From The Fortnightly Review. THE LYRISM OF THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA.⭑ BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. sat down to write, music sounded in their ears. Their thoughts and rhythms moved instinctively to vocal tunes. Thus we find that the epical, narrative, and meditative verse of the period, no less than the dra THE most prominent feature of the En-matic, was penetrated with lyrism. Many glish romantic or Elizabethan drama is a of the finest passages in the Faery predominance of high-strung poetry in all Queen seem written to be sung. The its parts. When we compare this drama lyric cry is audible throughout Marlowe's with that of Italy or of France at the same "Hero and Leander; not only in its epoch, or even with that of Athens in the high uplifted passion, but also in the tense classical period, its characteristic quality and quivering movement of the lines. is found to be a diffusion of lyrical poetry Shakespeare's sonnets are lyrical, both in through every fibre, vein, and tissue of its their structure and their tone. In this respect they differ from the sonnets of Milton, where the gnomic or reflective element predominates. vital structure. The dramatists, not unnaturally, felt this lyric impulse. It is the function of the drama in all ages to reflect the very form and pressure of the time in which it flourishes. The material conditions of the English theatre were also favorable to the development of a lyrical element in our drama. In the absence of scenery or The conception of character and the choice of situations in our drama are always poetical. Imagination never fails, even when the construction of the plot is lamentably defective. The playwright, in his diction, in his images and metaphors, in his rhetorical embroidery, in his handling of blank verse, exhibits a poetic faculty which sometimes conceals the poverty of his dramatic resources. It often happens that the effect of dialogue or soliloquy stage-decorations appeal had to be made is dramatically weakened by the abun- to the imagination of the spectators. That dance of imagery and the wealth of fancy was done by raising the accent of poetic lavished by the poet. The tone of diction speech to such a pitch that the wildest proper to dramatic utterance frequently flights of fancy emphasized the playexhales in lyrisms. These "lyrical interwright's meaning. There were only men breathings," as Coleridge called them with and boys upon the wooden platform of the admirable nicety of phrase, are exquisitely stage. What these actors uttered had to beautiful. To the student in his chamber bring distant scenes within the vision of they offer new delights at every turning the audience; their lines interpreted subtle of the page. They appeal to his imag ination; they stimulate his sense of beauty and of passion in the outer and the inner worlds of nature and mankind. But they tend to clog and interrupt the business of the scene. In the hands of playwrights of the second order, of Fletcher for example, these "lyrical interbreathings," constantly repeated, degenerate into a kind of poet ical rhetoric, which excuses or evokes a want of dramatic sincerity, a feeble grasp on the essential conditions of character and action. The lyrical element, which I have attempted to describe, was not peculiar to the drama. It pervaded all species of poetry in the Elizabethan age. That was the time when music flourished in England. We had then a native school of Composers, and needed not to borrow the melodies of other lands. Every house had its lute suspended on the parlor-wall. In every company of men and women part-songs could be sung. When poets * This paper was written to be read, upon 5th March, before the Elizabethan Literary Society of Toynbee Hall. changes of emotion, sudden reverses of fortune, the flux and reflux of passion in human hearts; and all this had to be presented with nothing but a bare background, with the open sky above, with smoking, jostling the players on the stage. people in hats and trunk-hose sitting, That being so, it is not wonderful that the playwright used the lyric note, the note of fancy of his audience, and to carry them high impassioned poetry, to stimulate the away with him into the realm of the ideal. He could not act upon their sense of sight, as the modern playwright does. Unless he pierced their intellectual sense, he failed to rivet their attention. It is thus, at any rate, that I partly explain to myself the lyrism of the English drama. In plain words, the bias of poetical lit erature in England during the Elizabethan bias. And the conditions of the London The drama obeyed that age was lyrical. stage favored a style of writing for the theatre which was eminently lyrical. of our theatre. Those famous "lunes" We see this in Marlowe, the founder