DRAMA.

A drama (we adopt Dr Johnson’s definition, with some little extension) is a poem or fictitious composition in dialogue, in which the action is not related, but represented.

A disposition to this fascinating amusement, considered in its rudest state, seems to be inherent in human nature. It is the earliest sport of children to take upon themselves sonic fictitious character, and sustain it to the best of their skill, by such appropriate gesture and language as their youthful fancies suggest, and such dress and decoration as circumstances place within their reach. The infancy of nations is as prone to this pastime as that of individuals. When the horde emerges out of a nearly brutal state, so far as to have holidays, public sports, and general rejoicings, the pageant of their imaginary deities, or of their fabulous ancestors, is usually introduced as the most pleasing and interesting part of the show. But however general the predisposition to the assumption of fictitious character may be, there is an immeasurable distance betwixt the rude games in which it first displays itself, and that polished amusement which is numbered among the fine arts, which poetry, music, and painting have vied to adorn, and to whose service genius has devoted her most sublime efforts; whilst philosophy has stooped from her loftier task, to regulate the progress of the action, and give probability to the representation and personification of the scene.

The history of Greece—of that wonderful country, whose days of glory have left such a never-dying blaze of radiance behind them—the history of Greece affords us the means of correctly tracing the polished and regulated drama, the subject of severe rule, and the vehicle for expressing[7:8:144] the noblest poetry, from amusements as rude in their outline as the mimic sports of children or of savages. The history of the Grecian stage is that of the dramatic art in general. They transferred the drama, with their other literature, to the victorious Romans, with whom it rather existed as a foreign than flourished as a native art. Like the other fine arts, the stage sunk under the decay of the empire, and its fall was accelerated by the introduction of the Christian religion. In the middle ages dramatic representation revived, in the shape of the homely Mysteries and Moralities of our forefathers. The revival of letters threw light upon the scenic art, by making us acquainted with the pitch of perfection to which it had been carried by the genius of Greece. With this period commences the history of the modern stage, properly so called. Some general observations on the drama, and its present state in Britain, will form a natural conclusion to the article.

The account which we have of the origin of Grecian theatrical representations, describes them as the fantastic orgies of shepherds and peasants, who solemnized the rites of Bacchus by the sacrifice of a goat, by tumultuous dances, and by a sort of masquerade, in which the actors were disguised like the ancient Mormce-dancers of England, or the Guisards of Scotland, who have not as yet totally disused similar revels. Instead of masks, their faces were stained with the lees of wine, and the songs and jests corresponded in coarseness to the character of the satyrs and fawns, which they were supposed to assume in honour of their patron Bacchus. Music, however, always formed a part of this rude festivity, and to this was sometimes added the recitations of an individual performer, who, possessed of more voice or talent than his companions, was able to entertain an audience for a few minutes by his own individual exertions.

Out of such rude materials, Thespis is supposed to have been the first who framed something like an approach to a more regular entertainment. The actors under this, the first of theatrical managers, instead of running about wild among the audience, were exalted upon a cart, or upon a scaffold formed of boards laid upon tressels. In these improvements Thespis is supposed to have had the aid of one Susarion, whose efforts were more particularly directed to the comic drama. But their fortunes have been unequal, for whilst the name of Thespis is still united with every thing dramatic, that of Susarion has fallen into oblivion, and is only known to antiquaries.

The drama in Greece, as afterwards in Britain, had scarcely begun to develope itself from barbarism, ere, with the most rapid strides, it advanced towards perfection. Thespis and Susarion flourished about four hundred and forty or fifty years before the Christian era. The battle of Marathon was fought in the year 490 before Christ; and it was upon Aeschylus, one of the Athenian generals on that memorable occasion, that Greece conferred the honoured title of the Father of Tragedy. We must necessarily judge of his efforts by that which he did, not by that which he left undone; and if some of his regulations may sound strange in modern ears, it is but just to compare the state in which he found the drama, with that in which he left it.

Aeschylus was the first, who, availing himself of the invention of a stage by Thespis, introduced upon the boards a plurality of actors at the same time, and converted into action and dialogue, accompanied or relieved at intervals by the musical performance of the chorus, the dull monologue of the Thespian orator. It was Aeschylus, also, who introduced the deceptions of scenery, stationary indeed, and therefore very different from the decorations of our stage, but still giving a reality to the whole performance, which could not fail to afford pleasure to those who beheld ' for the first time an effort to surround the player, while invested with his theatrical character, with scenery which might add to the illusions of the representations. But this was not all. A theatre, at first of wood, but afterwards of stone, circumscribed, whilst it accommodated, the spectators, and reduced a casual and disorderly mob to the quality and civilization of a regular and attentive audience.

The most remarkable effect of the tragedy of Aeschylus was the introduction of the chorus in a new character, which continued long to give a peculiar tone to the Grecian drama, and to make a striking difference betwixt that original theatre and those which have since arisen in modern nations.

The chorus who sung hymns in favour of Bacchus, the musical part, in short, of the entertainment, remained in the days of Thespis, as it had been in the rude village gambols which he had improved, the principal part of the dramatic entertainment. The intervention of monologue, or recitation, was merely a relief to the musicians and a variety to the audience. Aeschylus, whilst he assigned a part of superior consequence to the actor in his improved dialogue, new-modelled the chorus, which custom still enjoined as a necessary and indispensable branch of the performance. They were no longer a body of vocal musicians, whose strains were as independent of what was spoken by the personages of the drama, as those of our modern orchestra when performing betwixt the acts. The chorus assumed from this time a different and complicated character, which forms a marked peculiarity in the Grecian drama, distinguishing it from the theatrical compositions of modern Europe.

The chorus, according to this new model, was composed of a certain set of persons, priests, captive virgins, matrons, or others, usually of a solemn and sacred character, the contemporaries of the heroes who appeared on the stage, who remained upon the scene to celebrate in hymns set to music the events which had befallen the active persons of the drama; to afford them alternately their advice or their sympathy; and, at least, to moralize, in lyrical poetry, on the feelings to which their history and adventures, their passions and sufferings, gave rise. The chorus might be considered as, in some degree, the representatives of the audience, or rather of the public, on whose great stage those events happen in reality which are presented in the mimicry of the drama. In the strains of the chorus, the actual audience had those feelings suggested to them as if by reflection in a mirror, which the events of the scene ought to produce in their own bosom; they had at once before them the action of the piece, and the effect of that action upon a chosen band of persons, who, like themselves, were passive spectators, whose dignified strains pointed out the moral reflections to which the subject naturally gave rise. The chorus were led or directed by a single person of their number, termed the coryphaeus, who frequently spoke or sung alone. They were occasionally divided into two bands, who addressed and replied to each other. But they always preserved the character proper to them, of spectators, rather than agents in the drama.

The number of the chorus varied at different periods, often extending to fifty persons, and sometimes restricted to half that number; but it is evident that the presence of so many persons on the scene, officiating as no part of the dramatis personoe, but rather as contemporary spectators, involved many inconveniences and inconsistencies. That which the hero, however agitated by passion, must naturally have suppressed within his own breast, or uttered in soliloquy, was thus necessarily committed to the [7:8:145]confidence of fifty people, less or more. And when a deed of violence was to be committed, the helpless chorus, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. But still the union which Aeschylus accomplished betwixt the didactic hymns of the chorus and the events which were passing upon the stage, was a most important improvement upon the earlier drama. By this means the two unconnected branches of the old Bacchanalian revels were combined together; and we ought rather to be surprised that Aeschylus ventured, whilst accomplishing such an union, to render the hymns sung by the chorus subordinate to the action or dialogue, than that he did not take the bolder measure of altogether discarding that which, before his time, was reckoned the principal object of a religious entertainment. ∙

The new theatre and stage of Athens were reared, as we have seen, under the inspection of Aeschylus. He also introduced dresses in character for his principal actors, to which were added embellishments of a kind which mark the wide distinction betwixt the ancient and modern stage. The personal disguise which had formerly been . attained by staining the actor’s face, was now, by what doubtless was considered as a high exertion of ingenuity, accomplished by the use of a mask, so painted as to represent the personage whom he performed. To augment the apparent awkwardness of this contrivance, the mouths of these masks were frequently fashioned like the extremity of a trumpet, which, if it aided the actor’s voice to reach the extremity of the huge circuit to which he addressed himself, must still have made a ridiculous appearance upon the stage, had not the habits and expectations of the spectators been in a different tone from those of a modern audience. The use of the cothurnus or buskin, which was contrived so as to give to the performer additional and unnatural stature, would have fallen under the same censure. But the ancient and modern theatres may be said to resemble each other only in name, as will appear from the following account of the Grecian stage, abridged from the best antiquaries.

The theatres of the Greeks were immensely large in comparison to ours; and the audience sat upon rows of benches, rising above each other in due gradation. In form they resembled a horse-shoe. The stage occupied a platform, which closed in the flat end of the building, and was raised so high as to be on a level with the lowest row of benches. The central part of the theatre, or what we call the pit, instead of being filled with spectators, according to modern custom, was left for the occasional occupation of the chorus, during those parts of their duty which did not require them to be nearer to the stage. This space was called the orchestra, and corresponded in some measure with the open space which, in the modern equestrian amphitheatres, is interposed betwixt the audience and the stage, for the display of feats of horsemanship. The delusion of the scene being thus removed to a considerable distance from the eye of the spectator, was heightened; and many of the objections offered to the use of the mask and the buskin were lessened or totally removed. When the chorus did not occupy the orchestra, they ranged themselves beside the thymele, a sort of altar, surrounded with steps, placed in front of their stage orchestra. From this, as a post of observation, they watched the progress of the drama, and to this point the actors turned themselves when addressing them. The solemn hymns and mystic dances of the chorus, performed during their retreat into the orchestra, formed a sort of interludes, or interruptions of the action, similar in effect to the n⅛odern division into acts. But, properly speaking, there was no interruption of the representation from beginning to end. The piece was not, indeed, constantly progressive; but the illusion of the scene was always before the audience, either by means of the actors themselves or of the chorus. And the musical recitation and character of the dances traced by the chorus in their interludes, were always in correspondence with the character of the piece, grave, majestic, and melancholy; in tragedy, gay and lively; in comedy, and during the representation of satirical pieces, wild, extravagant, and bordering on buffoonery. The number of these interludes, or interruptions of the action, seems to have varied from three to six, or even more, at the pleasure of the author. The music was simple and inartificial, although it seems to have produced powerful effects on the audience. Two flute-players performed a prelude to the choral hymns, or directed the movement of the dances, which in tragedy were a solemn, slow, modulated succession of movements, very little resembling anything termed dancing among the moderns.

The stage itself was well contrived for the purposes of the Greek drama. The front was called the logeum, and occupied the full width of the flat termination of the theatre, contracted, however, at each extremity by a wall, which served to conceal the machinery necessary for the piece. The stage narrowed as it retired backwards; and the space so restricted in breadth was called the proscenium. It was terminated by a flat decoration, on which was represented the front of a temple, palace, or whatever else the poet had chosen for his scene. Suitable decorations appeared on the wings, as in our theatres. There were several entrances, both by the back scene and in front. These were not used indiscriminately, but so as to indicate the story of the piece, and render it more clear to apprehension. Thus, the persons of the drama who were supposed to belong to the palace or temple in the flat scene, entered frdm the side or the main door, as befitted their supposed rank; those who were inhabitants of the place represented, entered through a door placed at the side of the logeum; while those supposed to come from a distance were seen to traverse the orchestra, and to ascend the stage by a stair of communication, so that the audience were made spectators, as it were, of their journey. The proscenium was screened by a curtain, which was withdrawn -when the piece commenced. The decorations could be in some degree altered, so as to change the scene; though this, we apprehend, was seldom practised. But machinery for the ascent of phantoms, the descent of deities, and similar exhibitions, were as much in fashion among the Greeks as on our own modern stage; with better reason, indeed, for we shall presently see that the themes which they held most proper to the stage called frequently for the assistance of these mechanical contrivances.

In the dress and costume of their personages the Greeks bestowed much trouble and expense. It was their object to disguise as much as possible the mortal actor who was to represent a divinity or an hero; and while they hid his face and augmented his height, they failed not to assign him a mask and dress in exact conformity to the popular idea of the character represented; so that, seen across the orchestra, he might appear the exact resemblance of Hercules or of Agamemnon.

The Grecians, but in particular the Athenians, became most passionately attached to the fascinating and splendid amusement which Aeschylus thus regulated, which Sophocles and Euripides improved, and which all three, with other dramatists of inferior talents, animated by the full vigour of their genius. The delightful climate of Greece permitted the spectators to remain in the open air (for [7:8:146] there was no roof to their huge theatres) for whole days, during which several plays, high monuments of poetical talent, were successively performed before them. The enthusiasm of their attention may be judged of by what happened during the representation of a piece written by Hegemon. It was while the Athenians were thus engaged that there suddenly arrived the astounding intelligence of the total defeat of their army before Syracuse. The theatre was filled with the relations of those who had fallen; there was scarcely a spectator, who, besides sorrowing as a patriot, was not called to mourn a friend or relative. But, spreading their mantles before their faces, they commanded the representation to proceed; and thus veiled, continued to give it their attention to the conclusion. National pride, doubtless, had its share in this singular conduct, as well as fondness for the dramatic art. Another instance is giyen of the nature and acuteness of their feelings, when the assembly of the people amerced Phrynicus in a fine of a thousand drachmae, because, in a comedy founded upon the siege of Miletos, he had agitated their feelings to excess, in painting an incident which Athens lamented as a misfortune dislionourablc to her arms and her councils.

The price of admission was at first one drachma; but Pericles, desirous of propitiating the ordinary class of citizens, caused the entrance-money to be lowered to two oboli, so that the meanest Athenian had the ready means of indulging in this luxurious mental banquet. As it became difficult to support the expense of the stage, for which such cheap terms of admission could form no adequate fund, the same statesman, by an indulgence yet more perilous, caused the deficiency to be supplied from the treasure destined to sustain the expense of the war. It is a sufficient proof of the devotion of the Athenians to the stage, that not even the eloquence of Demosthenes could tempt them to forego this pernicious system. He touched upon the evil in two of his oiŉtions; but the Athenians were resolved not to forego the benefits of an abuse which they were aware could not be justified, and they passed a law making it death to touch upon that article of reformation.

It must not be forgotten, that the Grecian audience enjoyed the exercise of critical authority, as well as of classical amusement, at their theatre. They applauded and censured, as at the present day, by clapping hands and hissing. Their suffrage at those tragedies acted upon the solemn feasts of Bacchus, adjudged a laurel crown to the most successful dramatic author. This faculty was frequently abused; but the public, on sober reflection, seldom failed to be ashamed of such acts of injustice, and faithful, upon the whole, to the rules of criticism, evinced a fineness and correctness of judgment, which never descended to the populace of any other nation.

To this general account of the Grecian stage, it is proper to add some remarks on those peculiar circumstances from which it derives a tone and character so different from that of the modern drama; circumstances affecting at once its style of action, mode of decoration, and general effect on the feelings of the spectators.

The Grecian drama, it must be remembered, derived its origin from a religious ceremony; and, amid all its refinement, never lost its devotional character, unless it shall be judged to have done so in the department of satirical comedy.

When the audience was assembled, they underwent a religious lustration, and the archons or chief magistrates paid their public adoration to Bacchus, still regarded as the patron of the theatrical art, and whose altar was always placed in the theatre.

The subject of the drama was frequently religious. In tragedy especially, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as Aeschylus, selected their subjects from the exploits of the deities themselves, or of the demigods and heroes whom Greece accounted to draw an immediate descent from the denizens of Olympus, and to whom she paid nearly equal reverence. The object of the tragic poets was less to amuse and interest their audience by the history of the human heart, or soften them by the details of donìestic distress, than to elevate them into a sense of devotion or submission, or to astound and terrify them by the history and actions of a race of beings before whom ordinary mortality dwindled into pigmy size. This they dared to attempt; and, what may appear still more astonishing to the mere English reader, this they appear in a great measure to have performed. Effects were produced upon their audience which we can only attribute to the awful impression communicated by the idea of the immediate presence of the divinity. The emotions excited by the apparition of the Eumenides or furies, in Aeschylus’s tragedy of that name, so appalled the audience that females are said to have lost the fruit of their womb, and children to have actually expired in convulsions of terror. These effects may have been exaggerated; but that considerable inconveniences occurred from the extreme horror with which this tragedy impressed the spectators, is evident from a decree of the magistrates, limiting the number of the chorus, in order to prevent in future such tragical consequences. It is plain that the feeling by which such impressions arose must have been something very different from what the spectacle of the scene alone could possibly have produced. The mere sight of actors disguised in masks, suited to express the terrific yet sublime features of an antique Medusa, with her hair entwined with serpents,—the wild and dishevelled appearance, the sable and bloody garments, the blazing torches, the whole apparatus, in short, or properties as they are technically called, with which the classic fancy of Aeschylus could invest those terrific personages,—nay more, even the appropriate terrors of language and violence of gesture with which they were bodied forth, must still have fallen far short of the point which the poet certainly attained, had it not been for the intimate and solemn conviction of his audience that they were in the performance of an act of devotion, and to a certain degree in the presence of the deities themselves. It was this conviction, and the solemn and susceptible temper to which it exalted the minds of a large assembly, which prepared them to receive the electric shock produced by the visible representation of those terrible beings, to whom, whether as personifying the stings and terrors of an awakened conscience, or as mysterious and infernal divinities, the survivors of an elder race of deities, whose presence was supposed to strike awe even into Jove himself, the ancients ascribed the task of pursuing and punishing atrocious guilt.

It was in consistency with this connection betwixt the drama and religion of Greece, that the principal Grecian tragedians thought themselves entitled to produce upon the stage the most sacred events of their mythological history. It might have been thought that in doing so they injured the effect of their fable and action, since suspense and uncertainty, so essential to the interest of a play, could not be supposed to exist where the immortal gods, beings controlling all others, and themselves uncontrolled, were selected as the agents in the piece. But it must be remembered, that the synod of Olympus, from Jove downwards, were themselves but limitary deities, possessing indeed a certain influence upon human affairs, but unable to stem or divert the tide of fate or destiny, upon whose dark bosom, according to the Grecian creed, gods as well as men were embarked, and both sweeping downwards to [7:8:147]some distant yet inevitable termination of the present system of the universe, which should annihilate at once the race of divinity and of mortality. This awful catastrophe is hinted at not very obscurely by Prometheus, who, when chained to his rock, exults, in his prophetic view, in the destruction of his oppressor Jupiter; and so far did Aeschylus, in particular, carry the introduction of religious topics into his drama, that he escaped with some difficulty from an accusation of having betrayed the Eleusinian mysteries.

Where the subject of the drama was not actually taken from mythological history, and when the gods themselves did not enter upon the scene, the Grecian stage was, as we have already hinted, usually trod by beings scarcely less awful to the imagination of the audience; the heroes namely of their old traditional history, to whom they attributed an immediate descent from their deities, a frame of body and mind surpassing humanity, and after death an exaltation into the rank of demigods.

It must be added, that, even when the, action was laid among a less dignified set of personages, still the altar was present on the stage; incense frequently smoked; and frequent prayers and obtestations of the deity reminded the audience that the sports of the ancient theatre had their origin in religious observances. It is scarcely necessary to state how widely the classical drama, in this respect, differs in principle from that of the modern, which pretends to be nothing more than an elegant branch of the fine arts, whose end is attained when it supplies an evening’s amusement, whose lessons are only of a moral description, and which is so far from possessing a religious character, that it has with difficulty escaped condemnation as a profane, dissolute, and antichristian pastime. From this difference of principle there flows a difference of practical results, serving to account for many circumstances which might otherwise seem embarrassing.

The ancients, we have seen, endeavoured by every means in their power, including the use of masks and of buskins, to disguise the person of the actor; and, at the expense of sacrificing the expression of his countenance, and the grace, or at least the ease, of his form, they removed from the observation of the audience every association which could betray the person of an individual player, under the garb of the deity or hero he was designed to represent. To have done otherwise would have been held indecorous, if not profane. It follows, that as the object of the Athenian and of the modern auditor in attending the theatre was perfectly different, the pleasure which each derived from the representation had a distinct source. Thus, for example, the Englishman’s desire to see a particular character is intimately connected with the idea of the actor by whom it is performed. He does not wish to see Hamlet in the abstract, so much as to see how Kemble performs that character,^[1. It is proper to state here, once for all, that, contrary to our usual practice, this article is reprinted as it originallyappeared in the Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of this work, without any of those adaptations which the course of time and change of circumstances render necessary in ordinary cases. We have deemed this homage due to the genius and fame of the illustrious author (Sir Walter Scott), whose splendid view of the origin and progress of the dramatic art we have accordingly presented to the reader exactly as it proceeded from his own hand, leaving every contemporaneous allusion and illustration untouched. ] and to compare him perhaps with his own recollections of Garrick in the same part. He comes prepared to study each variation of the actor’s countenance, each change in his accentuation and deportment; to note with critical accuracy the points which discriminate his mode of acting from that of others; and to compare the whole with his owm abstract of the character. The pleasure arising from this species of critical investigation and contrast is so intimately allied with our ideas of theatrical amusement, that we can scarce admit the possibility of deriving much satisfaction from a representation sustained by an actor whose personal appearance and peculiar expression of features should be concealed from us, however splendid his declamation, or however appropriate his gesture and action. But this mode of considering the drama, and the delight which we derive from it, would have appeared to the Greeks a foolish and profane refinement, not very different in point of taste from the expedient of Snug the joiner, who intimated his identity by letting his natural visage be seen under the mask of the lion which he represented. It was with the direct purpose of concealing the features of the individual actor, as tending to destroy the effect of his theatrical disguise, that the mask and buskin were first invented, and afterwards retained in use. The figure was otherwise so dressed as to represent the deity or demigod, according to the statue best known, and adored with most devotion, by the Grecian public. The mask was, by artists who were eminent in the plastic art, so formed as to perfect the resemblance. Theseus or Hercules stood before the audience in the very form with which painters and statuaries had taught them to invest the hero, and there was certainly thus gained a more complete scenic deception than could have been obtained in our present mode. It was aided by the distance interposed betwixt the audience and the stage; but, above all, by the influence of enthusiasm acting upon the congregated thousands, whose imaginations, equally lively and susceptible, were prompt to receive the impressions which the noble verse of their authors conveyed to their ears, and the living personification of their gods and demigods placed before their eyes.

It is scarcely necessary to add, that, while these observations plead their apology for the mask and the buskin of the ancients, they leave, where it stood before, every objection to those awkward and unseemly disguises, considered in themselves, and without reference to the peculiar purpose and tendency of the ancient theatre. In fact, the exquisite pleasure derived from watching the eloquence of feature and eye, which we admire in an accomplished actor, was not, as some have supposed, sacrificed by the ancients for the assumption of these disguises. They never did, and, according to the plan of their theatres, never could, possess that source of enjoyment. The circuit of the theatre was immense, and the eyes of the thousands whom it contained were so far removed from the stage, that, far from being able to enjoy the minute play of the actor’s features, the mask and buskin were necessary to give distinction to his figure, and to convey all which the ancients expected to see, his general resemblance, namely, to the character he represented.

The style of acting, so far as it has been described to us, corresponded to the other circumstances of the representation. It affected gravity and sublimity of movement and of declamation. Rapidity of motion and vivacity of action seem to have been reserved for occasions of particular emotion; and that delicacy of bye-play, as well as all the aid which look and slight jesture bring so happily to the aid of an impassioned dialogue, were foreign to their system. The actors, therefore, had an easier task than on the modern stage, since it is much more easy to preserve a tone of high and dignified<declamation, than to follow out the whirlwind and tempest of passion, in which it is demanded of the performer to be energetic without bombast, and natural without vulgarity.

The Grecian actors held a high rank in the republic, ..... ∣. .... . . ....
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and those esteemed in the profession were richly recompensed. Their art was the more dignified, because the poets themselves usually represented the principal character in their own pieces; a circumstance which corroborates what we have already stated concerning the comparative inferiority of talents required in a Grecian actor, who was only expected to move with grace and declaim with truth and justice. His disguise hid all personal imperfections; and thus a Grecian poet might aspire to become an actor without that extraordinary and unlikely union of moral and physical powers which would be necessary to qualify a modern dramatist to mount the stage in person, and excel at once as a poet and as an actor.

It is no part of our present object to enter into any minute examination of the comparative merits of the three great tragedians of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Never, perhaps, did there arise, within so short a space, such a succession of brilliant talents. Sophocles might, indeed, be said to be the contemporary of both his rivals, for his youthful emulation was excited by the success of Aeschylus, and the eminence of his latter years was disturbed by the rivalry of Euripides, whom, however, he survived. To Aeschylus, who led the van in the dramatic enterprise, as he did in the field of Marathon, the sanction of antiquity has ascribed unrivalled powers over the realms of astonishment and terror. At his summons, the mysterious and tremendous volume of destiny, in which are inscribed the doom of gods and men, seemed to display its leaves of iron before the appalled spectators; the more than mortal voices of Deities, Titans, and departed Heroes, were heard in awful conference; heaven bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead, and the yet more undefined and grisly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves. All this could only be dared and done by a poet of the highest order, confident, during that early age of enthusiasm, that he addressed an audience prompt to kindle at the heroic scene which he placed before them. It followed almost naturally, from his character, that the dramas of Aeschylus, though full of terrible interest, should be deficient in grace and softness; that his sublime conciseness should deviate sometimes into harshness and obscurity; that, finding it impossible to sustain himself at the height to which he had ascended, he should sometimes drop, “fluttering his pinions vain,” into great inequalities of composition; and, finally, that his plots should appear rude and inartificial, contrasted with those of his successors in the dramatic art. Still, however, Aeschylus led not only the way in the noble career of the Grecian drama, but outstripped, in point of sublimity at least, those by whom he was followed.

