Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (subtítulos en español)

Tom Stoppard (Norton)

 

 

From The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed.:

 

TOM STOPPARD

b. 1937

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia, emigrated to Singapore (where his father died), and came to England in 1946. On his mother's remarriage, he took his stepfather's name of Stoppard. Leaving Pocklington School in Yorkshire at seventeen, he became a journalist, wrote a novel, and in 1962 his two short plays, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon among Other Things, were broadcast on the radio. The British theater had been dominated for a decade by realistic "kitchen sink" dramas when Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) appeared and was hailed as a major theatrical event. Critics recognized a debt to Waiting for Godot, but where Samuel Beckett had focused on the hopelessness of his two abandoned characters, Stoppard celebrates the gaiety and perverse vitality that can be generated from despair. 

Stoppard frequently uses plays by other playwrights as launching pads for his own. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern step out of the shadows of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the plot of Stoppard's Travesties (1974) is entwined with that of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Past and present are again entwined, though not intertextually, in his masterpiece, Arcadia (1993), which explores the nature of Nature, Classical and Romantic theories of landscape gardening, literary history and historians, truth and time, and the disruptive influence of sex on human orbits—"the attraction which Newton left out." Stoppard's most recent plays have been Indian Ink (1993) and The Invention of Love (1997), which brings together in one galaxy A. E. Housman, Moses Jackson, Oscar Wilde, and a sparkling constellation of High Victorian worthies.

In a different but no less witty mode, The Real Inspector Hound (1968) parodies the classic country-house murder-mystery play. Stoppard's hilarious spoof parallels Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap. An extratheatrical dimension is added by the subplot satirizing the pomposities of theater critics. When the lives of Birdboot and Moon become entangled with those of the characters in the play they are supposedly reviewing, we are treated to a brilliant demonstration of one of Stoppard's recurrent themes, the indistinct frontier between Life and Art. He has said:

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Stoppard shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love (1998) and has also written for radio and television, alternating—sometimes in the same work—between a serious handling of political themes and arabesques of exuberant fantasy. As he says, "I never quite know whether I want to be a serious artist or a siren."

 

Darkside Radio Play Trailer

 

—oOo—

Pinter, Harold

 Pinter, Harold. The Room. 1957. In Pinter, The Room and The Dumb Waiter.
_____. The Birthday Party. Drama. 1958.
_____. The Caretaker. Drama. 1959.
_____. The Dumb Waiter. Drama. First performed 1960.
_____. A Slight Ache. Drama. In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Hothouse. Drama. In Pinter, Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. A Night Out.  Drama. In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Black and White. In Pinter, Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Examination. London: Methuen, 1963.
_____. The Dwarfs. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Lover. Drama. 1963. In Pinter, The Collection and The Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Tea Party. TV drama. 1965.
_____. The Collection. Drama. In Pinter, The Collection and The Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Night School. Drama.  In Pinter,  Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Homecoming. Drama. 1965. (Methuen's Modern Plays). London: Methuen.
_____. The Basement. TV drama. 1967.
_____. Landscape. Drama. First broadcast BBC, 25 April 1968. 1st staged by the RSC, Aldsych Theatre, London , 2 July 1969. Dir. Peter Hall.
_____. The Go-Between. Screenplay, based on L. P. Hartley's novel. 1969.
_____. Silence. 1969. In Pinter, Plays: Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. 189-209.
_____. Old Times. Drama. London: Methuen, 1971.
_____. No Man's Land. TV drama. 1975.
_____. Betrayal. TV drama. 1978.
_____. Poems and Prose 1949-1977. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978.
_____. The Proust Screenplay. (= A la Recherche du Temps Perdu). Screenplay, based on Marcel Proust's novel. 1978.
_____. Mountain Language. New York: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
_____. One for the Road. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Victoria Station. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Party Time. Drama.
_____. Request Stop. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Last to Go. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Special Offer. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Trouble in the Works. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Family Voices. London: Next Editions / Faber, 1981.
_____. The French Lieutenant's Woman. Screenplay based on John Fowles' novel. 1982.
_____. A Kind of Alaska. Drama. 1982.
_____. Night. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's Your Trouble. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's All. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Applicant. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Interview. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Dialogue for Three. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Collected Poems and Prose. London: Methuen, 1986.
_____. Monologue. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. The Heat of the Day. Screenplay.
_____. The Comfort of Strangers and Other Screenplays (Reunion, Victory, Turtle Diary).
_____. The Trial. Screenplay.
_____. Moonlight. Drama. 1993.
_____. Ashes to Ashes. Drama. 1996.
_____. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998.
_____. "Art, Truth, and Politics." Nobel Lecture, Dec. 2005. Nobelprize.org
    http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
    2005-12-09
_____. "Arte, verdad y política. Trans. José Ángel García Landa and Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. In Fírgoa: Universidade pública 9 Dec. 2005.
http://firgoa.usc.es/drupal/node/24005
    2005-12-09

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Harold Pinter (1930-[2008]), poet and playwright, born in East London, the son of a Jewish tailor, and educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. He began to publish poetry in periodicals before he was 20, then became a professional actor, working mainly in repertory. 

His first play, The Room, was performed in Bristol in 1957, followed in 1958 by a London production of The Birthday Party, in which Stanley, an out-of-work pianist in a seaside boarding house, is mysteriously threatened and taken over by two intruders, an Irishman and a Jew, who present him with a Kafkaesque indictment of unexplained crimes. 

Pinter's distinctive voice was soon recognized, and many critical and commercial successes followed, including The Caretaker (1960), The Lover (1963), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1971), and No Man's Land (1975). Betrayal (1978; film, 1982) is an ironic tragedy which ends in beginning and traces with a reversed chronology the development of a love affair between a man and his best friend's wife. Later plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), based on a work by O. Sacks, One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), and Ashes to Ashes (1996, a short drama of the Holocaust). 

Pinter's gift for portraying, by means of dialogue which realistically produces the nuances of colloquial speech, the difficulties of communication and the many layers of meaning in language, pause, and silence, have created a style labelled by the popular imagination as 'Pinteresque', and his themes —nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatreds, and mental disturbance—are equally recognizable. 

Pinter has also written extensively for radio and television, directed plays, and written several screenplays, which include versions of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1969), A la recherche du temps perdu (1978) and J. Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1982). Poems and Prose, 1947-1977 was published in 1978. See The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996) by Michael Billington.


