. An allusion to Lysister's unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth's hand. The praises of the Queen which sound through all the poetry of her time seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader but they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never before had a female sovereign except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's feet the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was dispenser to Sydney and to Raleigh not merely a woman in Virgin Queen but the champion of Protestantism the lady of young England the heroine of conflict against popery in Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman in spite of the vanity caprice and ingratitude which disfigured her character and the vacillating torturous policy which often distinguished her government she was at bottom a sovereign of large views strong will and dauntless courage like her father she loved a man and she had the magnificent tastes of the tutors. She was a patron of the arts passionately fond of shows and spectacles and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays revels, masks and triumphs in the mythological taste of the day. When the queen paraded through a country town says Wharton the historian of English poetry almost every pageant was a pantheon when she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility at entering the hall she was saluted by the penates. In the afternoon when she condescended to walk in the garden the lake was covered with tritons and naryads the pages of the family were converted into wood nymphs who peeped from every bower and the footmen gambled over the lawns in the figures of sadders. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who pronouncing our royal prude to be the biggest paragon of unspotted chastity invited her to the groves free from the intrusions of Actaeon. The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice were perhaps the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Lycester when she visited him at Kenilworth in 1575. An account of these was published by a contemporary poet George Gascoyne the princely pleasures at the court of Kenilworth and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenilworth. Sydney was present on this occasion and perhaps Shakespeare then a boy of eleven and living at Stratford not far off may have been taken to see the spectacle may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake speak the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea and may have heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back utter such dulcet and harmonious breath that the rude sea grew civil at the sound. But in considering the literature of Elizabeth's reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose while following up Spencer's career to its close 1599. We have for the sake of unity of treatment anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose. This was John Lelys Oifuis, the anatomy of wit. It was in form of romance the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to grow old and get an education. But it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc. Written in language which from the title of the book has received the name of Euphuism. This new English became very fashionable among the ladies and that beauty in court which could not parlay Euphuism says a writer of 1632 was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French. Walter Scott introduced the Euphuis novel The Monastery. But the peculiar jargon which Sir Percy Shafton has made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust, be merry but with modesty, be sober but not too sullen, be valiant but not too venturous. I see now that as the fish scolopidus in the flood Araxes at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow and at the waning as black as the burnt coal, so Euphuis which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous is now at the last cast become most faithless. Besides the fish scolopidus the favorite animals of Lily's menagerie are such as the chameleon which though he have most guts draw at least breath. The bird Peralus which sitting upon white cloth is white upon green green and the serpent Porphyrios which though he be full of poison yet having no teeth hurteth none but himself. Lily's style was pithy and sententious and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuis was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable, and the images of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee which is evident enough in Shakespeare's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part Euphuis and his England and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598. Lily had many imitators. In Stephen Gawson's School of Abuse a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the first part of Euphuis the language is distinctly Euphuistic. The dramatist Robert Green published in 1587 his menophon, Camilla's alarm to slumbering Euphuis and his Euphuis censure to Philautus. His brother dramatist Thomas Lodge published in 1590 Rosalind, Euphuis's golden legacy from which Shakespeare took the plot of As You Like It. Shakespeare and Ben Johnson both quote from Euphuis in their plays and Shakespeare was really writing Euphuism when he wrote such a sentence as tis true, tis pity, pity tis, tis true. That nightly gentleman Philip Sidney was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courteur, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle the Earl of Leicester he had been sent to France when a lad of 18 with the embassy which went to treat of the Queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alençon and was in Paris at the time of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. Afterward he had travelled through Germany, Italy and the Netherlands had gone as ambassador to the emperor's court and elsewhere won golden opinions. In 1580 while visiting his sister Mary Countess of Pembroke at Wilton he wrote for her pleasure the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia which remained in manuscript until 1590. This was a pastoral romance after the manner of the Italian Arcadia of San Cesaro and the Diana Anna Morada of Montemayor a Portuguese author. It was in prose but intermixed with songs and sonnets and he finished only two books and a portion of a third. It describes the adventures of two cousins Musadoras and Pericles who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesas but the fanciful country of pastoral romance an unreal climb like the fairyland of Spencer. Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose the poet Drayton says that he did first reduce our tongue from Lily's writings then in use talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, playing with words and idle similes. Sidney was certainly no euphoist but his style was as Italianated as Lily's though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose. His Sidney in showers of sweet discourse sewed every page of the Arcadia with those flowers of conceit those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved but which the taste of a severer age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in Sidney chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he describes a field full of roses he makes the roses add such a ruddy show unto it as though the field were bashful at its own beauty. If he describes ladies bathing in a stream he makes the water break into twenty bubbles as not content to have the picture of their face enlarge upon him but he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them. And even a passage which should be tragic such as the death of its heroine, Perthenia he embroiders with conceits like these for her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a little redness about them her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling as though they kissed their neighbor death in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little in little to get upon the rosiness of them her neck a neck indeed of alabaster displaying the wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties so as here was a river of purest red there an island of perfectus white etc. The Arcadia like Euphuis was a ladies book it was the favorite court romance of its day it surfits a modern reader with its sweetness and confuses him with its tangle of adventures the lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert Earl of Pembroke to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are thought to have been dedicated and she was the subject of Ben Johnson's famous epitaph underneath this sable hearse lies the subject of all verse Sydney's sister Pembroke's mother death, ere thou hast slain another learned and fair and good as she time she'll throw a dart at thee Sydney's defensive poise composed in 1581 but not printed until 1595 was written in manlier English than the Arcadia and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time he was also the author of a series of love sonnets Astrofell and Stella in which he paid platonic court to the lady Penelope rich with whom he was not at all in love according to the conventional usage of the Amherst's Sydney died in 1586 from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help the Dutch against Spain the story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words thy necessity is yet greater than mine Sydney was England's darling and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain the need of some melodious tear Spencer's ruins of time were among the number of these funeral songs but the best of them all was one by Matthew Royden concerning whom little is known another typical Englishman of Elizabeth's reign was Walter Raleigh who was even more versatile than Sydney and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure mixed with the cool practical enterprise that marked the times he fought against the Queen's enemy by land and sea in many quarters of the globe in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain with the Huguenot army against the League in France Raleigh was from Devonshire the great nursery of English semen he was a half brother to the famous navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert and cousin to another great captain Sir Richard Grenville he sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure fleet and in 1591 he published a report of the fight near the Azores between Grenville's ship The Revenue and 15 great ships of Spain and action said Francis Bacon memorable even beyond credit and to the height of some heroical fable Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588 he was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex singed the Spanish king's beard in the harbor of Cadiz the year before he had sailed to Guyana in search of the fabled El Dorado destroying on the way the Spanish town of San Jose in the West Indies and on his return he published his discovery of the Empire of Guyana in 1597 he captured the town of Fial in the Azores he took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe America was still a land of wonder and romance full of rumors, nightmares and enchantments in 1580 when Francis Drake the Devonshire Skipper had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor after his voyage around the world the enthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred these narratives of rally and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert and Drake but especially the great psychopedia of nautical travel published by Richard Hackloot in 1589 the principal navigations, voyages and discoveries made by the English nation worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets we see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest written undoubtedly after Shakespeare had been reading the narrative of Sir George Summers' shipwreck on the Bermudas or Isles of Devils rally was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor James I he was sentenced to death on a trumped up charge of high treason the sentence hung over him until 1618 when it was revived against him and he was beheaded meanwhile, during his 12 years imprisonment in the tower he had written his magnum opus the history of the world this is not a history in the modern sense but a series of learned dissertations on law government, theology, magic, war, etc a chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in the universal history nowadays of their opinion which make paradise as high as the moon and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the air the preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elizabethan prose and the book ends with an oft quoted apostrophe to death oh eloquent, just and mighty death whom none could advise, thou has persuaded what none hath dared, thou has done and whom all the world hath flattered thou only has cast out of the world and despised thou has drawn together all the far-fetched greatness all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man and covered it all with these two narrow words Hic Yasset although so busy a man rally found time to be a poet Spencer calls him the Summers Nightingale and George Putnam in his Art of English Poesy 1589 finds his vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate Putnam used insolent in its old sense, uncommon but this description is hardly less true if we accept the word in its modern meaning Rally's most notable verses, the lie are a challenge to the world inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life the Saeva indignatio of swift the same grave and caustic melancholy the same disillusion marks his quaint poem The Pilgrimage it is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the manuscripts or by tradition to have been made by Sir Walter Rally the night before he was beheaded of one such poem the assertion is probably true namely the lines found in his Bible in the gatehouse at Westminster even such is time that takes in trust our youth, our joys, our all we have and pays as but with earth and dust who in the dark and silent grave when we've wandered all our ways shuts up the story of our days but from this earth, this grave, this dust my God shall raise me up by trust the strictly literary prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped fiction was represented outside of Arcadia and Euphoise already mentioned chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle George Turberville's Tragical Tales 1566 was a collection of such stories and William Painter's Palace of Pleasure 1576 to 77 a similar collection from Boccaccio's Decameron and the novels of Bandello these translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists Lodges Rosalind and Robert Green's Pendosto the sources respectively of Shakespeare's As You Like It and Winter's Tale are short pastoral romances not without prettiness in their artificial way the satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows against Martin Maeprelate an anonymous writer or