Sophocles, who obtained from his countrymen the title of the Pee of Attica, rivalled Aeschylus when in the possession of the stage, and obtained the first prize. His success occasioned the veteran’s retreat to Sicily, where he died, commanding that his epitaph should make mention of his share in the victory of Marathon, but should contain no allusion to his dramatic excellencies. His more fortunate rival judiciously avoided the dizzy and terrific path which Aeschylus had trode with so firm and daring a step. It was the object of Sophocles to move sorrow and compassion, rather than to excite indignation and terror. He studied the progress of action with more attention than Aeschylus, and excelled in that modulation of the story by which interest is excited at the beginning of a drama, maintained in its progress, and gratified at its conclusion. His subjects are also of a nature more melancholy and less sublime than those of his predecessor. He loved to paint heroes rather in their forlorn than in their triumphant fortunes, aware that the contrast offered new sources of the pathetic to the author. Sophocles was the most fortunate of the Greek tragedians. He attained the age of ninety-one years; and, in his eightieth, to vindicate himself from a charge of mental imbecility, he read to the judges his Oedipus Coloneus, the most beautiful, at least the most perfect, of his tragedies. He survived Euripides, his most formidable rival, of whom also we must say a few words.

It is observed by Schlegel, that the tone of the tragedies of Euripides approaches more nearly to modern taste than to the stern simplicity of his predecessors. The passion of love predominates in his pieces, and he is the first tragedian who paid tribute to the passion which has been too exclusively made the moving cause of interest on the modern stage,—the first who sacrificed to

Cupid, king of gods and men.

The dramatic use of this passion has been purified in modern times, by the introduction of that tone of sentiment which, since the age of chivalry, has been a principal ingredient in heroic affection. This was unknown to the ancients, in whose society females, generally speaking, held a low and degraded place, from which few individuals emerged, unless those who aspired to the talents and virtues proper to the masculine sex. Women were not forbidden to become competitors for the laurel or oaken crown offered to genius and to patriotism; but antiquity held out no myrtle wreath as a prize for the domestic virtues peculiar to the female character. Love, therefore, in Euripides, does not always breathe purity of sentiment, but is stained with the mixture of violent and degrading passions. This, however, was the fault of the age rather than of the poet, although he is generally represented as an enemy of the female sex; and his death was ascribed to a judgment of Venus.

When blood-hounds met him by the way, And monsters made the bard their prey.

This great dramatist was less happy than Sophocles in the construction of his plots; and, instead of the happy expedients by which his predecessor introduces us to the business of the drama, he had too often recourse to the mediation of a prologue, which came forth to explain in detail the previous history necessary to understand the piece.

Euripides is also accused of having degraded the character of his personages, by admitting more alloy of human weakness, folly, and vice, than was consistent with the high qualities of the heroic age. Aeschylus, it was said, transported his audience into a new and more sublime race of beings; Sophocles painted mankind as they ought to be, and Euripides as they actually are. Yet the variety of character introduced by the latter tragedian, and the interest of his tragedies, must always attract the modern reader, coloured as they are by a tone of sentiment, and by his knowledge of the actual business, rules, and habits of actual life, to which his predecessors, living, as they did, in an imaginary and heroical world of their own, appear to have been strangers. And although the judgment of the ancients assigned the pre-eminence in tragedy to Aeschylus or Sophocles, yet Euripides has been found more popular with posterity than either of his two great predecessors.

The division betwixt tragedy and comedy, for both sprung from the same common origin, the feasts, namely in honour of Bacchus, and the disguises adopted by his worshippers, seems to have taken place gradually, until the jests and frolics, which made a principal part of these revels were found misplaced when introduced with graver matter, [7:8:149]and were made by Susarion, perhaps, the subject of a separate province of the drama. The Grecian comedy was divided into the ancient, the middle, and the modern style of composition.

The ancient and original comedy was of a kind which may, at first sight, appear to derogate from the religious purposes which we have pointed out as the foundation of the drama. They frequently turn upon parodies, in which the persons and adventures of those gods and heroes who were the sublime subjects of the tragic drama, are introduced for the purpose of buffoon-sport and ridicule, as in Carey’s modern farces of Midas and the Golden Pippin. Hercules appears in one of those pieces astonishing his host by an extravagant appetite, which the cook in vain attempts to satiate, by placing before him, in succession, all the various dishes which the ancient kitchen afforded. In another comedy, Bacchus, in whose honour the solemnity was instituted, is brought in only in order to ridicule his extreme cowardice.

At other times, allowing a grotesque fancy its wildest range, the early comic authors introduced upon the stage animals, and even inanimate things, as part of their dramatis personce, and embodied forth on the stage the fantastic imaginations of Lucian in his True History. The golden age was represented in the same ridiculous and bizarre mode of description as the Pays de la Cocagne of the French minstrels, or the popular ideas of Lubber-land in England; and the pocts furnished kingdoms of birds, and worlds, in the moon.

Had the only charm of these entertainments consisted in the fantastic display with which the eyes of the spectators were regaled at the expense of the over-excited imagination of the poet, they would soon have fallen into disuse; for the Athenians were too acute and judicious critics to have been long gratified with mere extravagance. But these grotesque scenes were made the medium for throwing the most bold and daring ridicule upon the measures of the state, upon the opinions of individuals, and upon the religion of the country.

This propensity to turn into ridicule that which is most serious and sacred, had probably its origin in the rude gambols of the sylvan deities who accompanied Bacchus, and towhose petulant and lively demeanour rude jest was a natural accompaniment. The audience, at least the more ignorant part of them, saw these parodies with pleasure, which equalled the awe they felt at the performance of the tragedies, whose most solemn subjects were thus burlesqued; nor do they appear to have been checked by any sense that their mirth was profane. In fact, when the religion of a nation comes to consist chiefly in the practice of a few unmeaning ceremonies, it is often found that the populace, with whatever inconsistence, assume the liberty of profaning them by grotesque parodies, without losing their reverence for the superstitions which they thus vilify. Customs of a like tendency were common in the middle ages. The festival of the Ass in France, of the Boy-Bishop in England, of the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, and many other popular practices of the same kind, exhibited, in countries yet Catholic, daring parodies of the most sacred services and ceremonies of the Roman church. And as these were practised openly, and under authority, without being supposed to shake the people’s attachment to the rites which they thus ridiculed, we cannot wonder that similar profanities were well received among the Pagans, whose religion sat very loosely upon them, and who professed no fixed or necessary articles of faith.

It is probable that, had the old Grecian comedy continued to direct its shafts of ridicule only against the inhabitants of Olympus, it would not have attracted the coer cion of the magistracy. But its province was far more extensive, the poets claiming the privilege of laying their opinions on public affairs before the people in this shape. Cratinus, Eupolis, and particularly Aristophanes, a daring, powerful, and apparently unprincipled writer, converted comedy into an engine for assailing the credit and character of private individuals, as well as the persons and political measures of those who administered the state. The doctrines of philosophy, the power of the magistrate, the genius of the poet, the rites proper to the deity, were alternately made the subject of the most uncompromising and severe satire. It was soon discovered that the more directly personal the assault could be made, and the more revered or exalted the personage, the greater was the malignant satisfaction of the audience, who loved to see wisdom, authority, and religious reverence brought down to their own level, and made subjects of ridicule by the powers of the merciless satirist. The use of the mask enabled Aristophanes to render his satire yet more pointedly personal; for, by forming it so as to imitate, probably with some absurd exaggeration, the features of the object of his ridicule, and by imitating the dress and manner of the original, the player stepped upon the stage a walking and speaking caricature of the hero of the night, and was usually placed in some ludicrous position, amidst the fanciful and whimsical chimeras with which the scene was peopled.

In this manner Aristophanes ridiculed with equal freedom Socrates, the wisest of the Athenians, and Cleon, the demagogue, when at the height of his power. As no one durst perform the latter part, for fear of giving offence to one so powerful, the author acted Cleon himself, with his face smeared with the lees of wine. Like the satire of Rabelais, the political and personal invective of Aristophanes was mingled with a plentiful allowance of scurril and indecent jests, which were calculated to insure a favourable reception from the bulk of the people. He resembles Rabelais also in the wild and fanciful fictions which lie assumes as the vehicle of his satire; and his comedy of the Birds may even have given hints to Swift, when, in order to contrast the order of existing institutions with those of an Utopian and fantastic fairy land, he carries Gulliver among giants and pigmies. Yet though his indecency, and the offensive and indiscriminate scurrility of his satire, deserve censure ;—though he merits the blame of the wise for his attack upon Socrates, and of the learned for his repeated and envenomed assaults on Euripides,— Aristophanes has nevertheless added one deathless name to the deathless period in which he flourished; and, from the richness of his fancy, and gaiety of his tone, has deserved the title of the Father of Comedy. When the style of his sarcasm possessed the rareness of novelty, it was considered of so much importance to the state, that a crown of olive was voted to the poet, as one who had taught Athens the defects of her public men. But unless angels were to write satires, ridicule cannot be considered as the test of truth. The temptation to be witty is just so much the more resistless, that the author knows he will get no thanks for suppressing the jest which rises to his pen. As the public becomes used to this new and piquant fare, fresh characters must be sacrificed for its gratification. Recrimination adds commonly to the contest, and those who were at first ridiculed out of mere wantonnesu of wit, are soon persecuted for resenting the ill usages until literature resembles an actual personal conflict, where the victory is borne away by the strongest and most savage, who deals the most desperate wounds with the least sympathy for the feeling of his adversary.

The ancient comedy was of a character too licentious to be long tolerated. Two or three decrees having been [7:8:150]in vain passed, in order to protect the citizens against libels of this poignant description, the ancient comedy was finally proscribed by that oligarchy which assumed the government of Athens upon the downfall of the popular government towards the end of the Peloponnesian war. By order of these rulers, Anaxander, an actor, was punished capitally for parodying a line of Euripides, so as to infer a slight of the government. He was starved to death, to which, as an appropriate punishment, the public has since his time often indirectly condemned both actors and dramatists. Aristophanes, who was still alive, bowed to the storm, and relinquished the critical and satirical scourge which he had hitherto exercised in the combined capacity of satirist, reformer, and reviewer; and the use of the chorus was prohibited to comic actors, as it seems to have been in their stanzas chiefly that the offensive satire was invested. To this edict Horace alludes in the well known lines:

Successit vetus his comoedia, non sine multa Laude: sed in vitium libertas excidit, et viin Dignam lege regi, lex est accepta, chorusque Turpiter obticuit, sublato jure nocendi.^[2. The ancient comedy next play’d its part, VVell-famed, at first, for spirit and for art: But Liberty o’erleaping decent awe, Satiric rage required restraint from law; The edict spoke, dishonour’d silence bound The chorus, and forbade their ancient right to wound. ]

In the middle comedy, Thalia and her votaries seemed to have retraced their steps, and, avoiding personal satire, resorted once more to general subjects of burlesque raillery. We learn from history, real or fabulous, or from the works of the elder poets, that these plays had the fanciful wildness without the personal satire of the ancient comedy; for the authors were obliged to take care that there was no “offence” in their pleasantry. At most, they only ventured to touch on matters of instant interest in the way of inuendo, under feigned titles and oblique hints, and had no longer the audacity to join men’s vices or follies to their names. Aristophanes re-cast several of his pieces in this manner. But the same food, without the poignant seasoning to Much the audience had been accustomed, palled on their taste, and this cast of pieces soon gave place to that which the ancients called the New Comedy, so successfully cultivated by Menander and others.

Notwithstanding what modern critics have said to the contrary, and particularly the ingenious Schlegel, the new tone which comedy thus assumed seems more congenial to true taste as well as to public decorum, and even to the peace and security of the community, than that of Aristophanes, whose satiric wit, like a furious bull, charged upon his countrymen without respect or distinction, and tossed and gored whatever he met with in his way.

The new comedy had for its object the ludicrous incidents of private life (celebrare domestica facta, says Horace); to detail those foibles, follies, and whimsical accidents, which are circumstances material and serious to the agents themselves, but, as very usually happens on the stage of the world, matters only of ludicrous interest to the on-lookers. The new comedy admitted also many incidents of a character not purely ludicrous, and some which, calling forth pathetic emotion, approached more nearly to the character of tragedy than had been admitted in the ancient comedies of Aristophanes, and in this rather resembled what the French have called Tragédie Bourgeoise. It is scarce necessary to remark, that the line cannot be always distinctly drawn betwixt the subjects which excite mirth and those which call forth sympathy. It often happens that the same incident is at once affecting and ludicrous, or admits of being presented alternately in either point of view. In a drama, also, which treats of the faults and lighter vices, as well as of the follies of mankind, it is natural that the author should sometimes assume the high tone of the moralist. In these cases, to use the language of Horace, comedy exalts her voice, and the offended father, the pantaloon of the piece, swells into sublimity of language. A pleasant species of composition was thus attained, in which wit and humour were relieved by touches both of sentiment and moral instruction. The new comedy, taken in this enlarged point of view, formed the introduction to the modern drama; but it was neither so comprehensive in its plan, nor so various in character and interest.

The form which the Greeks, and in imitation of them the Romans, adopted, for embodying their comic effusions, was neither extended nor artificial. To avoid the charge of assaulting, or perhaps the temptation to attack private persons, the actors in their drama were rather painted as personifications of particular classes of society, than living individual characters. The list of these personages was sufficiently meagre. The principal character, upon whose devices and ingenuity the whole plot usually turns, is the Geta of the piece, a witty, roguish, insinuating, and malignant slave, the confident of a wild and extravagant son, whom he aids in his pious endeavours to cheat a suspicious, severe, and griping father. When to these three are added a wily courtezan, a procuress, a stolen virgin, who is generally a mute or nearly such, we have all the stockcharacters which are proper to the classic comedy. Upon this limited scale of notes the ancients rung their changes, relieving them occasionally, however, by the introduction of a boastful soldier, a boorish clown, or a mild and good-natured old man, to contrast with the irascible Chremes of the piece, the more ordinary representative of old age.

The plot is in general as simple as the cast of the characters. A father loses his child, who falls into the hands of a procuress or slave merchant. The efforts of the youth, who falls in love with this captive, to ransom her from her captivity, are seconded by the slave, who aids him in the various devices necessary to extort from his father the funds necessary for the purchase, and their tricks form the principal part of the intrigue. When it is necessary that the play shall close, the discovery of the girl’s birth takes place, and the young couple are married. The plots are indeed sometimes extended or enlarged by additional circumstances, but very seldom by any novelty of character or variety of general form.

It is a necessary consequence, that the ancient comic authors were confined within a very narrow compass. The vast and inexhaustible variety of knavery, folly, affectation, humour, &c. as mingled with each other, or as modified by difference of age, sex, temper, education, profession, and habit of body, are all within the royalty of the modern comic dramatist, and he may summon them up, under what limitations and in what circumstances he pleases, to play their parts in his piece. The ancients were much more limited in their circle of materials, and, perhaps, we must look for the ruling cause once more in the great size of tŉcir theatres, and to the use of the mask, which, though it easily presented the general or generic character of the personage introduced, was incapable[7:8:151] of the endless variety which can be given to ridicule of a more minute, refined, and personal kind, by the flexible organs of a modern actor.

But besides this powerful reason for refraining from any attempt to draw characters distinguished by peculiar habits, there is much reason to think that the mode of life pursued by the ancient Athenians was unfavourable to the formation of whimsical, original, or eccentric characters. Citizens of the same state, they lived much together, and the differences of ranks did not make the same distinction in taste and manners as in modern Europe. Their occupation, also, was the same. They were all public men, and had a common interest in the manage·, ment of the state; and it probably followed that, in men whose pursuits were all bent the same way, the same general similarity of manners might be found to exist, which is remarked in those who follow the same profession. The differences of youth and age, of riches and poverty, of good or bad temper, &c. must have been much modified in Attica, where all free citizens were, to a certain degree, on a level—discussed the same topics of state, and gave the same vote to forward them—enjoyed, without restriction, the same public amusements; and where the same general cast of manners might descend to the lowest of the citizens, for the very reason that even a poor herbwoman understood the delicacy of the Attic dialect so perfectly, as to distinguish a stranger by the first words he addressed to her.

The chorus, silenced, as we have seen, owing to the license of the old comedy, made no appendage to that which was substituted in its place. The exhibition of the Grecian comedy did not, in other respects, in so far as we know, materially differ from that of the tragedy. Instead of the choral interludes, the representation was now divided, by intervals of cessation, into acts, as upon the modern stage. And the number five seems to have been fixed upon as the most convenient and best adapted for the purposes of representation. The plot, as we have seen, and the distinct and discriminated specification of character, were, in either case, subordinate considerations to the force of style and composition. It follows, of consequence, that we can better understand and enjoy the tragedies than the comedies of the ancients. The circumstances which excite sublime or terrific sensations are the same, notwithstanding the difference of age, country, and language. But comic humour is of a character much more evanescent. The force of wit depends almost entirely upon time, circumstance, and manners, insomuch that a jest which raises inextinguishable laughter in a particular class of society, appears flat or disgusting if uttered in another. It is, therefore, no wonder that the ancient comedy, turning upon manners so far removed from our own time, should appear to us rather dull and inartificial. The nature of the intercourse between the sexes in classic times was also unfavourable for comedy. The coquette, the fine lady, the romp, all those various shades of the female character which occupy so many pleasant scenes on the modern stage, were totally unknown to ancient manners. The wife of the ancient comedy was a mere household drudge, the vassal, not the companion, of an imperious husband. The young woman whose beauty is the acting motive of the intrigue, never evinces the slightest intellectual property of any kind. And the only female character admitting of some vivacity is that of the courtezan, whose wit as well as her charms appeared to have been professional.

After subtracting the large field afforded by female art or caprice, female wit, or folly, or affection, the realm of the ancient comedy will appear much circumscribed; and we have yet to estimate a large deduction to be made on account of the rust of antiquity, and the total change of religion and manners. It is no wonder, therefore, that the wit of Plautus and Terence should come forth diminished in weight and substance, after having been subjected to the alembic of modern criticism. That which survives the investigation, however, is of a solid and valuable character. If these dramas do not entertain ns with a display of the specific varieties of character, they often convey maxims evincing a deep knowledge of human passion and feeling; and are so admirably adapted to express, in few and pithy words, truths which it is important to remember, that even the Apostle Paul himself has not disdained to quote a passage from a Grecian dramatist. The situation, also, of their personages is often truly comic; and the modern writers who have borrowed their ideas, and arranged them according to the taste of their own age, have often been indebted to the ancients for the principal cause of their success.

Having dwelt thus long upon the Grecian drama, we are entitled to treat with conciseness that of Rome, which, like the other fine arts, that people, rather martial than literary, copied from their more ingenious neighbours.

The Romans were not, indeed, without a sort of rude dramatic representation of their own, of the same nature with that which, as we have already noticed, usually arises in an early period of society. These were called Fabulae Atellanae ; farces, for such they were, which took their name from Atella, a town belonging to the Osci, in Italy. They were performed by the Roman youth, who used to attack each other with satirical couplets during the intervals of some rude game, in which they seem to have represented the characters of fabulous antiquity. But, 361 years before the Christian era, the Romans, in the time of a great pestilence, as we learn from Livy, introduced a more regular species of theatrical entertainment, in order to propitiate the deities by a solemn exhibition of public games; after which, what had hitherto been matter of mere frolic and amusement, assumed, according to the historian, the appearance of a professional art; and the Roman youth, who had hitherto appeared as amateur performers, gave up the stage to regular performers.

These plays continued, however, to be of a very rude structure, until the Grecian stage was transplanted to Rome. Livius Andronicus, by birth a Grecian, led the way in this improvement, and is accounted her first dramatist.

Seneca the philosopher is the only Roman tragedian whose works have reached our time. But his tragedies afford no very favourable specimen of Roman art. They are in the false taste which succeeded the age of Augustus, and debased the style of composition in that of Neŗo; bombastic, tedious, and pedantic; treating, indeed, of Grecian subjects, but not with Grecian art.

By a singular contrast, although we have lost the more valuable tragedies of Rome, we have been compelled to judge of the new Greek comedy through the medium of the Latin translations. Of Menander we have but a few fragments, and our examples of his drama are derived exclusively from Plautus and Terence. Of these, the former appears the more original, the latter the more elegant author. The comedies of Plautus are much more connected with manners, much more full of what may be termed drollery and comic situation, and are believed to possess a greater portion of Roman character. The Romans, indeed, had two species of comedy, the Palliata, where the scene and dress were Grecian; the Togata, where both were Roman. But besides this distinction, even the Mantled, or Grecian comedy, might be more or less of a Roman cast; and Plautus is supposed to have [7:8:152] infused a much stronger national tone into his plays than can be traced in those of Terence. They are also of a ruder cast, and more extravagant, retaining, perhaps, a larger portion of the rough horse-play peculiar to the Fabuloe Atellanoe. Terence, on the contrary, is elegant, refined, and sententious; decorous and regular in the construction of his plots; exhibiting more of wit in his dialogue, than of comic force in his situations; grave often and moral, sometimes even pathetic; and furnishing, upon the whole, the most perfect specimens of the Grecian comedy, both in action and character.

The alterations which the Romans made in the practice of the theatrical art do not seem to have been of great consequence. One circumstance, however, deserves notice. The orchestra, or, as we should say, the pit of the theatre, was no longer left vacant for the occasional occupation of the chorus, but was filled with the senators, knights, and other more respectable citizens. The stage was thus brought more near to the eye of the higher class of the audience. It would also seem that the theatres were smaller; for we read of two so constructed that each turned upon a pivot, so that, when placed back to back, they were separate theatres, yet were capable of being wheeled round, with all the audience, so as to bring their oblong ends together, then forming a single amphitheatre, in which the games of the circus succeeded to dramatic representation. It is not easy to conceive the existence of such machinery; but the story, at any rate, seems to show that their theatres must have been greatly smaller than those of Greece, to admit the supposition of such an evolution as being in any degree practicable. This diminution in the size of the house, and the occupation of the orchestra by the most dignified part of the audience, may have afforded a reason why masks were, at least occasionally, disused on the Roman stage. That they were sometimes disused is certain; for Cicero mentions Roscius Gallus as using a mask to conceal a deformity arising from the inequality of his eyes, which implies plainly that other comedians played with their faces disclosed. It is therefore probable that the imperfections of the mask were felt so soon as the distance was diminished between the performer and the spectators; and we may hazard a conjecture that this disguise was first laid aside in the smaller theatres.

But the principal change introduced by the Romans into the drama, and which continues to affect it in every country of Europe, respected the status or rank of the actors in society. We have seen that Athens, enthusiastic in her attachment to the fine arts, held no circumstances degrading which were connected with them. Aeschylus and Sophocles were soldiers and statesmen, yet lost nothing in the opinion of their countrymen by appearing on the public stage. Euripides, who was also a person of consequence, proved that “love esteems no office mean for he danced in a female disguise in his own drama, and that not as the Princess Nauticlea, but as one of her handmaidens, or, in modern phrase, as a figurante. The Grecians, therefore, attached no dishonour to the person of the actor, nor esteemed that he who contributed to giving the amusement of the theatre was at all degraded beneath those who received it. It was otherwise in Rome. The contempt which the Romans entertained for players might be founded partly upon their confounding this elegant amusement with the games of the circus and amphitheatre, performed by gladiators and slaves, the meanest, in short, of mankind. Hence, to use the words of St Augustine, “the ancient Romans, accounting the art of stage-playing and the whole scene infamous, ordained that this sort of men should not only want the honour of other citizens, but also be disfranchised and thrust out of their tribe, by a legal and disgraceful Censure, which the censors were to execute; because they would not suffer their vulgar sort of people, much less their senators, to be defamed, disgraced, or defiled with stage-players which act of theirs he styles “an excellent true Roman prudence, to be enumerated among the Romans’ praises.”

Accordingly, an edict of the praetor stigmatized as infamous all who appeared on the stage, either to speak or act; but it is remarkable that from this general proscription the Roman youth were excepted; and they continued to enact the Fabuloe Atellanoe, namely, the farces or drolleries of ancient Italian origin, without incurring any stigma. This exception seems to indicate that the edict originated in the national pride of the Romans, and their contempt for Grecian literature, and for foreigners of every description. Under any other view it is impossible they should have preferred the actors in these coarse farces, who, by the bye, are supposed to have been the originals of no less persons that Harlequin and Punchinello, to those who possessed taste and talents sufficient to execute the masterly scenes borrowed from the Grecian drama.

Injustice, however, and we call that law unjust which devotes to general infamy any profession of which it nevertheless tolerates the practice, is usually inconsistent. Several individual play-actors in Rome rose to high public esteem, and to the enjoyment of great wealth. Roscius was the friend and companion of Piso and of Sylla, and, what was still more to his credit, of Cicero himself, who thus eulogises the scenic art, while commemorating the merit of his deceased friend: Quis nostrum tarn animo agresti ac duro fuit, ut ĩìoscii morte nuper non commoveretur Ĩ qui quum esset senex mortuus, tamen, propter excellentem artem ac venustatem, videbatur omnino mari non debuisse.

Paris, another Roman actor, reached a height of celebrity as distinguished as Roscius, and exercised, as many of his profession have since done, an arbitrary authority over the unfortunate dramatic authors. It is recorded by the satirist that Statius the epic poet might have starved had he not given up to this favourite of the public, upon his own terms doubtless, the manuscript of an unacted performance. Paris was put to death by Domitian out of jealousy.

