WEBSTER The Roaring Girle 333 They took from contemporary history or legend themes in which they could plunge their audiences shuddering into the abysm of physical fear. Such tales as they loved to tell have become so rare in modern European chronicle that we were beginning to consider them impossible when the tragedy of Belgrade, in 1903, reminded us of the range of vindictive savagery. The nocturnal murder of Alexander and Draga was an episode, in all its sections, which seemed enacted in order that Tourneur or Chapman should arrange it in vehement blank verse. In the reign of Elizabeth and James a love of blood was kept alive by the frequent spectacle of sudden death. Of the audience of a London play-house the verse might have been recited with which the old Roman tragedy of Octavia had closed, "civis gaudet cruore." The more complete a massacre could be, the more hideous in its details, the more pitiless its motives, the readier a Jacobean audience was to welcome its presentment on the stage. Three writers of distinction stand out pre-eminent among the numerous caterers for this peculiar love of the horrible. In each the instinct of the poet prevailed, during lucid intervals, over the cult of mere agitation and terror; yet all three, if examined not by the light of their occasional passages of illumination and beauty, but in the lurid twilight of their complete works, are seen to be, from the stage point of view, OR Moll Cut-Purse. As it hath lately beene Acted on the Fortune-flage by the Prince his Players. Written by T. Middleton and T. Dekkar. melodramatists of the blood-curdling type, little interested in the sane development of a plot or the determination of shades of character. They are distinguished from one another, not by any difference of aim in their attitude to the stage and the public, but by their poetical equipment. Of the three, by far the greatest is JOHN WEBSTER, greater in some respects than any other English tragic poet except Shakespeare. Webster required but a closer grasp of style and a happier architecture to rank among the leading English poets. The Duchess of Malfy, and, in its more rudimentar John Webster form, the earlier White Devil, are plays which are distinguished by a marvellous intensity of passion. Webster has so splended a sense of the majesty of death, of the mutability of human pleasures, and of the velocity and weight of destiny, that he rises to conceptions which have an Eschylean dignity; but, unhappily, he grows weary of sustaining them, his ideas of stage-craft are rudimentary and spectacular, and his single well-constructed play, Appius and Virginia, has a certain disappointing tameness. Most of the Jacobean dramatists are now read only in extracts, and this test is highly favourable to Webster, who strikes us as a very noble poet driven by the exigencies of fashion to write for a stage, the business of which he had not studied and in which he took no great interest. JOHN MARSTON, whose Moll Cutpurse From the Roaring Girle" versification owes much to Marlowe, was a harsh and strident satirist, a screech-owl among the singing-birds; in the first decade of the seventeenth century he produced a series of vigorous rude tragedies and comedies which possess a character of their own, not sympathetic at all, but unique in its consistent note of caustic melancholy, and often brilliantly written. In CYRIL TOURNEUR the qualities of Marston and Webster are discovered driven to a grotesque excess. In the career of a soldier in the Netherlands fighting against the tyranny of Spain, he had in all probability inured his imagination to all spectacles of cruelty and cutrage. He pours out what he remembers upon his dreadful page, and his two lurid tragedies surpass in extravagance of iniquity and profusion of ghastly innuendo all other compositions of their time. Cyril Tourneur is prince of those whose design is "to make our flesh creep," and occasionally he still succeeds. Of these three poets, probably born about the same time, little biography is preserved. John Webster (1575 ?-1625 ?) was the son of a London tailor, and was made free of the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1604. Of the dates of his early plays, written in collaboration with Marston, Dekker, and others, little is exactly preserved. His tragedy of The White Devil, founded on the adventures of Vittoria Corombona, was acted, perhaps, in 1608, but not printed until 1612. The historical play called Appius and Virginia, the comedy of The Devil's Law-Cose, and the tragedy of The Duchess of Malty were his other dramatic productions. It is said that Webster was clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn, and that he died in 1625. To raise him hillocks that shall keep him warm, And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm; But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, For with his nails he'll dig them up again. From "THE DUCHESS Car. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers: alas ! What will you do with my lady? Call for help. Duch. To whom? to our next neighbours? They Bosola. Remove that noise. I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy Some syrup for his cold; and THE 335 TRAGEDY OF THE DVTCHESSE As it was Prefented priuatly at the Black- The perfect and exact Coppy, with diuerfe things Printed, that the length of the Play would not beare in the Prefentment. VVritten by John Webster. The manner of your death should much afflict you; Duch. Not a whit. What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut With cassia ? or to be shot to death with pearls ? I know, death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits and 'tis found John Marston St. Andrew's Church, Holborn Serve for mandragora to make me sleep. Go tell my brothers; when I am laid out, They then may feed in quiet. [They strangle her, kneeling. From "THE DEVIL'S LAW-CASE" Romelio. O, my lord, lie not idle : The chiefest action for a man of great spirit Is, never to be out of action. We should think; The soul was never put into the body, Which has so many rare and curious pieces Of mathematical motion, to stand still. Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds : In the trenches for the soldier; in the wakeful study For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea For men of our profession of all which Arise and spring up honour. John Marston (1575-1634) was born at Coventry in 1575; his mother was an Italian. He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, early in 1592, and took his degree two years later. The earliest works Marston is known to Must pull down heaven upon me Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arch'd As princes' palaces; they that enter there Must go upon their knees. Come, violent death, MARSTON 337 have published are his satires, called The Scourge of Villany, and the voluptuous, half-sarcastic romance in six-line stanza, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, both of 1598. His bitterness of tongue was so great that he was nicknamed "Kinsayder," one who crops or "kinses" the tails of dogs. From 1601 to 1607 he seems to have lived by writing for the stage. His most important pieces are Antonio and Mellida, in two parts (1602); The Malcontent (1604); The Dutch Courtezan (1605); Parasitaster; or, The Fawn (1606); and What You Will (1607). He entered the Church, long held an incumbency in Hampshire or Wiltshire, and died in the parish of Aldermanbury on June 25, 1634. VOL. II THE HISTORY OF Antonio and let such (As from his birth being hugged in the arms Antonio and Y |