company of writers who attacked the bishops are not wanting in wit but are so combered with fantastic whimsicalities and so bound up with personal quarrels that oblivion has covered them the most noteworthy of them were Nash's Pierre's Penelope's supplication to the devil Lily's Papua the Hatchet and Green's Grotes Worth of Wit of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature mentioned may be made of the Chronicle of England compiled by Ralph Hollandshed in 1577 this was Shakespeare's English history and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakespeare in his representation of Richard the Third and other characters in his historical plays in his Roman tragedies Shakespeare followed closely Sir Thomas North's translations of Plutarch's Lives made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amieux of books belonging to other departments than pure literature the most important was Richard Hooker's ecclesiastical polity the first four books of which appeared in 1594 this was a work on the philosophy of law and a defense as against the presbyterians the government of the English church by bishops no work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose it was written in sonorous, stately and somewhat involved periods and a Latin rather than an English idiom and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers such as Milton and Sir Thomas Brown had the ecclesiastical polity been written 100 or perhaps even 50 years later it would doubtless have been written in Latin the life of Sir Francis Bacon the father of inductive philosophy as he has been called better the founder of inductive logic belongs to English history and the bulk of his writings in Latin and English to the history of English philosophy but his volume of essays was a contribution to general literature in their completed form they belong to the year 1625 but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims the text for an essay then that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay they were said their author as grains of salt that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety they were the first essays so called in the language the word said Bacon is late but the thing is ancient the word he took from the French essay of Montaigne the first two books of which had been published in 1592 Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they came home to men's business in bosoms their alternate title explains their character counsels civil and moral that is pieces of advice touching the conduct of life of a nature where of men shall find much inexperience little in books the essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom his wide knowledge of the world of men the truth in depth of his sayings and the extent of ground which they cover as well as the weighty compactness of his style have given many of them the currency of proverbs revenge is a kind of wild justice he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination and his noble English rises now and then as in his essay on death into eloquence the eloquence of pure thought touched gravely and afar off by emotion in general the atmosphere of his intellect is that of Lumen Sikum which he loved to command not drenched or bloodied by the affections Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine a popular class of books in the 17th century were characters or witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons such as the good school master, the clown, the country magistrate much as in some modern heads of the people where Douglas Gerald or Lee Hunt sketches the medical student, the monthly nurse, etc a still more modern instance of the kind is George Elliott's impressions of Theophrastus such which derives its title from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus whose character sketches were the original models of this kind of literature the most popular character book in Europe in the 17th century was Le Bruyère's Charactère but this was not published until 1588 in England the fashion had been set in 1614 by the characters of Sir Thomas Overbury who died by poison the year before his book was printed one of Overbury's sketches the fair and happy milkmaid is justly celebrated for its old world sweetness and quaintness her breath is her own which sense all the year long of June she makes her hand hard with labor and her heart soft with pity and when winter evenings fall early sitting at her merry wheel she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune she bestows her years wages at next fair and in choosing her garments counts no bravery in the world like decency the garden and beehive are all her physical surgery and she lives the longer for it she dares go alone and unfolds sheep in the night and fears no manner of ill and as she means none yet to say truth she is never alone but is still accompanied with old songs honest thoughts and prayers but short ones thus lives she and all her care is she may die in the springtime to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding sheet England was still merry England in the times of good queen best and rang with old songs such as kept this milkmaid company songs said Bishop Joseph Hall which were sung to the wheel and sung to the pale Shakespeare loved their simple minstrelsy he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia and scattered snatches of them through his plays and wrote others like of them himself now good Cesario but that piece of song that old and antique song we heard last night we think it did relieve my passion much and more than light airs and recollected terms of these most brisk and giddy paced times market Cesario it is old and plain the knitters and the spinners and the sun the free maids that weave their threads with bones do used to chant it it is silly suits and dallas with the innocence of love like the old age many of these songs so natural, fresh and spontaneous together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse were printed in miscellaneous such as the passionate pilgrim England's helicon and Davison's poetical rhapsody some were anonymous or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names others were by well-known writers and others again were strewn through the plays of Lillie, Shakespeare, Johnson, Beaumont, Fletcher and other dramatists series of love sonnets like Spencer's Amaretti and Sydney's Astrofell and Stella were written by Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond Constable Watson and others all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary pastorals too were written in great number such as William Brown's Britannus pastorals and Shepero's pipe 1613 to 1616 and Marlowe's charmingly Rococo little idol the passionate shepherd to his love which Shakespeare quoted in the Mary Wives of Windsor and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply there were love stories in verse like Arthur Brooks Romeo and Juliet the source of Shakespeare's tragedy Marlowe's fragment hero in Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and the rape of Lucretia the first of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects though handled in anything but a classical manner Wordsworth said finally of Shakespeare that he could not have written an epic he would have died of a plethora of thought Shakespeare's two narrative poems indeed are by no means models of their kind the current of the story is choked at every turn though it be with golden sand it