If the actors rose to be persons of importance in Rome, the dramatic critics were no less so. They had formed a code of laws for the regulation of dramatic authors, to which the great names of Aristotle and Horace both contributed their authority. But these will be more properly treated of when we come to mention their adoption by the French stage.

Having thus hastily given some account of the ancient stage, from its rise in Greece to its transportation to Rome, 1 we have only to notice the circumstances under which if expired.

Christianity from its first origin was inimical to the institution of the theatre. The fathers of the church inveigh against the profaneness and immodesty of the theatre. In the treatise of Tertullian, De Spectaculis, he has written expressly upon the subject. The various authorities on this head have been collected and quoted by the enemies of the stage, from Prynne down to Collier. It ought, however, to be noticed, that their exprobation of the theatre is founded, first, upon its origin, as connected with heathen superstition; and secondly, on the beastly r and abominable license practised in the pantomimes, which, although they made no part of the regular drama, were presented nevertheless in the same place, and before the same audience. “We avoid your shows and games,” says Tertullian, “because[7:8:153] we doubt the warrant of their origin. They savour of superstition and idolatry, and we dislike the entertainment,as abhorring the heathen religion on which it is founded.” In another place he observes, the temples were united to theatres, in order that superstition might patronize debauchery; and that they were dedicated to Bacchus and to Venus, the confederate deities of Just and intemperance.

It was not only the connection of the theatre with heathen superstition that offended the primitive church, but also the profligacy of some of the entertainments which were exhibited. There cannot be much objected to the regular Roman dramas in this particular, since even Mr Collier allows them to be more decorous than the British stage of his own time; but, as we have already hinted, in the Ludi Sceniri, the intrigues of the gods and the heroes were represented upon the stage with the utmost grossness. These obscene and scandalous performances thus far coincided with the drama, that they were acted in the same theatres, and in honour of the same deities, and both were subjected to the same sweeping condemnation. They were not, however, absolutely or formally abolished, even when Christianity became the religion of the state. Tertullian and St Augustin both speak of the scenic representations of their own day, under the distinct characters of tragedy and comedy; and although condemned by the church, and abhorred by the more strict Christians, there is little doubt that the ancient theatre continued to exist until it was buried under the ruins of the Roman empire.

Modern Drama.

The same proneness to fictitious personification, which we have remarked as a propensity common to all countries, introduced, during the dark ages, a rude species of drama into most of the nations of Europe. Like the first efforts of the ancients in that art, it had its foundation in religion; with this great difference, that as the rites of Bacchus before, and even after the improvements introduced by Thespis, were well enough suited to the worship of such a deity, the religious dramas, mysteries, or whatever other name they assumed, were often so unworthy of the Christian religion, on which they were founded, that their being tolerated can be attributed only to the gross ignorance of the laity, and the cunning of the Catholic priesthood, who used them, with other idle and sometimes indecorous solemnities, as one means of amusing the people’s minds, and detaining them in contented bondage to their spiritual superiors.

In the empire of the East, religious exhibitions of a tlicatrical character appear to have been instituted about the year 990, by Theophylact, patriarch of Constantinople, with the intention, as Warton surmises, of weaning the minds of the people from the Pagan revels, by substituting Christian spectacles, partaking of the same spirit of license. His contemporaries give him little credit for his good intentions. “Theophylact,” says Cedrenus, as translated by Warton, “introduced the practice, which prevails to this day, of scandalizing God and the memory of his saints, on the most splendid and popular festivals, by indecent and ridiculous songs, and enormous shoutings, even in the midst of those sacred hymns which we ought to offer to divine grace for the salvation of our souls. But he having collected a company of base fellows, and placing over them one Euthynicus, snrnamed Çasnes, whom he also appointed the superintendent of his church, admitted into the sacred service diabolical dances, exclamations of ribaldry, and ballads borrowed from the streets and brothels.” The irregularities of the Greek clergy, who, on certain holidays, personated feigned characters, and entered even the choir in masquerade, are elsewhere mentioned. (Warton’s History of English Poetry, vol. ii. p. 370.) These passages do not prove that actual mysteries or sacred dramas were enacted on such occasions; but probably the indecent revels alluded to bore the same relation to such representations, as the original rites of Bacchus to the more refined exhibitions of Thespis and Susarion.

There has been some dispute among theatrical antiquaries, in which country of Europe dramatic representations of a religious kind first appeared. The liberal and ingenious editor of the Chester Mysteries has well remarked, in his introduction to that curious and beautiful volume, that a difficulty must always attend the inquiry, from the doubts that exist, whether the earliest recorded performances of each country were merely pantomimes, or were accompanied with dialogue. ι

The practice of processions and pageants with music, in which characters, chiefly of sacred writ, were presented before the public, is so immediately connected with that of speaking exhibitions, that it is difficult to discriminate the one from the other.

We are tempted to look first to Italy; as it is natural that the tragic art should have revived in that country in which it was last exercised, and where traditions, and perhaps some faint traces, of its existence were still preserved.

“The first speaking sacred drama,” says Mr Walker, “was Della Passione di nostro Signor Giesu Christo, by Giuliano Dati, bishop of San Leo, who flourished about the year 1445.” (Walker’s Essay on the Revival of the Drama in Italy, p. 6.) This elegant author does, indeed, show that Italian scholars, and particularly Mussato, the Paduan historian, had composed two Latin dramas upon something like the classical model about the year 1300. Yet, although his play upon the tyranny and death of Ezzlino obtained him both reputation and honour, it does not appear to have been composed for the stage, but rather to have been a dramatic poem, since the progress of the piece is often interrupted by the poet speaking in his own person.

The French drama is traced by Μ. Legrand as high as the thirteenth century; and he has produced one curious example of a pastoral entitled Un Jeu. He mentions also a farce, two devotional pieces, and two moralities, to each of which he ascribes the same title. It may be suspected that these are only dialogues recited by the travelling minstrels and troubadours, such as Petrarch acknowledges having sometimes composed for the benefit of the strolling musicians. Such were probably the spectacles exhibited by Philip the Fair in 1313, on account of the honour of knighthood conferred on his children. Ri-coboni, anxious for the honour of Italy, denies to these amusements the character of a legitimate drama; with what justice we have no information that can enable us to decide.

Amidst this uncertainty, it is not unpleasant to record the fair claim which Britain possesses to be one of the earliest, if not the very first nation in which dramatic representation seems to have been revived. The Chester Mysteries, called the Whitsun Plays, appear to have been performed during the mayoralty of John Arneway, who filled that office in Chester from 1268 to 1276. The very curious specimen of these mysteries, which has been of late printed for private distribution by Mr Markland of the Temple, furnishes us with the banes or proclamation, containing the history and character of the pageants which it announces.

Reverende lordes and ladyes all,

That at this tyme here assembled bee, By this messauge understande you shall, That sometymes there was mayor of this citie, [7:8:154]Sir John Arn way, Knyghte, who most worthilye Contented hymselfe to sett out an playe

The devise of one Done Rondali, moonke of Chester Abbey.

This moonke, moonke-like in scriptures well scene,

In storyes travelled with the best sorte;

In pagentes set fourth, apparently to all eyne,

The Okie and Newe Testament with livelye comforte; Intermynglinge therewith, onely to make sporte, Some things not warranted by any writt,

Which to gladd the hearers he woulde men to take yt.

This matter he abrevited into playes twenty-foure, And every playe of the matter gave but a taste, Leavinge for better learninge scircumstances to accomplishe, F or his proceedinges maye appeare to be in haste: Yet all together unprofitable his labour he did not waste, For at this daye, and ever, he deserveth the fame Which all monkes deserves professinge that name.

This worthy Knihte Arnway, then mayor of this citie, This order toke, as declare to you I shall,

That by twentye-fower occupations, artes, craftes,or misteries, These pagentes shoulde be played after breeffe rehearsall; For every pagente a cariage to be provyded withall, In which sorte we purpose this Whitsontyde, Our pageants into three partes to devyde∙

I. Now you worshippfull Tanners that of custome olde The fall of Lucifer did set out,

Some writers awarrante your matter, therefore be boulde Lustelye to playe the same to all the rowtte: And yf any thereof stand in any doubte.

Your author his author hath, your shewe let bee,

Good speech, fyne players, with apparill comelye.

Chester Mysteries.

Such were the celebrated Mysteries of Chester. To Mr Markland’s extracts from them is prefixed a curious dissertation upon their age and author. They were so highly popular, as to be ranked, in the estimation of the vulgar, with the ballads of Robin Hood; for a character in one of the old moralities is introduced as boasting,

I can rhimes of Robin Hood, and Randal of Chester, But of our Lord and our Lady I can nought at all.

The poetical value of these mysteries is never considerable, though they are to be found among the dramatic antiquities of all parts of Europe. It was, however, soon discovered that the purity of the Christian religion was inconsistent with these rude games, in which passages from scripture were profanely and indecently mingled with human inventions of a very rudc, and sometimes an indecorous character. To the Mysteries, therefore, succeeded the Moralities, a species of dramatic exercise, which involved more art and ingenuity, and was besides much more proper for a public amusement, than the imitations or rather parodies of sacred history, which had hitherto entertained the public.

These Moralities bear some analogy to the old or original comedy of the ancients. They were often founded upon allegorical subjects, and almost always bore a close and poignant allusion to the incidents of the day. Public reformation was their avowed object, and, of course, satire was frequently the implement which they employed. Dr Percy, however, remarks that they were of two characters, serious and ludicrous; the one approaching to the tragedy, the other to the comedy of classical times; so that they brought taste as it were to the threshold of the real drama. The difference between the Catholic and reformed religion was fiercely disputed in some of these dramas; and in Scotland, in particular, a mortal blow was aimed at the superstitions of the Roman church, by the celebrated Sir David Lindsay, in a play or morality acted in 1539, and entitled The Satire of the Three Estates. The objects of this drama were entirely political, although it is mixed with some comic scenes, and introduced by an interlude, in coarseness altogether unmatched. The spirit of Aristophanes, in all its good and evil, seems to have actuated the Scottish king-at-arms. It is a singular proof of the liberty allowed to such representations at the period, that James V. and his queen repeatedly witnessed a piece, in which the corruptions of the existing government and religion were treated with such satirical severity. The play, as acted, seems to have differed in some respects from the state in which it exists in manuscript.

In a letter to the Lord Privy Seal of England, dated 26th January 1540, Sir William Eure (envoy from Henry VIII.) gives the following account of the play, as it had then been performed “in the feast of Ephipanie at Lightgowe, before the king, queene, and the whole coun-saile, spirituali and temporali. In the firste entres come in Solace (whose parte was but to make mery, sing ballets with his fellowes, and drinke at the interluydes of the play), whoe showed firste to all the audience the play to be played. Next come in a king, who passed to his throne, having nae speche to thende of the play, and then to ratify and approve, as in parliament, all things done by the rest of the players, which represented The Three Estates. With hym came his cortiers, Placebo, Pic-tiiank, and Flatterye, and sic alike gard; one swering he was the lustiest, starkeste, best proportionit, and most valycant man that ever was; ane other swere he was the beste with long-bowe, crosse-bowe, and culverin, and so fourth. Thairafter there come a man armed in harness, with a swerde drawn in his bande, a Bushop, a Burges-man, and Experience, clede like a Doctor; who set them all down on the deis under the King. After them cornea poor man, who did go up and down the scaffblde, making a hevie complainte that he was hereyet, throw the courtiers taking his fewe in one place, and his tackes in another; whorthrough he had sceyled his house, his wyfe and childrene beggyng thair brede, and so of many thousands in Scotland; saying thair was no remedy to be gotten, as he was neither acquainted with controller nor treasurer. And then he looked to the king, and said he was nòt king in Scotland, for there was ane other king in Scotland that hanged Johne Armstrang, with his fellowes, Sym the Laird, and mony other mae; but he had lefte ane thing undone. Then he made a long narracione of the oppression of the poor, by the taking of the corse-presaunte beists, and of the berrying of poor men by the consistorye lawe, and of many other abusions of the Spi-ritualitie and Church. Then the Busiiop raise and rebuked him. Then the Man of Armes alledged the contraire, and commanded the poor man to go on. The poor man proceeds with a long list of the bishop’s evil practices, the vices of cloisters, &c. This is proved by Experience, who, from a New Testament, shows the office of a bushop. The Man of Armes and the Burges approve of all that was said against the clergy, and alledge the expediency of a reform, with the consent of parliament. The Busiiop dissents. The Man of Armes and the Burges said they were two, and he but one, wherefore their voice should have most effect. 'Thereafter the king, in the play, ratified, approved, and confirmed all that was rehersed.”

The other nations of Europe, as well as England, had their mysteries and moralities. In France, Boileau, following Menestrier, imputes the introduction of these spectacles to travelling bands of pilgrims.

Chez nos dévots ayeux, le théâtre abhorre'

Fut long-temps dans la France un plaisir ignoré;

Des pèlerins dit-on, one troupe grossière En public à Paris y monta la première; Et sottement zélée en sa simplicité Joua les saints, la Vierge, et Dieu par piété.

L'Aïl Poétique, chant, iii.
[7:8:155]

In Spain the Autos Sacramentales, which are analogous to the mysteries of the middle ages, are still presented without shocking a nation whose zeal is stronger than their taste; and, it is believed, such rude and wild plays, founded on scripture, are also occasionally acted in Flanders. In the History of the Council of Constance, we find that mysteries were introduced into Germany by the English, about 1417, and were first performed to welcome the Emperor Sigismund, on his return from England; and, from the choice of the subjects, we should almost suppose that they had transferred to that country the Chester Mysteries themselves. “Les Anglois,” says the historian, “se signalé ent entre les autres par un spectacle nouveau, ou au moins inusité jusques alors en Allemagne. Ce fut one comédie sacrée, que les eveques Anglois firent représenter devant l’empéreur, le Dimanche 31 de Janvier, sur la Naissance du Sauveur, sur l’Arrivée des Mages, et sur la Massacre des Innocens.” (Hist. du Concile de Constance, par L’Enfant, lib. v.) The character of these rude dramatic essays renders them rather subjects for the antiquary than a part of a history of the regular dramatic art.

We may also pass over, with brief notice, the Latin plays which, upon the revival of letters, many of the learned composed in express imitation of the ancient Grecian and Latin productions. We have mentioned those of Mussato, who was followed by the more celebrated Ca-raro, in the path which he had opened to fame. In other countries the same example was followed. These learned prolusions, however, were only addressed to persons of letters, then a very circumscribed circle, and, when acted at all, were presented at universities or courts on solemn public occasions. They form no step in the history of the drama, unless that, by familiarizing the learned with the form and rules of the ancient classical drama, they gradually paved the way for the adoption of the same regulations into the revived vernacular drama, and formed a division amongst the theatres of modern Europe, which has never yet been reconciled.

While the learned laboured to revive the classical drama in all its purity, the public at large, to which the treasures of the learned languages were as a fountain sealed, became addicted to a species of representation which properly neither fell under the denomination of comedy or tragedy, but was named History or Historical Drama. Charles Verardo, who, about 1492, composed a drama of this sort, in Latin, upon the expulsion of the Moors from Granada, claims, for this production, a total emancipation from the rules of dramatic criticism.

Requirat autem nullus hic comoediae, Leges ut observantur, aut tragediae; Agenda nempe est liistoria non fabula.

“Let none expect that in this piece the rules of comedy or of tragedy should be observed; we mean to act a history, not a fable.” From this expression it would seem that, in a historical drama, the author did not think himself entitled to compress or alter the incidents as when the plot was fabulous, but was bound, to a certain extent, to conform to the actual course of events. In these histories, the poet embraced often the life and death of a monarch, or some other period of history, containing several years of actual time, which, nevertheless, were made to pass before the eyes of the audience during the two or three hours usually allotted for the action of a play. It is not to be supposed that, with so fair a field open before them, and the applause of the audience for their reward, the authors of these histories should long have confined themselves to the matter of fact contained in records. They speedily innovated or added to their dramatic chronicles without regard to the real history. To those who plead for stage plays, that they elucidate and explain many dark and obscure histories, and fix the facts firmly in the minds of the audience, of which they had otherwise but an imperfect apprehension, the stern Prynne replies with great scorn, “that play-poets do not explain, but sophisticate and deform, good histories, with many false varnishes and playhouse fooleries;” and that “the histories are more accurately to be learned in the original authors who record them, than in derivative playhouse pamphlets, which corrupt them.” (Prynne’s Histrio-Mas-tix, p. 940.)

The dramatic chronicles, therefore, were a field in which the genius of the poet laboured to supply, by character, sentiment, and incident, the meagre detail of the historian. They became so popular in England, that, during the short interval betwixt the revival of the stage and the appearance of Shakspeare, the most part of the English monarchs had lived and died upon the stage; and it is well known that almost all his historical plays were new written by him, upon the plan of old dramatic chronicles which already existed.

But the miscellaneous audience which crowded to the vernacular theatre at its revival in Europe, were of that rank and intellect which is apt to become tired of a serious subject, and to demand that a lamentable tragedy should be intermingled with very pleasant mirth. The poets, obliged to eater for all tastes, seldom failed to insert the humours of some comic character, that the low or grotesque scenes in which he was engaged might serve as a relief to the graver passages of the drama, and gratify the taste of those spectators who, like Christofero Sly, tired until the fool came on the stage again. Hence Sir Philip Sidney’s censure on these dramatists, “how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings with clowns; not because the matter so carrieth it, but to thrust in the clown, by head and shoulders, to play a part in magestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion, so that neither the admiration and commisération, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy attained.” (Defence of Poesie. Sidney’s Arcadia, edit. 1627, p. 563.) “If we mark them well,” he concludes, “funerals and hornpipes seldom match daintily together.”

The historical plays led naturally into another class, which may be called Romantic Dramas, founded upon popular poems or fictitious narratives, as the former were on real history. Some of these were borrowed from foreign nations, ready dramatized to the hand of the borrower; others were founded on the plots which occurred in the almost innumerable novels and romances which we had made our own by translation. “I may boldly say it,” says Gosson, a recreant play-wright, who attacked his former profession, “because 1 have seen it, that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Asse, the Ethiopian History, Amadis of Eraunce, the Round Table, Eawdie Comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouse in London.” But it was not to be supposed that the authors would confine themselves to stricter rules in pieces founded upon Italian and Spanish novels, or upon romances of chivalry, than they had acted upon in the histories. Every circumstance which tended to loosen the reins of theatrical discipline in the one case, existed in the other; and, accordingly, comedics of intrigue, and tragedies of action and show, everywhere superseded, at least in popular estimation, the severe and simple model of the classical drama.

It happened that in England and Spain, in particular, the species of composition which was most independent of critical regulation was supported by the most brilliant[7:8:156] display of genius. Lopez de Vega and Calderon rushed on the stage with their hasty and high-coloured,: but glowing productions, fresh from the mint of imagination, and scorning that the cold art of criticism should weigh them in her balance. The taste of the Spaniards has been proverbially inclined to the wild, the romantic, and the chivalrous; and the audience of their bards would not have parted with one striking scene, however inartificially introduced, to have gained for their favourites the praise of Aristotle and all his commentators. Lopez de Vega himself was not ignorant of critical rules; but he pleads the taste of his countrymen as an apology for neglecting those restrictions which he had observed in his earlier studies.

Yet true it is I too have written plays,

The wiser few, who judge with skill, might praise;

But when I see how show and nonsense draws The crowds, and, more than all, the fair’s applause; Who still are forward with indulgent rage To sanction every monster of the stage;

I, doom’d to write the public taste to hit, Resume the barbarous dress , twas vain to quit;

I lock up every rule before I write, Plautus and Terence banish from my sight, Lest rage should teach these injured wits to join, And their dumb books cry shame on works like mine. To vulgar standards, then, I frame my play, Writing at ease, for, since the public pay, ’ Tis just, methinks, we by their compass steer, And write the nonsense that they love to hear.

Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, p. 103.

The Spanish comedies of intrigue also went astray, as far as their romantic tragedies, from the classical path. In fact, these new representations were infinitely more captivating from their vivacity, novelty, and, above all, from their reflecting the actual spirit of the time, and holding the mirror up to nature, than the cold imitations which the learned wrote in emulation of the classic drama. The one class are existing and living pictures of the times in which the authors lived; the others, the cold resurrection of the lifeless corpses which had long slumbered in the tomb of antiquity. The spirit of chivalry, which so long lingered in Spain, breathes through the wild and often extravagant genius of her poets. The hero is brave and loyal, and true to his mistress:

A knight of love who never broke a vow.

Lovers of this description, in whose minds the sexual passion is sublimated into high and romantic feeling, make a noble contrast with the coarse and licentious Greek or Roman, whose passion turns only on the difficulty of purchasing his mistress’s person, but who never conceives the slightest apprehension concerning the state of her affections.

That the crowd might have their loud laugh, a grazioso or clown, usually a servant of the hero, is in the Spanish drama uniformly introduced to make sport. Like Kemp or Tarletun, famous in the clown’s part before the time of Shakspeare, this personage was permitted to fill up his part with extemporary jesting, not only on the performers, but with the audience. This irregularity, with others, seems to have been borrowed by the English stage from that of Spain, and is the license which FIamlet condemns in his instructions to the players: “And let those that be your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered; that’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”

The bald simplicity of the ancient plots was, in like manner, contrasted to disadvantage with the intricacies, involutions, suspense, and bustle of Spanish intrigue upon the stage. Hence the boast of one of their poets, thus translated by Lord Holland:

Invention, interest, sprightly turns in plays, Say what they will, are Spain’s peculiar praise; Her’s are the plots which strict attention seize, Full of intrigue, and yet disclosed with ease. Hence acts and scenes her fertile stage affords, Unknown, unrivall’d, on the foreign boards.

Life of Lope de Vega, p. 10G.

While we admire the richness of fancy displayed in the Spanish pieces, it is impossible, in an age of refinement, to avoid being shocked by their wilful and extravagant neglect of every thing which can add probability to the action of their drama. But the apology for this license is well pleaded by Lord Holland.

“Without dwelling on the expulsion of the chorus (a most unnatural and inconvenient machine), the modems, by admitting a complication of plot, have introduced a greater variety of incidents and character. The province of invention is enlarged; new passions, or at least new forms of the same passions, are brought within the scope of dramatic poetry. Fresh sources of interest are opened, and additional powers of imagination called into activity. Can we then deny what extends its jurisdiction, and enhances its interest, to be an improvement in an art whose professed object is to stir the passions by the imitation of human actions? In saying this I do not mean to justify the breach of decorum, the neglect of probability, the anachronisms, and other extravagancies of the founders of the modern theatre. Because the first disciples of the school were not models of perfection, it does not follow that the fundamental maxims were defective. The rudeness of their workmanship is no proof of the inferiority of the material; nor does the want of skill deprive them of the merit of having discovered the mine. The faults objected to them form no necessary part of the system they introduced. Their followers in every country have either completely corrected or gradually reformed such abuses. Those who bow not implicitly to the authority of Aristotle, yet avoid such violent outrages as are common in our early plays. And those who pique themselves on the strict observance of his laws, betray, in the conduct, the sentiments, the characters, and the dialogue of their pieces (especially of their comedies), more resemblance to the modern than the ancient theatre; their code may be Grecian, but their manners, in spite of themselves, are Spanish, English, or French. They may renounce their pedigree, and even change their dress, but they cannot divest their features of a certain family-likeness to their poetical progenitors.”

In France the irregularities of the revived drama were of a lower complexion; for, until her stage was refined by Corneille, and brought under its present strict regime, it was adorned by but little talent; a circumstance which, amongst others, may account for the ease with which she subjected herself to critical rules, and assumed the yoke of Aristotle. Until she assumed the Grecian forms and restrictions, there is but little interesting in the history of her stage.

England adopted the historical and romantic drama with ardour, and in a state scarce more limited by rules than that of Spain herself. Her writers seem early to have ransacked Spanish literature; for the union of the countries during the short reign of Mary, nay even their wars under Elizabeth and Philip, made them acquainted with each other. The Spaniards had the start in the revival of the drama. Ferrex and Perrex, our earliest tragedy, was first presented in 1561; and Gammer Gurion's [7:8:157]Needle, our first comedy, in 1575; whereas Lopez de Vega, who was not by any means the earliest Spanish dramatist, died in 1562, leaving the stage stocked with his innumerable productions, to which his contemporaries had not failed to add their share. Thus, as soon as the stage of Britain was so far advanced as to be in a capacity of borrowing, that of Spain offered a fund to which her authors could have recourse; and, in fact, the Spanish drama continued to be a mine in which the British poets collected materials, often without acknowledgment, during all the earlier part of her dramatic history. From this source, as well as from the partialities of the audience, arose that early attempt at show and spectacle, at combats and marvellous incidents, which, though with very poor means of representation, our early dramatic poets loved to produce at the Bull or the Fortune playhouses. The extravagance of their plots, and the poor efforts by which our early dramatists endeavoured to represent show and procession, did not escape the censure of Sir Philip Sidney, who, leaning to the critical reformation which was already taking place in Italy, would gladly have seen our stage reduced to a more classical model.

“It is faultie,” says that gallant knight, “both in place and time, the two necessarie companions of all cor-porall actions. For the stage should alway present but one place; and the uttermost time presupposed in it should bee, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day; there are both many dayes and many places inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduhe, how much more in all the rest? where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affriche of the other, and so many other under kingdomes, that the plair, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where bee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall you have three ladies walke to gather flowers, and then wee must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by wee heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, then wee are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke. Upon the backe of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders arc bound to take it for a cave; while, in the mean time, two armies flie in, represented with some swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? Now of time they are much more überall; for ordinarie it is, that two young princes fall in love. After many traverses shee is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is readie to get another childe, and all this in two houres space; which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified, and at this day the ordinary players in Italy will not err in.”

