"Bengemens plot," and was working with Benjamin's aid and Marston's as well. That is why Eastward Hoe survived (as Cuckold's Haven) in 1685, and as late as the last quarter of the eighteenth century was adapted by Mrs. Lennox for the Drury Lane Theatre. It will always be literature, and there is no reason why it should not be acting drama as well. For the share of Chapman and Marston in its composition, and for its position in the history of comedy, the reader is referred to Professor Cunliffe's essay prefixed to the play as edited for this volume.

John Marston.—As we have already seen, Marston appears in Henslowe's records of the Admiral's men but for a moment, and that in 1599.1 In the same year and the next he is writing, for the Children of Paul's, plays whose interest is in their satirical attack upon Ben Jonson in his self-assumed rôle of censor of literature and drama. In and after 1601, however, Marston's productions are presented by the Children of the Chapel (later, of the Queen's Revels).

Much of the freshness, vigour, wit, and vivid characterization which make Eastward Hoe a masterpiece of realistic comedy may be found also in Marston's tragi-comedy of The Dutch Courtezan. Whether he wrote this before or after his collaboration with Chapman and Jonson I find it difficult to decide; but that the two plays are of approximately the same date of composition, 1604-5, there is no doubt; and that The Dutch Courtezan is a work of greater maturity in observation, temperament, and art than any other of the comedies produced by him during the brief period of his dramatic activity, 1598-1607, is, I think, self-evident. "We have but to open his works," declares Gifford, "to be convinced that Marston was the most scurrilous, filthy, and obscene writer of his time." And Dr. Stoll, in his discriminating study of the relations of Webster to Marston's Malcontent, confirms this judgment. "Take them away," he says of certain scenes, "and you take away one of the most characteristic features of Marston's comedy-the witty, foul-mouthed cynic, inspecting and manipulating, during lulls of the action, some great fool and ass. . The impudent, startling, and often outlandish vocabulary and figures, the abrupt and jerky antitheses, the outbursts of railing and satire, the lively, but filthy and hideous, imaginations-all are of a piece with the rest of the play, and with Marston as a whole." And so, too, "the harping on revolting olfactory images." one and another of Marston's plays, whether tragedy or comedy, with the exception of The Dutch Courtezan, these features obliterate whatever dramatic or literary merit may otherwise obtain. In the Histrio-Mastix, probably revised by him about 1599, we have, conjecturally, Marston's attack upon 1 If he is the Mr. Maxton of the Diary, Sept. 28th

In

Jonson-certainly Marston's "wild outlandish terms "; in Jacke Drums Entertainment of 1600, even more probably his, we have that richer assortment of indigestible words which Jonson, in the Poetaster, makes Crispinus vomit up; in the Malcontent of about the same year we have not only the affected phraseology but the foul-mouthed cynicism and hideous imaginations of Malevole; in What You Will, which by its style as well as its personal and general malignity must fall between 1600 and 1603, we have again the railing rhodomontade, the pessimism, and, apparently, the flings at Jonson; in The Parasitaster (produced in 1606, after January 30) we have the histrionic indignation of that other malcontent, Faunus-a bitter pessimism, and a ribaldry only more disgusting than the vices which he attacks. To conceive of Marston's returning to that kind of affectation in comedy, after he had co-operated in an Eastward Hoe (between May 4 and September 4, 1605), and produced of his own effort (in 1605 or 1606) a Dutch Courtezan, is disconcerting. But he did return to it, for his tragedy of Sophonisba, undoubtedly written later-for it is announced at the end of Parasitaster as forthcoming-doubly redoubles the brutal realism of his earlier work.