The Caretaker, a play by H. Pinter, performed and published in 1960.

One of Pinter's characteristically enigmatic dramas, it is built on the interaction of three characters, the tramp Davies and the brothers Aston and Mick. Aston has rescued Davies from a brawl and brought him back to a junk-filled room, in which he offers Davies a bed and, eventually, an ill-defined post as caretaker. The characters reveal themselves in inconsequential dialogue and obsessional monologue. Davies is worried about his papers, the blacks, gas leaks, and getting to Sidcup; Aston reveals that he has suffered headaches ever since undergoing electric shock treatment for his 'complaint'; Mick, the youngest, is alternately bully, cajoler, and materialist visionary, with dreams of transforming the room into a fashionable penthouse. In the end both brothers turn on Davies and evict him. The dialogue is at once naturalistic and surreal; the litany of London place names (Finsbury Park, Shepherd's Bush, Putney) and of decorator's jargon (charcoal-grey worktops, teak veneer) serves to highlight the no man's-land in which the characters in fact meet.




The Homecoming, a play by H. Pinter, performed and published 1965.

A black Freudian family drama, the play presents the return to his north London home and ostentatiously womanless family of Teddy, an academic, and his wife of six years, Ruth, once a photographic model. The patriarch, Mac, a butcher, is alternately violent and cringing in manner, and the other two sons, Lenny and Joey, in a very short time make sexual overtures to Ruth, who calmly accepts them; by the end of the play, Teddy has decided to leave her with the family, who intend to establish her as a professional prostitute. The tone is dark, erotic, and threatening; the shocking and the banal are sharply juxtaposed throughout. Ruth's acceptance of her role as mother, mistress, and possibly breadwinner for her new family, and her rejection of her husband, are intricately connected with the enigmatic figure of the long-dead mother. Jessie, who is both reviled and idolized by her survivors.

Pinter brinda por los "Viejos tiempos"

         

Pinter and Stoppard (Sanders)

 (From the Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders; "Post-War and Post-Modern Literature")

Harold Pinter

By far the most original, flexible, and challenging of the new dramatists of the late 1950s, Harold Pinter (1930-2008), was, like Wesker, the son of an East End Jewish tailor. Unlike him, however, he was an actor by training and profession. All Pinter's plays suggest a sure sense of the dramatic effect of pacing, pausing, and timing. Despite his determined protest against National Service as an 18-year-old, and despite his two brushes with the law as a conscientious objector, his early plays generally eschew direct political engagement and commment. They open up instead a world of seeming inconsequentiality, tangential communication, dislocated relationships, and undefined threats. 

Many of the dramatic non sequiturs of Pinter's first four plays—The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party (all written in 1957) and The Caretaker (written in 1959 and performed in the following year)—indicate how positive was his response to the impact of Waiting for Godot; their distinctive air of menace, however, suggests the influence of Kafka and the patterning of their dialogue a debt to the poetry and early drama of Eliot. In all four plays Pinter also reveals himself to be a master of a colloquial, vapidly repetitive, London English, one adept at varying the idioms of his characters' speech to striking and sometimes disturbing effect. In the most polyphonic of the early plays, The Birthday Party, he intrudes seemingly incongruous clichés about cricket and Sunday School teachers into Goldbert's volubly Jewish dialogue and he softens McCann's edgy bitterness with Irish sentimentality. Both characters threaten, and finally break, the inarticulate Stanley with a monstrous, staccato barrage of unanswerable questions and half-associated ideas: 'You need a long convalescence.' / 'A change of air' / 'Somewhere over the rainbow.' / 'Where angels fear to tread.' / 'Exactly.' / You're in a rut.' / 'You look anaemic.' / 'Rheumatic.' / 'Myopic.' / 'Epileptic.' 'You're on the verge.' / 'You're a dead duck.' / 'But we can save you.' / 'From a worse state.'

The Homecoming, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964, marks something of a turning-point in his career. Though the play opens familiarly enough in an undistinguished room in a north London house and with a one-sided conversation, an indifferent exchange of insults, and an ostensibly comic reference to an advertisement for flannel vests, it steadily veers away from comedy. Everything in the play is unspecific. The rhythms of Max's speech ('One of the loves of my life, Epsom?') suggest that the family may be Jewish, but nothing definite is made of the fact. More significantly, there appears to be a family tradition of unfaithful women, for parallels are loosely established between the dead but adulterous mother and her living daughter-in-law, Ruth, who the male members of the family treat as if she where a whore. There are also often inexplicit frictions between generations and between the uneducated stop-at-homes and the homecoming son, Teddy, a professsor at an American university. 

The Homecoming leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity. Its most notable successors, Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978), all extend its calculated uncertainty and its (now gentrified) hints of menace and ominousness. All of them are distinguished by their teasing play with the disjunctions of memory and with unstable human relationships. Old Times presents its audience with an open triangle, defined not only by its characters, two women and a man, but also by silences, indeterminacies, and receding planes of telling and listening. In No Man's Land, two elderly men, and two younger ones, seem to shift in relationship to one another; they know and do not know; they remember and obliterate memory. Betrayal, cleverly based on a series of retrogressions, deals, ostensibly realistically, with middle-class adultery in literary London (though its reiterated ideas, words, and phrases reveal how artificially it is patterned). 

Since One for the Road (1984), Pinter's plays have shifted away from developed representations of uncertainty towards a far more terse and more overtly political drama. Both One for the Road and Mountain Language (1988) are insistingly concerned with language and with acts of interrogation. As in The Birthday Party, language is seen as the means by which power can be exercised and as something that can be defined and manipulated to suit the ends of those who actually hold power. Nevertheless, the two plays focus on individuals threatened no longer by an unspecified menace, as Stanley was, but by the palpable oppression of (unnamed) modern states. Where Pinter's earlier work had allowed for indeterminacy, his latest work seems to have surrendered to an insistent demand for moral definition. The ideas of 'them' and 'us', which were once open, subtle, fluid categories, have been replaced by a rigid partisanship.

(....)