Italy, referred to by Sir Philip Sidney as the cradle of the reformed drama, had had her own age of liberty and confusion; her mysteries, her moralities, her historical and her romantic dramas. But the taste for the ancient and classical stage was still rooted in the country where it had flourished, and Trissino is acknowledged as the father of the regular drama. The Sophonisba of this learned prelate is praised by Voltaire as the first regular tragedy which Europe had seen after so many ages of barbarism. Pope has added his tribute.

When learning, after the long Gothic night,

Fair o’er the western world renewed its light,

With arts arising, Sophonisba rose,

The tragic muse returning wept her w oes;

With her the Italian scene first learned to glow,

And the first tears for her were taught to flow.

This tragedy was represented at Rome in the year 1515. The Greek model is severely observed, and the author has encumbered his scene with a chorus. It has some poetic beauties, and is well calculated to recommend the new or rather revived system on which it was written. Lα Posmonda of Rucelleri was written about the same time with Sophonisba; and, after these pieces, tragi-comédies, histories, and romantic dramas, were discarded, and succeeded by tragedies upon a regular classical model; written in verse, having five acts, and generally a chorus.

Notwithstanding their rigorous attention to the ancient model, the modern tragic poets of Italy have not been very successful in arresting the attention of their countrymen. They are praised rather than followed; and the stern, unbending composition of Alfieri, while it has given a tone of rude and stoical dignity to his dramas, has failed in rendering them attractive. They frequently please in the closet; but the audience of modern days requires to be kept awake by something more active, more bustling, more deeply interesting, than the lessons of the schools; and a poet of high fancy has written in some measure in vain, because he has mistaken the spirit of his age. The tragic actors, also, whatever excellence they may attain to in their art, do not attract the same consideration, attention, and respect, as in France or England; and they who are the direct authors of a pleasure so nearly connected with our noblest and best feelings, occupy a rank subordinate to the performers at the opera.

It is only as a modification of the drama that we here propose to touch upon that entertainment of Italian growth, but known by importation in every civilized kingdom of Europe. These kingdoms have often rivalled each other in the rewards held forth to musical performers, and encouraged their merit by a degree of profusion, which has had the effect of rendering the professors petulant, capricious, and unmanageable. Their high emoluments are not granted, or their caprices submitted to, without a degree of pleasure in some degree corresponding to the expense and the sufferance; and it is in vain for the admirers of the legitimate drama to pretend that such is not obtained. Voltaire has with more justice confessed, that probably the best imitation of the ancient stage was to be found in the Italian tragic opera. The recitative resembled the musical declamation of the Athenians, and the choruses, which are frequently introduced, when properly combined with the subject, approach to those of the Greeks, as forming a contrast, by the airs which they execute, to the recitative, or modulated dialogue of the scene. Voltaire instances the tragic operas of Metastasio in particular, as approaching in beauty of diction, and truth of sentiment, near to the ancient simplicity; and finds an apology even for the detached airs, so fatal to probability, in the beauty of the poetry and the perfection of the music. And although, as a critic and man of cultivated taste, this author prefers the regular, noble, and severe beauties of the classic stage, to the effeminate and meretricious charms of the opera, still he concludes that, with all its defects, the SGrt of enchantment which results from the brilliant intermixture of scenery, chorus, dancing, music, dress, and decoration, subjects even the genius of criticism; and that the most sublime tragedy, and most artful comedy, will not be so frequently revisited by the same individual as an indifferent opera. We may add the experience of London to the testimony of this great critic; and, indeed, were it possible that actors could frequently be procured, possessed of the powers of action and of voice which were united in Grassini, it would be impossible to deny to the opera the praise of being an amusement as exquisite in point of taste as fascinating from show and music. But as the musical parts of the entertainment are predominant, every thing else has been too often sacrificed to the caprice of a composer, wholly ignorant[7:8:158] in every art save his own; and the mean and paltry dialogue, which is used as a vehicle for the music, is be* come proverbial to express nonsense and inanity.

The Italian comedy, as well as their tragedy, boasts its regular descent from classical times. Like the comedy of Menander, it introduces dramatis personoe whose characters are never varied, and some of whom are supposed to be directly descended from the ancient Mimi of the Atellan Fables. Such an origin is claimed for the celebrated Harlequin, and for the no less renowned Punei-nello, our English Punch, both of whom retain the character of jesters, cowards, wags, and buffoons, proper to the Samnio of the Romans. It is believed of these worthies that they existed before the time of Plautus, and continued to play their frolies during the middle ages, when the’ legitimate drama was'unknown. For the former fact, sculpture, as well as tradition, is appealed to by Italian antiquaries, who have discovered the representation of these grotesque characters upon the Etruscan vases. In support of the latter averment, the grave authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas is appealed to, who, we rejoice to find,thought Harlequin “and Punch no unlawful company in fitting''time ano place. “ Ludps," says that eminent person, with more consideration fol· human infirmity than some saints of our own d<(y, “est necessarius ad conversationem vitee humanoe : ad omnia autem quoe sunt utilia conversationi humanoe, deputari possunt aliqiM officia licita: et ideo eticim officium histrionum quod ordinatur αd solatium hominibus exhibendum, non est secundum se illicitum, nec sunt histriones in statu peccati, dummodo moderate ludo utantur; id est, non utendo aliquibus illicitis verbis vel factis, ad ludum, et non adhibendo ludum negotiis et temporibus indebitis, unde illi qui moderate eis subveniunt, non peccant, sed juste faciunt mereedem ministerii eorum eis tribuendo. Et licet D. August, super Joan, dicit quod donare res suas histrionibus, vitium est immane, hoc intelligi debet de illis qui dant histrionibus qui in ludo utuntur illicitis, vel de illis qui superflue sua in tales consumunt, non de illis histrionibus qui moderate ludo utuntur''

Saint Anthony gives his sanction to Saint Thomas on this point: “Histrionatus arsqιιiα desenit humanoe recreationi quoe necessarìa est vitoe hominis secundum D. Thomam, de se non est illicita et de illa arte vivere non est prohibitum! (S. Antonius in 3 part. Suoe Summoe, tit. iii. cap. 4.) Saint Anthony, indeed, adds the reasonable restriction, that no clergyman should play Harlequin, and that Punch should not exhibit in the church.

Under this venerable authority these Mimi went on and flourished. Other characters enlarged their little drama. The personages appeared in masks. “Each of these,” says Mr Walker, “was originally intended as a kind of characteristic representation of some particular Italian district or town. Thus Pantalone was a Venetian merebant; Dottore, a Bolognese physician; Spatiento, a Neapolitan braggadocio; Pullicinella, a wag of Apulia; Giangurgolo and Coviello, two clowns of Calabria; Gelsomino, a Roman beau; Beltrame, a Milanese simpleton; Erigĭiella, a Fe-rarese pimp; and Arleechino, a blundering servant of Bergamo. Each of these personages was clad in a peculiar dress, each had bis peculiar mask, and each spoke the dialect of the place he represented. Besides these, and a few other such personages, of which at least four were introduced in each play, there were the Amorosos or In-namoratos ; that is, some men and women who aeted serious parts, with Smeraldina, Colorabina, Spilletta, and other females, who played the parts of servettas or waiting-maids. All these spoke Tuscan or Roman, and wore no masks.” (Essay on the Revival of the Drama in Italy, p. 249.)

The pieces acted by this class of actors were called Commedia deli arte, and were congenial to the taste of the Italians, with whom gesticulation and buffoonery are natural attributes. Their drama was of the most simple kind. Each of the actors was already possessed of his dramatic character, which was as inalienable as his dress, and was master of the dialect he was to use, and had his imagination and memory stored with all the characteristic jests, or lazzi as they were termed, peculiar to the personage he represented. All that the author had to do was to invent the skeleton of a plot which should bring his characters into dramatic situation with respect to each other. The dialogue suited to the occasion was invented by the players, just as ours invest their parts with the proper gestures and actions. This skeleton had the name of scenario) and was filled up by the performers, either impromptu or in consequence of previous arrangement and premeditation. This species of comedy was extremely popular, especially among the lower class of spectators. It was often adopted as an amusement in good society, and by men of genius; and FIamineo de la Scala has left about fifty such scenarios adapted for representation. The fashion even found its way into England, and probably the partof Mastćr Punch, who first appeared in the character of the Vice of the English morality, was trusted to the improvisatory talents of the actor. Mr d’Israeli, a curious as well as elegant investigator of ancient literature, has shown that at least one scheme of a Commedia dell' arte has been preserved to us. It is published in the Variorum edition of Shakspeare, but remains unexplained by the commentators. Such comedies, it is evident, could require no higher merit in the composer than the imagining and sketching a few comic situations; the dialogue and diction was all entrusted to the players.

The Italians, however, became early possessed of a regular comedy, which engrossed the admiration of the more cultivated classes of society. Bibbiena’s comedy, entitled La Calandra, is composed in imitation of Terence and Plautus. It was first acted in 1490. La Calandra is remarkable, not only for being the first Italian comedy, but also for the perfection of scenic decoration with which it was accompanied in the representation. It was followed by the productions of Ariosto and Trissino, and other authors in the same line. But it appears, from the efforts used to support this style of drama, that it did not take kindly root in the soil, and lacked that popularity which alone can nurse it freely. Various societies were formed under the whimsical titles of Gli Intronati, Gli Insensati, and so forth, for the express purpose of bringing forward the regular drama; exertions which would certainly have been unnecessary had it received that support and encouragement which arises from general popularity.

Goldoni, in a later age, at once indulged his own fanciful genius and his natural indolence, by renouncing the classical rules, and endeavouring to throw into the old and native Italian Maseherata the variety and attributes of the proper comedy. He adopted Harlequin and the rest of his merry troop in the characters which they held, and endeavoured to , enlist them in the more regular service of the drama, just as free corps and partizans are sometimes new-modelled into battalions of the line. This ingenious and lively writer retained all the license of the Commedia dell' arte, and all the immunities which it claimed from regular and classical rules; but instead of trusting to the extempore jests and grotesque wit of the persons whom he introduced, he engaged them in dialogues, as well as plots, of his own invention, which often display much humour and even pathos. It required, however, the richness of a fancy like Goldoni’s to extract novelty and interest from a dramatic system in which so many of the actors held a fixed and prescriptive character, hardly [7:8:159]admitting of being varied. Accordingly, we do not find that the Italian stage is at present in a more flourishing condition than that of other modern nations.

The revival of the regular drama in France was attended with important consequences, owing to the nature of her government, the general usc of her language throughout Europe, and the influence which, from her situation, she must necessarily hold over other nations. It is the boast of Paris that the regular classical drama, banished from every other stage, found a safe and honourable refuge on her own. Yet France has reluctantly confessed that she also had her hour of barbarism. Her earlier drama was borrowed, like that of other countries, from Spain, who, during the whole of the sixteenth and great part of the seventeenth century, held such a formidable predominance in the European republic. While the classical stage was reviving in Italy, and the historical and romantic drama was flourishing in Spain, France was torn to pieces by civil discord. The first French tragedy composed upon a regular plan was that of Mairet, imitated from the Sophonisba of Trissino; and Riccoboni boasts with justice, that whoever shall compare the Italian tragedy of the sixteenth century with that of the French of the same period, will find the latter extravagant and irregular, and the former already possessed of gravity, dignity, and regularity. The French, like the English, date the excellence of their stage from one great author; and the illustrious name of Pierre Corneille affords to their dramatic history the mighty landmark which Shakspeare gives to our own.

Cardinal Richelieu, who had succeeded in establishing upon a broad basis the absolute power of the French monarch, was not insensible to the graces and ornaments which the throne derived from being surrounded by the muses. He was himself fond of poetry, and even a competitor for the honours of the buskin. He placed himself at the head of five dramatic writers, to whom on that account the public gave the title of Les Cinq Auteurs. All these are deservedly forgotten excepting Corneille, of whose successful talent the cardinal had the meanness to evince no ordinary degree of jealousy. The malevolence of that minister was carried so far that he employed the French Academy, whose complaisance must be recorded to their shame, to criticise severely the Cid, the first, and perhaps the finest, of Corneille’s tragedies. Scudery, a favourite of the cardinal, buoyed by Richelieu’s favour, was able for some time to balance Corneille in the opinion of the public; but his name is now scarcely known by any other circumstance than his imprudent and audacious rivalry. This great man was not only surrounded by the worst possible models, but unfortunately the authors of these models were also favourites of the public and of the all-powerful cardinal; yet Corneille vanquished the taste of his age, the competition of his rivals, and the envy of Richelieu.

Corneille, like his predecessors, and like Routrou in particular, borrowed liberally from the Spanish theatre; but bis own taste, regulated probably upon his situation, dictated an adherence to the classical model. The French stage arose, it must be remembered, under the protection of an absolute monarch, for whose amusement the poet laboured, and in whose presence the drama was performed. It followed, as a natural consequence, that a more strict etiquette was exacted upon the scene than had hitherto been supposed applicable to a merely popular amusement. A departure from regularity in tragedy was no longer a bold flight. A violation of decorum in comedy was no longer a broad jest. When the audience was dignified by the presence of the monarch, the former became an impertinence, and the latter a gross and indecent insult. The muse of comedy was therefore bound over for her good behaviour; and even her grave sister was laid under such rules and restrictions as should insure the decorum and dignity of her scene.

It was at this period that those classical fetters which are framed on the three unities were fashioned into form, and imposed on the French drama. These are acknowledged by Corneille, in his Essay upon Dramatic Poetry, in the following short but emphatic sentence: “ Il faut observer les unites d’action, de lieu, et de jour ; personne n ’ en doute! The rule, as thus emphatically admitted by r the fiery Corneille, was equally binding upon the elegant Racine, and has fettered the French stage until the present day. “La Motte,” says Voltaire, “a man of wit and talent, but attached to paradoxes, has written in our time against the doctrine of the unities; but that literary heresy had no success.”

Upon these rules, adopted by the very first writer of eminence for the French stage, and subscribed to by all succeeding dramatists, depends the principal and long-disputed difference betwixt the drama of France and those countries in which her laws of taste have been received, and the stages of Spain, England, and modern Germany, where those critical maxims have been controverted. In other words, the unities proper to the classical drama have been found inapplicable to plays of a historical or romantic plan. It is therefore necessary to examine with accuracy the essence and effect of those laws so often disputed with more obstinacy than liberality.

The arbitrary forms to which the French thus subjected their theatre are, in their general purport, founded on good and sound rules of the critical art. But, considered ju-daically and literally, the interpretation put upon those unities by the French critics must necessarily lay the dramatic author under restraints equally severe and unnecessary, without affording any corresponding addition to the value of his work. The pedantry by which they are enforced reminds one of the extreme, minute, rigorous, and punctilious discipline to which some regiments have been subjected by a pedantic commanding officer, which seldom fails to lower the spirit and destroy the temper of the soldier, without being of the slightest service to him in the moment of danger or the day of battle.

The first dramatic unity is that of action, and, rightly understood, it is by far the most important. A whole, says Aristotle, is that which has a beginning, middle, and end. In short, one strong concentrated interest, upon which all subordinate incidents depend, and to which they contribute, must pervade the piece. It must open with the commencement of the play, evolve itself, and be progressive with its progress—must be perpetually in sight, and never stationary, until at length it arrives at a catastrophe, by which it is ended and extinguished. In this rule, abstractedly considered, there is nothing but what is consistent with good sense and sound criticism. The period allowed for dramatic representation is not long, and will not admit of the episodical ornaments which may be happily introduced into epic poetry. And as the restlessness or impatience of a theatrical audience is always one of its marked characteristics, it has been observed, that neither the most animated description, nor the most beautiful poetry, can ever reconcile the spectators to those inartificial scenes in which the plot or action of the piece stands still that the performers may say fine things. The introduction of an interest, separate and distinct from the main action of the play, has a still worse effect; it diminishes the effect of the whole, and divides the attention of the audience; as a pack of hounds, when in full pursuit, are impeded and puzzled by starting a fresh object of chase.
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Yet even this rule must be liberally considered if we would allow dramatic authors that fair room and exercise for their genius, which gives rise to the noblest displays of genius in the art. Modern dramatists are no longer, it must be remembered, limited to the simple and surer uniformity of the ancient drama, which fixed on one single event as its object, made it the subject of the moral reflections of the chorus, managed it by the intervention of three or at most five persons, and consequently presented a picture so limited in size and subject that there was no difficulty in avoiding the intermixture of a foreign interest. The modern taste has opened the stage to a wider range of topics, which are at the same time more complicated in detail, depending on the agency of a variety of performers, and on the result of a succession of events. Such dramas have indeed an unity of action peculiar to themselves, which should predominate over and absorb every other. But although, like the oak, it should predominate over all the neighbouring underwood, its dignity is not injured by the presence and vicinity of that which it overshadows. On the contrary, a succession of events tending to the same end, if they do not divert the attention from the principal interest, cannot fail, by their variety and succession, to keep it fixed upon the business of the scene.

To take an example. In the tragedy of Macbeth a chain of varied and important events are introduced, any one link of which might be hammered out into a drama on the severe and simple model of the drama of ancient Greece. There is the murder of Duncan, that of Banquo, and the dethronement and death of the tyrant; all which are events complete of themselves, independent of each other, and yet included within one tragedy of five acts. But, nevertheless, this is never felt as a deficiency in the performance. It is to the character of Macbeth, to his ambition, guilt, remorse, and final punishment, that the mind attaches itself during the whole play; and thus the succession of various incidents, unconnected excepting by the relation they bear to the principal personage, far from distracting the attention of the audience, continues to sharpen and irritate curiosity till the curtain drops over the fallen tyrant. This is not, indeed, an unity of action according to the rule of Aristotle, or the observance of the French theatre. But, in a lighter point of view, it has all the advantage which could possibly be derived from the severest adherence to the precept of Aristotle, with this additional merit, that the interest never stagnates in declamation, or is suspended by unnecessary dialogue.

It would in fact be easy to show that the unity of action, in its strict sense, may frequently be an unnatural as well as a cumbrous restraint on the genius of the poet. In the course of nature, an insulated action seldom exists of a nature proper to transfer to the stage. If, indeed, the play is founded on some single mythological fable, or if the scene is laid in some early stage of society, when man as yet remained separated from his kind, and connected only with his petty tribe or family, the subject of a plot may be chosen where the agency of a very few persons, and these naturally connected together, may, without foreign or extraneous assistance, afford matter for a tragedy. But in the actual course of the peopled world, men are so crowded together, and their movements depend so much upon impulses foreign to themselves, that the action must often appear multiplied and complicated, and all that the author can do is to preserve the interest uniform and undivided. Its progress may be likened to that of a brook through beautiful scenery. A judicious improver of the landscape would be certainly desirous to make its course visible, but not to cut off its beautiful undulations, or to compel it into a straight channel. He would follow the course of nature, and neither affect to conceal the smaller rills by which the stream was fed, nor bring them so much in view as to deprive the principal object of its consequence. We admit the difficulty inseparable from the dramatic art, and must grant that the author runs some risk of losing sight of the main interest of the piece, by dwelling upon the subordinate accessories; but we contend that the attention of the audience is still more likely to be fatigued by a bald and simple plot, to which, during the course of five acts, there must belong much speaking and little progress. And, in point of common sense and common feeling, that piece must always present unity of action which has unity of interest and feeling; which fixes the mind of the audience upon one train of thought and passion, to which every occurrence in the drama verges; and which is consummated and wound up by the final catastrophe.

The second dramatic unity is that of time, about which the critics of various nations have disagreed. If taken in its strict and proper sense, it means that the time supposed to be consumed in the action represented, should not exceed that which is occupied by the actual representation. But even Aristotle extends the duration of the action to one revolution of the sun, and Corneille extends it to thirty hours, which is to the actual period of representation as ten to one. Boileau, a supereminent authority, thus lays down the rule for the unities of time and place:

Que le lieu de la scène y soit fixe 7 & marqué.

Un Rimeur, sans péril, delà les Pirenées, Sur la scène en un jour renferme des années. Là souvent le Héros d’un spectacle grossier, Enfant au premier acte, est Barbon au dernier, Mais nous, que la liaison à se règles engage, Nous voulons qu’avec art l’action se ménage: Qu’en un lieu, qu’en un jour, un seul fait accompli Tienne jusqu’à la fin le Théâtre rempli.

It has been triumphantly remarked, that in thus yielding up the strict letter of the precept, in allowing the three hours employed in acting a play to be multiplied into twenty-four or thirty, the critics have retained nearly all the inconvenience of this famous rule, while they sacrificed its principle, and any advantage attached to its observance. The only benefit supposed to be attached to this unity is that of probability. We shall not at present inquire whether this is worth preserving at the cost of imposing heavy restrictions on dramatic genius. But granting the affirmative, probability is as much violated by squeezing the events of twenty-four hours into a period of only three, as if the author had exercised the still greater license of the English and Spanish theatres. There is no charm in the revolution of the sun, which circumscribes within that particular period the events of a drama. When the magic circle drawn around the author by the actual date of representation is once obliterated, the argument grounded upon probability falls; and he may extend his narrative unconfined by any rule, except what may be considered as resolving itself into the unity of action. A week, a month, a year, years may be included in the course of the drama, provided always the poet has power so to rivet the attention of the audience on the passing scene, that the lapse of time shall pass unregarded. There must be none of those marked pauses which force upon the spectators’ attention the breach of this unity. Still less ought the judicious dramatist to permit his piece to embrace such a space of time as shall necessarily produce the change on the persons of the characters ridiculed by Boileau. The extravagant conduct of the plot in the Winter’s Tale has gone far to depreciate that drama, [7:8:161]which, in passages of detached beauty, is inferior to none of Shakspeare’s, in the opinion of the best judges. It might perhaps be improved in acting, by performing the three first acts as a play, and the fourth and fifth as an afterpiece. Yet, even as it is now acted, who is it that, notwithstanding the cold objection arising out of the breach of unity, witnesses without delight the exquisite contrast betwixt the court and the hamlet, the fascinating and simple elegance of Perdita, or the witty rogueries of Autolycus? The poet is too powerful for the critic, and we lose the exercise of our judgment in the warmth of our admiration.

The faults of Shakspeare or of his age we do not, however, recommend to the modern dramatist, whose modesty will certainly place him in his own estimation far beneath that powerful magician whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself. But if for his own sake the author ought to avoid such gross violations of dramatic rule, the public, for theirs, ought not to tie him down to such severe limitations as must cramp, at least, if they do not destroy, his power of affording them pleasure. If the whole five acts are to be compressed within the space of twenty-four hours, the events must, in the general case, be either so much crowded upon each other as to destroy the very probability which it is the purpose of this law to preserve; or many of them being supposed to have happened before the commencement of the piece, must be detailed in narrative, which never fails to have a bad effect on the stage.

The same objections apply to the rigid enforcement of the third unity, that of place; and indeed the French authors have used respecting it the license of relaxing, in practice, the severity of their theory. They have frequently infringed the rule which they affirm to be inviolable; and their flexible creed permits the place to be changed, provided the audience are not transported out of the city where the scene is laid. This mitigation of doctrine, like that granted in the unity of time, is a virtual resignation of the principle contended for. Let us examine, however, upon what that principle is founded.

The rule which prohibits the shifting the scene during the period of performance, was borrowed by the French from the ancients, without considering the peculiar circumstances in which it arose. First, we have seen already, that during the ancient drama, there was no division into acts, and that the action was only suspended during the songs of the chorus, who themselves represented a certain class of personages connected with the scene. The stage, therefore, was always filled; and a supposed change of place would have implied the violent improbability that the whole chorus were transported, while in the sight of the spectators, and employed in the discharge of their parts, to the new scene of action. Secondly, there is evidence that in the Euménides of Aeschylus, and the Ajax of Sophocles, the scene is actually changed, in defiance of the presence of the chorus; and a much greater violation of probability is incurred than could have taken place in a modern theatre, where, before every change of scene, the stage is emptied of the performers. Thirdly, the ancients were less hardly pressed by this rule than the modern writers. From the extent of their theatres and the size of their stages, the place of action was considerably larger, and might be held to include a wider extent, than ours. The climate of Greece admitted of many things being transacted with' propriety in the open air; and, finally, they had a contrivance for displaying the interior of a house or temple to the audience, which, if not an actual change of scene, was adapted to the same purpose.

If this long litigated question, therefore, is to be disposed of by precedent, we have shown that the rule of the ancients was neither absolute, nor did the circumstances of their stage correspond with those of ours; to which it may be added, that the simple and inartificial structure of their plots seldom required a change of scene. But surely it is of less consequence to examine the practice of the ancients, than to consider how far it is founded upon truth, good taste, and general effect. Granting, therefore, that the supposed illusion, which transports the spectator to the actual scene of action, really exists, let us inquire whether, in sacrificing the privilege of an occasional change of scene, we do not run the risk of shocking the spectator, and disturbing his delightful dreams, by other absurdities and improbabilities, attendant necessarily on a scrupulous adherence to this restriction.

