PLAYS BY WEBSTER & TOURNEUR

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

UNEXPURGATED EDITION.

[THE MERMAID SERIES.]

LONDON:

VIZETELLY & CO., 16, HENRIETTA STREET,

COVENT GARDEN.

1888.

[Transcriber's Note: "The Revenger's Tragedy," attributed here to Cyril Tourneur, is now generally recognised as the work of Thomas Middleton.]

CONTENTS.

THE GLOBE THEATRE.

The first Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, Southwark, "the summer theatre of Shakespeare and his fellows," is believed to have been built in 1594, partly of materials removed from the Theatre in Shoreditch, "the earliest building erected in or near London purposely for scenic exhibitions." Outside, the Globe was hexagonal in shape, and, like all the theatres of that epoch, was open at the top, excepting the part immediately over the stage, which was thatched with straw. The interior of the theatre was circular. The performances took place by daylight, and while they were going on a flag with the cross of St. George upon it was unfurled from the roof. Originally, in place of scenery, the names of the localities supposed to be represented were inscribed on boards or hangings for the information of the audience. The sign of the theatre was a figure of Hercules supporting the globe, beneath which was written "Totus mundus agit Histrionem."

In 1601, the Globe Theatre was used as a place of meeting by the conspirators engaged in Essex's rebellion, and next year Shakespeare's Hamlet, following upon other of his plays, was here produced for the first time. In subsequent years plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, and contemporary dramatists were performed at the Globe, until in 1613 the theatre was burnt to the ground owing to some lighted paper, thrown from a piece of ordnance used in the performance, igniting the thatch. The theatre was rebuilt in the following spring with a tiled roof, and according to Howes's MS., quoted by Collier in his life of Shakespeare, "at the great charge of King James and many noblemen and others." Ben Jonson styled the new theatre "the glory of the Bank and the fort of the whole parish."

The Globe Theatre was pulled down in 1644 by Sir Matthew Brand with the view to tenements being erected upon its site, a portion of which at the present day is occupied by Barclay and Perkins's brewery.

JOHN WEBSTER AND CYRIL TOURNEUR.

Nothing is known about the lives of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur. We are ignorant when they were born and when they died. We possess only meagre hints of what contemporaries thought of them. One allusion to Tourneur survives, which shows that he was not popular in his lifetime as a dramatist:—

His fame unto that pitch so only raised
As not to be despised nor too much praised.

A superficial critic speaks of "crabbed Webster, the playwright, cart-wright," and proceeds, at some length, to deride his laborious style and obscurity. Commendatory verses by S. Sheppard, Th. Middleton, W. Shirley, and John Ford prove, however, that Webster's tragedies won the suffrage of the best judges. None such are printed with Tourneur's plays.

Webster began to write for the stage as early as 1601. Between that date and 1607 he worked upon Marston's Malcontent, and is supposed to have collaborated with Dekker in the History of Sir Th. Wyatt, Northward Ho, and Westward Ho. Tourneur began his literary career by a satire called Transformed Metamorphosis, in 1600, which was followed in 1609 by a Funeral Poem on the Death of Sir Francis Vere. Both he and Webster published Elegies in 1613 upon the death of Prince Henry.

In this year he was employed upon some business for the Court, as appears from this passage in the Revels Accounts (ed. Cunningham, p. xliii.):

To Cyrill Turner, upon a warraunte signed by the Lord Chamberleyne and Mr. Chauncellor, dated at Whitehall, 23rd December, 1613, for his chardges and paines in carrying l'res for his Mats. service to Brussells.... X li.

The amount of this payment renders it improbable that Tourneur's mission was of any political or diplomatical importance.

We do not know when he commenced playwright; but The Revenger's Tragedy was licensed in 1607 and printed in the same year. The Atheist's Tragedy was printed in 1611; it had been written almost certainly at some earlier period. Webster's White Devil was printed and probably produced in 1612; his Duchess of Malfi, produced perhaps in 1616, was printed in 1623.