Tom Stoppard

Where Orton's comedy is explosive, untidy, and unresolved, that of Top Stoppard (born in Czechoslovakia in 1937) is implosive, symmetrical, and logical. Where Orton disorders the traditional elements of farce, Stoppard takes a fresh delight in the kind of theatrical clockwork that was perfected by Feydeau. Unlike Orton or Feydeau, however, Stoppard seems to take a deep intellectual pleasure in parallels, coincidences, and convergences that extends beyond a purely theatrical relish. In an age which has exhibited a fascination with the often extraordinary patternings of mathematical and metaphysical theory, he has emerged as an almost exemplary artist, one with an appeal to the pragmatic and the speculative alike. At their most brilliant, his plays are carefully plotted, logical mystery tours which systematically find their ends in their beginnings.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which opened at the National Theatre in April 1967 (the year following its first, amateur, presentation at the Edinburgh Festival), begins, according to its stage direction, with 'two ELIZABETHANS passing the time in a place without any visible character'. This is Hamlet playfully reread according to Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian principles. Everything is renedered relative. The perspective is changed, time is fragmented, the Prince is marginalized, and two coin-spinning attendant lords are obliged to take on the weight of a tragedy which they neither understand nor dignify. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead de-heroizes, but, despite its frantically comic surfaces, it never expels the impending sense of death implied in its title. Shakespeare's toadying gentlemen are transformed into two prosy commoners endowed with twentieth-century sensibilities, men trapped by their costumes, their language, and their characterless setting. Their tragedy, if tragedy it is, lies in their awareness of convergence, concurrence, and consequence: 'Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one—that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles...'.  However arbitrary life might appear to be, logic is relentless and the pre-existent and inescapable pattern of Hamlet determines that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's strutting and fretting must end, like real life, with death.

Much of Stoppard's subsequent drama introduces characters who are as much out of their intellectual and social depths as are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the short radio play, If You're Glad I'll be Frank (1966), a bemused husband desperately tries to reclaim his wife who has become subsumed into a speaking clock. In The Real Inspector Hound (1968), a superbly poised parody of an English detective story, two theatre critics find themselves absorbed into a play and a murder which they assumed they had come to observe. 

In Jumpers (produced by the National Theatre in 1972) a moral philosopher preparing a lecture on the existence of God, and on the related problem of the objectivity of good and evil, is confronted by the murder of an acrobat at a party in his own home. As its title so succintly and riddlingly suggests, Jumpers is about intellectual gymnastics, the making of mental and moral jumps and the construction of an unsteady philosophical architecture; it is also a tour de force of plotting. 

Henry Carr, the somewhat dim-witted central figure of what is perhaps Stoppard most sustainedly witty and inventive play, Travesties (1974), is equally overwhelmed by the events in which he becomes involved. The play begins with a historical footnote (the real Carr, British Consul in Zurich, had taken James Joyce to court, claiming reimbursement for the cost of a pair of trousers worn in an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest performed in Zurich in March 1918), and a historical coincidence (Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara, all used Zurich as a refuge from the First World War), but it develops into a complex, totally speculative, extrapolation of political and literary history. Stoppard shapes his own play around echoes, parodies, and inversions of Wilde's comedy, and, to a lesser extent, of Joyce's Ulysses. 

None of his later plays has quite the same confident verve. His excursions into explicitly political drama—with the unwieldy script for actors and symphony orchestra, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), and the clever television play, Professional Foul (1978)—demonstrate an (at the time) unfashionable concern with persecution of intellectuals by the thuggishly illiberal Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Hapgood (1988), with its carefully deployed twins, its double-takes, and its spies who explain the particle theory of light, does, however, suggest something of a return to his old whimsy, albeit a singularly menacing whimsy.

 

 

 

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Macbeth (NIVEL AVANZADO)

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Marlowe and Kyd (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Marlowe and Kyd

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 1972 ed.)

Whether The Spanish Tragedy  is earlier than Tamburlaine, as some suppose, does not greatly matter, for, historically, Kyd and marlowe are not easily separable; they both attained great popularity at the same time and both fell together.

The sentimentalists can no longer make a pathetic story out of Christopher Marlowe's life (1564-93). Additions to our knowledge have left us few illusions. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, passed from the King's School in his native city to Cambridge, where he absorbed the music and the legends of Latin poetry and indulged in some unusual reading and speculation. Though he lived as wildly as Greene and Nashe, he was never one of their fellowship. He was, in fact, a "university wit" who had made himself common, and appears to be pointed at with Nashe's finger of scorn. The facts about his life and works are as obscure as the circumstances of his death. He had become notorious for "atheism", and he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford tavern at the end of a long day spent with three men of very dubious repute. Some time before, Kyd had been arrested for "mutinous sedition", but was released after Marlowe's death, having shown that heretical papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, whom he accused of blasphemy. There is no profit in speculating on what was behind Marlowe's death. He had lived dangerously and was such a man as could have written his plays. (The most reliable biography is The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 1942, by the American scholar John Bakeless). His literary life begins with an undated translation of Ovid's Amores, called Elegies by the publishers. This has more merits than is usually allowed. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe set forth on his way as a poet of classical amorism, but, unlike Shakespeare, he did not immediately find his natural magic and music. Marlowe's first original work was Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, played in 1587 or 1588 and printed anonymously in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the powerful acting of Alleyn and the superiority of the piece to the plays which had so far held the popular stage gave Tamburlaine great popularity. Yet, save in one obscure and hostile allusion by Greene, the author is nowhere named. Even Heywood, who mentions both Marlowe and Tamburlaine in his Apology for Actors, does not clearly associate them. The dramatic excesses of the play were disliked by some, but, of course, the real offence was that Marlowe succeeded. Like Swinburne he carried the young men away by the irresistible force of his style. The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, of which the first known edition is the quarto of 1604, is assumed to be his next play and is dated c. 1588; but there is good reason for refusing it a date earlier than 1592. Faustus, however, is not so complete a thing as Tamburlaine. The comic scenes are almost abjectly bad, and prove either that Marlowe's excesses of humour are worse than his excesses of tragedy, or that his play has suffered from foolish theatrical additions. Nevertheless the greatest parts of Faustus show him at the height of his poetic and dramatic magnificence. The same difficulty is presented in another play, The Jew of Malta. It is mentioned as early as 1592; but as there is no evidence that it was printed before 1633, we have a reasonable excuse for disclaiming the poorer passages as playhouse alterations. In The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (printed 1593-4), Marlowe gave us the first historical play of the type which Shakespeare followed in Richard II. The Massacre at Paris and The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage complete the list of Marlowe's accepted dramas. The first known edition of the former is undated; it was acted in 1593; the earliest text of the latter belongs to the year 1594. The Massacre, badly transmitted, has fitful power. Dido, usually dismissed with undeserved contempt, bears the name of Nashe on its title as co-author; but of Nashe's hand there is little trace.