If the action is always to pass in the scene, some place of general resort must be adopted, a hall, anti-room, or the like. It can seldom be so fortunately selected but that much must be necessarily discussed there, which, in order to preserve any appearance of probability, should be transacted elsewhere; that many persons must be introduced whose presence must appear unnatural; and that much must be done there which the very circumstances of the piece render totally absurd. Dennis has applied these observations with great force, and at the same time with great bitterness, in his critique upon Cato, which Johnson has quoted at length in his Life of Addison. The scene, it must be remembered, is laid, during the whole drama, with scrupulous attention to the classical rule, in the great hall of Cato’s palace at Utica. Here the conspirators lay their plots, the lovers carry on their intrigues; and yet Sempronius, with great inconsistency, disguises himself as Juba to obtain entrance into this vestibule, which was common to all. Here Cato retires to moralize, and chides his son for interrupting him; and although he retires to stab himself, it is to this place that he is brought back to die. All this affords a striking proof how genius and taste can be fettered and embarrassed by a too pedantic observance of rules. Let no one suppose that the inconveniences arising from the rigid observance of the unity of place, occur in the tragedy of Cato alone; they might in that case be attributed to the inexperience or want of skill in the author. The tragedies of Corneille and Racine afford examples enough that the authors found themselves compelled to violate the rules of probability and common sense, in order to adhere to those of Aristotle. In the tragedy of Cinna, for example, the scene is laid in the emperor’s cabinet; and in that very cabinet, compelled, doubtless, by the laws of unity, Amelia shouts forth aloud her resolution to assassinate the emperor. It is there too that Maximus and Cinna confide to each other all the secrets of their conspiracy; and it is there where, to render the impropriety more glaring, Cinna suddenly reflects upon the rashness of his own conduct:

Amis, dans ce palais on peut nous écouter;

Et nous parlons peut-être avec trop d’imprudence, Dans un lieu si mal propre à notre confidence.

It would be an invidious, but no difficult task, to show that several of the chefs d’oeuvres of the French drama are liable to similar objections; and that the awkward dilemmas in which the unity of place involves them, is far more likely to destroy the illusion of the performance, than the ’ mere change of scene would have done. But we refer the reader to the Dramaturgic of Lessing upon this curious topic.

The main question yet remains behind, namely, whether such an illusion is actually produced in the minds of the audience by the best-acted play, as induces them to [7:8:162]suppose themselves witnessing a reality ;—an illusion, in short, so complete, as to suffer from the occasional extension of time or change of place in the course of the piece? We do not hesitate to say that no such impression was ever produced on a sane understanding; and that the Parisian critic, in whose presence the unities are never violated, no more mistakes Talma for Nero, than a London citizen identifies Kemble with Coriolanus, or Kean with Richard HI.^[3. See note to page 147- ] The ancients, from the distance of the stage, and their mode of dressing and disguising their characters, might certainly approach a step nearer to reality; and producing on their stage the very images of the deities they worshipped, speaking the language which they accounted proper to them, it is highly probable that, to minds capable of high excitation, there might be a shade of this illusion in their representations. The solemn distance of the stage, the continuous and uninterrupted action, kept the attention of the Greeks at once more closely riveted, and more abstracted from surrounding circumstances. But in the modern theatre, the rapid succession of intervals for reflection, the well-known features of the actors, the language which they speak differing frequently from that which belongs to the age and country where the scene is laid, interrupt at every turn every approximation to the fantastic vision of reality into which those writers who insist upon the strict observance of the unities suppose the audience to be lulled. To use the nervous words of Johnson, “It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible, or for a single moment was ever credited.” There is a conventional treaty between the author and the audience, that upon certain suppositions being granted by the latter, his powers of imagination shall be excrted for the amusement of the spectators. The postulates which are demanded, even upon the French theatre, and under the strictest model, are of no ordinary magnitude. Although the stage is lighted with lamps, the spectator must say with the subjugated Catherine,

I grant it is the sun that shines so bright.

The painted canvass must pass for a landscape; the well-known faces of the performers for those of ancient Greeks, or Romans, or Saracens; and the present time for many ages distant. He that submits to such a convention ought not scrupulously to limit his own enjoyment; that which is supposed Rome in one act, may in the next be fancied Paris; and as for time, it is, to use the words of Dr Johnson, “of all modes of existence, most obsequious to imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation.”

If dramatic representation does not produce the impression of reality, in what, it may be asked, consists its power? We reply, that its effects are produced by the powerful emotions which it excites in the minds of the spectators. The professors of every fine art operate their impressions in the same manner, though they address themselves to different organs. The painter exhibits his scene to the eye, the orator pours his thunder upon the ear, the poet awakens the imagination of his reader by written description; but each has the same motive, the hope, namely, of exciting in the reader, hearer, or spectator, a tone of feeling similar to that which existed in his own bosom, ere it was bodied forth by his pencil, tongue, or pen. It is the artist’s object, in short, to tune the reader’s imagination to the same pitch with his own; and to corn municate, as well as colours and words can do, the same sublime sensations which had dictated his own compositions. The tragedian attempts to attain this object still more forcibly, because his art combines those of the poet, orator, and artist, by storming as it were the imagination at once through the eye and the ear. Undoubtedly a drama with such advantages, and with those of dresses and costume, approaches more nearly to actual reality, and therefore has a better chance of attaining its object, especially when addressing the sluggish and inert fancies of the multitude; although it may remain a doubtful question whether, with all these means and appliances, minds of a high poetic temperature may not receive a more lively impression from the solitary perusal than from the representation of one of Shakspeare’s plays. But, to the most ignorant spectator, however unaccustomed to the trick of the scene, the excitement which his fancy receives falls materially short of actual mental delusion. Even the sapient Partridge himself never thought of being startled at the apparition of the king of Denmark, which he knew to be only a man in a strange dress; it was the terror so admirably expressed by Garrick, which communicated itself to his feelings, and made him reverse the case of the fiends, and tremble without believing. In truth, the effects produced upon this imaginary character, as described by an excellent judge of human nature, exhibit, probably, the highest point of illusion to which theatrical exhibition can conduct a rational being. In an agony of terror which made his knees knock against each other, he never forgets that he is only witnessing a play. The presence of Mrs Millar and his master assures him against the reality of the apparition; yet he is no more able to subdue his terrors by this comfortable reflection, than we have been to check our tears, although well aware that the Belvidera with whose sorrows we sympathized was no other than our own inimitable Mrs Siddons. With all our passions and all our sympathies, we are still conscious of the ideal character of that which excites them; and it is probably this very consciousness of the unreality of scene that refines our sorrows into a melancholy yet delicious emotion, and extracts from it that bitterness necessarily connected with a display of similar misery in actual life.

If, therefore, no illusion subsists of a character to be affected by a change of scene, or by the prolongation of the time beyond tĥe rules of Aristotle, the very foundation of these unities is undermined; but, at the same time, every judicious author will use liberty with prudence.

If we are inclined to ascend to the origin of these celebrated rules, we ought not to be satisfied with the ipse dixit of a Grecian critic, who wrote so many centuries ago, and whose works have reference to a state of dramatic composition which has now no existence. Upon the revival of letters, indeed, the authority of Aristotle was considered as omnipotent; but even Boileau remonstrated against his authority, when weighed with that of reason and common sense.

Un pedant envieux de sa vaine science,

Tout hérissé de Grec, tout bouffi d’arrogance, Et qui de mille auteurs retenus mot pour mot, Dans la teste entassez, n’a souvent fait qu’un sot, Croit qu’un livre fait tout, et que sans Aristote La raison ne voit goutte, et le bon sens radote.

The opinions of Aristotle must be judged of according to the opportunities and authorities which lay open before him; and from the high critical judgment he has displayed, we can scarce err in supposing he would have drawn [7:8:163]different results in different circumstances. Dr Drake, whose industry and taste have concentrated so much curious information respecting Shakspeare and his age, has quoted upon this topic a striking passage from Mr Morgan’s Essay on the Character of Falstaff.

Speaking, says Dr Drake, of the magic influence which our poct almost invariably exerts over his auditors, Mr Morgan remarks, that “on such an occasion, a fellow like Rymer, ^[4. Rymer was a calumniator of Shakspeare. ] waking from his trance, shall lift up his constable’s staff, and charge this great magician, this daring practiser of arts inhibited, in the name of Aristotle to surrender; whilst Aristotle himself, disowning his wretched officer, would fall prostrate at his feet and acknowledge his supremacy. — 0 supreme of dramatic excellence! might he say, not to me be imputed the insolence of fools. The bards of Greece were confined within the narrow circle of the chorus, and hence they found themselves constrained to practise, for the most part, the precision, and copy the details, of nature. I followed them, and knew not that a larger circle might be drawn, and the drama extended to the whole reach of human genius. Convinced, I see that a more compendious nature may be obtained; a nature of effects only, to which neither the relation of places, or continuity of time, are always essential. Nature, condescending to the faculties and apprehensions of man, has drawn through human life a regular chain of visible causes and effects. But poetry delights in surprise, conceals her steps, seizes at once upon the heart, and obtains the sublime of things without betraying the rounds of her ascent. True poetry is magic, not nature; an effect from causes hidden or unknown. To the magician I prescribed no laws; his law and his power are one; his power is his law. If his end is obtained, who shall question his course? Means, whether apparent or hidden, are justified in poesy by success; but then most perfect and most admirable when most concealed.

“Yes, continues Mr Morgan, whatever may be the neglect of some, or the censure of others, there are those who firmly believe that this wild, this uncultivated barbarian, as he has been called, has not yet obtained one half of his fame; and who trust that some new Stagyrite will arise, who, instead of pecking at the surface of things, will enter into the inward soul of his compositions, and expel, by the force of congenial feelings, those foreign impurities which have stained and disgraced his page. And as to those spots which still remain, they may perhaps become invisible to those who shall seek them through the medium of his beauties, instead of looking for those beauties, as is too frequently done, through the smoke of some real or imputed obscurity. When the hand of time shall have brushed off his present editors and commentators, and when the very name of Voltaire, and even the memory of the language in which he has written, shall be no more, the Appalachian Mountains, the banks of the Ohio, and the plains of Sciola, shall resound with the accents of this barbarian. In his native tongue he shall roll the genuine passions of nature; nor shall the griefs of Lear be alleviated, or the charms and wit of Rosalind be abated, by time? ^[5. SkaksĮ/care and. his Times, by Nathan Drake, M.D. p. 553, 554, vol. ii. ]

In adopting the views of those authors who have pleaded for the liberty of the poet, it is not our intention to deny that great advantages may be obtained by the observance of the unities; not considering them as in themselves essential to the play, but only as points upon which the credibility and intelligibility of the action in some sort depends. We acknowledge, for example, that the author would be deficient in dramatic art, who should divide the interest of his piece into two or more separate plots, instead of combining it in one progressive action. We confess, moreover, that the author, who more violently extends the time, or more frequently changes the place of representation, than can be justified by the necessity of the story, and vindicated by his exertion of dramatic force, acts unwisely, in so far as he is likely to embarrass a great part of the audience, who, from imperfect hearing or slowness of comprehension, may find it difficult to apprehend the plot of his play. The latitude which we are disposed to grant is regulated by the circumstances of the case, the interest of the plot, and, above all, the talents of the author. He that despises the praise of regularity which is attainable by study, cannot reckon on the indulgence of the audience, unless on the condition of indemnifying them by force of genius. If a definitive rule were to be adopted, we should say that it would certainly be judicious to place any change of place or extension of time at the beginning of a new act; as the falling of the curtain and cessation of the action has prepared the audience to set off, as it were, upon a new score. But we consider the whole of these points of propriety as secondary to the real purposes of the drama, and not as limitary of that gifted genius who can, in the whirlwind of his scene, bear the imagination of his audience along with him over the boundaries of place;

While panting time toils after them in vain.

It is not upon the observance of the unities alone that the French found their pretensions to a classical theatre. They boast also to have discarded that intermixture of tragic and comic scenes, which was anciently universal upon the Spanish and English stages.

If it had been only understood by this reformation, that the French condemned and renounced that species of tragi-comedy which comprehended two distinct plots, the one of a serious, the other of a humorous character, and these two totally unconnected, we give them full credit for their restriction. Dryden, in the Spanish Friar, and other pieces; and Southern, both in Oronoho and Isabella, as well as many other authors of their age, have in this particular transgressed unpardonably the unity of action. For, in the cases we have quoted, the combination of the two plots is so slight, that the serious and comic scenes separated, might each furnish forth a separate drama; so that the audience appear to be listening, not to one play only, but to two dramatic actions independent of each other, although contained in the same piece. So far, therefore, we heartily agree in the rule which excludes such an unhappy interchange of inconsistent scenes, moving upon opposite principles and interests.

When, however, the French critics carry this rule farther, and proscribe the appearance of comic or inferior characters, however intimately connected with the tragic plot, we would observe, in the first place, that they run the risk of diminishing the reality of the scene; and secondly, that they exclude a class of circumstances essential to its beauty.

On the first point it must be observed, that the rule which imposes upon valets and subordinate personages the necessity of talking as harmonious verse and as elegant poetry as their masters, entirely ruins the probability of the action. Where all is elegant, nothing can be sublime ;, where all is ornamented, nothing can be impressive; where all is tuned to the same smooth falsetto of sentiment, nothing can be natural or real. By such an assimilation of manners and language, we stamp fiction on the very front [7:8:164] of our dramatic representation. The touches of nature which Shakspeare has exhibited in his lower and gayer characters, like the chastened back-ground of a landscape, increase the effect of the principal group. The light and fanciful humour of Mercutio serves, for example, to enhance and illustrate the romantic and passionate character of Romeo. Even the doating fondness and silly peevishness of the nurse tends to relieve the soft and affectionate character of Juliet, and to place her before the audience in a point of view which those who have seen Miss O’Neil perform Juliet know how to appreciate. A contrast is effected which a French author dared not attempt, but of which every bosom at once acknowledges the power and the truth. Let us suppose that the gay and gallant Mercutio had as little character as the walking confident of a French hero, who echoes the hexameters of his friend in hexameters of a lower level; or let us suppose the nurse of Juliet to be a gentle Nora, as sublime in white linen as her principal in white satin; and let the reader judge whether the. piece would gain in dignity any thing proportioned to what it must lose in truth and interest. The audience at once sympathizes with the friendship of Romeo and Mercutio, rendered more natural and more interesting by the very contrast of their characters; and each spectator feels as a passion, not as a matter of reflection, that desire of vengeance which impels Romeo against Tibalt; for we acknowledge as an amiable and interesting individual the friend whom he has lost by the sword of Capulet. Even the anilities of the nurse give a reality to the piece, which, whatever French critics may pretend, is much more seriously disturbed by inconsistency of manners, than by breach of their dramatic unities. “God forbid,” says Mr Puff, in the Critic, “that, in a free country, all the fine words in the language should be engrossed by the higher characters of the piece.” The French critics did not carry their ideas of equality quite so far, but they tuned the notes of their subalterns just one pitch lower than those of their principal characters, so that their language, similar in style, but lower in sentiment and diction, presents still that subordinate resemblance and correspondence to that of their superiors, which the worsted lace upon the livery of a servant bears to the embroidery upon the coat of his master.

It is not to mere expression that these remarks are confined; for if we consult the course of human life, we shall find that mirth and sorrow, and events which cause both, are more nearly allied than perhaps it is altogether pleasing to allow. Considered relatively to a spectator, an incident may often excite a mingled emotion, partaking at once of that which is moving and that which is ludicrous; and there is no reader who has not, at some period of his life, met with events at which he hesitated whether to laugh or to cry. It remains to be proved why scenes of this dubious yet interesting description should be excluded from the legitimate drama, while their force is acknowledged in that of human life. We acknowledge the difficulty of bringing them upon the scene with their full and corresponding effect. It was perhaps under this persuasion that the fool, whose wild jests were too much the result of habit and practice to be subdued even by the terrors of the storm, has been banished from the terrific scene of King Lear. But, in yielding to this difficulty, the terrible contrast has been thus destroyed, in which Shakspeare exhibited the half perceptions of the natural fool, as contrasted with the assumed insanity of Edgar, and the real madness of the old king. They who prefer to this living variety of emotion the cold uniformity of a French scene of passion, must be numbered among those who read for the pleasure of criticism, and without hope of partaking the enthusiasm of the poet.

While we differ from French criticism respecting the right to demand an accurate compliance with the unities, ' and decline to censure that casual intermixture of comic character which gives at once reality and variety to the drama, we are no less disposed to condemn the impertinent love scenes which these authors have, as a matter of etiquette, introduced into all their tragedies, however alien from the passion on which they are grounded. The French drama assumed its present form under the auspices of Louis XIV. who aimed at combining all the characters of a hero of romance. The same spirit which inspired the dull monotony of the endless folios of Scudery and Cal-prenedc, seemed to dictate to Corneille, and even to Racine, those scenes of frigid metaphysical passion which encumber their best plays. We do not dispute the deep interest which attaches to the passion of love, so congenial to the human breast, when it forms the groundwork of the play; but it is intolerably nauseous to find a dull love tale mingled as a indispensable ingredient in every dramatic plot, however inconsistent with the rest of the piece. The Amoureux and Amoureuse of the piece come regularly forth to recite their common-places of gallantry, in language as cold as it is exaggerated, and as inconsistent with passion and feeling as with propriety and common sense. Even the horrid tale of Oedipus has the misplaced garnishment of a love intrigue between Theseus, brought there for no other purpose, and a certain Dirce, whom, in the midst of the pestilence, he thus gallantly compliments:

Quelque ravage affreux qu’étale ici la peste,

L’absence aux vrais amans est encore plus funeste.

The predominance of a passion which expresses itself so absurdly is all that the French have condescended to adopt from the age of chivalry, so rich in more dramatic stores; and they have borrowed it in all its pedantry, and without its tenderness and firc. Riccoboni has probably alleged the true reason for the introduction of these heavy scenes of love intrigue, which is, that at little expense of labour to the author, they fill up three quarters of the action of his play. We quote from the French version, as that immediately before us, and most generally intelligible: “Par exemple, otons de Nicoede les dix scènes de Laodice, de l’ Oedipe les dix scenes de Dirce, de Polieucte les scenes d’amour de Sepere, de la Piiedre de Monsieur hacine les six scènes d’ARiciE, et nous verrons que non sculement l’action ne sera point interrompue, mais quelle en sera plus vive; en sorte que l’on verra manifestement, que ces scènes de tendresses noiit servi qu’à ralentir l’action de la pièce, à la refroidir, et à rendre le héros moins grand. Si après ces deux meilleurs tragédies de la France, on examine tous les autres, on connaitra bien mieux cette verite. Lorsque l’amour fait le sujet de la tragédie, ce sentiment, si intéressant par lui-mcme, occupe le scène avec raison; j’aime l’amour de Piiedre, mais de Piiedre scule.” Under this thraldom the fetters of the French stage long laboured, notwithstanding the noble example of Athalie, the chef d’oeuvre of Racine. By the example of Voltaire, in one or two of his best pieces, they have of late ventured occasionally to discard their uninteresting Cupid, whose appearance on the stage as a matter of course and of ceremony, produced as little effect as when his altar and godhead are depicted on the semicircle of a fan.

We have already observed, that the refined, artificial, and affected character of the French tragedy, arose from its immediate connection with the pleasures and with the presence of an absolute sovereign. From the same circumstance, however, the French stage derived several advantages. A degree of discipline, unknown in other theatres, was early introduced among the French actors; and those of a subordinate rank, who, on the English stage, [7:8:165]sometimes exhibit intolerable, contemptuous, and wilful negligence, become compelled, on that of France, to pay the same attention to their parts as their superiors, and to exert what limited talents they possess in the subordinate parts to which they are adapted. The effect of this common diligence upon the scene, is a general harmony and correspondence in its parts, which never fails to strike a stranger with admiration.

The royal protection, also, early produced on the Parisian stage an improved and splendid style of scenery, decoration, and accompaniments. The scenes and machinery which they borrowed from Italy, they improved with their usual alert ingenuity. They were still further improved under the auspices of Voltaire, who had the sole merit of introducing natural and correct costume. Before his time the actors, whether Romans or Scythians, appeared in the full dress of the French court; and Augustus himself was represented in a huge full-bottomed wig, surmounted by a crown of laurel. The strict national costume introduced by Voltaire is now observed. That author has also the merit of excluding the idle crowd of courtiers and men of fashion who thronged the stage during the time of representation, and formed a sort of semicircle round the actors, leaving them thus but a few yards of an area free for performance, and disconcerting at once the performers and the audience, by the whimsical intermixture of players and spectators. The nerves of those pedants who contended most strenuously for the illusion of the scene, and who objected against its being interrupted by an occasional breach of the dramatic unities, do not appear to have suffered from the presence of this singular chorus.

It was not decoration and splendour alone which the French stage owed to Louis XIV. Its principal obligation was forthat patronage which called forth in its service the talents of Corneille and Racine, the Homer and the Virgil of the French drama. However constrained by pedantic rules; however held back from using that infinite variety of materials which national and individual character presented to them; however frequently compelled by system to adopt a pompous, solemn, and declamatory style of dialogue; these distinguished authors still remain the proudest boast of the classical age of France, and a high honour to the European republic of letters. It seems probable that Corneille, if left to the exercise of his own judgment, would have approximated more to the romantic drama. The Cid possesses many of the charms of that species of composition. In the character of Don Gourmaz, he has drawn a national portrait of the Spanish nobility, for which very excellence he was subjected to the censure of the academy, his national court of criticism. In a general point of view, he seems to have been ambitious of overawing his audience by a display of the proud, the severe, the ambitious, and the terrible. Tyrants and conquerors have never sat to a painter of greater skill; and the romantic tone of feeling which he adopts in his more perfect characters is allied to that of chivalry. But Corneille was deficient in tenderness, in dramatic art, and in the power of moving the passions. His fame, too, was injured by the multiplicity of his efforts to extend it. Critics of his own nation have numbered about twenty of his dramas which have little to recommend them; and no foreign reader is very likely to verify or refute the cen∙ sure, since he must previously read them to an end.

Racine, who began to write who the classical fetters were clenched and riveted upon the French drama, did not make that effort of struggling with his chains which we observe in the elder dramatist; he was strong where Corneille evinced weakness, and weak in the points where his predecessor showed vigour. Racine delineated the passion of love with truth, softness, and fidelity; and his scenes of this sort form the strongest possible contrast with those in which he, as well as Corneille, sacrificed to the dull Cupid of metaphysical romance. In refinement and harmony of versification, Racine has hitherto been unequalled; and his Athalie is, perhaps, likely to be generally acknowledged as the most finished production of the French drama.

Subsequent dramatists, down to the time of Voltaire, were contented with imitating the works of these two great models, until the active and ingenious spirit of that celebrated author seems tacitly to have meditated further experimental alterations than he thought it prudent to defend or to avow. His extreme vivacity and acute intellect were mingled, as is not unfrequent in such temperaments, with a certain nervous timidity, which prevented him from attempting open and bold innovation, even where he felt compliance with existing rules most inconvenient and dispiriting. He borrowed, therefore, liberally from Shakspeare, whose irregularities were the frequent object of his ridicule; and he did not hesitate tacitly to infringe the dramatic unities in his plays, while in his criticism he holds them up as altogether inviolable. While he altered the costume of the stage, and brought it nearer to that of national truth, he made one or two irresolute steps towards the introduction of national character. If we were, indeed, to believe the admirers of Corneille, little remained to be done in this department; he had already, it is said, taught his Romans to speak as Romans, and his Greeks as Greeks; but of such national discrimination foreigners are unable to perceive a trace. His heroes, one and all, talk like men of no peculiar character or distinct age and nation, but, like the other heroes of the French dramatic school, are “all honourable men,” who speak in high, grave, buskined rhimes, where an artificial brilliancy of language, richness of metaphor, and grandeur of sentiment, are substituted for that concise and energetic tone of dialogue, which shows at once the national and individual character of the personage who uses it. In Mahomet, Al-zire, and one or two other pieces, Voltaire has attempted some discrimination of national character; the groundwork, however, is still French; and, under every disguise, whether of the turban of the Ottoman, the feathery crown of the savage, or the silk tunic of the Chinese, the character of that singular people can be easily recognized. Voltaire probably saw the deficiency of the national drama with his usual acuteness; but, like the ancient philosophers, he contentedly joined in the idolatry which he despised.

It seems, indeed, extremely doubtful whether the French tragedy can ever be brought many steps nearer to nature. That nation is so unfortunate as to have no poetical language; so that some degree of unnatural exaltation of sentiment is almost necessary to sustain the tone of tragedy at a pitch higher than that of ordinary life. The people are passionately fond of ridicule; their authors are equally afraid of incurring it: they are aware, like their late ruler, that there is but one step betwixt the sublime and the ridiculous; and they are afraid to aim at the former, lest their attempt, falling short, should expose them to derision. They cannot reckon on the mercy or enthusiasm of their audience; and while they banish com-. batsand deaths, and even violent action of any kind, from the stage, this seems chiefly on account of the manifest risk that a people, more alive to the ludicrous than the lofty, might laugh when they should applaud. The drunken and dizzy fury with which Richard, as personated by Kean, continues to make the motion of striking after he has lost his weapon, would be caviare to the Parisian par.- terre. Men must compound with their poets and actors, [7:8:166]and pardon something like extravagance, on the score of enthusiasm. But if they are nationally dead to that enthusiasm, they resemble a deaf man listening to eloquence, who is more likely to be moved to laughter by the gestures of the orator, than to catch fire at his passionate declamation.

Above all, the French people are wedded to their own opinions. Each Parisian is, or supposes himself, master of the rules of the critical art; and whatever limitations it imposes on the author, the spectators receive some indemnification from the pleasure of sitting in judgment upon him. To require from a dancer to exhibit his agility without touching any of the lines of a diagram chalked on the floor, would deprive the performance of much ease, strength, and grace; but still the spectator would feel a certain interest in watching the dexterity with which the artist avoided treading on the interdicted limits, and a certain pride in detecting occasional infringements. In the same manner, the French critic obtains a triumph from watching the transgressions of the dramatic poet against the laws of Aristotle; equal, perhaps, to the more legitimate pleasure he might have derived from the unfettered exercise of his talents. Upon the whole, the French tragedy, though its regulations seem to us founded in pedantry, and its sentiments to belong to a state of false and artificial refinement, contains, nevertheless, passages of such perfect poetry and exquisite moral beauty, that to hear them declaimed with the art of Talma, cannot but afford a very high pitch of intellectual gratification.