It is needful to dwell on the comparison of these dates, since they give Tourneur the priority of authorship in a style of tragedy which both poets cultivated with marked effect. Not to class them together as the creators of a singular type of drama would be uncritical. They elaborated similar motives, moved in the same atmosphere of moral gloom, aimed at the like sententious apophthegms, affected the same brevity and pungency, handled blank verse and prose on parallel methods, and owed debts of much the same kind to Shakespeare. That Webster was the greater writer, as he certainly possessed a finer cast of mind, and surveyed a wider sphere of human nature in his work, will be admitted. Yet it seems not impossible that he may have followed Tourneur's lead in the peculiar form and tone of his two masterpieces.

Speaking broadly, the two best tragedies of Webster and the two surviving tragedies of Tourneur constitute a distinct species of the genus which has been termed Tragedy of Blood.[1] It was Kyd, in his double drama called The Spanish Tragedy, who first gave definite form to this type. Those two plays exhibit the main ingredients of the Tragedy of Blood—a romantic story of crime and suffering, a violent oppressor, a wronged man bent upon the execution of some subtle vengeance, a ghost or two, a notorious villain working as the tyrant's instrument, and a whole crop of murders, deaths, and suicides to end the action. What use Shakespeare made of the type, and how he glorified it in Hamlet, is well known. Both Tourneur and Webster, writing after Shakespeare, had of necessity felt his influence, and their handling of the species was modified by that of their great master. Yet they reverted in many important particulars from the Shakespearean method to Kyd's. The use they both made of the villain, a personage which Shakespeare discarded, might be cited as distinctive. Kyd described the villain in the character of his Lazarrotto thus:—

I have a lad in pickle of this stamp,
A melancholy, discontented courtier,
Whose famished jaws look like the chap of death;
Upon whose eyebrow hangs damnation;
Whose hands are washed in rape and murders bold;
Him with a golden bait will I allure,
For courtiers will do anything for gold.

The outlines sketched by Kyd were filled in with touches of diseased perversity and crippled nobleness by Tourneur in his Vendice, and were converted into full-length portraits of impressive sombreness by Webster in his Flamineo and Bosola.

When we compare Tourneur with Webster as artists in the Tragedy of Blood, the former is seen at once to stand upon a lower level. His workmanship was rougher and less equal; his insight into nature less humane, though hardly less incisive; his moral tone muddier and more venomous; his draughtsmanship spasmodic and uncertain. Tourneur seems to have invented his own plots; they have the air of being fabricated after a recipe. This flaw—an apparent insincerity in the choice of motives—corresponds to the more painful moral flaw which makes his occasional good work like that of a remorseful and regretful fallen angel. While we read his plays, the line of Persius rises to our lips:—

Virtutem videant intabescantque relictÂ.

Webster, as man and artist, never descends to Tourneur's level. He selects his two great subjects from Italian story, deriving thence the pith and marrow of veracity. These subjects he treats carefully and conscientiously, according to his own conception of the dreadful depths in human nature revealed to us by sixteenth century Italy. He does not use the vulgar machinery of revenge and ghosts in order to evolve an action. In so far as this goes, he may even be said to have advanced a step beyond Hamlet in the evolution of the Tragedy of Blood. His dramatic issues are worked out, without much alteration, from the matter given in the two Italian tales he used. Only he claims the right to view human fates and fortunes with despair, to paint a broad black background for his figures, to detach them sharply in sinister or pathetic relief, and to leave us at the last without a prospect over hopeful things. "One great Charybdis swallows all," said the Greek Simonides; and this motto might be chosen for the work of Shakespeare's greatest pupil in the art of tragedy. Yet Webster never fails to touch our hearts, and makes us remember a riper utterance upon the piteousness of man's ephemeral existence:—

Sunt lacrimÆ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.

