in the closet to jot down a précis of all the plots in the play, interrupts the growing flood of explanations with "Cease here all further scrutiny. This paper One is too relieved to object. Metrically this play is very similar to its two forerunners; though here, as in the handling, Webster seems a little quieter. He is unaffected by the Fletcher influence in metre. The run of his lines is still elusive and without any marked melody, except in one or two passages. The beginning lines with the continual shift ing and sliding of accent, and the jerky effect of conversation, continue. It was always a blank verse for talking rather than reading. One trick Webster seems to have developed further, the filling out of feet with almost inadequate syllables. Twice in the first five pages "marriage" is a trisyllable. "Emotion" fills two feet; and so on. This habit, common between 1580 and 1595, was revived by some writers after 1615. It fits in very queerly with that opposite tendency to the use of trisyllabic feet that Webster greatly indulged in. Sometimes the combination is rather piquant. But "marriage" is, perhaps, a symp tom of an increased steadiness and mastery of rhythm. There are two or three passages where his blank verse is abler and better, in considerable periods, not in short fragments and exclamations, than it had been before. And this is accompanied by a greater evenness. Leonora's great speech (III. 3) begins with something of the old ripple: but it dies away: ... There is no plague i' the world can be compared In the desire itself. . . . O, I shall run mad! For as we love our youngest children best, Since 'tis indeed our latest harvest-home, The beauty and pathos of these lines, the complete and masterful welding of music and meaning, show what fineness is in The Devil's LawCase. One could quote many other things as noble, or as admirable, from Romelio's glorious "I cannot set myself so many fathom Beneath the height of my true heart, as fear," or the sagacious and horrid rightness of his "doves never couple without A kind of murmur," to Jolenta's cry, "O, if there be another world i' the moon Yet the play is not a good play. These good bits illuminate, for the most part, nothing but themselves, and have only a literary value. A good play must leave an increasing impression of beauty or terror or mirth upon the mind, heaping its effect continually with a thousand trifles. This does not so. It is a play without wholeness. Its merits are occasional and accidental. If you read closely, there is the extraordinary personality of Webster plain enough over and in it all. But he was working in an uncongenial medium. It is a supreme instance of the importance of the right form to the artist. The Fletcher-Massinger "tragi-comedy" was the product of an age and temper as unsuitable to Webster as the tragedy of blood and dirt had been suitable. The Devil's Law-Case is not even a fine failure, as, for instance, Timon of Athens is. In the first place a tragi-comedy is not a thing to make a fine failure of. And in the second place Webster's nature and methods demanded success in a right form, or nothing. He had to suffuse the play with himself. He was not great enough and romantic enough to confer immortality upon fragments. His bitter flashes required the background of thunderous darkness to show them up; against this grey daylight they are ineffectual. Beyond the uninteresting and unimportant A Monumental Column (1613), which only shows how naturally Webster turned to the imitation of Donne when he turned to poetry, the uncertain and featureless Monuments of Honour, and a few rather perfunctory verses of commendation, we have nothing more of Webster's except A Cure for a Cuckold. This must have been written shortly after The Devil's Law-Case. It is almost entirely unimportant for throwing light on the real Webster. All we know is that he had something to do with the play; how much or little it is impossible to tell from reading it. He may be responsible for the whole of the main plot. That it is not so obscure and unmotivated as has sometimes been supposed, I have shown in an Appendix; but it is not good. Parts have a slight, unreal, charm for those who are interested in antiquities. The way in which in IV. 3 (p. 310) Lessingham suddenly sulks, and goes off to make mischief, in order to spin the play out for another act and a bit, is childish. It is a pity we cannot barter with oblivion and give A Cure for a Cuckold for Ford and Webster's lost murder play. This was one of the last, and it must have been one of the best, of the Elizabethan domestic tragedies. What a superb combination, Ford and Webster! And on such a subject! It may have been again, after all those years, the last cry of the true voice of Elizabethan drama. Once, in 1624, there was, perhaps, a tragedy of blood, not of sawdust. It is beyond our reach. |