The French comedy assumed a regular shape about the same period with the tragedy; and Molière was in his department what Corneille and Racine were in theirs; an original author, approached in excellence by none of those that succeeded him. The form which he assumed for a model was that of the comedy of Menander, and he has copied pretty closely some pieces from the Latin stage. Molière was endowed by nature with a rich fund of comic humour, which is nowhere more apparent than in those light pieces which are written upon the plan of the Italian masked comedy. In these he has introduced the jealous old pantaloon, the knavish and mischievous servant, and some of its other characters. In his regular comedy he soared to a higher pitch. Before his time the art had sought its resources in the multiplicity and bustle of intrigue, escape, and disguise,—of, at best, in a comic dialogue, approaching to mere buffoonery. Molière’s satire aimed at a nobler prey; he studied mankind for the purpose of attacking those follies of social life which are best exposed by ridicule. The aim of few satirists has been so legitimate, or pursued with such success. Female vanity, learned pedantry, unreasonable jealousy, the doating and disgraceful passions of old men, avarice, coquetry, slander, the quacks who disgrace medicine, and the knaves who prostitute the profession of the law, were the marks at which his shafts were directed.

Molière’s more regular comedies are limited by the law of unities, and finished with great diligence. It is true, the author found it sometimes necessary tacitly to elude the unity of place, which he durst not openly violate; but, in general, he sacrifices probability to system. In the Ecole des Femmes, Arnolph brings his wife into the street, out of the room in which his jealousy has imprisoned her, in order to lecture her upon the circumspection due to her character; which absurdity he is guilty of, that the scene may not be shifted from the open space before his door to her apartment. In general, however, it may be noticed, that the critical unities impose much less hardship upon the comic than upon the tragic poet. It is much more easy to reconcile the incidents of private life to the unities of time and place, than to compress within their limits the extensive and prolonged transactions which comprehend the revolution of kingdoms and fate of monarchs. What influence, however, these rules do possess, must operate to cramp and embarrass the comic as well as the tragic writer; to violate and disunite those very probabilities which they affect to maintain; and to occasion a thousand real absurdities rather than grant a conventional license, which seems essential to the freedom of the drama.

The later comic authors of France seem to have abandoned the track pointed out by Molière, as if in despair of approaching his excellence. Their comedy, compared with that of other nations, and of their great predecessor, is cramped, and tame, and limited. In this department, as in tragedy, the stage experienced the inconvenience arising from the influence of the court. The varied and unbounded field of comic humour which the passions and peculiarities of the lower orders present, was prohibited, as containing subjects of exhibition too low and vulgar for a monarch and his courtiers; and thus the natural, fresh, and varied character of comedy was flung aside, while the heartless vices and polished follies of the great world were substituted in its place. Schlegel has well observed, that the object of French comedy “is no longer life, but society; that perpetual negotiation between conflicting vanities which never ends in a sincere treaty of peace; the embroidered dress, the hat under the arm, and the sword by the side, essentially belong to them; and the whole of the characterization is limited to the folly of the men and the coquetry of the women.”

It is scarcely in nature that a laughter-loving people should have remained satisfied withan amusement so dull and insipid as their regular comedy. A few years preceding the revolution, and while the causes of that event were in full fermentation, the Marriage of Figaro appeared on the stage. It is a comedy of intrigue; and the dialogue is blended with traits of general and political satire, as well as with a tone of licentiousness, which was till then a stranger to the French stage. It was received with a degree of enthusiastic and frantic popularity which nothing but its novelty could have occasioned, for there is little real merit in the composition. Frederick of Prussia, and other admirers of the old theatrical school, were greatly scandalized at so daring an innovation on the regular French comedy. The circumstances which followed have prevented Beaumarchais’ example from being imitated; and the laughers have consoled themselves with inferior departments of the drama. Accordingly, we find the blank supplied by farces, comic operas, and dramatic varieties, in which plots of a light, flimsy, and grotesque character are borne out by the comic humour of the author and comic skill of the actor. Brunet, a comedian of extraordinary powers in this cast of interludes, has at times presumed so far upon his popularity as to season his farce with political allusions. It will scarce be believed that he aimed several shafts at Napoleon when in the height of his power. The boldness as well as the wit of the actor secured him the applause of the audience; and such a hold had Brunet of their affections, that an imprisonment of a few hours was the greatest punishment which Bonaparte ventured to inflict upon him. But whatever be the attachment shown to the art in general, the French, like ourselves, rest the character of their theatre chiefly upon the ancient specimens of art; and the regular tragedy, as well as comedy, seems declining in that kingdom.

As the drama of France was formed under the patronage of the monarch, and bears the strongest proofs of its courtly origin, that of England, which was encouraged by the people at large, retains equally unequivocal marks of its popular descent. Its history must naturally draw to [7:8:167]some length, as being that part of our article likely to be most interesting to the reader. In part, however, we have paved the way for it by the details common to the rise of dramatic art in the other nations of Europe. We shall distinguish the English drama as divided into four periods, premising that this is merely a general, and not a precise division. The taste which governed each period, and the examples on which it is grounded, will usually be found to have dawned in the period preceding that in which it was received and established.

I. From the revival of the theatre until the great civil war.

II. From the Restoration to the reign of Queen Anne.

III. From the earlier part of the last century down to the present reign.

IV. The present state of the British drama.

I. The drama of England commenced, as we have al-? ready observed, upon the Spanish model. Ferrex and Perrex was the first composition approaching to a regular tragedy, and it was acted before Queen Elizabeth, upon the 18th day of January 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple. It partakes rather of the character of a historical than of a classical drama, although more nearly allied to the latter class than the chronicle plays which afterwards took possession of the stage. We have already recorded Sir Philip Sidney’s commendation of this play, which he calls by the name of Gorboduc, from one of the principal characters. Acted by a learned body, and written in great part by Lord Sackville, the principal author of the Mirror for Magistrates, the first of English tragedies assumed in some degree the honours of the learned buskin; but although a chorus was presented according to the classical model, the play was free from the observance of the unities, and contains many irregularities severely condemned by the regular critics.

English comedy, considered as a regular composition, is said to have commenced with Gammer G urton s Needle. This “right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy,” was the supposed composition of John Still, Master of Arts, and afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was acted in Christ-Church College, Cambridge, in 1575. It is a piece of low humour, the whole jest turning upon the loss and recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair the breeches of her man Hodge; but, in point of manners, it is a great curiosity, as the curia suppellex of our ancestors is scarcely anywhere so well described. The popular characters also, the Sturdy Beggar, the Clown, the Country Vicar, and the Shrew of the sixteenth century, arc drawn in colours taken from the life. The unity of time, place, and action, are observed through the play with an accuracy of which France might be jealous. The time is a few hours; the place, the open square of the village before Gammer Gurton’s door; the action, the loss of the needle; and this, followed by the search for and final recovery of that necessary implement, is intermixed with no other thwarting or subordinate interest, but is progressive from the commencement to the conclusion.

It is remarkable that the earliest English tragedy and comedy are both works of considerable merit; that each partakes of the distinctive character of its class; that the tragedy is without intermixture of comedy, the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy.

These models were followed by a variety of others, in which no such distinctions were observed. Nur⅛eraus theatres sprung up in different parts of the metropolis, opened upon speculation by distinct troops of performers. Their number shows how much they interested public curiosity; for men never struggle for a share in a losing profession. They acted under licenses, which appear to have been granted for the purpose of police alone, not of exclusive privilege or monopoly; since London contained, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, no fewer than fourteen distinct companies of players, with very considerable privileges and remunerations. (See Drake’s Shak∙ speare and his Times, vol. ii. p. 205.)

The public, therefore, in the widest sense of the word, was at once arbiter and patron of the drama. The companies of players who traversed the country might indeed assume the name of some peer or baron, for the sake of introduction or protection; but those of the metropolis do not, at this early period of our dramatic history, appear to have rested in any considerable degree upon learned or aristocratic privilege. Their license was obtained from the crown, but their success depended upon the voice of the people; and the pieces which they brought forward were, of course, adapted to popular taste. It followed necessarily that histories and romantic dramas were the favourites of the age. A general audience in an unicarned age requires rather amusement than conformity to rules, and is more displeased with a tiresome uniformity than shocked with the breach of all the unities. The players and dramatists, before the rise of Shakspeare, followed, of consequence, the taste of the public, and dealt in the surprising, elevating, and often bombastic incidents of tragedy, as well as in the low humour and grotesque incident of the comic scene. Where these singly were found to lack attraction, they mingled them together, and dashed their tragic plot with an under-intrigue of the lowest buffoonery, without any respect to taste or congruity.

The clown was no stranger to the stage; he interfered, without ceremony, in the most heart-rending scenes, to the scandal of the more learned spectators.

Now lest such frightful shows of fortune’s fall, And bloody tyrant’s rage, should chance appall The death-struck audience, ’midst the silent rout Comes leaping in a self-misformed lout, And laughs and grins, and frames his mimic face, And jostles straight into the prince’s place;

Then doth the theatre echo all aloud With gladsome noise of that applauding crowd, A goodly hotchpotch, where vile russettings Are matched with monarchs and with mighty kings.

An ancient stage-trick, illustrative of the mixture of tragic and comic action in Shakspeare’s time, was long preserved in the theatre. Henry IV. holding council before the battle of Shrewsbury, was always represented as seated on a drum; and when he rose and came forward, the place was occupied by Falstaff, which seldom failed to produce a laugh from the galleries. The taste and judgment of the author himself was very different. During the whole scene Falstaff gives only once, and under irresistible temptation, the rein to his petulant wit, and it is instantly checked by the prince, to whom, by the way, and not to the king, his words ought to be addressed.

The English stage might be considered as equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. With an education more extensive, and a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mistaken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius as comprehensive and versatile as intense and powerful, Shakspeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the [7:8:168]path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order, and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantie restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakspeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national drama; and certainly no one will succeed him capable of establishing by mere authority a form more restricted than that which Shakspeare used.

Sueh is the action of existing circumstances upon genius, and the re-action of genius upon future circumstances. Shakspeare and Corneille were each the leading spirit of his age; and the difference between them is well marked by the editor of the latter. “ Corneille est inegal comme Shakspeare, et plein de genie comme lui; mais le genie de Corneille etoit a celui de Shahspeare ce quun seigneur est a l’egard d’un homme de peuple ne avec le meme esprit que lui” This distinction is strictly accurate, and contains a compliment to the English author which, assuredly, the critie did not intend to make. Corneille wrote as a courtier, circumscribed within the imaginary rules and ceremonies of a court, as a chicken is by a circle of chalk drawn round it. Shakspeare, composing for the amusement of the public alone, had within his province, not only the inexhaustible field of actual life, but the whole ideal world of fancy and superstition; more favourable to the display of poetical genius than even existing realities. Under the circumstances of Corneille, Shakspeare must have been restricted to the same dull, regular, and unvaried system. He must have written, not according to the dictates of his own genius, but in conformity to the mandate of some intendant des menus plaisirs; or of some minister of state, who, like Cardinal Richelieu, thought he could write a tragedy because he could govern a kingdom. It is not equally clear to what height Corneille might have ascended had he enjoyed the national immunities of Shakspeare. Each pitched down a land-mark in his art. The circle of Shakspeare was so extended, that it is with advantage liable to many restrictions; that of Corneille included a narrow limit, which his successors have deemed it unlawful to extend.

It is not our intention, within the narrow space to which our essay is necessarily limited, to enlarge upon the character and writings of Shakspeare. We can only notice his performances as events in the history of the theatre—of a gigantic character indeed, so far as its dignity, elevation, and importance are considered; but, in respect of the mere practice of the drama, rather fixing and sanctioning, than altering or reforming those rules and forms which he found already established. This we know for certain, that those historical plays or chronicles, in which Shakspeare’s muse has thrown a never-fading light upon the history of his country, did, almost every one of them, exist before him in the rude shape of dry dialogue and pitiful buffoonery, stitched into scenes by the elder playwrights of the stage. His romantic dramas exhibit the same contempt of regularity which was manifested by Marlow and other writers; for where there was abuse or extreme license upon the stage, the example of Shakspeare may be often quoted as its sanction, never as tending to reform it. In these particulars the practice of our immortal bard was contrasted with that of Ben Jonson, a severe and somewhat pedantie scholar; a man whose mind was coarse, though capable both of strength and elevation, and whose strong perception of comic humour was tinctured with vulgarity.

Jonson’s tragic strength consists in a sublime, and sometimes harsh, expression of moral sentiment; but displays little of tumultuous and ardent passion, still less of tenderness or delicacy; although there are passages in which he seems adequate to expressing them. He laboured in the mine of the classies, but overloaded himself with the ore, which he could not or would not refine. His Cataline and Sejanus are laboured translations from Cieero, Sallust, and Taeitus, which his own age did not endure, and which no succeeding generation will probably be much tempted to revive. With the stern superiority of learning over ignorance, he asserted himself a better judge of his own productions than the public which condemned him, and haughtily claimed the laurel which the public suffrage often withheld; but the world has as yet shown no disposition to reverse the opinion of their predecessors.

In comedy Jonson made some efforts partaking of the character of the older comedy of the Grecians. In his Tale of a Tub he follows the path of Aristophanes, and lets his wit run into low buffoonery, that he might bring upon the stage Inigo Jones, his personal enemy. In Cynthia’s Revels and the Staple of News, we find him introducing the dull personification of abstract passions and qualities, and turning legitimate comedy into an allegorical mask. What interest can the reader have in such characters as the three Penny boys, and their transactions with the Lady Pecunia? Some of Jonson’s more legitimate comedies may be also taxed here with filthiness of language, of which disgusting attribute his works exhibit more instances than any English writer of eminence excepting Swift. Let us, however, be just to a master-spirit of his age. The comic force of Jonson was strong, marked, and peculiar; and he excelled even Shakspeare himself in drawing that class of truly English characters, remarkable for peculiarity of humour ; that is, for some mode of thought, speech, and behaviour, superinduced upon the natural disposition by profession, education, or fantastical affectation of singularity. In blazoning these forth with their natural attributes and appropriate language, Ben Jonson has never been excelled, and his works everywhere exhibit a consistent and manly moral, resulting naturally from the events of the scene.

It must also be remembered, that although it was Jonson’s fate to be eclipsed by the superior genius, energy, and taste of Shakspeare, yet those advantages which enabled him to maintain an honourable though an unsuccessful struggle, were of high advantage to the drama. Jonson was the first who showed by example the infinite superiority of a well-conceived plot, all the parts of which bore upon each other, and forwarded an interesting con-elusion over a tissue of detached scenes, following without necessary connection or increase of interest. The plot of the Fox is admirably conceived; and that of the Alehy-mist, though faulty in the conclusion, is nearly equal toil. In the two comedies of Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour, the plot deserves much less praise, and is deficient at once in interest and unity of action; but in that of the Silent Woman nothing can exceed the art with which the circumstance upon which the conclusion turns is, until the very last scene, concealed from the knowledge of the reader, while he is tempted to suppose it constantly within his reach. In a word, Jonson is distinguished by his strength and stature, even in those days when there were giants in the land, and affords a model of a close, animated, and characteristic style of comedy, abounding in moral satire, and distinguished at once by force and art, which was afterwards more cultivated by English dramatists, than the lighter, more wild, and more fanciful department in which Shakspeare moved, beyond the reach of emulation.

The general opinion of critics has assigned genius as the characteristic of Shakspeare, and art as the appropriate excellence of Jonson; not surely that Jonson was deficient in genius, but that art was the principal characteristic[7:8:169] of his laborious scenes. We learn from his own confession, and from the panegyrics of his friends, as well as the taunts of his enemies, that he was a slow composer. The natural result of laborious care is jealousy of fame; for that which we do with labour, we value highly when achieved. Shakspeare, on the other hand, appears to have composed rapidly and carelessly, and sometimes even without considering, while writing the earlier acts, how the catastrophe was to be huddled up, in that which was to conclude the piece. We may fairly conclude him to have been indifferent about fame, who would take so little pains to win it. Much perhaps might have been achieved by the union of these opposed qualities, and by blending the art of Jonson with the fiery invention and fluent expression of his great contemporary. But such an union of opposite excellencies in the same author was hardly to be expected; nor perhaps would the result have proved altogether so favourable as might at first view be conceived. We should have had more perfect specimens of the art, but they must have been much fewer in number; and posterity would certainly have been deprived of that wild luxuriance of dramatic excellencies and poetic beauties, which, like wild flowers upon a common field, he scattered profusely among the unacted plays of Shakspeare.

Although incalculably superior to his contemporaries, Shakspeare had successful imitators, and the art of Jonson was not unrivalled. Massinger appears to have studied the works of both with the intention of uniting their excellencies. He knew the strength of plot; and although his plays are altogether irregular, yet he well understood the advantage of a strong and defined interest; and in unravelling the intricacy of his intrigues, he often displays the management of a master. Art, therefore, not perhaps in its technical, but in its most valuable sense, was Massinger’s as well as Jonson’s; and, in point of composition, many passages of his plays arc not unworthy of Shakspeare. Were we to distinguish Massinger’s peculiar excellence, we should name that first of dramatic attributes, a full conception of character, a strength in bringing out, and consistency in adhering to it. He does not, indeed, always introduce his personages to the audience in their own proper character; it danms forth gradually in the progress of the piece, as in the hypocritical Luke, or in the heroic Marullo. But, upon looking back, we are always surprised and delighted to trace from the very beginning, intimations of what the personage is to prove as the play advances. There is often a harshness of outline, however, in the character of this dramatist, which prevents their approaching to the natural and easy portraits bequeathed us by Shakspeare.

Beaumont and Fletcher, men of remarkable talent, seemed to have followed Shakspeare’s mode of composition rather than Jonson’s, and thus to have altogether neglected that art which Jonson taught, and which Massinger in some sort practised. They may, indeed, be rather said to have taken for their model the boundless license of the Spanish stage, from which many of their pieces are expressly and avowedly derived. The acts of their plays arc so detached from each other, in substance and consistence, that the plot scarce can be said to hang together at all, or to have, in any sense of the word, a beginning, progress, and conclusion. It. seems as if the play began because the curtain rose, and ended because it fell, the author, in the mean time, exerting his genius for the amusement of the spectators, pretty much in the same manner as in the Scenario of the Italians, by the actors filling up, with their extempore wit, the scenes chalked out for them. To compensate for this excess of irregularity, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher have still a high poetical value.

If character be sometimes violated, probability discarded, and the interest of the plot neglected, the reader is, on the other hand, often gratified by the most beautiful description, the most tender and passionate dialogue, a display of brilliant wit and gaiety, or a feast of comic humour. These attributes had so much effect on the public, that, during the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, many of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays had possession of the stage, while those of Shakspeare were laid upon the shelf.

Shirley, Ford, Webster, Decker, and others, added performances to the early treasures of the English drama, which abound with valuable passages. There never, probably, rushed into the lists of literary competition together a band more distinguished for talent. If the early drama be inartificial and unequal, no nation at least can show so many detached scenes, and even acts, of distinguished poetical merit. One powerful cause seems to have produced an effect so marked and distinguished, to wit, the universal favour of a theatrical public, which daily and nightly thronged the numerous theatres then open in the city of London.

In considering this circumstance, it must above all be remembered that these numerous audiences crowded, not to feast their eyes upon show and scenery, but to see and hear the literary production of the evening. The scenes which the stage exhibited were probably of the most paltry description. Some rude helps to the imagination of the audience might be used by introducing the gate of a castle or town; the monument of the Capulets, by sinking a trap-door, or by thrusting in a bed. The good-natured audience readily received these hints, with that conventional allowance which Sir Philip Sidney had ridiculed, and which Shakspeare himself has alluded towhen he appeals from the poverty of theatrical representation to the excited imagination of his audience.

Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O, the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest, in little space, a million;

And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work;

Suppose, within the girdle of these walls,

Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder; Printing their proud hoofs i , the receiving earth. For ’ tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times; Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass

Such were the allowances demanded by Sbakspeare and his contemporaries from the public of their day, in consideration of the imperfect means and appliances of their theatrical machinery. Yet the deficiency of scenery and show, which, when existing in its utmost splendour, divides the interest of the piece in the mind of the ignorant, and rarely affords much pleasure to aspectator of taste, may have been rather an advantage to the infant drama. The specta tors having nothing to withdraw their attention from the immediate business of the piece, gave it their full and uninterrupted attention. And here it may not be premature to inquire into the characteristical difference between the audiences of the present day, and those earlier theatrical ages, when the drama boasted not only the names of Shakspeare, of Massinger, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Shirley, of Ford, and others of subordinate degree; the meanest of whom shows occasionally more fire than warms whole reams of modern plays. This will probably be found [7:8:170]to rest on the varied and contrasted feelings with which the audience of ancient and that of modern days attend the progress of the scene.

Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that the general east of theatrical composition must receive its principal bent and colouring from the taste of the audience:

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,;

For those who live to please, must please to live.

But though this be an undeniable, and in some respects a melancholy truth, it is not less certain that genius, labouring in behalf of the public, possesses the power of re-action, and of influencing in its turn that taste to which it is in some respects obliged to conform; while, on the other hand, the playwright, who aims only to catch the passing plaudit and the profit of a season, by addressing himself exclusively to the ruling predilections of the audience, degrades the public taste still farther by the gross food which he ministers to it, unless it shall be supposed that he may contribute involuntarily to rouse it from its degeneracy, by cramming it even to satiety and loathing. This action, therefore, and re-action of the taste of ζhe age on dramatic writing, and vice versa, must be both kept in view when treating of the difference betwixt the days of Shakspeare and our own.

Perhaps it is the leading distinction betwixt the ancient and modern audiences, that the former came to listen and to admire; to fling the reins of their imaginations into the hands of the authors and actors, and to be pleased, like the reader to whom Sterne longed to do homage, “they knew not why, and cared not wherefore.” The novelty of dramatic entertainments (for there elapsed only about twenty years betwixt the date of Gammer Gurtorìs Needle, accounted the earliest English play, and the rise of Shakspeare) must have had its natural effect upon the audience. The sun of Shakspeare arose almost without a single gleam of intervening dawn; and it was no wonder that the audience, introduced to this enchanting and seductive art at once, under such an effulgence of excellence, should have been more disposed to wonder than to criticise; to admire, or rather to adore, than to measure the height or ascertain the course of the luminary which diffused such glory around him. The great number of theatres in London, and the profusion of varied talent which was dedicated to this service, attest the eagerness of the public to enjoy the entertainments of the scene. The ruder amusements of the age lost their attractions; and the royal bear-ward of Queen Elizabeth lodged a formal complaint at the feet of her majesty, that the play-houses had seduced the audience from his periodical bear-baitings. This fact is worth a thousand conjectures; and we can hardly doubt that the converts, transported by their improving taste from the bear-garden to the theatre, must, generally speaking, have felt their rude minds subdued and led captive by the superior intelligence, which not only placed on the stage at pleasure all ranks, all ages, all tempers, all passions of mere humanity, but extended its powers beyond the bounds of time and space, and seemed to render visible to mortal eyes the secrets of the invisible world. We may, perhaps, form the best guess of the feelings of Shakspeare’s contemporary audience, by recollecting the emotions of any rural friend, of rough but sound sense and ardent feelings, whom we have had the good fortune to conduct to a theatre for the first time in his life. It may be well imagined that such a spectator thinks little of the three dramatic unities, of which Aristotle says so little, and his commentators and followers talk so much; and that the poet and the performers have that enviable influence over his imagination, which transports him from place to place at pleasure, crowds years into the course of hours, and interests him in the business of each scene, however disconnected from the others. His eyes are riveted to the stage, his ears drink in the accents of the speakers, and he experiences in his mature age, what we have all felt in childhood, a sort of doubt whether the beings and business of the scene be real or fictitious. In this state of delightful fascination, Shakspeare and the gigantic dramatic champions of his age found the British public at large; and how they availed themselves of the advantages which so favourable a temper afforded them, their works will show so long as the language of Britain continues to be read. It is true that the enthusiastic glow of the public admiration, like the rays of a tropical sun darted upon a rich soil, called up in profusion weeds as well as flowers; and that, spoiled in some degree by the indulgent acceptation which attended their efforts, even our most admired writers of Elizabeth’s age not unfrequently exceeded the bounds of critical nicety, and even of common taste and decorum. But these eccentricities were atoned for by a thousand beauties, to which, fettered by the laws of the classic drama, the authors would hardly have aspired, or, aspiring, would hardly have attained. All of us know and feel how much the exercise of our powers, especially those which rest on keen feeling and self-confidence, is dependent upon a favourable reception from those for whom they are put in action. Every one has observed how a cold brow can damp the brilliancy of wit and fetter the flow of eloquence; and how both are induced to send forth sallies corresponding in strength and fire, upon being received by the kindred enthusiasm of those whom they have addressed. And thus, if we owe to the indiscriminate admiration with which the drama was at first received, the irregularities of the authors by whom it was practised, we also stand indebted to it, in all probability, for many of its beauties, which became of rare occurrence, when, by a natural, and indeed a necessary change, satiated admiration began to give way to other feelings.

When a child is tired of playing with a new toy, its next delight is to examine how it is constructed; and, in like manner, so soon as the first burst of public admiration is over with respect to any new mode of composition, thε next impulse prompts us to analyse and to criticise what was at first the subject of vague and indiscriminate wonder. In the first instance, the toy is generally broken to pieces: in the other, while the imagination of the authors is subjected to the rigid laws of criticism, the public generally lose in genius what they may gain in point of taste. The author who must calculate upon severe criticism turns his thoughts more to avoid faults than to attain excellence, as he who is afraid to stumble must avoid rapid motion. The same process takes place in all the fine arts; their first productions are distinguished by boldness and irregularity; those which succeed, by a better and more correct taste, but also by inferior and less original genius.

