Max Bluestone - Shakespeares Contemporaries

A mong the plays treated in this volume, Gammer Gurton's Needle and Cambises may be viewed as a kind of prologue, a promise of things to come. Within a few decades, the plays of Lyly and Marlowe began to appear on the London stage. An alert young man of twenty-one who, in 1584, saw the first performance of Lyly's first play, could have seen all the plays of Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, Kyd, and Greene while still in his twenties, and the best of the plays of Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, Webster, Chapman, Middleton, Tourneur, and Beaumont and Fletcher before he had passed his forties. Meanwhile he could have seen all the plays of Shakespeare, and hundreds more by a score of other playwrights. The prime of Elizabethan drama fitted a span no longer than the prime of a single human life.

My task is to say something about the criticism of this drama, but first a word about its nature and early standing. After centuries of slow preparation, the sudden flowering of the 1580's and the teeming fruitfulness of the next few decades are a marvel of cultural history. This drama has sometimes proved too pungent for classical tastes, but no one has been able to deny at least its plenitude, vitality, and infinite variety. It is deadly to appraise art in terms of the average, since whatever endures is whatever excels the average, but an Elizabethan play chosen almost at random shows certain admirable traits. It will be "dramatic" in the root sense, full of "doings," full enough indeed to furnish out a dozen modern plays. It will be richly peopled, projecting many characters in sharp contrast with each other. It will be truly dialectal, in the sense that the speech will seem to

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issue from the speakers, not from an author-ventriloquist. And this speech will be colorful, energetic, resourceful--reflecting the time's delight in words. In addition there will be moments of poetry and flashes of insight into the nature of man and his eternal dilemma. When the poetry and insight prevail, the play is above average. There are a number of such plays, and not all of them are by Shakespeare.

In view of its distinction, it is odd that this drama won little critical attention in its own day. The spectators no doubt talked about it, but they did not write about it. Perhaps the interested writers were too busy creating drama to create dramatic criticism. Elizabethan criticism of popular Elizabethan drama may be treated in four words: it does not exist. What we have is not criticism but a few laudatory or damnatory remarks, panegyric defenses or satiric attacks, along with a few rationalizations by the playwrights themselves, usually Ben Jonson. However, it may be viewed as an act of critical approbation when the age began to print individual plays and then the collected works of individual authors. Ben Jonson issued the first installment of his works in 1616, and his admirers completed the project in 1640. Shakespeare's fellow actors issued his collected works in 1623, and the volume was reissued in 1632. Six plays by Lyly were issued collectively by a publisher in 1632, and six by Marston in 1633. That is all for the period proper, but after the closing of the theatres in 1642, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were collected in 1647 and 1679. Publishers were prepared to issue other playwrights in collected form, but the plans were dropped as the climate of critical opinion became hostile. Sadly enough, the typical late seventeenth-century record of Elizabethan drama is a stationer's catalogue of single plays, in print or languishing in manuscript.

The Restoration period had decided that Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare were all it wanted from the former age; and even these received mixed notices in the critical writings of the time. The others were sometimes plagiarized by the new dramatists, but they were dismissed with contempt by the critics. Heywood especially served as a convenient whipping-boy. In the eighteenth century, plays by the same survivors but in a new order: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, continued to be performed, usually in adapted versions, and continued to be published in collected form. Those of Philip Massinger were added to the list, but the other playwrights receded further and further from sight. Individual plays might be pilfered in grotesque stage presentations, but the original authors were not mentioned or not regarded seriously. It was enough to enumerate them and their plays in works of reference. If the typical late seventeenth-century record is a stationer's catalogue, the typical eighteenth-century record is a dictionary of the drama.