is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy excerpt the place of narration and that in the rape of Lucretia especially the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings instead of hastening on to the action as Chaucer or any born storyteller would have done in Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy although not the same subtlety in the first two divisions of the poem the story does in some sort get forward but in the continuation by George Chapman who wrote the last four Cysteads the path is utterly lost with woodbine and the gadding vine are grown one is reminded that modern poetry if it has lost in richness has gained in directness when one compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's hero and lander with Byron's ringing lines the wind is high on hell's wave as on that night of stormy water when love who sent forgot to save the young the beautiful the brave the lonely hope of Cesto's daughter Marlowe's continuator Chapman wrote a number of plays but he is best remembered for the literal translation of Homer issued in parts from 1598 to 1615 this was not so much a literal translation of the Greek as a great Elizabethan poem inspired by Homer it was Homer's fire but not his simplicity the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits it was written as has been said as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman's time certainly all later versions and cowpers and Lord Derby's and Bryant's seemed pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English his verse was not the heroic line of ten syllables chosen by most of the standard translators but the long fourteen-syllable measure which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist in Chapman it is often harsh but seldom tame and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like role of Homer's hexameters from his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwirried fire like rich autumnus's golden lamp whose brightness met admire past all the other host of stars when with his cheerful face fresh-washed in lofty ocean waves he doth the sky and chase Keats is fine-oed on first looking into Chapman's Homer is well-known Fairfax's version of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered 1600 is one of the best metrical translations the national pride in the achievements of Englishmen by land and sea found expression not only in prose chronicles and in books like Stowe's Survey of London and Harrison's Description of England prefix to Hollinshade's Chronicle but in long historical and descriptive poems like William Warner's Albion's England 1586 Samuel Daniel's History of the Civil Wars 1595 to 1602 Michael Drayton's Baron's Wars 1596 England's Heroic Epistles 1598 and Polyolbion 1613 the very plan of these works was fatal to their success it is not easy to digest history and geography into poetry Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three but his Polyolbion was nothing more than a gazetteer in rhyme a topographical survey of England and Wales with tedious personifications of rivers, mountains and valleys in 30 books and nearly 100,000 lines it was Drayton who said of Marlowe that he had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets had and there are brave things in Drayton but there are only occasional passages Oasis among dreary wastes of sand his Agincourt is a spirited war song and his Nymphidia, or Court of Fairy is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's Culprit Faye and is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow the popular fairy lore of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream the well-language Daniel of whom Ben Johnson said that he was a good honest man but no poet wrote, however, one fine meditative piece his Epistles of the Countess of Cumberland a sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in Praise of Philosophy Suave Marie Magno Turbantebus ecora ventis, etc but the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in the drama it is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary former mold will run along for centuries without having anything poured into it worth keeping until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and passion such was in England the fortune of the stage play at a time when Chaucer was writing sketches that were really dramatic the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever these were taken from the Bible and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and saint's days afterward the town guilds or incorporated trades took hold of them and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air in some English cities as Coventry almost to the close of the 16th century and in the celebrated passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria we have an instance of a miracle play that has survived to our own day these were followed by the moral plays in which allegorical characters such as clergy, lusty Uventus riches, folly and good demeanence were the persons of the drama the comic character in the miracle plays had been the devil and he was retained in some of the morality side by side with the abstract vice who became the clown or fool of Shakespearean comedy the formal vice iniquity as Shakespeare calls him had it for his business to belabor the roaring devil with his wooden sword with his dagger of lath and his rage and his wrath cries a ha to the devil pair your nails good men evil he survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes and in Mr. Punch of the puppet shows who kills the devil and carries him off on his back and the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes masks and interludes the latter a species of short farce were popular at the court of Henry VIII Elizabeth was often entertained at the universities or at the inns of the court with Latin plays or with translations from Seneca Euripides and Ariosto original comedies and tragedies began to be written modeled upon Terence and Seneca and chronicle histories founded on the English kings. There was a master of the revels at court whose duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen and these were acted by the children of the royal chapel or by the choir boys of St. Paul's cathedral these early plays are of interest to the students of the history of the drama and throw much light upon the construction of later plays like Shakespeare's but they are rude and inartistic and without any literary quality there were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy noblemen like the Earl of Leicester and bands of strolling players who acted in in-yards and bear gardens it was not until stationary theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and established that any plays were produced which deserved the name of literature in 1576 the first playhouse was built in London this was the Black Friars which was located within the liberties of the dissolved monastery of the Black Friars in order to be outside of the jurisdiction of the mayor and corporation who were Puritan and determined in their opposition to the stage for the same reason the theater and the curtain were built in the same year outside the city walls in shortage later the rose, the globe and the swan were erected on the bankside across the Thames and playgoers resorting to them were accustomed to take a boat these early theaters were of the rudest construction the six penny spectators and the roundlings stood in the yard or pit which had neither floor nor roof the shilling spectators sat