However the order of dates may run, in The Dutch Courtezan we find none of the gobbets of style, none of the revolting imagery, none of the personal animadversion, and but little of the strained cynicism of the other comedies. In the prologue Marston forswears railing, though "rail we could "

Though the “full scope of the play," as he informs us, is to point "the difference betwixt the love of a courtezan and a wife," and though the theme, itself of a most delicate nature, is handled with an Elizabethan directness which would render it unacceptable to any self-respecting playgoer of to-day, the drama is admirably constructed and makes excellent reading. Not, of course, virginibus puerisque. There is a real moral purpose in the story of the high-minded Malheureux who, arguing that "the sight of vice augments the hate of sin," finds that, at first sight, even he can succumb. His soliloquy on the unmoral superiority of beasts vividly forecasts similar soliloquies in Beaumont's parts of Philaster and A King and No King. The intrigue is cleverly compounded of interests romantic, comic, and patheti. The situations as well as the characters are lifelike-none the less so when painfully pornographic; and the sensational reverses of fortune are adroitly invented. The by-plot of episodes, in which the ever-recurring and incorrigible Cockledemoy, after the fashion laid down in The merry, conceited jests of George Peele, cozens the Mulligrubs, ludicrously pious and money

loving Puritans of the Family of Love, is not closely interwoven with the main movement, but is, for all that, first-rate acting farce. The scene, unlike that of Marston's other plays, always excepting Eastward Hoe, is in London; and the picture of contemporary life is entitled to a laudable rank among those presented by the citizen comedies of manners and romance which, following in the wake of The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Shomakers Holiday, played so large a part, during this period, in the entertainment of the public. The distant but honourable relationship of the tender-hearted Beatrice and her spontaneously bubbling sister to well-known Shakespearean characters has been noticed by all readers. The younger, Crispinella, is undeniably fascinating, not only in her romantic recalcitrance, but in the naturalness which prompts her to "speak what she thinks," and that with a bourgeois broadness that would drive a twentieth-century barmaid to cover. Though historians of social custom assure us that such virginal wit would not have offended the seventeenth-century ear, it is with some relief that one notes how very much Crispinella's seventeenth-century sister is shocked. The courtezan Franceschina is, as Mr. Bullen has described her, “a fair vengeful fiend, . . . playful and pitiless as a tigress, whose caresses are sweet as honey and poisonous as aconite." The caresses are indeed of such professional artistry that one cannot but cry with Crispinella (though in altogether different sequence), "My stomach o' late stands against kissing extremely."

The Dutch Courtezan is the only comedy of genuine merit, dramatic and literary, produced by Marston unaided. It was played at Court as late as eight years, or nine, after its original production; and in 1680 Betterton revised and revived it under the name of The Revenge, or A Match in Newgate. It was several times after that altered, and under various aliases-Woman's Revenge, Love and Revenge, Vintner in Suds, Vintner Tricked, and, finally, as Trick upon Trick, at Drury Lane,—it held the London stage until 1789. I heartily agree with Dr. Ward that with proper revision and "in adequate hands it would prove a source of genuine delight to any theatrical audience." The proper revision would be a difficult task, not so much in view of the coarseness of the lines, for they are not, as a rule, wanton or intrinsically revolting, and could be cut, but in view of the intimately carnal nature of the central situations. I have seen a famous Russian actress in scenes of a modern popular play, just as perilous of subject and much more wanton in purport, performing to interested audiences of fashion; but I have felt as if I were peeping through a keyhole. And I opine that my fellow-hearers were similarly affected. Though enchained by the histrionic skill of the impersonation, an audience may be repelled not so much by the portrayal of immorality as by the betrayal of its confidence in the matter of taste-which is, after all, the sovereign arbiter of art.

In a recent article on "Poetry and Common Sense " in one of our leading weeklies a writer has discriminatingly explained the relative absence of cetrain traits of continental poetry from English literature "by a distinctive Anglo-Saxon characteristic-an imperative common sense. "In respect of realism of a very un-English sort, England," he affirms, "even in its drama and fiction, has lagged behind other countries, but especially in its poetry. It has never relished unblinking accuracy in setting forth the relations of the sexes. Frank utterances in Don Juan seem to English critics blotches of bad taste and bad art. To turn to America, Walt Whitman's similar experiments found favour chiefly on the Continent. The usual explanation is that such restraint is prompted by a finer morality. Probably it would be truer to say that it comes from the poet's common sense, a fellow-feeling with his readers." That something of the same recoil obtained in Marston's own day is evident from the comment of his contemporary, Anthony Nixon, who wrote in The Black Year, of 1606, of The Dutch Courtezan, then recently published, as "corrupting English conditions." When we consider that of