of "Tamburlaine," those descants upon beauty, those apostrophes to divine Xeno- | romantic drama, which he was born to crate, those fierce forth-stretchings after perfect. And he has more than once or universal empire, are lyrical; lyrical not twice written plays which are purely lyrionly in their tone and sentiment, but also cal in their construction. in the form and exaltation of the verses which express them. The serious part of "Faustus" is a sustained lyric. The philosopher in his study evokes the image of Had I as many souls as there be stars, Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium? — The lyrical accent here is unmistakable. Preserving the form of dramatic verse, keeping well to his decasyllabic metre, Marlowe soars aloft into that higher region of poetry where music is demanded. He does not rely upon the decoration or the business of the stage; that was nothing then; he forces the audience, by poetry, by the evocation of their sympathies, by a keen lyric cry, to comprehend the dramatic situation. If we abstracted the lyrical passages from "Tamburlaine " and "Faustus "there would be little left noteworthy in these plays. The case is different with "Edward II." Here Marlowe constructs a tragedy, which would be forcibly dramatic without its lyrical element. The lyrism survives. It is particularly potent in the scene of Edward's abdication. But the action and the passions move almost without its help. The lyric, which was nearly everything in "Tamburlaine " and " Faustus," has become a subordinate quantity in "Edward II." At the point which Marlowe reached in "Edward II.," Shakespeare took his art up. Shakespeare always regarded the dramatic movement of the play first. But he never neglected the lyrical element. He recognized this as a main point in the It will suffice to mention "Romeo and Juliet." This is a lyrical poem, dramatically presented. As a German critic has remarked, Romeo and Juliet" combines the sonnet, the epithalium, and the aubade - three types of lyrical poetry - under one dramatic form. The whole play is a chant d'amour - an exhalation of human love, in poetry assuming the dramatic mantle. All the incidents of action fall away and sink into their place before the simple fact that Romeo loves Juliet, and Juliet loves Romeo. This play is the lyric cry converted into drama. I must not engage in detailed analysis upon this point, else I should like to show ceived and executed is the tragedy of by copious illustrations how lyrically con"Richard II." I should like to show how "Love's Labor's Lost "falls short of being a good comedy by its dependence upon lyrical rhymed structures in the metre, and by its incongruous admixture of high lyric flights of passion - Biron's ecstatic extravaganzas - with satirical humor and frank buffoonery. This play, in some respects one of the most charming of Shakespeare's earliest efforts, closing as it does upon the note of one of his most genial and native songs, does not indeed deserve the name of a comedy, but rather that of some ethereal variety entertainment, because of its imperfectly assimilated lyrism. I should like to point out how far more finely mingled are the elements of comedy and lyric in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," which is really a dramatic romance, interweaving three separate strains of poetry- the heroic in Theseus, the amorous in the two pairs of lovers, the fantastic in the fairies-with one strain of burlesque, toned exquisitely into keeping with the major parts. I should like lastly to demonstrate how "The Tempest," a work of Shakespeare's maturity, is a pure ideal lyric, converted by the master's wonder-working wand into an effective drama for the stage, without the sacrifice of its dominant quality, but rather by the maintenance of the lyric note throughout. Descending to minor compositions, it would have been interesting to examine Dekker's " Old Fortunatus," Day's "Par liament of Bees," Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess," and some of the later romantic tragi-comedies, in which the lyrism of the English drama is most noticeable. For the present, having suggested this point of view, I will leave it to the consideration of impartial students. This uplifting of dramatic into lyrical style in dialogue and soliloquy is common Marlowe proved in "Edward II." that to all those of the Elizabethan playwrights a tragedy could be constructed, which was who were gifted with a genuine poetic not dependent on its lyrical element, but faculty. We find it everywhere in Fletchwhich used that only for purposes of occa-er's romantic plays. I need not cull sional rhetoric and powerful appeal to the imagination of the audience. The type which he then fixed became the standard for his immediate successors. This brings us back to what Coleridge called