on the stage where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes and whence they chaffed the actors or the opposed rascality in the yard there was no scenery and the female parts were taken by boys plays were acted in the afternoon a placard with the letters Venice or Rome or whatever indicated the place of the action with such rude appliances must Shakespeare bring before his audience the midnight battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets the dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their public and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of that day that it responded to the appeal it suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of space and time and with aid of some few foot and half foot words fight over York and Lancaster's long jars pedantry undertook even at the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle or classical unities of time and place to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy but the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the audience and they decided for freedom in action rather than restraint and recitation hence our national drama is of Shakespeare and not of Racine by 1603 there were twelve playhouses in London in full blast although the city then numbered only 150,000 inhabitants fresh plays were produced every year the theatre was more to the Englishman of that time than it has ever been before or since it was his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one no great drama has ever flourished apart from a living stage and it was fortunate that the Elizabethan dramatists were almost all of them actors and familiar with stage effect even the few exceptions like Beaumont and Fletcher who were young men of good birth and fortune and not dependent on their pens were probably intimate with the actors lived in the theatrical atmosphere and knew practically how plays should be put on it had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright Richard Burbage and Edward Allen the leading actors of their generation made large fortunes Shakespeare himself made enough to earn the profits of the globe to retire with a competence some seven years before his death and purchase a handsome property in his native Stratford accordingly shortly after 1580 a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career these were young graduates of the universities Marlowe, Green, Peel, Kid, Lily Lodge and others who came up to town and led a bohemian life as actors and playwrights most of them were wild and dissipated and ended in wretchedness Peel died of a disease brought on by his evil discourses Green in extreme destitution from a surfeit of wrenish wine and pickled herring and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl the euphuis, Lily, produced eight plays from 1584 to 1601 they were written for court entertainments in prose and mostly on mythological subjects they have little dramatic power but the dialogue is brisk and vivacious and there are several pretty songs in them all the characters talk euphuism the best of these was Alexander and Kempaspi the plot of which is briefly as follows Alexander has fallen in love with his beautiful captive Kempaspi and employs the artist Apelles to paint her portrait during the sittings Apelles becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion which is returned Alexander discovers their secret but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the lovers hands the situation is a good one and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist but Lily slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and in places of passionate scenes gives us clever discourses and soliloquies or at best a light interchange of question and answer full of conceits, partays and double meanings for example Apelles, whom do you love best in the world? Kempaspi, he that made me last in the world Apelles, that was a god Kempaspi, I had thought it had been a man, etc Lily's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy and Shakespeare's indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in Machado about nothing greatly superior as they are to anything of the kind in Lily the most important of the dramatists who were Shakespeare's forerunners or early contemporaries was Christopher or as he was familiarly called Kit Marlowe Born in the same year with Shakespeare, 1564 he died in 1593 at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays except the comedy of errors and loves labors lost Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his tambourine written before 1587 and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakespeare to do but to take it as he found it Tambourine was a crude, violent piece full of exaggeration and bombast but with passages here and there of splendid declamation justifying Ben Johnson's phrase Marlowe's mighty line Johnson however ridiculed in his discoveries the cynical strutting and furious vociferation of Marlowe's hero and Shakespeare put a quotation from Tambourine to the mouth of his ranting pistol Marlowe's Edward II was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays it was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakespeare and not undeserving of the comparison which had provoked with the latter's Richard II but the most interesting of Marlowe's plays to a modern reader is the tragical history of Dr Faustus the subject is the same as in Goethe's Faust and Goethe who knew the English play spoke of it as greatly planned the opening of Marlowe's Faustus is very similar to Goethe's his hero, wearied with unprofitable studies and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life sells his soul to the devil in return for a few years of supernatural power the tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power wasting it in practical jokes and feats of lejeune but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious the love story of Margaret which is the central point of Goethe's drama is entirely wanting in Marlowe's and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's Mephistopheles Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright as befitted in age which believed in witchcraft the greatest part of the English Faustus is the last scene in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn Oh lente, lente, corrile, noctis equi the stars move still, time runs the clock will strike oh soul, be changed into little water drops and fall into the ocean, never be found Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular he had no humor and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery George Peele's masterpiece David and Bathsheba was also in many respects a fine play though its beauties were poetic rather than dramatic consisting not in the characterization which is feeble but in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery there is one noble chorus oh proud revolt of a presumptuous man etc which reminds one of passages in Milton's Samson Agonist and occasionally Peele rises to such high Eschelion audacities as these at him the thunder shall discharge his bolt and his fair spouse with bright and fiery wings sit ever burning on his hateful bones Robert Green was a very unequal writer his plays are slovenly and careless in construction and he puts classical allusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage he has not withstanding in his comedy parts more natural lightness and grace than either Marlowe or Peele as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and