A golden age of letters
The English were as exuberant in literature as in religion. The better half of Shakespeare's plays, most of Chapman's work, much of Jonson's, Webster's, Middleton's, Dekker's and Marston's, some of Massinger's, and all of Beaumont and Fletcher's belong to the reign of James I. In poetry there is Donne, in prose Burton, and in those same years the Bible was translated. These alone would be glory enough for a reign. The king liked drama, and in one Christmas season fourteen plays were given at his court. The Globe burned down in 1613 when two cannon were fired in a scene of Henry VIII, but it was rebuilt, and by 1631 seventeen theatres stood in or near London.
George Chapman
George Chapman was five years older than Shakespeare, outlived him by eighteen years, and lived through three reigns (Elizabeth to 1603, James I from 1603 to 1625, and Charles I afterward). His powers matured slowly. By 1598 he had completed Marlowe's Hero and Leander and published seven books of the Iliad. His complete Homer was finished in 1615, and his best plays date between 1607 and 1613. By drawing on recent French history for Bussy d'Ambois he opened a new chapter in English drama. The play is full of bombast and seldom of magic, but its rhetoric becomes truly striking in the scene where Bussy and his enemy trade bitter compliments.
Chapman never shook off the weight of his schooling. His Greek and Latin dried up his talent, and his plays are hard going today. Even we, like Keats, may feel little thrill at first looking into Chapman's Homer. His long lines have a strength that sometimes rivals Pope's translation, which is usually thought better, but the music of the original is lost; the swifter measure of the Greek carries us forward faster than rhymed English can. For the Odyssey he used ten-syllable couplets, which have a lulling effect. James seems to have dozed over this heavy Homer, for he refused to pay the 300 pounds (the book's figure) that the late Prince Henry had promised Chapman on completion of the work. The Earl of Somerset rescued the aged poet from poverty.
Beaumont and Fletcher
Heywood, Middleton, Dekker, Tourneur and Marston we may pass with a bow to their passing fame. Fletcher we cannot pass so quickly, for in the years of his fame (1612 to 1625) the English ranked him as a dramatist next after Shakespeare and Jonson. He was the son of a Bishop of London and nephew or cousin of three minor poets, and so grew up among verse and rhyme. He had the honor of working with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Massinger on The Spanish Curate, and, with greater success, with Francis Beaumont.
Beaumont too was born into a literary home, the son of a distinguished judge and brother of a minor poet who cleared the way for him a year earlier. He left Oxford and the Inner Temple without a degree, tried his hand at verse, and joined Fletcher to write plays. The two handsome bachelors lived together, shared their meals and clothes, and, as the gossip John Aubrey says, were so alike in taste that they seemed to share even their household. For ten years they collaborated on plays such as Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Their dialogue is lively, though involved, and the plots are cleverly knotted but resolved artificially, with little real philosophy. Even so, by the end of the century, as Dryden notes, their plays were more popular than Shakespeare's.
Beaumont died at thirty, in the year of Shakespeare's death. Fletcher then wrote a long series of plays alone or with others, popular at first and later neglected. Some of his comedies, with their tangled and noisy intrigues, borrow from Spanish models and, with their stress on infidelity, helped to shape the drama of Charles II's time. Tired of that bloody and bawdy world, Fletcher wrote in 1608 a pastoral, The Faithful Shepherdess, as fanciful as A Midsummer Night's Dream and at times as good in its verse. Clorin, who has lost her shepherd lover, retires to a bower beside his grave and swears to stay there for life. She bids farewell to the holy earth that holds the most faithful of shepherds, gives up the dances, garlands and games she once loved, and says that all is gone with him but his dear memory, which will outlive him and rise again whenever a shepherd's pipe sounds. The play was staged only once. In an age that kept the Elizabethan appetite for excitement, a song in praise of chastity could hardly please.
John Webster
The strongest and darkest dramatist of James's age is John Webster. We know almost nothing of his life, and it hardly matters. From his preface to his best play, The White Devil (1611), we can read his mood: there he calls his audience the fools of the pit and says that the breath of an unworthy crowd can poison the deepest tragedy. The story is based on Vittoria Accoramboni, whose crimes and trial had stirred Italy in Webster's boyhood.
Vittoria thinks her husband's income unworthy of her beauty. She listens to the rich Duke Brachiano, and with the help of her brother Flamineo, who is counted among the worst characters in English literature, husband and wife are murdered. Arrested, Vittoria defends herself so boldly and skillfully that judges and cardinal alike are astonished. Brachiano carries her off from justice, but both are pursued, and in the end pursuer and pursued, wronged and wrongdoer, die in a tumultuous slaughter. It is said these scenes satisfied Webster's appetite for blood for a year. The plot is good and the characters are well drawn, the language is manly and at times shocking, the great scenes grip us, and the verse sometimes approaches Shakespeare's eloquence. Yet people of refined taste may be repelled by the harshness of Flamineo, by the bitter words from sweet mouths, by the brazen coarseness of the play and its ambiguous words that would have embarrassed even Shakespeare.
In The Duchess of Malfi Webster returned to the slaughterhouse. Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, forbids his widowed sister, the Duchess, to marry again, because if she dies childless he will inherit her fortune. She regrets her enforced chastity and says that the birds of the field are happier than we, for they may choose their mates and sing their sweet songs in spring. Stirred by desire and prohibition, she secretly marries her steward Antonio. Ferdinand orders her death. In the last act someone dies nearly every minute, with doctors and hired ruffians in attendance, and no one waits for any process of law. The worst figure in the play, who has the Duchess killed, steals her property and takes a mistress only to kill her too, is a cardinal; Webster was no friend of the pope. He means to condemn human life as savage and without discrimination, and only in the distant corners of this dark canvas do we find a trace of nobility, loyalty or love. Even Ferdinand forgets himself, and when he looks at his sister's face, still lovely in death, he softens and says, cover her face, my eyes dazzle, she died young. But then his old savagery returns.
Let us turn to sweeter matter in the work of a man who could write, drink to me only with thine eyes.