the "lyrical interbreathings" of the romantic drama, and necessitates a closer examination of those portions of non-lyrical plays in which the dramatic style modulates into the lyric. The passages in Shakespeare's trage dies and comedies where dialogue or soliloquy soars into the empyrean of impassioned poetry are so frequent, and some of them are so famous, that it is needless to do more than allude to them in passing. Macbeth's declamation on the vanity of life, when he hears the news of the queen's death; Perdita's melodious enumeration of spring flowers; Claudio's horror-stricken meditation on the state of disembodied spirits; the narrative of Ophelia's drowning; the last speeches of Antony and Cleopatra - especially that sublime cry of hers: I am again for Cydnus, examples from "The Faithful Shepherd- The emblems of her honor lost: all joy And blushing do unloose her zone, keep from No merry noise, nor lusty songs, be heard Nor full cups crowned with wine make the honor. all these illustrate what I mean by dra- Come not to me again; but say to Athens weep. We note the same ascent to lyrism in Heywood. When Mr. Frankford, in "A Woman Killed with Kindness," is approaching and leaving his wife's bedchamber, and again when he discovers the lute which she has left behind her in the desecrated home, he breaks into soliloquies ringing with a wounded heart-cry. The intensity of the situation changes the accent of the verse. One of these three passages will serve as an example : — So, again, are those vignetted pictures, and freaks of roving fancy, which present an episode idealized, and strike the key: note of its purified emotion. A good instance of this is when Lorenzo and Jessica exchanged their lovers' thoughts by means of musical allusions -a sustained and measured dialogue in anti-O God! O God! that it were possible phonal descant - beneath the flooding To undo things done; to call back yesterday! That time could turn up his swift sandy glass moonlight in the park at Belmont. To untell the days, and to redeem these hours! Lor. Or that the sun Could, rising from the west, draw his coach Take from the account of time so many min utes, Till he had all these seasons called again, Those minutes, and those actions done in of Fletcher's " Valentinian is accentuthem, ated by the two songs of the second act; Even from her first offence; that I might take and the whole spirit of "The Maid's As spotless as an angel in my arms! It is the same with Webster, with Dekker, with Ford, with Marston. Even Ben Jonson, that strict master of severity in style, indulges now and then in flights of lyrism. Lovel's dissertation upon Platonic affection in "The New Inn" is an example; so too are the opening lines about Earine in "The Sad Shepherd." Tragedy" lives in Aspatia's dirge: Lay a garland on my hearse My love was false, but I was firm Lightly, gentle earth! Ford, though he was not one of the best lyrists of this period, managed to sublimate the motive of his tragedy, "The Broken Heart," in three songs, "Can you paint a thought?" "Oh, no more, no more, too late," and "Glories, pleasures, pomps, delights, and ease." This is equally true of comedies or dramatized romances. Dekker's lyrics in "The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell" yield at once the purest accent of his own poetic quality and the highest value of the play in which they occur. Heywood's song, "Ye little birds that sit and sing," is the culminating point of his "Fair Maid of the Exchange." The spirit of the man and the spirit of the work of art are both extracted and etherealized in the four stanzas of that exquisitely transparent ditty. I have now made it clear in what way think the songs which are scattered through our drama deserve to be carefully studied; first as the ultimate expression of that lyrism to which the romantic species in England was always tending; and secondly, as an index to the playwright's specific quality as poet. We have now seen that the characteristic note of the English romantic drama is a predominance of high-strung poetry in all its parts. This poetry, even in the blank-verse passages, assumes a lyrical quality. But the spirit of this poetry goes farther; climbs higher; and the final point to which it soars, claims our attention next. The lyrical element, on which I have been so long insisting as the very mainspring of English romantic art, culminates and finds free expression in the songs which are scattered up and down each play. These songs cannot be regarded as occasional ditties, interpolated for the delectation of the audience. On the contrary they strike the keynote of the playwright's style. They condense the particular emotion of the tragedy or comedy in a quintessential drop of melody. I Mr. Pater has dwelt upon a single in stance of this fact with his usual felicity