The supposed association of Marlowe with works attributed to Shakespeare or used by Shakespeare must be barely mentioned in a survey such as this. Assertions about composite authorship are easy to make and hard to establish or refute. Still, composite authorship and revision by several hands are known facts of the time. Readers should trust their own convictions and not accept attributions too readily. In Titus Andronicus and in Henry VI there is some show of argument for Marlowe's hand. The full-bodied verse of Titus and the soaring, defiant character of Aaron might be the work of the author of Tamburlaine, but might equally be the work of a young admirer. Marlowe may have had a share in Henry VI, but the nature and extent of that share (if any) cannog be discussed briefly. At this time of day it is impossible to distinguish between the verse of Marlowe and the verse of a young poet writing with Marlowe's infectious tune in his head. Arden of Feversham is one of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays in which some students have detected Marlowe's hand. The whole question is discussed in F. P. Wilson's Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (1953).

Two other works, non-dramatic, remain for mention: Hero and Leander and Lucan's First Booke Translated Line for Line, both entered for printing in 1593. The first, unfinished, was published in 1598, afterwards with a completion by Chapman; the second appeared in 1600. The famous short poem "Come live with me and be my love" appeared first in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and next, in a fuller form, in Englands Helicon (1600). The nearly simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet's work unprinted. We gather, from various allusions, that Marlowe had friends and admirers in spite of his ill-repute.

The first duty of a historian is to dwell, not upon Marlowe's faults, but upon his achievements; and the fact to be recorded is that Marlowe is a prime creative force in English literature, and a creative force of a new kind. Till Marlowe's time no one had made possible and credible such daemonic figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas, whose tragic doom is compelled by forves within themselves and not by mischances from without. Marlowe's heroes confront the fates; they are not the sport of destiny. Marlowe himself has the self-possession of the strong man, and could use his sources creatively. His violence is native, and the inequalities in his art are the effect of his strength, not the signs of undeveloped power. His work was finished at an age at which few poets have really begun. Edward II stands by itself among his plays. There is a temptation to overpraise it. because it is the first complete historical play of the stricter type without lapses into foolery, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. But it merely seems the best because it never sinks to the worst depths of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Just as certainly it never touches their greatest heights. In passion and word-music the play is inferior to the greater pieces; it lacks, too, the touch of caricature that gives them convincing vitality. Still, it is the first successful attempt we have at the interpretation of history on the stage; for a successful history-play must interpret history, it must not merely label figures with historical names. The earlier historical plays were only another form of the cautionary historical poems in A Mirror for Magistrates. After Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II and its great successors became possible; but Marlowe could never have attained the all-embracing versatility of Shakespeare. Edward II showes his limitations as clearly as his powers. No one remembers its characters and scenes as one remembers the characters and scenes of Richard II.

Marlowe gave his age true tragedy. He also gave it tragedy's true instrument, great verse. Gorboduc had taught blank verse how to speak on the stage; Tamburlaine taught it how to sing. Indeed, it might be said that Marlowe's genius is operatic, and he obviously learned something of his music from Spenser. His famous passages are like great solos, superbly lyrical and appropriate, but not integrally woven into the texture of the drama. His dramatic blank verse unites the formal dignity of Gorboduc with the musical fluency of The Faerie Queene; and so it is rhythmically free and inventive, capable alike of magic and of majesty, always the master and never the slave of its metrical pattern. And though his daemonic figures may seem excessive in deed or aspiration, their poetic speech, however "mighty", is spontaneous, natural, and even simple.

 

Thomas Kyd (1558-94) appears to be the person held up to contempt by Nashe in his preface to Menaphon as an example of those who "could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should have need". Kyd's great offence was that he had made an immense theatrical success with The Spanish Tragedy. The extent of Kyd's Latinity may not have been great; but though he "never ware gowne in the Universitie" he was a fellow pupil with Spenser at Merchant Taylors.' His translations from the Italian and French, which seem to have annoyed Nashe specially, are quite unimportant. The Italian work is a pamphlet, and the French a version of Robert Garnier's Cornélie under the title Pompey the Great, his fair Corneliaes Tragedie (printed 1594—there is no record of its being acted). Other works attributed to him raise too many bibliographical problems to be accepted readily. The First Part of Jeronimo, extant in a quarto of 1605, is possibly a "first part" to The Spanish Tragedie, but not very probably written by Kyd himself. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (published 1592) may perhaps be his, for that is the subject of the play within the play in The Spanish Tragedie; but it is quite definitively inferior to that piece. Even the Tragedie itself is a problem. Its date is unknown. It may have been written just before 1588. By 1592 it was enjoying great popularity. Its first known quarto is dateless; but even that is described as "Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression", so it may not be the first; the second known quarto appeared in 1594, and the third in 1599. None of them gives the least clue as to the author's name; and it is not till 1612 that "M. Kid" is named casually by Heywood, as the author, in his Apology for Actors. The play out-Senecas Seneca in its wild horrors and in the excesses of its style. But there van be observed a faint resemblance to Hamlet, not merely in details of the story, but in the halting, suffering, distracvted, self-communing character of Hieronimo, who was an entirely new kind of tragic hero. The Spanish Tragedy is the first example we possess of the Hamlet type of play.

Kyd can be easily underrated. His contribution to drama is intrinsically as well as historically important. He was the first English dramatist to discover the bearing of episode and of dramatic "movement" upon character, and the first to give the audience a hint of the development that follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. We have parted company with the older declamatory tragedy of the English Senecans, with the "operatic" tragedy of Marlowe, and we are nearer the manner of Shakespeare. That the young Shakespeare knew The Spanish Tragedy is evident. Was there a closer association? What are the "whole Hamlets" of "tragicall speaches" referred to by Nashe in 1589 and apparently associated with Kyd? Did Kyd write a play upon the well-known story of Hamlet? Did Shakespeare make that play the basis of his own? Does the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) carry over some sections of an older, non-Shakespearean play? There is no certain answer to any of these questions. Perhaps in some obscure library there lies unrecognized the lost Hamlet of Kyd, or another, as the lost Fulgens and Lucres lay unrecognized till 1919. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was such a play.

