The Press. — London, England, 1856-05-31 00:00:00

MAY 31, 1856. itt atur t. The Works of John Marston. Reprinted from the Earliest Editions. With Notes, and some Account of his Life and Writings, by J. 0. Halliwell, F.R.S , F.S.A. Three Vols. London : John Russell Smith. (Second Notice.) Floating reminiscences, rather than imita tions, of Shakespeare may he frequently de tected in Marston, as in nearly all these writers. Lamb says that the situation of Andrugio and Lucia, in Antonio and Mellida, when the banished Duke is cast upon the territory of his enemy, resembles that of Lear and Kent. But the resemblance is faint ; nor can Marston be charged with copying Shake speare in this instance, Antonio and Mellida having appeared some three or four years before Lear. A much nearer resemblance may be traced in the Second Part of the same play, where the ghost of Antonio's father rises and exhorts his son to revenge his murder. This situation, which is finely conceived and exe• euted, was obviously suggested by Hamlet, upon which there can be no doubt the main idea of the tragedy is founded. Occasionally there are verbal echoes of familiar passages in Shakespeare, showing how current his words had become even in his own day. Whets Syphax soliloquises upon the wound his " reputation " has suffered, the lamentation of Cassia, although of a dilerent complexion, in stantly recurs to the reader; and thus also we are reminded of Richard 111. when Massinissa rushes in wounded after a fatal charge, "in his "gorget and shirt," calling out for another horse : Mount us again; give us another horse ! Give me horse ! Know I sin Carthage every creature, and am graced That I may bleed for them. Give me fresh horse ! Again, when Gisco, the surgeon who has been employed to poison Massinissa, returns, having failed of his purpose : Ardroball. Gisco, is 't done ? Gisco. Your pardon, worthy lord, It is not done ; my heart sunk in my breast : His virtue mimed me, faintness seized nie all— Some god's in kings that will not let them fall. The speech of the King in Hamlet seems at once to suggest the original : Do not fear our person ; There's such divinity loth hedge a King, That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will. Turiiin,g from these slight points of resem blance, of which there are many examples, we will touch upon some peculiarities in Marston, for which it would not he very easy, we sus pect, to find any parallels in Shakespeare. One of these peculiarities consists in a certain curtness of phrase by which he pounces, as it were, upon his object, producing rather a ludicrous effect when the subject happens to be serious. Thus Asdruball exclaims at the appioach of Gisco, See him by whom Massinissa is not; meaning thereby, see the man by whom Massinissa has ceased to live. This is a favorite form of expression. When Sophonisba discovers that she has been betrayed by her tire-woman, she calls upon Syphax to negative the young woman's existence, and Syphax re Joins in the same language : Sophonisba. Let her not be. Sypha.r. She is not! That is to say—" Kill her;" to which the other replies, "Consider it done !" Very often, too, in the haste of writing for the actors without any view to publication, Marston repeats himself. We have an in stance of this in the two following passages:— Darkness is fled. Look! infant morn bath drawn Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night; And now Aurora's horse trots azure rings, Breathing fair light about the firmament. :The black j a d es o f swart n i g h t trot f oggy r i ngs Bout heaven's brow. The same image, relieved of the verbal repeti tion, is given elsewhere with exquisite beauty of expression : For see, the dapple grey coursers of the morn Beat up the light with their bright silver hooves, And chase it through the sky. THE PRESS. In another play the following identical lines occur : 0 fight for Carthage ! Charge home; wounds smart not for that so just, so great, So good a city. My wound smarts not, blood's loss makes me not faint For that loved city. Examples occur also of an eccentric species of figure which is either very Oriental, or very Irish. A single illustration will suffice : Do not expostulate the heaven's will : But, 0 remember to forget thyself; Furget remembrance what thou once haat been. This singular injunction is not an accidental aberration of the poet. It is repeated under very solemn circumstances in another play : Madatue, 0 that you could remember to forget ! Marston, in common with many of his con temporaries, is open to the charge not only of tearing a passion to tatters occasionally, but of rendering it absurd by a kind of extrava gance which utterly defies description. Thus when the Duke of Venice, a character steeped in the blackest depths of tragedy, discovers that his daughter is about to elope with her lover, he breaks out into this highly comical rant, the force of which may be realised by supposing it t4:4 be delivered by Buckstone : Forobosco, Alberto, Feliche, Castilio, Balurdo ! run, keep the palace, post to the ports, tro to my daughter's chamber; whither now ? scud to the Jew's—stay, run to the gates, stop the gondolets, let none pass the marsh, do all at once. An• tonio? his head, his head. Keep you the Court, the rest stand still, or run, or go, or shout, or search, or scud, or call, or hang, or do, do, do, su, su, an, something; I know not who, who, who, what I do, do, do, nor who, who, who, where I am. Finding that these complicated orders have failed, and that his daughter has effected her escape, he bursts out again : Pursue, pursue, fly, run, post, scud away! Fly, call, run, row, ride, cry, shout, hurry, haste; Haste, hurry, shout, cry, ride, row, run, call, fly Backward and forward, every way about ! All this is intended to express the confusion of ideas occasioned by an incident which throws the whole palace into consternation, and which baffles for the moment the plans of an infuriated father. In such a situation the ludicrous iteration might possibly be supposed to have rather a natural effect, by bringing out palpably the disturbance which sets all the persons on the stage