of phrase. Speaking of the song of Mariana's page in "Measure for Measure," he remarks that in it "the kindling power and poetry of the whole play seems to pass for a moment into an actual strain of music." The same might be said about the two songs in the second act of "As You Like It," Ariel's songs in "The Tempest," and all the fairy lyrics of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." What painters call their accent, the highest value in their pictures, we find in these dramatic lyrics. It only requires a moment's reflection to perceive in how true a sense the little poems written by the dramatist for music Ben Jonson rarely struck the note of at a certain point in his play, give the genuine inevitable lyric inspiration. None accent of his style, the highest value in of the songs in his plays can be called his scheme of composition. This is very perfect in their music. Beside being stiff clear when we consider the dirges intro- through labor of the file they are often duced by Webster into "The Duchess of awkward in some turn or other of exMalfi" and "Vittoria Corombona. The pression. The best to my mind are the sombre genius of the poet, his sinister" Hymn to Diana," in "Cynthia's Revels," philosophy of life, the terrible gloom of and the "Ode to Charis," introduced from his tragic motives, are epitomized in those Underwoods into "The Devil is an Ass." funeral ditties. In like manner, the theme It may interest some of my readers to Some of our dramatists were defective in the lyrical faculty. Their blank-verse lyrism is rather rhetorical than poetical; and their songs are mediocre. Massinger is of this sort; so, but in a less degree, is Middleton; and Shirley might be classed with them, had he not bequeathed to us the two immortal odes upon the vanity of human power and glory, from “ Cupid and Death," and "The Contention of Ajax." Hast thou seen the down in the air, When wanton blasts have tossed it? Or the ship on the sea, When ruder winds have crossed it? Hast thou marked the crocodile's weeping, Or hast thou viewed the peacock in his Or the dove by his bride, false is she! rhythm to Fletcher's "God Lyæus ever in one of Middleton's comedies.* no It re One playwright of the highest eminence, and two of the second order, Marlowe, Cyril Tourneur, and Marston, have songs printed in their plays. This does The execution of the lyric in "Volpone," not prove, however, that they wrote none; "Come, my Celia, let us prove," is excel for publishers, at that period, were not lent. These couplets might be reckoned always careful to retain the lyrics when among Jonson's successes, did they not they sent an author's plays to press. challenge fatal comparison with the ode also appears that stage ditties were of Catullus, from which they are in part garded as common property. In the case borrowed, but of which they are in no true of Marston, stage directions are frequently sense an adequate translation. The song given for the introduction of music and from "The Silent Woman," "Still to be singing. But whether his own lyrics were neat, still to be drest," converted into En-used on those occasions cannot now be glish from the Latin of Jean Bonnefons, determined. Marlowe had the lyrical deserves honorable mention; not only for faculty in over-measure. I have already its terseness and correctness, but also be pointed out what a large part blank-verse cause it plainly foreshadowed and prob- lyrism plays in his tragedies. It must ably helped to form the lyric style of therefore be left to conjecture whether he the seventeenth century. If we may trust chose to dispense with the element of Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson song, or whether in the printing of his thought highly of his drinking-song in plays the lyrics were omitted. In the lat"The Poetaster." It does not find a ter case, we have suffered grievous wrong place in the best anthologies of songs from the publishers of his dramatic works. from the dramatists. I shall therefore But I am inclined to believe, from the produce it here; for it illustrates what I stage-business of Marlowe's tragedies, that mean by Jonson's awkwardness of phrase; the detached lyric formed no portion of and if he really set great store upon this his scheme. Did we possess none but little ode, it also illustrates his incapacity the original editions of Lyly's comedies, for just self-criticism:— Swell me a bowl with lusty wine, I drink as I would write, This is certainly inferior in poetry and we should have to mourn the loss of those charming songs, which form the best part of Lyly's literary bequest to posterity. A Mad World, my Masters. The text of the Masque gives "Drop, drop, your violets." Since the violets are obviously addressed in the following lines, it seems to me that your must here be a misprint for you. |