The Spanish Tragedie

La frase que lanzó mil barcos al mar

 

 

—oOo—

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Harold Pinter (NIVEL AVANZADO, Sección B)

SECCIÓN B, NIVEL AVANZADO: Harold Pinter




Nobel Lecture by Harold Pinter. Video. YouTube (Svenna Jensen) 9 Nov. 2011.*
    http://youtu.be/PH96tuRA3L0

—Un texto que traduje: Art, Truth and Politics de Harold Pinter.

__________________________

Ben Jonson - NIVEL AVANZADO

Ben Jonson: apuntes a NIVEL AVANZADO

 Felix E. Schelling, Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour— a longer introduction to Ben Jonson's life and literary career:



THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. 

Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England. Jonson's father lost his estate under Queen Mary, "having been cast into prison and forfeited." He entered the church, but died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty. Jonson's birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in 1573. He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare's junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born. But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. His mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade. As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning. Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

"All that I am in arts, all that I know;" 

and dedicating his first dramatic success, "Every Man in His Humour," to him. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted into St. John's College, Cambridge." He tells us that he took no degree, but was later "Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study." When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him;" and how "since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his." Jonson's reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings. 

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the poet's family affections. The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood [and] little credit to his father whom he survived. We know nothing beyond this of Jonson's domestic life. 

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly "the theatrical profession" we do not know. In 1593, Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare's other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn. From entries in "Henslowe's Diary," a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral's men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his "share" (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him "upon a book which he showed the plot unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas next." In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in a play called "Hot Anger Soon Cold." All this points to an association with Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon mere promise. From allusions in Dekker's play, "Satiromastix," it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he "ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon" taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd's famous play, "The Spanish Tragedy." By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres — well known for his "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title — accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of "our best in tragedy," a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us. That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however, is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in which he had a hand. These are "Page of Plymouth," "King Robert II. of Scotland," and "Richard Crookback." But all of these came later, on his return to Henslowe, and range from August 1599 to June 1602. 

Returning to the autumn of 1598, an event now happened to sever for a time Jonson's relations with Henslowe. In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of that year, Henslowe writes: "I have lost one of my company that hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." The last word is perhaps Henslowe's thrust at Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and convicted. He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had "were forfeited." It is a thought to give one pause that, but for the ancient law permitting convicted felons to plead, as it was called, the benefit of clergy, Jonson might have been hanged for this deed. The circumstance that the poet could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter "T," for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later. 

On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of "Every Man in His Humour" to the Chamberlain's men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that "Every Man in His Humour" was accepted by Shakespeare's company and acted for the first time in 1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson's works, 1616. But it is a mistake to infer, because Shakespeare's name stands first in the list of actors and the elder Kno'well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that particular part. The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever corresponded to the list of characters. 

"Every Man in His Humour" was an immediate success, and with it Jonson's reputation as one of the leading dramatists of his time was established once and for all. This could have been by no means Jonson's earliest comedy, and we have just learned that he was already reputed one of "our best in tragedy." Indeed, one of Jonson's extant comedies, "The Case is Altered," but one never claimed by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage as Rachel, although in other respects "The Case is Altered" is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson. 

"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours. 

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which 

     "Some one peculiar quality
     Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
     All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
     In their confluctions, all to run one way."

But continuing, Jonson is careful to add: 

     "But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,
     The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
     A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot
     On his French garters, should affect a humour!
     O, it is more than most ridiculous."

Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play is admirably written and each character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus): "I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us." "Every Man in His Humour" is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word "humour" seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare's Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in "Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in "The Magnetic Lady or Humours Reconciled." 

With the performance of "Every Man Out of His Humour" in 1599, by Shakespeare's company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in Jonson's career. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism or satire. "Every Man Out of His Humour" is the first of three "comical satires" which Jonson contributed to what Dekker called the poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire — as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy — there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on the topic, except of late, have not helped to make them clearer. The origin of the "war" has been referred to satirical references, apparently to Jonson, contained in "The Scourge of Villainy," a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by John Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator of Jonson's. On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been discovered (49, 68, and 100) variously charging "playwright" (reasonably identified with Marston) with scurrility, cowardice, and plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be ascertained with certainty. Jonson's own statement of the matter to Drummond runs: "He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his "Poetaster" on him; the beginning[s] of them were that Marston represented him on the stage."* 

[footnote] *The best account of this whole subject is to be found in the edition of "Poetaster" and "Satiromastix" by J. H. Penniman in "Belles Lettres Series" shortly to appear. See also his earlier work, "The War of the Theatres," 1892, and the excellent contributions to the subject by H. C. Hart in "Notes and Queries," and in his edition of Jonson, 1906. 

Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he was described as "a public, scurrilous, and profane jester," and elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow...a perpetual talker and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his upper and nether beard) with hard wax. From him Ben Jonson takes his Carlo Buffone ['i.e.', jester] in "Every Man in His Humour" ['sic']." Is it conceivable that after all Jonson was ridiculing Marston, and that the point of the satire consisted in an intentional confusion of "the grand scourge or second untruss" with "the scurrilous and profane" Chester? 

We have digressed into detail in this particular case to exemplify the difficulties of criticism in its attempts to identify the allusions in these forgotten quarrels. We are on sounder ground of fact in recording other manifestations of Jonson's enmity. In "The Case is Altered" there is clear ridicule in the character Antonio Balladino of Anthony Munday, pageant-poet of the city, translator of romances and playwright as well. In "Every Man in His Humour" there is certainly a caricature of Samuel Daniel, accepted poet of the court, sonneteer, and companion of men of fashion. These men held recognised positions to which Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it is notable that he became, not pageant-poet, but chronologer to the City of London; and that, on the accession of the new king, he came soon to triumph over Daniel as the accepted entertainer of royalty. 

"Cynthia's Revels," the second "comical satire," was acted in 1600, and, as a play, is even more lengthy, elaborate, and impossible than "Every Man Out of His Humour." Here personal satire seems to have absorbed everything, and while much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make plays. Another of these precocious little actors was Salathiel Pavy, who died before he was thirteen, already famed for taking the parts of old men. Him Jonson immortalised in one of the sweetest of his epitaphs. An interesting sidelight is this on the character of this redoubtable and rugged satirist, that he should thus have befriended and tenderly remembered these little theatrical waifs, some of whom (as we know) had been literally kidnapped to be pressed into the service of the theatre and whipped to the conning of their difficult parts. To the caricature of Daniel and Munday in "Cynthia's Revels" must be added Anaides (impudence), here assuredly Marston, and Asotus (the prodigal), interpreted as Lodge or, more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too mindful a neglect. 