his pinner of Wakefield there is a fresh breath as of the green English country in such passages as the description of Oxford the scene at Harleys and Fair and the picture of the dairy in the Keeper's Lodge at Mary Fressingfield in all these anti-shakesperian dramatas there was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a new literary departure as compared not only with Shakespeare but with later writers who had the inestimable advantage of his example their work was full of imperfection hesitation, experiment Marlowe was probably a native genius the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster but his plays as a whole are certainly not equal to theirs they wrote in a more developed state of the art but the work of this early school settled the shape which the English drama was to take it fixed the practice and traditions to the National Theatre it decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life the real and the ideal tragedy and comedy, prose and verse in the same play without limitations of time, place and action it decided that the English play was to be an action and not a dialogue bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions hangings, riots, plays within plays drunken revels, beatings, battle murder and sudden death it established blank verse with occasional rhyming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech as the language of the tragedy and high comedy parts and prose as the language of the low comedy and business parts and it introduced songs a feature of which Shakespeare made exquisite use Shakespeare, indeed like all great poets invented no new form of literature but touched old forms to finer purposes refining everything, discarding nothing even the old chorus and dumb show he employed though sparingly as also the old jig or comic song which the clown used to give between the acts of the life of William Shakespeare the greatest dramatic poet of the world so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to construct a theory and support it with some show of reason that the plays which pass under his name were really written by Bacon or someone else there is no danger of this paradox ever making serious headway for the historical evidence that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays though not overwhelming, is sufficient but it is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day or perhaps of all time was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only 250 years after the event that the single authorship of the Homeric poem should be doubted as not so strange for Homer is almost prehistoric but Shakespeare was a modern Englishman and at the time of his death the first English colony in America was already 9 years old the important known facts of his life can be told almost in a sentence he was born at Stratford on Avon in 1564 married when he was 18 went to London probably in 1587 and became an actor, playwriter and stockholder in the company which owned the Black Friars and the Globe Theaters he seemingly prospered in his calling and retired about 1609 to Stratford where he lived in his house that he had bought some years before and where he died in 1616 his Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593 the Rape of Lucretia in 1594 and his Sonnets in 1609 so far as it is known only 18 of the 37 plays are generally attributed to Shakespeare were printed during his lifetime these were printed singly in quarto shape and were little more than stage books or librettos the first collected edition of his works was the so-called First Folio of 1623 published by his fellow actors Heming and Condell no contemporary of Shakespeare thought it worthwhile to write a life of the stage player there are a number of references to him in the literature of the time some generous as in Ben Johnson's well-known verses others singularly unappreciative like Webster's mention of the right happy and copious industry of master Shakespeare but all these together do not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about Spencer or Sydney or Rowley or Ben Johnson there is indeed nothing to show that his contemporaries understood among them in the person of our English Terrence, Mr. Will Shakespeare the age for the rest was not a self-conscious one nor greatly given to review writing and literary biography nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shakespeare's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man he lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do his sonnets have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence of the character in life but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than convincing Shakespeare probably began by touching up old plays Henry VI and the bloody tragedy of Titus Andronicus if Shakespeare's at all are doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage the taming of the shrew seems to be an old play worked over by Shakespeare and some other dramatist and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in parts of Henry VIII, Pericles such partnerships were common among the Elizabethan dramatists the most illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and Fletcher the plays in the first folio were divided into histories, comedies and tragedies and it will be convenient to notice them briefly in that order it was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try his fortune Elizabeth had finally thrown down the gauge of battle to Catholic Europe by the execution of Mary Stuart in 1587 the following year saw the destruction of the colossal armada which Spain had sent to revenge Mary's death and hard upon these events followed the gallant exploits of Grenville, Essex and Raleigh that Shakespeare shared the exultant patriotism of the times and the sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe which was now born in the breasts of Englishmen is evident from many a passage in his plays this happy breed of men this little world this precious stone set in a silver sea this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England this land of such dear souls this dear, dear land England bound in with the triumphant sea his English histories are ten in number of these, King John and Henry VIII are isolated plays the others form a consecutive series in the following order Richard III the two parts of Henry IV Henry V the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III this series may be divided into two each forming a tetralogy or group of four plays in the first the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster but the power of the red rose was founded in usurpation in the second group accordingly comes the Nemesis in the civil wars of the roses reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York and the tyranny of Gloucester the happy conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series this new usurper is overthrown in turn and Henry VII the first tutor sovereign ascends the throne and restores the Lancasterian inheritance purified by bloody atonement from the stain of Richard II's murder these eight plays are, as it were the eight acts of one great drama and if such a thing were possible they should be represented on successive nights like the parts of a Greek trilogy in order of composition the second group came first Henry VI is strikingly inferior to the others Richard III is a good acting play and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great tragedians who have taken the part of