The original school founded by Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, continued by Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. Shirley, Ford, and others, whose compositions are distinguished by irregularity as well as genius, was closed by the breaking out of the great civil war in 1642. The stage had been the constant object of reprobation and abhorrence on the part of the puritans, and its professors had no favour to expect at their hands if victorious. We read : therefore, with interest, but without surprise, that almost all the actors took up arms in behalf of their old master King Charles, in whose service most of them perished. Robinson, a principal actor at the Blackfriars, was killed by Harrison in cold blood, and under the application of a text of scripture,—“Cursed is he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently.” A few survivors endeavoured occasionally to practise their art in secrecy and obscurity, [7:8:171]but were so frequently discovered, plundered and stripped by the soldiers, that “ Enter the red-coat, Exit hat and cloak” was too frequent a stage direction. Sir William Davenant endeavoured to evade the severe zealots of the time, by representing a sort of opera, said to have been the first drama in which moveable scenery was introduced upon the stage. Even the cavaliers of the more grave sort disapproved of the revival of these festive entertainments during the unstable and melancholy period of the interregnum. “I went,” says the excellent Evelyn, in his Diary, oth May 1658, “to see a new opera after the Italian way; in recitation, music, and scenes, much inferior to the Italian composure and magnificence; but it was prodigious that in such a time of public consternation, such a variety should be kept up or permitted, and being engaged with company, could not decently resist the going to see it, though my heart smote me for it.” Da-venant’s theatrical enterprise, abhorred by the fanaticism of the one party, and ill adapted to the dejected circumstances of the other, was not probably very successful.

II. With royalty the stage revived in England. But the theatres in the capital were limited to two, a restriction which has never since been extended. This was probably by the advice of Clarendon, who endeavoured, though vainly, to stem at all points the flood of idle gaiety and dissipation which broke in after the Restoration. The example of France might reconcile Charles to this exertion of royal authority. With this restoration of the drama, as well as of the crown, commences the second part of English dramatic history.

Charles II. had been accustomed to enjoy the foreign stage during his exile, and had taste enough to relish its beauties. It is probable, however, that his judgment was formed upon the French model, for few of the historical or romantic dramas were revived at the restoration. So early as 26th of November 1662, the Diary of Evelyn contains this entry: “I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played; but now the old plays began to disgust this refined age, since his majesty has been so long abroad.” Dryden, Howard, and others, who obtained possession of the stage, introduced what was for some time called Heroic Plays, written in couplets, and turning upon the passions of love and honour. In the dialogue, these pieces resembled that of the French stage, where the actors declaim alternately in the best language and in the finest thoughts which the poet can supply, but without much trace of natural passion or propriety of character. But though French in dialogue and sentiment, the heroic plays were English in noise and bustle, and the lack of truth and nature was supplied by trumpets and tempests, victories and processions. An entertainment of a character so forced and unnatural was obviously of foreign growth, and flowed from the court. Dryden himself has assured us “that the favour which heroic plays had acquired upon the stage was entirely owing to the countenance which they had received at court; and that the most eminent persons for wit and humour in the royal circle had so far honoured them, that they judged no way so fit as verse to entertain a noble audience, or express a noble passion.” In these pieces the unities were not observed; but in place of the classical restrictions, there were introduced certain romantic whimsical limitations of the dramatic art, which, had they been adopted, must soon have destroyed all its powers of pleasing. The characters were avowedly formed upon the model of the French romance, where honour was a sort of insane gasconading extravagance, and who seem to have made a vow never to speak or think of any thing but love, and that in language sometimes ingeniously metaphysical, sometimes puerile to silliness, sometimes mad even to raving, but always absurd, unnatural, and extra vagant. In point of system it was stated, that a heroic play should be an imitation of a heroic poem. The laws of such compositions did not, it was said, dispense with those of the elder drama, but exalted them, and obliged the poet to draw all things as far above the ordinary proportion of the stage, as the stage itself is beyond the common words and actions of human life. The effects which a heroic play, constructed upon such an overstrained model, produced, is well described by Mrs Evelyn, wife of the author of that name already quoted, in a letter to Mr Bohun, written in 1671. “Since my last to you I have seen the Siege of Grenada, a play so full of ideas, that the most refined romance I ever read is not to compare with it. Love is made so pure, and valour so nice, that one would imagine it designed for an Utopia rather than our stage. I do not quarrel with the poet, but admire one born in the decline of morality should be able to feign such exact virtue; and as poetic fiction has been instructive in former ages, I wish this the same event in ours. As to the strict law of comedy, I dare not pretend to judge. Some think the division of the story not so well as if it could all have been comprehended in the day of action. Truth of history, exactness of time, possibilities of adventures, are niceties which the ancient critics might require; but those who have outdone them in fine notions may be allowed the liberty to express them their own way, and the present world is so enlightened that the old dramatique must bear no sway. This account perhaps is not enough to do Mr Driden right, yet is as much as you can expect from the leisure of one who has the care of a nursery.” (See Evelyn’s Works.) This ingenious lady felt what, overawed by the fashion of the moment, she has intimated rather than expressed; namely, that the heroic drama, notwithstanding the fine poetry of which it may be made the vehicle, was overstrained, fantastical, and unnatural.

In comedy, also, there was evinced, subsequent to the Restoration, a kindred desire of shining in dialogue rather than attempting the humorous delineation of character of which Shakspeare, Jonson, and the earlier schools, had set the example. The comic author no longer wrote to move the hearty laugh of a popular assembly, but to please a fashionable circle, “the men of wit and pleasure about town,” with whom wit and raillery is always more prevailing than humour. As in tragedy, therefore, the authors exhausted trope and figure, and reduced to logic the language of heroic passion; so in comedy, a succession of smart jests, which neither serve to advance the action of the piece, nor display the character of the speaker, was bandied to and fro upon the stage.

Satire is the appropriate corrective of extravagance in composition; and the Rehearsal of the Duke of Buckingham, though it can scarcely be termed a work of uncommon power, had yet the effect of holding up to public ridicule the marked and obvious absurdities of the revived drama in both its branches. After the appearance of this satire, a taste too extravagant for long endurance was banished from the theatre; both tragedy and comedy retraced their steps, and approached more nearly to the field of human action, passion, and suffering; and, down to the revolution, a more natural style of drama occupied the stage. It was supported by men of the highest genius, who, but for one great leading error, might perhaps have succeeded in giving to the art its truest and most energetic character. The talents of Otway, in his scenes of passionate affection, rival at least, and sometimes excel, those of Shakspeare. More tears have been shed, probably, for the sorrows of Belvidera and Monimia than for those of Juliet and Desdemona. The introduction of actresses upon the stage was scarcely known before the Restoration, and it furnished the poets of the latter period [7:8:172]with appropriate representatives for their female characters. This more happy degree of personification, as it greatly increased the perfection of the scene, must have animated in proportion the genius of the author. A marked improvement, therefore, may be traced in love scenes, and, indeed, in all those wherein female characters are introduced; that which was to be spoken by a fitting representative was of course written with more care, as it was acted with greater effect. This was an advantage, and a great one, possessed by the theatre succeeding the Restoration. Great dramatic force and vigour marked the dramatic compositions of this age. It was not, indeed, equal to that of Shakspeare, either in point of the talent called forth, or the quantity of original poetry given to the public; but Otway, and even Lce, notwithstanding his bombastic rant, possessed considerable knowledge of dramatic art and stage-effect. Several plays of this period have kept possession of the stage; less perhaps on account of intrinsic merits, than because some of the broad errors of the earlier age had been removed, and a little more art had been introduced in the combination of the scenes, and disentanglement of the plot. The voice of criticism was frequently heard; the dramatic rules of the ancients were known and quoted; and though not recognized in their full extent, had nevertheless some influence in regulating the action of the drama.

In one heinous article, however, the poets of this age sinned at once against virtue, good taste, and decorum; and endangered, by the most profligate and shameless in-deeency, the cause of morality, which has been often considered as nearly allied with that of the legitimate drama. In the first period of the British stage, the actors were men of decent character, and often acquired considerable independence. The women’s parts were acted by boys. Hence, although there were too many instances of low and licentious dialogue, there were few of that abominable species which addresses itself, not to the fancy, but to the passions, and is seductive, instead of being ludicrous. Had Charles II. borrowed from the French monarchs the severe etiquette of their court, when he introduced into England something resembling the style of their plays, he would have asserted what was due to his own dignity, and the cause of sound morals and good manners, by prohibiting this vulgar and degrading license, which in itself was insulting to the presence of a king. It was, however, this prince’s lot, in the regulation of his amusements, as well as in his state government, to neglect self-respectability. In his exile he had been “merry, scandalous, and poor had been habituated to share familiarly coarse jests and loose pleasures with his dissolute companions; and unfortunately he saw no reason for disusing the license to which he had accustomed himself, when it was equally destructive to his own character and to decorum. What had been merely coarse was, under his influence, rendered vicious and systematic impurity. Scenes, both passionate and humorous, were written in such a style as if the authors had studied whether the grave seduction of the heroic, or the broad infamy of the comic scenes, should contain the grossest insult to public deceney. The female performers were of a character proper to utter whatever ribaldry the poet chose to put into their mouths; and as they practised what they taught, the king himself, and the leading courtiers, formed connections which gave the actress a right to be saucy in their presence, and to reekon upon their countenance when practising in public the effrontery which marked their intercourse in private life. How much this shocked the real friends of Charles, is shown by its effects upon Evelyn, whose invaluable Diary we have already quoted: “This night was aeted my Lord BroghilEs tragedy called Mustapha, before their majesties at court, at which I was present; though very seldom now going to the public theatres, for many reasons, as they are now abused to an atheistical liberty. Foul and indecent women now, and never till now, are permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and some their wives: witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R∙ Howard, P. Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families, and ruin of both body and soul.” He elsewhere repeatedly expresses his grief and disgust at the pollution and degeneracy of the stage. (Evelyn’s Works, vol. i. p. 392.) In a letter to Lord Cornbury (son of the great Clarendon), he thus expresses himself: “In the town of London there are more wretched and indecent plays permitted than in all the world besides;” and adds shortly after, “If my Lord Chancellor would but be instrumental in reforming this one exorbitancy, it would gain both the king and his lordship multitudes of blessings. You know, my lord, that I (who have written plays, and am a scurvy poet too sometimes) am far from puritanisme; but I would have no reproach left our adversaries, in a theme which may so conveniently be reformed. Plays are now with us become a licentious exercise, and a vice, and neede severe censors, that should look as well to their morality as to their lines and numbers.” And, at the hazard of multiplying quotations, we cannot suppress the following:—1st March 1671. “I walked with him (the king) through St James’s Park to the garden, where I both heard and saw a very familiar discourse betwixt— (z. e. the king) and Mrs Nelly (Gwyn), as they called an impudent comedian, she looking out of her terrace at the top of the wall, and [the king] standing in the green walk under it. I was heartily sorry at this scene.”

The foul stain, so justly censured by a judge so competent and so moderate as Evelyn, was like that of the leprosy in the Levitical law, which sunk into and pervaded the very walls of the mansion; it became the leading characteristic of the English theatre, of its authors, and of its players. It was, however, especially in comedy that this vice was most manifest; and, to say truth, were not the eyes of antiquaries, like the ears of confessors, free from being sullied by the impurities committed to them, the comedies of this period, as well as the comic scenes introduced to relieve the tragedies, are fitter for a brothel than for the library of a man of letters.

It is a pity that we are under the necessity of drawing the character of the drama at this age from a feature so coarse and disgusting. Unquestionably, as the art in other respects made progress, it might, but for this circumstance, have reached an uncommon pitch of perfection. The comedies of Congreve contain probably more wit than was ever before embodied upon the stage; each word was a jest, and yet so characteristic, that the repartee of the servant is distinguished from that of the master; the jest of the coxcomb from that of the humorist or fine gentleman of the piece. Had not Sheridan lived in our own time, we could not have conceived the possibility of rivalling the comedies of Congreve. This distinguished author understood the laws of composition, and combined his intrigue with an art unusual on the British stage. Nor was he without his rivals, even where his eminence was most acknowledged. Vanburgh and Farquhar, inferior to Congreve in real wit, and falling into the next period, were perhaps his equals in the composition of acting plays. Like other powerful stimulants, the use of wit has its bounds, which Congreve is supposed sometimes to have exceeded. His dialogue keeps the attention too much upon the stretch, and, however delightful in the closet, fatigues the mind during the action. When you are perpetually[7:8:173] conscious that you lose something by the slightest interruption of your attention, whether by accident or absence of mind, it is a state of excitement too vivid and too constant to be altogether pleasant; and we feel it possible that we might sometimes wish to exchange a companion of such brilliant powers, for one who would afford us more repose and relaxation.

The light, lively, but somewhat more meagre dialogue of the latter dramatists of the period, and of that which succeeded, was found sufficient to interest, yet was not so powerful as to fatigue the audience. Vanburgh and Farquhar seemed to have written more from the portraits of ordinary life; Congreve from the force of his own conception. The former, therefore, drew the characters of men and women as they found them; selected, united, and heightened for the purpose of effect, but without being enriched with any brilliancy foreign to their nature. But all the personages of Congreve have a glimpse of his own fire, and of his own acuteness. He could not entirely lay aside his quick powers of perception and reply, even when he painted a clown or a coxcomb; and all that can he objected, saving in a moral sense, to this great author, is his having been too prodigal of his wit; a faculty used by most of his successors with rigid economy.

That personification of fantasy or whim called characters of humour, which Ben Jonson introduced, was revived during this period. Shadwell, now an obscure name, endeavoured to found himself a reputation, by affecting to maintain the old school, and espousing the cause of Ben Jonson against Dryden and other innovators. But although there was considerable force of humour in some of his forgotten plays, it was Wycherly upon whom fell the burthen of upholding the standard of the Jonsonian school. The Plain Dealer is indeed imitated from Molière; but the principal character has more the force of a real portrait, and is better contrasted with the perverse, bustling, masculine, petty-fogging, and litigious character of Widow Blackacker, than Alceste is with any of the characters in the Misanthrope. The other plays of this author are marked by the same strong, masculine, and forcible painting, which approaches more to the satire of Jonson, than to the ease of Vanburgh, the gaiety of Farquhar, or the wit of Congreve. Joining, however, the various merits of these authors, as belonging to this period, they form a galaxy of comic talent scarce to be matched in any other age or country; and which is only obscured by those foul and impure mists which their pens, like the raven wings of Sycorax, had brushed from fern and bog.

Morals repeatedly insulted long demanded an avenger; and he arose in the person of Jeremy Collier. It is no disgrace to the memory of this virtuous and well-meaning man, that, to use the lawyer’s phrase, he pleaded his cause too high; summoned unnecessarily to his aid the artillery with which the Christian fathers had fulminated against the heathen drama; and pushing his arguments to extremity, directed it as well against the use as against the abuse of the stage. Those who attempted to reply to him availed themselves, indeed, of the weak parts of his arguments; but, upon the main points of impeachment, the poets stood self-convicted. Dryden made a manly and liberal submission, though not without some reflections upon the rudeness of his antagonist’s attacks. “I shall say the less of Mr Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly accused of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one. Yet it were not difficult to prove, that in many places he has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty; besides, that he is too much given to horse-play in his raillery, and comes from battle like a dictator from the plough. I will not say, ‘ the zeal of God’s house has eaten him up but I am sure it. has devoured some part of his good manners and civility.” Congreve, less prudent, made an angry and petulant defence, yet tacitly admitted the charge brought against him, by retrenching in the future editions of his plays, plissages of grossness and profaneness, which the restless antiquary still detects in the early copies. And, on the whole, Collier’s satire was attended with such salutary effects, that men started at the mass of impudence and filth which had been gradually accumulated in the theatre during the last reigns; and if the Augean stable was not sufficiently cleansed, the stream of public opinion was fairly directed against its conglomerated impurities. Since that period, indecency, that easy substitute for wit and pleasantry, has been gradually banished from the drama, where the conversation is now (according to Sheridan) at least always moral, if not entertaining.

During the second period of the British drama, great improvement was made in point of art. The principles of dramatic composition were more completely understood, and the pocts themselves had written so much upon the subject, that, as Dryden somewhere complains, they had taught their audience the art of criticising their performances. They did not, however, so far surrender the liberties and immunities of their predecessors, as to receive laws from the French critics. The rules of the unities were no further adopted by Otway, Congreve, and the writers of the time, than their immediate purpose admitted. It was allowed on all hands that unnecessary and gross irregularities were to be avoided, but no precise rule was adopted. Poets argued upon the subject according to caprice, and acted according to convenience. Gross and palpable extensions of time, and frequent changes of place, were avoided; and, unless in tragi-comedies, authors studied to combine the intrigue of their play into one distinct and progressive action. The genius by which this art was supported was neither so general nor so profuse as that which decorated the preceding period. It was enough, however, to support the honour of the drama; and if the second period has produced fewer masterpieces of talent, it has exhibited more plays capable of being acted.

III. In the third period of dramatic history, the critics began to obtain an authority for which they had long struggled, and which might have proved fatal to the liberties of the stage. It is the great danger of criticism, when laying down abstract rules without reference to any example, that these regulations can only apply to the form, and never to the essence, of the drama. They may assume that the plot must be formed on a certain model, but they cannot teach the spirit which is to animate its progress. They cannot show how a passion should be painted, but they can tell to a moment when the curtain should be dropped. The misfortune is, that, while treating of these subordinate considerations, critics exalt them to an undue importance in their own minds and that of their scholars. What they carve out for their pupils is a mere dissection of a lifeless form; the genius which animated it escapes, as the principle of life glided from the scalpel of those anatomists who sought to detect it in the earlier days of that art. Rymer had, as early as 1688, discovered that our poetry of the last age was as rude as its architecture. “One cause thereof,” he continues, [7:8:174]“might be, that Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry has been so little studied amongst us; it was, perhaps, commented upon by all the great men in Italy, before we well knew (on this side of the Alps) that there was such a book in being.” Accordingly, Rymer endeavours to establish what he calls the Rule of Reason over Fancy, in the contrivance and economy of a play. “Those who object to this subjugation,” he observes, “arc mere fanatics in poetry, and will never be saved by their good works.” The species of reason, however, to which Rymer appeals, resembles, in its occult nature, that which lies hidden in the depths of municipal law, and which is better known to the common class of mankind under the name of Authority. Because Aristotle assigns Pity and Terror as the objects of tragedy, Rymer resumes the proposition, that no other source of passion can be legitimate. To this he adds some arbitrary rules, of which it would be difficult to discover the rationale. It was the opinion, we are told, of the ancients, “that comedy (whose province was humour and ridiculous matter only) was to represent worse than the truth, history to describe the truth, but tragedy was to invent things better than the truth. Like good painters, they must design their images like the life, but yet better and more beautiful than the life. The malefactor of tragedy must be a better sort of malefactor than those that live in the present age: For an obdurate, impudent, and impenitent malefactor, can neither move compassion nor terror, nor be of any imaginable use in tragedy.” It would be difficult to account for these definitions upon any logical principle, and impossible for an admirer of the drama to assent to a rule which would exclude from the stage Iago and Richard III. It is equally difficult to account for the rationale of the following dogmas: “If I mistake not, in poetry no woman is to kill a man, except her quality gives her the advantage above him; nor is a servant to kill his master; nor a private man, much less a subject, to kill a king, nor on the contrary. Poetical decency will not suffer death to be dealt to each other by such persons, whom the laws of duel allow not to enter the lists together.” (Rymer’s View of the Tragedies of the Last Age.) Though for these and similar critical conceits it would be difficult to find any just principle, nevertheless, Rymer, Dennis, and other critics, who, mixing observations founded on sound judgment and taste, with others which rested merely upon dauntless assertion, or upon the opinions of Aristotle, began thereby to extend their authority, and produce a more than salutary influence upon the drama. It is true, that both of the aristarchs whom we have named were so ill advised as themselves to attempt to write plays, and thereby most effectually proved that it was possible for a drama to be extremely regular, and at the same time intolerably dull. Gradually, however, their precepts, in despite of their example, gained influence over the stage. They laid down rules in which the audience were taught to regard the trade of a connoisseur as easy and soon learned; and the same quantity of technical jargon which, in the present day, constitutes a judge of painting, was, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, sufficient to elevate a templar into a dramatic critic. The court of criticism, though self-constituted, was sufficiently formidable, since they possessed the power of executing their own decrees. Many authors made their submission; amongst others, Congreve humbled himself in the Mourning Bride ; and Addison, with anxious and constitutional timidity, sacrificed to the unities in his celebrated tragedy of Cato. Being in form and essence rather a French than an English play, it is one of the few English tragedies which foreigners have admired. It was translated into Italian, and admired as a perfect model by Riccoboni, although his taste condemns the silly love intrigue. Its success was contagious. Southerne and Rowe may be considered as belonging to the same school; although the former admired Shakspeare, and the latter formed himself, in some degree, on the model of Otway. Translations of French tragedies became every day more frequent; and their diction and style of dialogue was imitated upon the British stage. The language of tragedy no longer expressed human passion, or intimated what the persons of the drama actually felt, but described and debated alternately what they ought to feel; and sounding sentences, and long similes, exhibiting an active fancy and a cold imagination, supplied at once the place of force and of pathos.

The line between comedy and tragedy was now strictly drawn. The latter was no longer permitted to show that strain of heroic humour which exhibits itself in the character of Falconbridge, Hotspur, and Henry V., as well as Mercutio. All was to be cold and solemn, and in the same key of dull, grave state. Neither was comedy relieved by the touches of pathetic tenderness, and even sublimity, which are to be found in the romantic plays of the earlier period. To compensate the audience for the want of this beautiful variety of passion and feeling, Southerne, as Otway had done before him, usually introduces a few scenes of an under-plot, containing the most wretched and indecent farce, which was so slightly and awkwardly dovetailed into the original tragedy, that they have since been cancelled as impertinent intrusions, without being so much as missed. Young, Thomson, and others who followed the same wordy and declamatory system of composition, contributed rather to sink than to exalt the character of the stage. The two first were both men of excellent genius, as their other writings have sufficiently testified; but, as dramatists, they wrought upon a false model, and their productions are of little value.

It is a remarkable instance of the decay of dramatic art at this period, that several of the principal authors of the time felt themselves at liberty to write imitations of old plays belonging to the original school, by way of adapting them to the taste of their own age. The Pair Penitent of Rowe is well known as a poor imitation of Massinger’s Fatal Dowry. It does not greatly excel the original in the management and conduct of the piece; and, in every thing else, falls as far beneath it as the baldest translation can sink below the most spirited original.

It would appear that the players of this period had adopted a mode of acting correspondent to the poetical taste of the time. Declamation seems to have been more in fashion in the school of Booth and Betterton than that vivacity of action that exhibits at once with word, eye, and gesture, the immediate passion which it is the actor’s part to express. “I cannot help,” says Cibber, “in regard to truth, remembering the rude and riotous havock we made of all the late dramatic honours of the theatre: all became at once the spoil of ignorance and self-conceit. Shakespeare was defaced, and tortured in every signal character; Hamlet and Othello lost, in one hour, all their good sense, their dignity, and fame; Brutus and Cassius became noisy blusterers, with bold unmeaning eyes, mistaken sentiments, and turgid elocution.” (Cibber’s Memoirs.)

A singular attempt to deviate from the prevailing taste in tragedy was made by Lillo, with the highly laudable purpose of enlarging the sphere of dramatic utility. He conceived that plays founded upon incidents of private life might carry more immediate conviction to the mind of the hearers, and be the means of stlfling more vices in the bud, than those founded on the more remote and grander events of history. Accordingly, he formed his plots from domestic crimes, and his characters never rose [7:8:175]above the ranks of middle life. Lillo had many requisites for a tragedian; he understood, either from innate taste or critical study, the advantage to be derived from a consistent fable; and, in the tragedy of the Fatal Curiosity, he has left the model of a plot, in which, without the help of any exterior circumstances, a train of events operating upon the characters of the dramatic persons produce a conclusion at once the most dramatic and the most horrible that the imagination can conceive. Neither does it appear that, as a poet, Lillo was at all inferior to others of his age. He possessed a beautiful fancy; and much of his dialogue is as forcibly expressed as it is well conceived. On some occasions, however, he sinks below his subject; and on others, he appears to be dragged down to the nether sphere in which it is laid, and to become cold and creeping, as if depressed with the consciousness that he was writing upon a mean subject. George Barmvell never rises above an idle and profligate apprentice; Milwood’s attractions are not beyond those of a very vulgar woman of the town; Thoroughgood, as his name expresses, is very worthy and very tiresome; and there is, positively, nothing to redeem the piece, excepting the interest arising from a tale of horror, and the supposed usefulness of the moral. The Fatal Curiosity is a play of a very different cast, and such as might have shaken the Grecian stage even during the reign of terror. But the powers of the poet prove unequal to the concluding horrors of his scene. Old Wilmot’s character, as the needy man who had known better days, exhibits a mind naturally good, but prepared for acting cvil, even by the evil which he has himself suffered, and opens in a manner which excites the highest interest and expectation. But Lillo was unable to sustain the character to the close. After discovering himself to be the murderer of his son, the old man falls into the common cant of the theatre; he talks about computing sands, increasing the noise of thunder, adding water to the sea, and fire to Aetna, by way of describing the excess of his horror and remorse; and becomes as dully desperate, or as desperately dull, as any other despairing hero in the last scene of a fifth act.