It is just this power of blending tenderness and pity with the exhibition of acute moral anguish by which Webster is so superior to Tourneur as a dramatist.

Both playwrights have this point in common, that their forte lies not in the construction of plots, or in the creation of characters, so much as in an acute sense for dramatic situations. Their plots are involved and stippled in with slender touches; they lack breadth, and do not rightly hang together. Their characters, though forcibly conceived, tend to monotony, and move mechanically. But when it is needful to develop a poignant, a passionate, or a delicate situation, Tourneur and Webster show themselves to be masters of their art. They find inevitable words, the right utterance, not indeed always for their specific personages, but for generic humanity, under the peine forte et dure of intense emotional pressure. Webster, being the larger, nobler, deeper in his touch on nature, offers a greater variety of situations which reveal the struggles of the human soul with sin and fate. He is also better able to sustain these situations at a high dramatic pitch—as in the scene of Vittoria before her judges, and the scene of the Duchess of Malfi's assassination. Still Tourneur can display a few such moments by apocalyptic flashes—notably in the scenes where Vendice deals with his mother and sister.

Both playwrights indulge the late Elizabethan predilection for conceits. Webster, here as elsewhere, proves himself the finer artist. He inserts Vittoria's dream, Antonio's dialogue with Echo, Bosola's Masque of Madmen, accidentally and subserviently to action. Tourneur enlarges needlessly, but with lurid rhetorical effect, upon the grisly humours suggested by the skull of Vendice's dead mistress. Using similar materials, the one asserts his claim to be called the nobler poet by more steady observance of the Greek precept "Nothing overmuch." Words to the same effect might be written about their several employment of blank verse and prose. Both follow Shakespeare's distribution of these forms, while both run verse into prose as Shakespeare never did. Yet I think we may detect a subtler discriminative quality in Webster's most chaotic periods than we can in Tourneur's; and what upon this point deserves notice is that Webster, of the two, alone shows lyrical faculty. His three dirges are of exquisite melodic rhythm, in a rich low minor key; much of his blank verse has the ring of music; and even his prose suggests the colour of song by its cadence. This cannot be said of the sinister and arid Muse of Tourneur. She wears no evergreens of singing, nay, no yew-boughs even, on her forehead. Her dusky eyes sparkle with sharp metallic scintillations, as when Castiza says to her mother:—

Come from that poisonous woman there.

The Revenger's Tragedy is an entangled web of lust, incest, fratricide, rape, adultery, mutual suspicion, hate, and bloodshed, through which runs, like a thread of glittering copper, the vengeance of a cynical plague-fretted spirit. Vendice emerges from the tainted crew of Duke and Duchess, Lussurioso, Spurio and Junior, Ambitioso and Supervacuo, with a kind of blasted splendour. They are curling and engendering, a brood of flat-headed asps, in the slime of their filthy appetites and gross ambitions. He treads and tramples, on them all. But he bears on his own forehead the brands of Lucifer, the rebel, and of Cain, the assassin. The social corruption which transformed them into reptiles, has made him a fiend incarnate. Penetrated to the core with evil, conscious of sin far more than they are, he towers above them by his satanic force of purpose. Though ruined, as they are ruined, and by like causes, he maintains the dignity of mind and of volition. The right is on his side; the right of a tyrannicide, who has seen his own mistress, his own father, the wife of his friend, done to death by the brutalities of wanton princelings. But Tourneur did not choose to gift Vendice with elevation of nature. In the strongest scene of the play he showed this scorpion of revenge, stooping to feign a pander's part, tempting his mother and his sister as none but a moral leper could have done. In the minor scene of the duke's murder, he made him malicious beyond the scope of human cruelty and outrage. It was inherent apparently in this poet's conception of life that evil should be proclaimed predominant. His cynicism stands self-revealed in the sentence he puts into Antonio's mouth, condemning Vendice to death:—

You that would murder him would murder me.