The third and last of the "comical satires" is "Poetaster," acted, once more, by the Children of the Chapel in 1601, and Jonson's only avowed contribution to the fray. According to the author's own account, this play was written in fifteen weeks on a report that his enemies had entrusted to Dekker the preparation of "Satiromastix, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang." 

It was this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton. Slight and hastily adapted as is "Satiromastix," especially in a comparison with the better wrought and more significant satire of "Poetaster," the town awarded the palm to Dekker, not to Jonson; and Jonson gave over in consequence his practice of "comical satire." Though Jonson was cited to appear before the Lord Chief Justice to answer certain charges to the effect that he had attacked lawyers and soldiers in "Poetaster," nothing came of this complaint. It may be suspected that much of this furious clatter and give-and-take was pure playing to the gallery. The town was agog with the strife, and on no less an authority than Shakespeare ("Hamlet," ii. 2), we learn that the children's company (acting the plays of Jonson) did "so berattle the common stages...that many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither." 

Several other plays have been thought to bear a greater or less part in the war of the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And what could have been the nature of this "purge"? Among several suggestions, "Troilus and Cressida" has been thought by some to be the play in which Shakespeare thus "put down" his friend, Jonson. A wiser interpretation finds the "purge" in "Satiromastix," which, though not written by Shakespeare, was staged by his company, and therefore with his approval and under his direction as one of the leaders of that company. 

The last years of the reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as a dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as a dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields. Plays on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the stage from the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making no new departure when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore when Jonson staged "Sejanus," three years later and with Shakespeare's company once more, he was only following in the elder dramatist's footsteps. But Jonson's idea of a play on classical history, on the one hand, and Shakespeare's and the elder popular dramatists, on the other, were very different. Heywood some years before had put five straggling plays on the stage in quick succession, all derived from stories in Ovid and dramatised with little taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" is a tragedy of genuine dramatic power in which is told with discriminating taste the story of the haughty favourite of Tiberius with his tragical overthrow. Our drama presents no truer nor more painstaking representation of ancient Roman life than may be found in Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline his Conspiracy," which followed in 1611. A passage in the address of the former play to the reader, in which Jonson refers to a collaboration in an earlier version, has led to the surmise that Shakespeare may have been that "worthier pen." There is no evidence to determine the matter. 

In 1605, we find Jonson in active collaboration with Chapman and Marston in the admirable comedy of London life entitled "Eastward Hoe." In the previous year, Marston had dedicated his "Malcontent," in terms of fervid admiration, to Jonson; so that the wounds of the war of the theatres must have been long since healed. Between Jonson and Chapman there was the kinship of similar scholarly ideals. The two continued friends throughout life. "Eastward Hoe" achieved the extraordinary popularity represented in a demand for three issues in one year. But this was not due entirely to the merits of the play. In its earliest version a passage which an irritable courtier conceived to be derogatory to his nation, the Scots, sent both Chapman and Jonson to jail; but the matter was soon patched up, for by this time Jonson had influence at court. 

With the accession of King James, Jonson began his long and successful career as a writer of masques. He wrote more masques than all his competitors together, and they are of an extraordinary variety and poetic excellence. Jonson did not invent the masque; for such premeditated devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far into the reign of King Charles; but, towards the end, a quarrel with Jones embittered his life, and the two testy old men appear to have become not only a constant irritation to each other, but intolerable bores at court. In "Hymenaei," "The Masque of Queens," "Love Freed from Ignorance," "Lovers made Men," "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," and many more will be found Jonson's aptitude, his taste, his poetry and inventiveness in these by-forms of the drama; while in "The Masque of Christmas," and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" especially, is discoverable that power of broad comedy which, at court as well as in the city, was not the least element of Jonson's contemporary popularity. 

But Jonson had by no means given up the popular stage when he turned to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its dramatis personae, from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is scarcely a virtuous character in the play. Question has been raised as to whether a story so forbidding can be considered a comedy, for, although the plot ends in the discomfiture and imprisonment of the most vicious, it involves no mortal catastrophe. But Jonson was on sound historical ground, for "Volpone" is conceived far more logically on the lines of the ancients' theory of comedy than was ever the romantic drama of Shakespeare, however repulsive we may find a philosophy of life that facilely divides the world into the rogues and their dupes, and, identifying brains with roguery and innocence with folly, admires the former while inconsistently punishing them. 

"The Silent Woman" is a gigantic farce of the most ingenious construction. The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a heartless nephew on his misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to himself a wife, young, fair, and warranted silent, but who, in the end, turns out neither silent nor a woman at all. In "The Alchemist," again, we have the utmost cleverness in construction, the whole fabric building climax on climax, witty, ingenious, and so plausibly presented that we forget its departures from the possibilities of life. In "The Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the less to the life, certain sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their shrewdness and rascality and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness of their victims. We may object to the fact that the only person in the play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably written and contrived, the personages stand out with such lifelike distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated with such verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel every time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy, "Bartholomew Fair," less clear cut, less definite, and less structurally worthy of praise than its three predecessors, but full of the keenest and cleverest of satire and inventive to a degree beyond any English comedy save some other of Jonson's own. It is in "Bartholomew Fair" that we are presented to the immortal caricature of the Puritan, Zeal-in-the-Land Busy, and the Littlewits that group about him, and it is in this extraordinary comedy that the humour of Jonson, always open to this danger, loosens into the Rabelaisian mode that so delighted King James in "The Gipsies Metamorphosed." Another comedy of less merit is "The Devil is an Ass," acted in 1616. It was the failure of this play that caused Jonson to give over writing for the public stage for a period of nearly ten years. 

"Volpone" was laid as to scene in Venice. Whether because of the success of "Eastward Hoe" or for other reasons, the other three comedies declare in the words of the prologue to "The Alchemist": 

"Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known No country's mirth is better than our own." 

Indeed Jonson went further when he came to revise his plays for collected publication in his folio of 1616, he transferred the scene of "Every Man in His Humour" from Florence to London also, converting Signior Lorenzo di Pazzi to Old Kno'well, Prospero to Master Welborn, and Hesperida to Dame Kitely "dwelling i' the Old Jewry." 