in motion to and fro, in and out, tumbling over each other, and doing nothing in the end ; but the same doubtful excuse cannot be pleaded for those passages of profounder interest, where we find this same spirit of extravagance carried into lurid excesses. The vice was not con fined to writers of the special idiosynct acy of Marston and Webster, but was very generally cultivated, and seems to have been a current fashion of the time. Even Jonson, if he did not run into the extremes of rant and born bast, frequently expressed himself with a grandeur above his occasions, and dressed himself in stiff brocade, when an ordinary easy suit would have been better adapted to the scene. The simplicity, serene power, and truthfulness of Shakespeare appear to wonder ful advantage in the midst of all this hyper bolical rage. Another trait in which a section of the dra matists, at the head of which Jonson and Marston may be placed, offered a remarkable contrast to Shakespeare was the classical lore with which they deluged their plays. Shake speare had as much of it as he wanted, and he used it with taste and discretion ; but the others, who had come from Cambridge or Oxford, made a pompous display of their scho lastic learning, which weighed down their dialogue like so much lead. Marston rises beyond them all in this way, introducing in some places whole speeches and parts of speeches in Latin. The consequence was that the pieces which were thus heavily freighted never became popular. "Few of the Univer " sity pens," says a contemporary satirist, " play well ; they smell too much of Ovid, and " talk too much of Proserpine and Jupiter. " Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts " them all down ; aye, and Ben Johnson " too." But, in spite of these drawbacks, Marston has great qualities. His plays are full of power, often rising to a height of excellence which, if he could have sustained it through- 519 out, would have placed him in the highest rank as a dramatic poet. The inequality of his execution alone bars his claim to that position. Wo have left ourselves little space for characteristic specimens, but will make room for a short example, admirable in its kind : THE TRUE KING. Why, man, I never was a Prince till now 'Tie nut the bared pate, the hended knees, tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state, Troops of pied butterflies, that flutter still In greatness' summer, that confirm a prince : 'Tis not the unsavoury breath of multitudes, Shouting and clapping, with confused din, Tnat makes a prince. No, Lucio, he's a King, A true, right Ki.ig, that dares do an4ht, save wrong; Fears nothing mortal, but to be unjust; Who is not blown up with the flattering puffs Of spungy sycophants ; who stands unmoved, Despite the justling of opinion ; Who can enjoy himself, mangre the throng That strive to press his quiet out of him; Who sits upon Jove's footstool, as I do, Adoring, not affecting, majesty; Whose brow is wreathed with the silver crown Of clear content; this, Lucio, is a King. And of this empire every man's possessed, That's worth his souL Mr. Halliwell has rendered good service to the State of Literature by this edition of tho plays of Marston, carefully printed from the early editions, and increased in value by a useful introduction and some brief explanatory notes. Our only regret is, that he did not modernise the text, for the convenience of readers who are not familiar with the fluc tuating orthography and obsolete forms of the early part of the seventeenth century. Such forms as the following are stumbling-blocks to the modern reader : Luc. No wonder, noble lord, having lost a son, A country, crown, and— And. 1, Lucio, having lost a son, a son, A country, house, crown, son. Unless the reader understood that " I " repre sents " Ay" the passage would be unintelli gible to him. As the orthography of the Elizabethan period is purely arbitrary, and involves no structural considerations, an editor, especially one so thoroughly compe tent as Mr. Halliwell, need never hesitate in displacing it by modern equivalents. Memoirs of the Court of England during the Regency, 1811-20. By the Duke of Bucking- Two Vols. London : ham and Chandos. Hurst and Biackett. THE Grenville Papers comprised in the decade of these volumes relate to all the public affairs of the time; there is in them inuch secret political history, much gossip, much informa tion on the motives and characters of the eminent personages who figured in the trans actions of the Regency. The contents are too miscellaneous to be noticed in detail, but attention may in particular be profitably directed to the authentic explanation here given of the causes which led so often to the failure of the Whigs to obtain political power. More than once the prize seemed to be within their grasp , they attributed their ill luck to the treachery of the Regent. We see in these volumes that it is more justly charge able to their want of influence, patriotism, and political foresight. When the Prince became Regent he was quite willing to smooth the way for the acces sion of his political associates to power, but he was not willing to suddenly change his father's system of government, nor to resign himself absolutely into the hands of the Whig party They wished to go further and. faster in the way of change than he thought either becoming or prudent Hence that difference between him and the Grey-Gren ville party in the first instance, which in this work is attributed to the agency of Sheridan. For the details we must refer to the early chapters in the first volume. Apart from the Whigs was the connection, small in numbers but powerful in talent, headed by the Marquis Wellesley and Mr. Canning. The Marquis was contemptuous of the supremacy of Mr. Perceval ; he played for the Premiership; and it is stated here that-- From the moment State for the Foreign policy the object of wh to the Administration. would hare disheartened ; SIM u Is SlAL‘ell uern 1.11151. t he accepted the post of Secretary of A Department, be commenced that which was to bring back Mr. C ion. The obstacles he encon= rtened a less enterprising spirit; bat,