Even justice, in his view, rests on egotism. And yet Tourneur has endowed Vendice with redeeming qualities. The hero of this crooked play is true to his ideal of duty, true to his sense of honour. He dies contented because he has perfected his revenge, preserved his sister's chastity, and converted his mother at the poniard's point. Where all are so bad and base, Vendice appears by comparison sublime. If we are to admire tone and keeping in a work of art, we certainly find it here; for the moral gradations are relentlessly scaled within the key of sin and pollution. The only character who stirs a pulse of sympathy is vicious. Castiza is a mere lay figure, and her mother one of the most repulsive personages of the Jacobean drama.

Webster presents a larger mass of dramatic work to the critic. Beside the tragedies included in this volume, he wrote another tragedy, Appius and Virginia, a tragi-comedy entitled The Devil's Law-case, and is said to have had a share in the history-play of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and in three comedies, Northward Ho, Westward Ho, and A Cure for a Cuckold. The Devil's Law-case shows how much this playwright depended on material supplied him, and how little he could trust his own inventive faculty. It starts with an involved plot of Italian deceit and contemplated crime, which Webster develops in his careful but not very lucid manner. We feel that we are working toward some sinister dÉnouement, when suddenly, by a twist of the hand, a favourable turn is given to events, and the play ends happily—violating probability, artistic tone, and the ethical integrity of the chief character, Romelio. From The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt in its present mangled and misshapen form it is impossible to disengage Webster's handiwork with any certainty. The same may be said about the brisk and well-wrought pieces Northward Ho and Westward Ho. Yet I see no reason to dispute Webster's share in these three plays. A Cure for a Cuckold[2] requires more particular comment. This comedy was ascribed by the publisher Kirkman to John Webster and William Rowley. But the ascription stands for absolutely nothing, unless we can discover corroborative internal evidence of Webster's collaboration. Such evidence I do not find, although there is certainly nothing in the play to disprove Kirkman's assertions. It should be added that a delicate little piece of serio-comic workmanship lies embedded in the otherwise trashy Cure for a Cuckold. Mr. Edmund Gosse early saw and twice pointed out how easily this play within the play could be detached from the rest; and the Honourable S. E. Spring Rice has recently printed, at Mr. Daniel's private press, a beautiful edition of what, following Mr. Gosse's suggestion, he calls Love's Graduate. I should like to believe that "piece of silver-work," as Mr. Gosse has aptly called it, to be truly the creation of Webster, "the sculptor whose other groups are all in bronze." Indeed, there are no reasons why the belief should not be indulged, except that Kirkman's ascription carries but a feather's weight, and that there is nothing special in the style to warrant it. Love's Graduate, rescued from A Cure for a Cuckold by pious hands, is one of the unclaimed masterpieces of this fruitful epoch.

The great length of Webster's two Italian tragedies rendered it impossible to print Appius and Virginia in this volume. That is much to be regretted; for without a study of his Roman play, justice can hardly be done to the scope and breadth of Webster's genius. Of Appius and Virginia Mr. Dyce observed with excellent judgment: "this drama is so remarkable for its simplicity, its deep pathos, its unobtrusive beauties, its singleness of plot, and the easy, unimpeded march of its story, that perhaps there are readers who will prefer it to any other of our author's productions." Webster, who was a Latin scholar, probably studied the fable in Livy; but its outlines were familiar to English people through Painter's "Palace of Pleasure." He has drawn the mutinous camp before Algidum, the discontented city ruled by a licentious noble, the stern virtues of Icilius and Virginius, and the innocent girlhood of Virginia with a quiet mastery and self-restraint which prove that the violent contrasts of his Italian plays were calculated for a peculiar effect of romance. When treating a classical subject, he aimed at classical severity of form. The chief interest of the drama centres in Appius. This character suited Webster's vein. He delighted in the delineation of a bold, imperious tyrant, marching through crimes to the attainment of his lawless ends, yet never wholly despicable. He also loved to analyse the subtleties of a deep-brained intriguer, changing from open force to covert guile, fawning and trampling on the objects of his hate by turns, assuming the tone of diplomacy and the truculence of autocratic will at pleasure, on one occasion making the worse appear the better cause by rhetoric, on another espousing evil with reckless cynicism. The variations of such a character are presented with force and lucidity in Appius. Yet the whole play lacks those sudden flashes of illuminative beauty, those profound and searching glimpses into the bottomless abyss of human misery, which render Webster's two Italian tragedies unique. He seems to have been writing under self-imposed limitations, in order to obtain a certain desired effect—much in the same way as Ford did when he composed the irreproachable but somewhat chilling history of Perkin Warbeck.