During this third period of the drama, comedy underwent several changes. The department called genteel comedy, where the persons as well as the foibles ridiculed were derived chiefly from high life, assumed a separate and distinct existence from that which ransacked human nature at large for its subject. Like the tragedy of the period, this particular species of comedy was borrowed from the French. It was pleasing to "the higher classes, because it lay within their own immediate circle, and turned upon the topics of gallantry, persiflage, affectation, and raillery. It was agreeable to the general audience, who imagined they were thereby admitted into the presence of their betters, and enjoyed their amusement at their expense. The Careless Husband of Cibber is, perhaps, the best English play on this model. The general fault to which they are all liable is their tendency to lower the tone of moral feeling; and to familiarize men, in the middling, with the cold, heartless, and selfish system of profligate gallantry practised among the higher ranks. We are inclined to believe that, in a moral point of view, genteel comedy, as it has been usually written, is more prejudicial to public morals, than plays the tendency of which seems at first more grossly vicious. It is not so probable that the Beggar s Opera has sent any one from the two-shilling gallery to the highway, as that a youth entering upon the world, and hesitating between good and evil, may be determined to the worse course by the gay and seductive example of Lovemore or Sir Charles Easy. At any rate, the tenderness with which vices are shaded off into foibles familiarizes them to the mind of the hearer, and gives a false colouring to those crimes which should be placed before the mind in their native deformity. But the heaviness of this class of plays, and the difficulty of finding adequate representatives for those characters which are really well drawn, are powerful antidotes to the evil which we complain of. That which is dully written, and awkwardly performed, will not find many imitators.

The genteel comedy being a plant of foreign growth, never obtained exclusive possession of the English stage, any more than court dresses have been adopted in our private societies. The comedy of intrigue, borrowed, perhaps, originally from the Spaniards, continued to be written and acted with success. Many of Cibber’s pieces, of Centlivre’s, and others, still retain their place on the stage. This is a species of comedy easily written, and seen with pleasure, though consisting chiefly of bustle and complicated incident; and requiring much co-operation of the dress-maker, scene-painter, and carpenter. After all the bustle, however, of surprise, and disguise, and squabble; after every trick is exhausted, and every stratagem played off, the writer too often finds himself in a labyrinth from which a natural mode of extrication seems altogether impossible. Hence the intrigue is huddled up at random; and the persons of the drama seem, as if by common consent, to abandon their dramatic character before throwing off their stage-dresses. The miser becomes generous; the peevish cynic good humoured; the libertine virtuous; the coquette is reformed; the debauchee is reclaimed; all vices natural and habitual are abandoned by those most habitually addicted to them: a marvellous reformation, which is brought about entirely from the consideration that the play must now be concluded. It was when pressed by this difficulty that Fielding is said to have damned all fifth acts.

The eighteenth century, besides genteel comedy, and comedy of intrigue, gave rise to a new species of dramatic amusement. The Italian opera had been introduced into this country at a great expense, and to the prejudice, as it was supposed, of the legitimate drama. Gay, in aiming at nothing beyond a parody of this fashionable entertainment, and making it the vehicle of some political satire against Sir Robert Walpole’s administration, unwittingly laid the foundation of the English opera. The popularity of his piece was unequalled; partly owing to its peculiar humour, partly to its novelty, partly to the success of the popular airs, which every body heard with delight, and partly to political motives. The moral tendency of the Beggars Opera has been much questioned; although, in all probability, the number of highwaymen is not more increased by the example of Macheath, than that of murderers is diminished by the catastrophe of George Barnwell. Many years ago, however, an unhappy person, rather from a perverted and most misplaced ambition, than from the usual motives of want and desperation, chose, though in easy circumstances, and most respectably connected, to place himself at the head of a band of thieves and housebreakers, whose depredations he directed and shared. On the night on which they committed the crime for which he suffered, and when they were equipped for the expedition, he sung to his accomplices the chorus of the Beggar s Opera, “Let us take the road.” But his confederates, professional thieves, and who pursued, from habit and education, the desperate practices which Mr B adopted from an adventurous spirit of profligate quixotry, knew nothing at all of Gay or the Beggars Opera; and, in their several confessions and testimonies, only remembered something of a flash-song, about “turning lead to gold.” This curious circumstance, while it tends to show that the drama may affect the weak part of a mind, predisposed to evil by a diseased imagination, [7:8:176]proves the general truth of what Johnson asserts in the Life of Gay, that “highwaymen and housebreakers seldom mingle in any elegant diversions; nor is it possible for any one to imagine that he may rob with safety because he sees Macheath reprieved on the stage.”

This play is now chiefly remarkable as having given rise to the English opera. In this pleasing entertainment, it is understood that the plot may be light and the characters superficial, provided that the music be good and adapted to the situation, the scenes lively and possessed of comic force. Notwithstanding the subordinate nature of this species of composition, it approaches, perhaps, more closely to the ancient Grecian drama than any thing which retains possession of our stage. The subjects, indeed, are as totally different as the sublime from the light and the trivial. But, in the mixture of poetry and music, and in the frequent introduction of singing characters unconnected with the business of the piece, and therefore somewhat allied to the chorus, the English opera has some general points of resemblance with the Grecian tragedy. This species of dramatic writing was successfully practised by Bickerstaff, and has been honoured by the labours of Sheridan.

IV. With the fourth era of our dramatic history commenced a return to a better taste, introduced by the celebrated David Garrick. The imitations of French tragedy, and the tiresome uniformity of genteel comedy, were ill adapted to the display of his inimitable talent. And thus, if the last generation reaped many hours of high enjoyment from the performances of this great actor, the present is indebted to him for having led back the public taste to the dramas of Shakspeare.

The plays of this great author had been altogether forgotten, or so much marred and disguised by interpolations and alterations, that he seems to have arisen on the British stage with the dignity of an antique statue disencumbered from the rubbish in which it had been enveloped since the decay of the art. But, although Garrick showed the world how the characters of Shakspeare might be acted, and so far paved the way for a future regeneration of the stage, no kindred spirit arose to imitate his tone of composition. His supremacy was universally acknowledged; but it seemed as if he was regarded as an object of adoration, not of imitation; and that authors were as much interdicted the treading his tragic path, as the entering his magic circle. It was not sufficiently remembered that the faults of Shakspeare, or rather of his age, are those into which no modern dramatist is likely to fall; and that he learned his beauties in the school of nature, which is ever open to all who profess the fine arts. Shakspeare may, indeed, be inimitable, but there are inferior degress of excellence, which talent and study cannot fail to attain; and the statuary were much to blame who, in despair of modelling a Venus like that of Phidias, should set himself to imitate a Chinese doll. Yet such was the conduct of the dramatists of Britain long after the supremacy of Shakspeare had been acknowledged. He reigned a Grecian prince over Persian slaves; and they who adored him did not dare attempt to use his language. The tragic muse appeared to linger behind the taste of the age, and still used the constrained and mincing measure which she had been taught in the French school. Hughes, Cumberland, and other men of talent, appeared in her service; but their model remained as imperfect as ever; and it was not till our own time that any bold efforts were made to restore to tragedy that truth and passion, without which declamation is only rant and impertinence. Horace Walpole, however, showed what might be done by adopting a more manly and vigorous style of composition; and Home displayed the success of a more natural current of passion. The former, chusing a theme not only totally unfit for representation, but from which the mind shrinks in private study, treated it as a man of genius, free from the trammels of habit and of pedantry. His characters in the Mysterious Mother do not belong to general classes, but have bold, true, and individual features; and the language approaches that of the first age of the English drama. The JĎouglas of Home is not recommended by this species of merit. In diction and character it does not rise above other productions of the period. But the interest turns upon a passion which finds a response in every bosom; for those who are too old for love, and too young for ambition, are all alike awake to the warmth and purity of maternal and filial affection. The scene of the recognition of Douglas’s birth possesses a power over the affections, which, when supported by adequate representation, is scarcely equalled in the circle of our drama. It is remarkable that the ingenious author was so partial to this theatrical situation, as to introduce it in several of his other tragedies.

The comedy of the fourth period is chiefly remarkable for exhibiting The Rivals and the School for Scandal. Critics prefer the latter, whilst the general audience reap, perhaps, more pleasure from the former; the pleasantry being of a more general east, the incident more complicated and varied, and the whole plot more interesting. In both these plays, the gentlemanlike ease of Farquhar is united with the wit of Congreve. Indeed, the wit of Sheridan, though equally brilliant with that of his celebrated predecessor, flows so easily, and is so happily elicited by the line of the dialogue, that, in admiring its sparkles, we never once observe the stroke of the flint which produces them. Wit and pleasantry seemed to be the natural atmosphere of this extraordinary man, whose history was at once so brilliant and so melancholy. Goldsmith was, perhaps, in relation to Sheridan what Vanburgh was to Congreve. His comedies turn on an extravagance of intrigue and disguise, and so far belong to the Spanish school. But the ease of his humorous dialogue, and the droll yet true conception of the characters, make sufficientamends for an occasional stretch in point of probability. If all who draw on the spectators for indulgence were equally prepared to compensate by a corresponding degree of pleasure, they would have little occasion to complain. The elder Colman’s Jealous Wife, and some of his smaller pieces, are worthy, and it is no ordinary compliment, of being placed beside these masterpieces. We dare not rank Cumberland so high, although two or three of his numerous efforts retain possession of the stage. The Wheel of Fortune was certainly one of the best acting plays of its time, but it was perhaps chiefly on account of the admirable representative which the principal character found in Mr John Kemble.

The plays of Foote, the modern Aristophanes, who ventured, by his powers of mimicking the mind as well as the external habits, to bring living persons on the stage, belong to this period, and make a remarkable part of its dramatic history. But we need not dwell upon it. Foote was an unprincipled satirist; and while he affected to be the terror of vice and folly, was only anxious to extort forbearance-money from the timid, or to fill his theatre at the indiscriminate expense of friends and enemies, virtuous or vicious, who presented foibles capable of being turned into ridicule. It is a just punishment of this course of writing, that Foote’s plays, though abounding in comic and humorous dialogue, have died with the parties whom he ridiculed. When they lost the zest of personality, their popularity, in spite of much intrinsic merit, fell into utter decay.

Meantime dramatic composition of the higher class seemed[7:8:177] declining. Garrick in our fathers’ time, Mrs Siddons in ours, could neither of them extract from their literary admirers any spark of congenial fire. No part written for either of these astonishing performers has survived the transient popularity which their talents could give to almost any thing. The truth seems to be, that the French model had been wrought upon till it was altogether worn out; and a new impulse from some other quarter—a fresh turning up of the soil, and awakening of its latent energies by a new mode of culture—was become absolutely necessary to the renovation of our dramatic literature. England was destined to receive this impulse from Germany, where literature was in the first luxuriant glow of vegetation, with all its crop of flowers and weeds rushing up together. There was good and evil in the importation derived from this superabundant source. But the evil was of a nature so contrary to that which had long palsied our dramatic literature, that, like the hot poison mingling with the cold, it may in the issue bring us nearer to a state of health.

The affectation of Frederic II. of Prussia, and of other German princes, for a time suppressed the native literature, and borrowed their men of letters from France, as well as their hair-dressers,—their dramas as well as their dressed dishes. The continental courts, therefore, had no share in forming the national drama. To the highest circle in every nation that of France will be most acceptable, not only on account of its strict propriety and conformity to les convenances, but also as securing them against the risk of hearing bold and offensive truths uttered in the presence of the sovereign and the subject. But the bold, frank, cordial, and rough character of the German people at large did not relish the style of the French tragedies translated for their stage; and this cannot be wondered at, when the wide difference between the nations is considered.

The natural character of the Germans is diametrically opposite to that of the French. The latter are light almost to frivolity, quick in seeing points of ridicule, slowly awakened to those of feeling. The Germans are of an abstracted, grave, and somewhat heavy temper; less alive to the ridiculous, more easily moved by an appeal to the passions. That which moves a Frenchman to laughter, affects a German with sorrow or indignation; and in that which touches the German as a source of the sublime or pathetic, the quick-witted Frenchman sees only subject of laughter. In their theatres the Frenchman comes to judge, to exercise his critical faculties, and to apply the rulcs which he has learned, fundamentally or by rote, to the performance of the night. A German, on the contrary, expects to receive that violent excitation which is most pleasing to his imaginative and somewhat phlegmatic character. While the Frenchman judges of the form and shape of the play, the observance of the unities, and the denouement of the plot, the German demands the powerful contrast of character and passion—the sublime in tragedy and the grotesque in comedy. The former may be called the formalist of dramatic criticism, keeping his eye chiefly on its exterior shape and regular form; the latter is the fanatic, who, disregarding forms, requires a deep and powerful tone of passion and of sentiment, and is often content to surrender his feelings to inadequate motives.

From the different temper of the nations, the merits and faults of their national theatres became diametrically opposed to each other. The French author is obliged to confine himself, as we have already observed, within the circle long since described by Aristotle. He must attend to all the decorum of the scene, and conform to every regulation, whether rational or arbitrary, which has been entailed on the stage since the days of Corneille. He must never so far yield to feeling as to lose sight of grace and dignity. He must never venture so far in quest of the sublime, as to run the risk of moving the risible faculties of an audience, so much alive to the ridiculous, that they will often find or make it in what is to others the source of the grand or the terrible. The Germans, on the contrary, have never subjected their poets to any arbitrary forms. The division of the empire into so many independent states has prevented the ascendency of any general system of criticism; and their national literature was not much cultivated, until the time when such authority had become generally unpopular. Lessing had attacked the whole French theatrical system in his Dramaturgie with the most bitter raillery. Schiller brought forward his splendid dramas of romance and of history. Goethe crowded the stage with the heroes of ancient German chivalry. No means of exciting emotion were condemned as irregular, providing emotion was actually excited. And there can be no doubt that the license thus given to the poet, the willingness with which the audience submitted to the most extravagant postulates on their part, left them at liberty to exert the full efforts of their genius.

Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, became at once the fathers and the masters of the German theatre; and it must be objected to these great men, that, in the abundance of their dramatic talent, they sometimes forgot that their pieces, in order to be acted, must be adapted to the capabilities of a theatre; and thus wrote plays altogether incapable of being represented. Their writings, although affording many high examples of poetry and passion, are marked with faults which the exaggeration of their followers has often carried into total extravagance. The plays of chivalry and of history were followed by an inundation of imitations, in which, according to Schlegel, “there was nothing historical but the names and external circumstances; nothing chivalrous but the helmets, bucklers, and swords; and nothing of old German honesty but the supposed rudeness. The sentiments were as modern as they were vulgar; from chivalry pieces, they were converted into cavalry plays, which certainly deserve to be acted by horses rather than men.” (Schlegel onthe Drarna. y )

It is not the extravagance of the apparatus alone, but exaggeration of character and sentiment, which have been justly ascribed as faults to the German school. The authors appear to have introduced too harshly, brilliant lights and deep shadows; the tumid is too often substituted for the sublime; and faculties and dispositions the most opposed to each other are sometimes described as existing in the same person.

In German comedy the same faults predominate in a much greater degree. The pathetic comedy, which might be rather called domestic tragedy, became, unfortunately, very popular in Germany; and found a champion in Kotzebue, who carried its conquests over all the Continent. The most obvious fault of this species of composition is the demoralizing falsehood of the pictures which it offers to us. The vicious are frequently presented as objects less of censure than of sympathy; sometimes they are selected as objects of imitation and praise. There is an affectation of attributing noble and virtuous sentiments to the persons least qualified by habit or education to entertain them; and of describing the higher and better educated classes as uniformly deficient in those feelings of liberality, generosity, and honour, which may be considered as proper to their situation in life. This contrast may be true in particular instances, and being used sparingly, might afford a good moral lesson; but, in spite of truth and probability, it has been assumed, upon all occasions, by these authors, as the groundwork of a sort of intellectual jacobinism; consisting, as Mr Coleridge has well expressed[7:8:178] it, “in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion, have excommunicated from our esteem.”

The German taste was introduced upon the English theatre within these twenty years. But the better productions of her stage have never been made known to us; for, by some unfortunate chance, the wretched pieces of Kotzebue have found a readier acceptance or more willing translators, than the sublimity of Goethe, the romantic strength of Schiller, or the deep tragic pathos of Lessing. They have tended, however, wretched as the model is, to introduce on our stage a degree of sentiment, and awaken among the audience a strain of sensibility, to which we were previously strangers.

George Coleman’s comedy of John Bull is by far the best effort of our late comic drama. The scenes of broad humour are executed in the best possible taste; and the whimsical, yet native characters, reflect the manners of real life. The sentimental parts, although one of them includes a finely wrought up scene of paternal distress, partake of the falsetto of German pathos. But the piece is both humorous and affecting; and we readily excuse its obvious imperfections, in consideration of its exciting our laughter and our tears.

Whilst the British stage received a new impulse from a country whose literature had hitherto scarce been known to exist, she was enriched by productions of the richest native genius. A retired female, thinking and writing in solitude, presented to her countrymen the means of regaining the true and manly tone of national tragedy. She has traced its foundation to that strong instinctive and sympathetic curiosity, which tempts men to look into the bosoms of their fellow-creatures, and to seek, in the distresses or emotions of others, the parallel of their own passions. She has built on the foundations which she laid bare, and illustrated her precepts by examples which will long be an honour to the age in which they were produced and admired, yet its disgrace, when it is considered that they have been barred their legitimate sphere of influence upon the public taste.

Besides this gifted person, the names of Coleridge, of Maturin, and other men of talents, throng upon our recollection; and there is one who, to judge from the dramatic sketch he has given us in Manfred, must be considered as a match for Aeschylus, even in his sublimest moods of horror. It is no part of our plan, however, to enter upon the criticism of our contemporaries.^[6. This and other similar expressions, which now excite a melancholy interest, are suffered to remain, for the reason stated in the note, page 147∙ ] Suffice it to say, that the age has no reason to apprehend any decay of dramatic talent.

Neither can our actors be supposed inadequate to the representation of such pieces of dramatic art as we judge our authors capable of producing. We have lost Mrs Siddons and John Kemble, but we still possess -Kean, Young, and Miss O’Neil; and the stage has to boast other tragic performers of merit. In comedy perhaps it was never more strong. In point of scenery and decoration, our theatres are so amply provided, that they may rather seem to exceed than to fall short of what is required to form a classical exhibition.

Where then are we to look for that unfortunate counterbalance, which confessedly depresses the national drama, in despite of the advantages we have enumerated? We apprehend it will be found in the monopoly possessed by two large establishments, which, unhappily for the progress of national taste, and, it is said, without any equivalent advantage to the proprietors, now enjoy the exclusive privilege of dramatic representation. It must be distinctly understood, that we attribute these disadvantages to the system itself, and by no means charge them upon those who have the administration of either theatre. The proprietors have a right to enjoy what the law invests in them; and the managers have probably discharged their duty to the public as honourably as circumstances would admit of; but the system has led into errors which affect public taste, and even public morals. We shall briefly consider it as it influences, 1st, the mode of representation; 2dly, the theatrical authors and performers; and, 3dly, the quality and composition of the audience.

The first inconvenience arises from the great size of the theatres, which has rendered them unfit for the legitimate purposes of the drama. The persons of the performers are, in these huge circles, so much diminished, that nothing short of the mask and buskin could render them distinctly visible to the audience. Show and machinery have therefore usurped the place of tragic poetry; and the author is compelled to address himself to the eyes, not to the understanding or feelings, of the spectators. This is of itself a gross error. Every thing beyond correct costume and theatrical decorum is foreign to the legitimate purposes of the drama, as tending to divide the attention of the audience; and the rivalry of the scene-painter and the carpenter cannot be very flattering to any author or actor of genius. Besides, all attempts at decoration, beyond what the decorum of the piece requires, must end in paltry puppet-show exhibition. The talents of the scene-painter and mechanist cannot, owing to the very nature of the stage, make battles, sieges, &c. any thing but objects of ridicule. Thus wė have enlarged our theatres, so as to destroy the effect of acting, without carrying to any perfection that of pantomime and dumb show.

Secondly, The monopoly of the two large theatres has operated unfavourably both upon theatrical writers and performers. The former have been in many instances, if not absolutely excluded from the scene, yet deterred from approaching it, in the same manner as men avoid attempting to pass through a narrow wickct, which is perpetually thronged by an importunate crowd. Allowing the managers of these two theatres, judging in the first and in the last resort, to be possessed of the full discrimination necessary to a task so difficult; supposing them to be at all times alike free from partiality and from prejudice; still the number of plays thrust upon their hands must prevent their doing equal justice to all, and must frequently deter a man of real talents, either from pride or modesty, from entering a competition clogged with delay, solicitation, and other circumstances, haud subeunda ingenio suο. It is unnecessary to add, that increasing the number of theatres, and diminishing their size, would naturally tend to excite a competition among the managers, whose interest it is to make experiments on the public taste; and that this would infallibly secure any piece of reasonable promise a fair opportunity of being represented. It is by such a competition that genius is discovered; it is thus that horticulturists raise whole beds of common flowers, for the chance of finding among them one of those rare varieties which are the boast of their art.
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The exclusive privilege of the regular London theatres is equally, or in a greater degree, detrimental to the performer; for it is with difficulty that he fights his way to a London engagement; and when once received, he is too often retained for the mere purpose of being laid aside, or shelfed as it is technically called; that is, rendered a weekly burden upon the pay-list of the theatre, without being produced above four or five times in the season to exhibit his talents. Into this system the managers are forced, from the necessity of their situation, which compels them to enlist in their service every performer who seems to possess buds of genius, although it ends in their being so crowded together that they have no room to blossom. In fact, many a man of talent thus brought from the active exercise of a profession, to be paid for remaining inactive in obscurity in London, and supported by what seems little short of eleemosynary bounty, either becomes careless of his business or disgusted with it; and, at any rate, stagnates in that mediocrity to which want of exercise alone will often condemn talent.

Thirdly, and especially, the magnitude of these theatres has occasioned them to be destined to company so scandalous, that persons not very nice in their taste of society must yet exclaim against the abuse as a national nuisance. We are aware of the impossibility of excluding a certain description of females from public places in a corrupt metropolis like London; but in theatres of moderate size, frequented by the better class, these unfortunate persons would feel themselves compelled to wear a mask at least of decency. In the present theatres of London, the best part of the house is openly and avowedly set off for their reception; and no part of it that is open to the public at large is free from their intrusion, or at least from the open display of the disgusting improprieties to which their neighbourhood gives rise. And these houses, raised at an immense expense, are so ingeniously misconstructed, that in the private boxes you see too little of the play, and in the public boxes greatly too much of a certain description of the company. No man of delicacy would wish the female part of his family to be exposed to such scenes; no man of sense would wish to put youth of the male sex in the way of such temptation. This evil, if not altogether arising from the large size of the theatres, has been so incalculably increased by it, that, unless in the case of strong attraction, prostitutes and their admirers usually form the principal part of the audience. We censure, and with justice, the corruption of morals in Paris. But in no public place in that metropolis is vice permitted to bear so open and audacious a front as in the theatres of London. Barefaced vice is never permitted to insult decency. Those who seek it must go to the haunts to which it is limited. In London, if we would enjoy our most classical public amusement, we are braved by her on the very threshold.

We notice these evils, without pretending to point out the remedy. If, however, it were possible so to arrange interests, that the patents of the present theatres should cover four, or even six, of smaller size, dedicated to the same purpose, we conceive that more good actors would be found, and more good plays written; and, as a necessary consequence, that good society would attend the theatre in sufficient numbers to enforce respect to decency. The access to the stage would be rendered easy to both authors and actors; and although this might give scope to some rant and false taste, it could not fail to call forth much excellence, that must otherwise remain latent or repressed. The theatres would be relieved of the heavy ex-’ pense at present incurred, in paying performers who do not play; and in each maintaining three theatrical corps for the separate purposes of tragedy, comedy, and musical pieces; only one of which can be productive labourers on the same evening, though all must be supported and paid. According to our more thrifty plan, each of these companies would be earning at the same time the fruits of their professional industry. The hours of representation, in one or more of these theatres, might be rendered more convenient to those in high life, whilst the middling classes might enjoy a rational and classical entertainment after the business of the day.

Such an arrangement might indeed be objected to by those who entertain a holy horror of the very name of a theatre, and who imagine impiety and blasphemy are inseparable from the drama. We have no room left to argue with such persons, or we might endeavour to prove that the dramatic art is in itself as capable of being directed either to right or wrong purposes, as the art of printing. It is true, that even after a play has been formed upon the most virtuous model, the man who is engaged in the duties of religion will be better employed than he who is seated in a theatre, and listening to it. To those abstracted and enrapt spirits, who feel or suppose themselves capable of remaining constantly involved in heavenly thoughts, any sublunary amusement may justly seem frivolous. But the mass of mankind are not so framed. The Supreme Being, who claimed the seventh day as his own, allotted the other six days of the week for purposes merely human. When the necessity of daily labour is removed, and the call of social duty fulfilled, that of moderate and timely amusement claims its place, as a want inherent in our nature. To relieve this want, and fill up the mental vacancy, games are devised, books are written, music is composed, spectacles and plays are invented and exhibited. And if these last have a moral and virtuous tendency; if the sentiment expressed tend to rouse our love of what is noble, and our contempt of what is mean; if they unite hundreds in a sympathetic admiration of virtue, abhorrence of vice, or derision of folly; it will remain to be shown how far the spectator is more criminally engaged, than if he had passed the evening in the idle gossip of society, in the feverish pursuits of ambition, or in the unsated and insatiable struggle after gain—the graver employments of the present life, but equally unconnected with our existence hereafter. (d. d. d.)