In his comedies of London life, despite his trend towards caricature, Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his time as few men knew it; and each represented it intimately and in elaborate detail. Both men were at heart moralists, seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said — though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality — leaving the world better for the art that they practised in it. 

In 1616, the year of the death of Shakespeare, Jonson collected his plays, his poetry, and his masques for publication in a collective edition. This was an unusual thing at the time and had been attempted by no dramatist before Jonson. This volume published, in a carefully revised text, all the plays thus far mentioned, excepting "The Case is Altered," which Jonson did not acknowledge, "Bartholomew Fair," and "The Devil is an Ass," which was written too late. It included likewise a book of some hundred and thirty odd "Epigrams," in which form of brief and pungent writing Jonson was an acknowledged master; "The Forest," a smaller collection of lyric and occasional verse and some ten "Masques" and "Entertainments." In this same year Jonson was made poet laureate with a pension of one hundred marks a year. This, with his fees and returns from several noblemen, and the small earnings of his plays must have formed the bulk of his income. The poet appears to have done certain literary hack-work for others, as, for example, parts of the Punic Wars contributed to Raleigh's "History of the World." We know from a story, little to the credit of either, that Jonson accompanied Raleigh's son abroad in the capacity of a tutor. In 1618 Jonson was granted the reversion of the office of Master of the Revels, a post for which he was peculiarly fitted; but he did not live to enjoy its perquisites. Jonson was honoured with degrees by both universities, though when and under what circumstances is not known. It has been said that he narrowly escaped the honour of knighthood, which the satirists of the day averred King James was wont to lavish with an indiscriminate hand. Worse men were made knights in his day than worthy Ben Jonson. 

From 1616 to the close of the reign of King James, Jonson produced nothing for the stage. But he "prosecuted" what he calls "his wonted studies" with such assiduity that he became in reality, as by report, one of the most learned men of his time. Jonson's theory of authorship involved a wide acquaintance with books and "an ability," as he put it, "to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use." Accordingly Jonson read not only the Greek and Latin classics down to the lesser writers, but he acquainted himself especially with the Latin writings of his learned contemporaries, their prose as well as their poetry, their antiquities and curious lore as well as their more solid learning. Though a poor man, Jonson was an indefatigable collector of books. He told Drummond that "the Earl of Pembroke sent him 20 pounds every first day of the new year to buy new books." Unhappily, in 1623, his library was destroyed by fire, an accident serio-comically described in his witty poem, "An Execration upon Vulcan." Yet even now a book turns up from time to time in which is inscribed, in fair large Italian lettering, the name, Ben Jonson. With respect to Jonson's use of his material, Dryden said memorably of him: "[He] was not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow....But he has done his robberies so openly that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him." And yet it is but fair to say that Jonson prided himself, and justly, on his originality. In "Catiline," he not only uses Sallust's account of the conspiracy, but he models some of the speeches of Cicero on the Roman orator's actual words. In "Poetaster," he lifts a whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively for his purposes. The sophist Libanius suggests the situation of "The Silent Woman"; a Latin comedy of Giordano Bruno, "Il Candelaio," the relation of the dupes and the sharpers in "The Alchemist," the "Mostellaria" of Plautus, its admirable opening scene. But Jonson commonly bettered his sources, and putting the stamp of his sovereignty on whatever bullion he borrowed made it thenceforward to all time current and his own. 

The lyric and especially the occasional poetry of Jonson has a peculiar merit. His theory demanded design and the perfection of literary finish. He was furthest from the rhapsodist and the careless singer of an idle day; and he believed that Apollo could only be worthily served in singing robes and laurel crowned. And yet many of Jonson's lyrics will live as long as the language. Who does not know "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair." "Drink to me only with thine eyes," or "Still to be neat, still to be dressed"? Beautiful in form, deft and graceful in expression, with not a word too much or one that bears not its part in the total effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore to William Browne of Tavistock the famous lines beginning: "Underneath this sable hearse." Jonson is unsurpassed, too, in the difficult poetry of compliment, seldom falling into fulsome praise and disproportionate similitude, yet showing again and again a generous appreciation of worth in others, a discriminating taste and a generous personal regard. There was no man in England of his rank so well known and universally beloved as Ben Jonson. The list of his friends, of those to whom he had written verses, and those who had written verses to him, includes the name of every man of prominence in the England of King James. And the tone of many of these productions discloses an affectionate familiarity that speaks for the amiable personality and sound worth of the laureate. In 1619, growing unwieldy through inactivity, Jonson hit upon the heroic remedy of a journey afoot to Scotland. On his way thither and back he was hospitably received at the houses of many friends and by those to whom his friends had recommended him. When he arrived in Edinburgh, the burgesses met to grant him the freedom of the city, and Drummond, foremost of Scottish poets, was proud to entertain him for weeks as his guest at Hawthornden. Some of the noblest of Jonson's poems were inspired by friendship. Such is the fine "Ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Moryson," and that admirable piece of critical insight and filial affection, prefixed to the first Shakespeare folio, "To the memory of my beloved master, William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," to mention only these. Nor can the earlier "Epode," beginning "Not to know vice at all," be matched in stately gravity and gnomic wisdom in its own wise and stately age. 

But if Jonson had deserted the stage after the publication of his folio and up to the end of the reign of King James, he was far from inactive; for year after year his inexhaustible inventiveness continued to contribute to the masquing and entertainment at court. In "The Golden Age Restored," Pallas turns the Iron Age with its attendant evils into statues which sink out of sight; in "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," Atlas figures represented as an old man, his shoulders covered with snow, and Comus, "the god of cheer or the belly," is one of the characters, a circumstance which an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided, the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room blazoned about with Jonson's own judicious "Leges Convivales" in letters of gold, of a company made up of the choicest spirits of the time, devotedly attached to their veteran dictator, his reminiscences, opinions, affections, and enmities. And we hear, too, of valorous potations; but in the words of Herrick addressed to his master, Jonson, at the Devil Tavern, as at the Dog, the Triple Tun, and at the Mermaid, 

     "We such clusters had
     As made us nobly wild, not mad,
     And yet each verse of thine
     Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."