all Marston's works this is the least objectionable, we are astounded at the impudence of his publisher, William Sheares, who, some quarter-century after Marston had exchanged the stage for the pulpit, dedicates the collected Workes to the Viscountess Falkland, with an extenuation of any shortcoming on the ground that "they were the author's Juvenilia and youthful recreations. However," he adds, "he is free from all obscene speeches, which is the chief cause that makes Plays to be so odious unto most men. He abhors such writers, and their works; and hath professed himself an enemy to all such as stuff their scenes with ribaldry, and lard their lines with scurrilous taunts and jests; so that whatsoever, even in the spring of his years, he hath presented upon the private and public theatre, now in his autumn and declining age, he need not be ashamed of" (!).

Marston began by lampooning "villainies" public and private, concrete and abstract, in satires that must have been composed when he was not more than twenty-two years of age. But, as the grievances of a youth of twentytwo, whose imaginations were even then hideous and his language scurrilous and foul, were not genuine, so the indignant fury all through his career was nistrionic; his righteousness, a second-hand literary article, good for trade. The indifference to fame which he parades in his callow first-fruits, The Scourge of Villanie,

"Let others pray

For ever their fair poems flourish may;

But as for me, hungry Oblivion,

Devour me quick,"

1 The Nation, July 13, 1911.

is as insincere as the satirical pose of his life; and the same insincerity marks the Oblivioni Sacrum of his epitaph.

As to his comedies, if, as he informs us in the preface to The Fawne (Parasitaster)," comedies are writ to be spoken not read; . . . the life of these things consists in action," their doom, with the exception of The Courtezan, was sealed in his own day. The play-going public has consigned the rest to obl vion long ago; never again can the world of readers be edified by any of them. The Malcontent is ambitious in sensational devices, but sepulchral in its action, grim and discordant in its poetry. In the purging of Zuccone by his neglected spouse, The Fawn presents boisterously comic situations that might be played with impunity in a brothel; and, for the rest, the interest centres in a series of cynical or ribald dialogues and declamations, which have the wit but not the humour of the vaudeville monologue of to-day. What You Will has no merit whatever. These three plays are, in general, excremental or venomous. Here and there a deodorized sentiment or image, rhetorically expressed; and here and there a dramatic character of original and distinctively "humorous" peculiarity. But Malevole, Faunus, and such other railers are sewers of scurrilous cynicism, flattery or hypocrisy, rather than of humours. They constitute a misanthropic type not artistically indigenous to comedy. The humours, on the other hand, of the silent lord, Granuffe; the jealous husband, Don Zuccone, and his resourceful wife, Zoya; the sickly knight, Sir Amoroso; the choleric marshal, Bilioso, have their appropriate place in the museum of literary history.

Marston's contribution as a comic dramatist is to the development, through the Dutch Courtezan, of the romantic comedy of manners; through his share of Eastward Hoe, of realistic comedy; and through The Malcontent, and, in some sense, again The Courtezan, of the sensational tragi-comedy already naturalized by Greene and Shakespeare, and soon to be elaborated to its extreme by Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton and Rowley.1

Field. With these dramatists of humours must, at any rate, be mentioned Jonson's "scholar" and Chapman's "loved son," "Nathaniel Field. As a child actor of the Queen's Chapel he had in 1600, when but thirteen years of age, attracted the favourable attention of the former by his playing in Cynthia's Revels; and later he had taken a leading part in The Silent Woman. The gratitude of Chapman he earned by his successful performance in Bussy D'Ambois. In 1610 his comedy, A Woman is a

1 The Malcontent (all Marston's, save the Induction added in 1604 by Webster), as a tragi-comedy of the "revenge" motif is a rare instance of the fusion drama, a surviving "sport" of the blood and thunder tragedy of Thomas Kyd. See Stoll's John Webster, PP. 57, 98; Baskervill, Jonson's Early Comedy, 162, 268; Hart's Jonson, I, XLIV.