The detailed criticism of Webster as a dramatist, and the study of his two chief tragedies in relation to their Italian sources, would lead me beyond the limits of this Introduction. He is not a poet to be dealt with by any summary method; for he touches the depths of human nature in ways that need the subtlest analysis for their proper explanation. I am, however, loth to close this introduction without a word or two concerning the peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style.[3] Owing to condensation of thought and compression of language, his plays offer considerable difficulties to readers who approach them for the first time. So many fantastic incidents are crowded into a single action, and the dialogue is burdened with so much profoundly studied matter, that the general impression is apt to be blurred. We rise from the perusal of his Italian tragedies with a deep sense of the poet's power and personality, an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes, and a clear conception of the leading characters. Meanwhile the outlines of the fable, the structure of the drama as a complete work of art, seem to elude our grasp. The persons, who have played their part upon the stage of our imagination, stand apart from one another, like figures in a tableau vivant. Appius and Virginia, indeed, proves that Webster understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able to work one out with conscientious firmness. But in Vittoria Corombona and The Duchess of Malfi, each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a murky background; and the whole play is a mosaic of these parts. It lacks the breadth which comes from concentration on a master-motive. We feel that the author had a certain depth of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art. It is probable that able representation upon the public stage of an Elizabethan theatre gave them the coherence, the animation, and the movement which a chamber-student misses. When familiarity has brought us acquainted with Webster's way of working, we perceive that he treats terrible and striking subjects with a concentrated vigour special to his genius. Each word and trait of character has been studied for a particular effect. Brief lightning flashes of acute self-revelation illuminate the midnight darkness of the lost souls he has painted. Flowers of the purest and most human pathos, like Giovanni de Medici's dialogue with his uncle in Vittoria Corombona, bloom by the charnel-house on which the poet's fancy loved to dwell. The culmination of these tragedies, setting like stormy suns in blood-red clouds, is prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror. No dramatist showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain combined to make men miserable. He seems to have had a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals so powerfully. He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds are sought for in the ruined places of abandoned lives, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of sin-haunted conscience, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed, the deaths of frantic hope-deserted criminals. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological elements of tragedy home to our imagination. He makes free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, masques, and nightmares. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature, his profound pity for the innocent who suffer shipwreck in the storm of evil passions not their own, save him, even at his gloomiest and wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists—Tourneur, for example—blundered. That the tendency to brood on what is ghastly belonged to Webster's idiosyncrasy appears in his use of metaphor. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a sinister turn—as thus:

You speak as if a man
Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat,
Afore you cut it open.

When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses
are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's
shoulders.

Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an
ague.

I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of
the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you
fasting.

In his dialogue, people bandy phrases like—"O you screech-owl!" and "Thou foul black cloud!" A sister warns her brother to think twice before committing suicide, with this weird admonition:—

I prithee, yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.

But enough has now been said about these peculiarities of Webster's dramatic style. It is needful to become acclimatised to his specific mannerism, both in the way of working and the tone of thinking, before we can appreciate his real greatness as a dramatic poet and moralist. Then we recognise the truth of what has recently been written of him by an acute and sympathetic critic: "There is no poet morally nobler than Webster."[4]

John Addington Symonds.