But the patronage of the court failed in the days of King Charles, though Jonson was not without royal favours; and the old poet returned to the stage, producing, between 1625 and 1633, "The Staple of News," "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," the last doubtless revised from a much earlier comedy. None of these plays met with any marked success, although the scathing generalisation of Dryden that designated them "Jonson's dotages" is unfair to their genuine merits. Thus the idea of an office for the gathering, proper dressing, and promulgation of news (wild flight of the fancy in its time) was an excellent subject for satire on the existing absurdities among newsmongers; although as much can hardly be said for "The Magnetic Lady," who, in her bounty, draws to her personages of differing humours to reconcile them in the end according to the alternative title, or "Humours Reconciled." These last plays of the old dramatist revert to caricature and the hard lines of allegory; the moralist is more than ever present, the satire degenerates into personal lampoon, especially of his sometime friend, Inigo Jones, who appears unworthily to have used his influence at court against the broken-down old poet. And now disease claimed Jonson, and he was bedridden for months. He had succeeded Middleton in 1628 as Chronologer to the City of London, but lost the post for not fulfilling its duties. King Charles befriended him, and even commissioned him to write still for the entertainment of the court; and he was not without the sustaining hand of noble patrons and devoted friends among the younger poets who were proud to be "sealed of the tribe of Ben."
Jonson died, August 6, 1637, and a second folio of his works, which he had been some time gathering, was printed in 1640, bearing in its various parts dates ranging from 1630 to 1642. It included all the plays mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs, excepting "The Case is Altered;" the masques, some fifteen, that date between 1617 and 1630; another collection of lyrics and occasional poetry called "Underwoods", including some further entertainments; a translation of "Horace's Art of Poetry" (also published in a vicesimo quarto in 1640), and certain fragments and ingatherings which the poet would hardly have included himself. These last comprise the fragment (less than seventy lines) of a tragedy called "Mortimer his Fall," and three acts of a pastoral drama of much beauty and poetic spirit, "The Sad Shepherd." There is also the exceedingly interesting "English Grammar" "made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of all strangers out of his observation of the English language now spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and "Timber, or Discoveries" "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The "Discoveries," as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passages of Jonson's "Discoveries" are literal translations from the authors he chanced to be reading, with the reference, noted or not, as the accident of the moment prescribed. At times he follows the line of Macchiavelli's argument as to the nature and conduct of princes; at others he clarifies his own conception of poetry and poets by recourse to Aristotle. He finds a choice paragraph on eloquence in Seneca the elder and applies it to his own recollection of Bacon's power as an orator; and another on facile and ready genius, and translates it, adapting it to his recollection of his fellow-playwright, Shakespeare. To call such passages — which Jonson never intended for publication — plagiarism, is to obscure the significance of words. To disparage his memory by citing them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the "Discoveries," is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the subtler graces of diction. 

When Jonson died there was a project for a handsome monument to his memory. But the Civil War was at hand, and the project failed. A memorial, not insufficient, was carved on the stone covering his grave in one of the aisles of Westminster Abbey: 

"O rare Ben Jonson." 

FELIX E. SCHELLING.
THE COLLEGE,
PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

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The following is a complete list of his published works: — 


DRAMAS:

     Every Man in his Humour, 4to, 1601;
     The Case is Altered, 4to, 1609;
     Every Man out of his Humour, 4to, 1600;
     Cynthia's Revels, 4to, 1601;
     Poetaster, 4to, 1602;
     Sejanus, 4to, 1605;
     Eastward Ho (with Chapman and Marston), 4to, 1605;
     Volpone, 4to, 1607;
     Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, 4to, 1609 (?), fol., 1616;
     The Alchemist, 4to, 1612;
     Catiline, his Conspiracy, 4to, 1611;
     Bartholomew Fayre, 4to, 1614 (?), fol., 1631;
     The Divell is an Asse, fol., 1631;
     The Staple of Newes, fol., 1631;
     The New Sun, 8vo, 1631, fol., 1692;
     The Magnetic Lady, or Humours Reconcild, fol., 1640;
     A Tale of a Tub, fol., 1640;
     The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood, fol., 1641;
     Mortimer his Fall (fragment), fol., 1640.

To Jonson have also been attributed additions to Kyd's Jeronymo, and collaboration in The Widow with Fletcher and Middleton, and in the Bloody Brother with Fletcher. 


POEMS:    Epigrams, The Forrest, Underwoods, published in fols., 1616, 1640; Selections: Execration against Vulcan, and Epigrams, 1640; G. Hor. Flaccus his art of Poetry, Englished by Ben Jonson, 1640; Leges Convivialis, fol., 1692. Other minor poems first appeared in Gifford's edition of Works. 


PROSE:    Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter, fol., 1641; The English Grammar, made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of Strangers, fol., 1640.
Masques and Entertainments were published in the early folios. 


WORKS:   

     Fol., 1616, volume. 2, 1640 (1631-41);
     fol., 1692, 1716-19, 1729;
     edited by P. Whalley, 7 volumes., 1756;
     by Gifford (with Memoir), 9 volumes., 1816, 1846;
     re-edited by F. Cunningham, 3 volumes., 1871;
     in 9 volumes., 1875;
     by Barry Cornwall (with Memoir), 1838;
     by B. Nicholson (Mermaid Series), with Introduction by
     C. H. Herford, 1893, etc.;
     Nine Plays, 1904;
     ed. H. C. Hart (Standard Library), 1906, etc;
     Plays and Poems, with Introduction by H. Morley (Universal
     Library), 1885;
     Plays (7) and Poems (Newnes), 1905;
     Poems, with Memoir by H. Bennett (Carlton Classics), 1907;
     Masques and Entertainments, ed. by H. Morley, 1890.

SELECTIONS:   

     J. A. Symonds, with Biographical and Critical Essay,
     (Canterbury Poets), 1886;
     Grosart, Brave Translunary Things, 1895;
     Arber, Jonson Anthology, 1901;
     Underwoods, Cambridge University Press, 1905;
     Lyrics (Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher), the Chap Books,
     No. 4, 1906;
     Songs (from Plays, Masques, etc.), with earliest known
     setting, Eragny Press, 1906.

LIFE:   

     See Memoirs affixed to Works;
     J. A. Symonds (English Worthies), 1886;
     Notes of Ben Jonson Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden;
     Shakespeare Society, 1842;
     ed. with Introduction and Notes by P. Sidney, 1906;
     Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889.

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To the Memory of Shakespeare

—oOo—