the king but in a literary sense it is unequal to Richard II or the two parts of Henry IV the latter is unquestionably Shakespeare's greatest historical tragedy and it contains his master creation in the region of low comedy the immortal fall stuff the constructive art with which Shakespeare shaped history into drama with the two plays on that subject which were already on this stage these, like all the other old chronicle histories such as Thomas Lord Cromwell and the famous victories of Henry V follow a merely chronological or biographical order giving events loosely as they occurred without any unity of effect or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe Shakespeare's order was logical he compressed and selected disregarding the fact of history oftentimes in favor of the higher truth of fiction bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect even though they had no such relation in the chronicle and were separated perhaps by many years Shakespeare's first two comedies were experiments Love's labor's lost was a play of manners with hardly any plot it brought together a number of humors that is oddities and affectations of various sorts and played them off one another as Ben Johnson afterward did in his comedies of humor Shakespeare never returned to this type of play and lost perhaps in the taming of the shrew there the story turned on a single humor, Catherine's bad temper just as the story in Johnson's Silent Woman turned on Morose's Hatred of Noise the taming of the shrew is therefore one of the least Shakespearean of the Shakespeare's plays a bourgeois domestic comedy with a very narrow interest it belongs to the school of French comedy like Molière's Malade Imagineur not to the romantic comedy of Shakespeare Fletcher the comedy of errors was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind it was a play purely of incident a farce in which the main improbability being granted namely that the twin antifoli and twin dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished all the amusing complications follow naturally enough there is little character drawing in the play any two pairs of twins in the same predicament would be equally droll the fun lies in the situation this was a comedy of the Latin school and resembled the monecmi of Plautus Shakespeare never returned to this type of play though there is an element of errors in Midsummer Night's Dream in the two gentlemen of Verona he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors in this play as in the merchant of Venice Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and The Tempest the plan of construction is as follows there is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters and a secondary intrigue or under plot by the low comedy characters the former is by no means purely comic but admits the presentation of the noblest motives the strongest passions and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry in some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gaity as in As You Like It and Twelfth Night in others like Measure for Measure it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure even to the end and a play like Winter's Tale in which the painful situation is prolonged for years is only technically a comedy such dramas indeed were called on many of the title pages of the time tragic comedies the low comedy interlude on the other hand was broadly comic cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play sometimes loosely and by way of variety or relief as in the episode of Touchstone and Audrey in As You Like It sometimes closely as in the case of Dogbury and Vargas in Much Ado About Nothing where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction it is Shakespeare's only play of contemporary middle-class English life and is written almost throughout in prose it is his only pure comedy except the taming of the shrew Shakespeare did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy though he turned it to a new account the two species graded into one another thus Symboline is in its fortunate ending really as much of a comedy as a Winter's Tale to which its plot bears a resemblance and is only technically a tragedy because it contains a violent death in some of the tragedies as Beth and Julius Caesar the comedy element is reduced to a minimum but in others as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast akin to this is the use to which Shakespeare put the old vice or clown of the moralities the fool in Lear, Touchstone and As You Like It and Thercides and Troilus and Cressida are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter or half-crazy philosophy and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man's nature the earliest of Shakespeare's tragedies unless Titus Andronicus be his was doubtless Romeo and Juliet which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of first love it contains a large proportion of rhyming lines which is usually a sign in Shakespeare of early work he dropped rhyme more and more on his later plays and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet Romeo and Juliet is also unique among his tragedies in this respect that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality as in the Greek drama it was Shakespeare's habit to work out this tragic conclusion from within through character rather than through external chances this is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero this is so in a special sense in Hamlet the subtlest of all Shakespeare's plays and if not his masterpiece at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds it is observable that in Shakespeare's comedies there is no one central figure but that in passing into tragedy he intensified and concentrated the action upon a single character this difference is seen even in the naming of the plays the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes the comedies never somewhat later probably than the tragedies already mentioned were the three Roman plays Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antonin Cleopatra it is characteristic of Shakespeare that he invented the plot of none of his plays but took material that he found at hand in these Roman tragedies he followed Plutarch closely and yet even in doing so gave if possible a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist it is most instructive to compare Julius Caesar with Ben Johnson's Catelyn and Sojanus Johnson was careful not to go beyond his text in Catelyn he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catelyn Sojanus is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus and Suetonius there is none of this dead learning in Shakespeare's play having grasped the conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius and Mark Anthony as Plutarch gave them he pushed them out into their consequences so independently of his original and yet so harmoniously with it that the reader knows that he is reading history and needs no further warrant for it than Shakespeare's own Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakespeare's undoubted tragedies and Troilus and Cressida says Coleridge is the hardest to characterize the figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakespeare turns upon them becomes a stupid bully Ulysses a crafty politician and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction in losing their ideal remoteness the heroes of the Iliad lose their poetic quality and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment it was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakespeare as a rude though prodigious genius even Milton could describe him as warbling his native wood notes wild but a truer criticism has shown that he was also a profound artist it is true that he wrote for his audiences and that his art is not everywhere and at all points perfect but a great artist will contrive as Shakespeare did to reconcile practical exigencies like those of the public stage with the finer requirements of his art strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakespeare's plays and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case compared to the audience liked puns or the audience liked ghosts compare for example his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in Faustus Shakespeare's age believed in witches, elves and apparitions and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery the ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion Banquo's Wraith which is invisible to all but Macbeth is the haunting of an evil conscience the witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition thrown into a human shape so as to become actors in the drama in the same way the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream are the personified caprices of the lovers and they are unseen by the human characters whose likes and dislikes they control save in the instance where bottom is translated that is becomes mad and has sight of the invisible world so in the Tempest Ariel is the spirit of the air and caliban of the earth and the he made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature yet he is not an English poet simply but a world poet Germany has made him her own and the Latin races though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the cannons of classical taste have at length learned to know him an ever growing mass of Shakespearean literature in the way of comment and interpretation critical, textual, historical or illustrative testifies to the durability and growth of his fame above all his plays still keep and probably always will keep the stage it is common to speak of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood in some sense on a level but in truth there is an almost measureless distance between him and all of his contemporaries the rest shared with him in the mighty influences of the age their plays were touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint heirs but as a whole they are obsolete they live in books but not in the hearts and on the tongues of men the most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare was Ben Johnson whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the others gracious in personality Johnson was nine years younger than Shakespeare he was educated at Westminster school served as a soldier in the Low Countries became an actor in Henslow's company and was twice imprisoned once for killing a fellow actor in a duel and once for his part in the comedy of Eastward Ho which gave offense to King James he lived down to the times of Charles I, 1635 and became the acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit combats of the mermaid, the devil and other famous London taverns what things have we seen down at the mermaid, heard words that have been so nimble and so full of subtle flame as if that everyone from whom they came had meant to put his whole wit in a jest and had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply Oh Rare Ben Johnson Johnson's comedies were modeled upon the Vetus Commedia of Aristophanes which was satirical in purpose and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakespeare's they were classical and not romantic and were pure comedies admitting no admixture of tragic motives there was hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his dramatic creations they were comedies not of character in the high sense of the word but of manners or humors his design was to lash the follies and vices of the day and his dramatist persona consisted for the most of gulls, imposters, fops, cowards swaggering braggarts and Paul's men in his first play every man in his humor acted in 1598 in every man out of his humor Bartholomew Faire and indeed in all of his comedies his subject was the spongy humors of the time that is the fashionable affectations the whims, oddities and eccentric developments of London life his procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humors to play them off upon each other involve them in all manner of comical misadventures and render them utterly ridiculous and contemptible there was thus a perishable element in his art for manners change and however effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been before an audience of Johnson's day it is as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a reader 200 years hence to understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day as the colonel nevertheless a patient reader with the help of copious footnotes can gradually put together for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Johnson's comedy dwells and can admire the dramatist's solid good sense his great learning his skill and construction and the astonishing fertility of his invention his characters are not revealed from within like Shakespeare's but built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute laborious particulars the difference will be plainly manifest of such a character as Slender in the Merry Wives of Windsor be compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Johnson's plays with master Stephen for example in Every Man in His Humor or if fall staff be put side by side with Captain Boba Dill in the same comedy perhaps Johnson's masterpiece in the way of comic caricature Cynthia's Rebels was a satire on the courtiers and the Poa Taster on Johnson's literary enemies the Alchemist was an exposure of quackery and is one of his best comedies but somewhat over-weighted with learning Volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas but is a harsh and disagreeable piece and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy the Silent Woman is perhaps the easiest of all Johnson's plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate there is a distinct plot to it the situation is extremely ludicrous and the emphasis is laid upon single humor or eccentricity as in some of Molière's lighter comedies like Le Malade Imaginaire or Le Médicin Marguer-Louis in spite of his heaviness in drama Johnson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry his songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakespeare's but they have a grace of their own such pieces as his love's triumph him to Diana, the noble mind and the adaptation from Philistratus drink to me only with thine eyes and many others entitle their author to rank among the first English lyricists some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous verse the forest and underwoods others in the numerous masks which he composed these were a species of entertainment very popular at the court of James I combining dialogue with music intricate dances and costly scenery Johnson left an unfinished pastoral drama the sad shepherd which though not equal to Fletcher's faithful shepherdess contains passages of great beauty one especially descriptive of the shepherdess Aireen who had her very being and her name with the first buds and breathings of the spring born with the primrose and the violet and earliest roses blown and of part one, chapter three